a big ”gotcha” moment reactionaries have against communism is that some communists are relatively well off and have some wealth to our name.
however, i find that the poorest in society dont have any energy to study theory and look at the world in certain ways.
i know that this was true for me. i used to be quite poor earlier in my life and money was scarce.
during this time, i used to spend the money i did have on stupid consumerist things. however, when i actually had a stable income, i found that i didnt want as many things (because i could always buy them)
furthermore, i used to fetishize the 1st world and a big goal of mine was to move to a 1st world country thinking they were ”better”. after my financial situation improved i was able to see that life isnt actually better over there and most their better conditions are because they still engage in neocolonialism and steal resources from the global south.
the way i looked at things changed a lot and i eventually stopped being a liberal.
many reactionaries like to say ”how can you be a communist when you have fancy things?” but being poor was such a psychologically taxing experience that i couldnt look at things from a rational perspective at all
i think this is why the united states keeps their population poor and in constant debt. they accuse north korea of actively harming their own population to keep them from revolting but i think its actually them who do this.
Fanon said something about revolutionary movements requiring a privileged strata to form its theoretical basis because only a privileged strata has the time and energy to devote to theoretical pursuits. That the Western Marxists most devoted to and knowledgable of theory are often relatively well off shouldn’t be all too surprising.
However, the majority of Communists are not these people. The theory producing subset of Communists is small and effectively impotent without working acting Comrades. The majority of whom are radicalized because of their poverty.
The idea that most marxists are stuffy intellectuals disconnected from reality comes from this relationship imo. People who do not engage with communist praxis aren’t going to be familiar with its practitioners, they are going to be familiar with its public facing theoreticians.
Yup. Lenin founded Iskra to spread Marxist theory amongst the economically and educationally underprivileged workers. The economists (mensheviks and Bernstein) criticized his approach and suggested that theory should only be formulated by the intellectuals while the workers should get the simple content. Lenin severely criticized the comments of such ‘intellectuals’.
At the end, it turns out Lenin was correct. His approach brought the revolutionary theory to the masses.