It’s fascinating to me how the same people who like to do purity tests for China or Vietnam claiming they’re not actually communist are also the ones who’ll defend places like US or Canada saying yeah it’s not perfect, but it’s the ideal of the system that matters.
It’s such an incredible example of cognitive dissonance. These people able to recognize that their own system doesn’t live up to the ideal they have in their heads, but still treat it as a valid interpretation of the idea, but when it comes to a system they dislike then the same logic doesn’t apply all of a sudden.
I do think this may be a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy though. Since people feel that better things aren’t possible they’re not trying to work towards them. If we look at the way the right has been organizing, it’s pretty clear that there are a lot of people who are disillusioned with the western political mainstream. These people could be educated and recruited into a communist movement if there was active organization happening. The main problem that I see is that a lot of people on the left are rejecting effective methods for building a movement that have been proven in the past as being authoritarian.
Occupy Wall Street comes to mind. It’s like a natural demobilizing ideaolgy that grows in reaction to neoliberalism. People get focused on grassroots and bottom up approaches, which makes sense and is necessary. But then they get taken over by astroturfing because their leadership is basically unofficial and nothing more than a friend group that got their first. I’m looking at you David Graeber (RIP). And now the whole “99% vs 1%” rhetoric is all but entirely used by the right wing.