For former socialists, there’s one argument I see them use for why they are not socialist anymore.
That argument is that they felt guilty about wanting to push their ideology onto others and so they started believing in parliamentary politics again where every opinion is valuable. My dad who used to be an anarchist as a teenager used this reasoning, as well as one of my teachers.
But this argument doesn’t make sense to me, because it makes politics into something which only revolves around opinions, while we communists and the capitalist class know it’s about power.
I feel like these people never learned much about their ideology when they were socialists. I think I will never stop being a communist, I know too much.
Have you seen this reasoning yourself?
When I see certain communist personalities in history who later become staunch anti-communists, I am led to believe that it comes down to poor theoretical formation or, as you and star have both mentioned, there was no interest or “belief” in Marxist theory in the first place. Or else, why would many Eastern Europeans who actually lived under AES and received formal education and a rigorous formation in Marxism, would overnight just go completely against it?
Some people have ideology tied to their emotions, which we all do to different extents and which can be useful when it comes to praxis and mobilising large masses of people. But emotions are not fixed and can fluctuate, which is why it is important to contain them within a theoretical framework. This is why I have been striving to read and study theory extensively; because, like you, I can’t and don’t want to see myself as anything other than a communist in the future.
not sure how it was elsewhere, but i get the impression that in hungary, essentially nobody believed the marxist education in my parents’ generation (born in the 1950s). to them, it was just some bullshit the state pushed on them and they learned just enough of it to pass.
so i’m not sure how good that education was, if this is how people reacted to it. even people whose parents had been communists before ww2, were hunted by the nazis during it, survived the horror, became party members in the newly born socialist states of the warsaw pact, etc.
It’s a very interesting case. I think it could be a culmination of various factors, like:
Maybe teaching Marxism through formal education, like any other discipline, isn’t as effective to disseminate the ideology. It would seem like a mandatory chore than a voluntary venture.
The children of the communist partisans did not live through the harsh times of feudal oppression or fascist rule. The more time that passes, the less the people are connected to the original spirit of the revolution, especially when the later generations of the USSR were living in very comfortable conditions.
nr 2 is definitely a thing. the people that did the counterrevolution in hungary took all the advantages the system provided to them as granted, and imagined they would keep all that but also get treats and riches, like the workers in mythical western european welfare states.
I’ve heard the same thing about ML courses in DDR universities. The students weren’t interested and many professors couldn’t care less as well.