when i was a kid i also believed 'communists should ditch that label, for PR reasons'. now i think you make more headway owning it than dishonestly disavowing it. not least because *someone will almost always bring up stalin no matter what you call yourself*

stalin is a powerful trope for normies. his name stands for the perverse emergence of injustice from the overzealous pursuit of justice. it's dramatic irony. it's a morality tale about how power corrupts.

that mythic trope stands as a barricade between normies and socialism *no matter what kind of spin you put on socialism*

what are the crimes normally attributed to stalin? the show trials, the purges, the gulag, forced collectivization... in other words state violence. the socialisms that define themselves in opposition to stalin therefore downplay state violence as much as they can.

but statehood IS (a monopoly on legitimate) violence. the question of who's doing violence to whom, and to what end, is the fundamental problem of politics. it's capitalism's answer to this question that makes us hate it so much.

"nobody does violence to anybody" sounds good, but it's not actually a political position. political positions require charting out a plausible path from where we are now into the glorious future ahead, and that path goes through socialist states.

the demonization of stalin is the demonization of socialist statehood itself. you will not convince a normie that the latter is false as long as they remain convinced that the former is true.

the ritual denunciation of stalin on "the left" 1) presents a utopia of socialism without antagonism 2) flatters first-worlders and academics 3) spares people the unpleasantness of interrogating how their ideas about the past were formed 4) makes a virtue of losing and waiting

if we decline to draw from the entire history of socialism-in-power in favor of utopian socialism or pragmatic liberalism, the range of results we can obtain will be limited to those achieved by utopian socialism (evanescent communes) and pragmatic liberalism (hellworld)

pretending our new thing is sui generis and doesn't have anything to do with bad stalinism *doesn't actually mean we'll face different problems or have better solutions*. stalin faced problems that were generic to socialism. socialism isn't just a label, it's a class project.

you don't actually transcend that project just by calling yourself something else, just like you don't transcend capitalism by calling yourself a post-capitalist.