Comment by ants_everywhere
2 months ago
> It is very difficult to take the political opinions of people who talk like this seriously.
This tells me you haven't read the literature.
I've probably seen 150 versions of the comment you made, but almost everyone tries to explain why the violence is justified.
People rarely try to deny that revolutionary socialism is a violent ideology since every major writer from Marat to Marx to Lenin to Mao has explicitly advocated violence against civilian non-combatants. Some, like Marx, even explicitly call it terror (as in terrorism).
Can you tell me what you're referring to? Of course I've read the literature.
> People rarely try to deny that revolutionary socialism is a violent ideology since every major writer from Marat to Marx to Lenin to Mao has explicitly advocated violence against civilian non-combatants.
Yea, that's a very different thing than murdering "dissidents." Capitalists use (state) violence to maintain power; violence is necessary to seize power and create your own state. That was Mao. We are now many decades later and any "revolutionary socialist" in the area would be trying to overthrow the government by definition.
China isn't very indicative of revolutionary socialism, and revolutionary socialism comes in dozens or hundreds of different conflicting flavors. Even Lenin and Stalin argued over many things including how they should treat what we would now call "small business owners", and Stalin won in the end (mostly because Lenin died, but still).
Why don't you paint other ideologues (i.e. capitalists) with the same broad brush? It's not like they're any less violent in their suppression of threats to their power. Ever hear of vietnam? or the korean war?