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.
This is actually another interesting aspect of the whole thing. People keep dredging up how bad things were in USSR, or how authoritarian China is today, etc. as if people are proposing just mindlessly replicating that kind of a system in the west. It’s a really naive argument because each country is uniquely shaped by its culture, history, and its material conditions.
USSR was the way it was because of all the factors that was present when it was created. China is the way it is because of its conditions. It’s a fallacy to nitpick negative aspects of these systems and fear monger about them. The reality is that if there is ever a serious socialist movement in the west then it will necessarily be rooted in western culture, history, and the conditions that are present in the west today. It’s going to be a unique project with its own positive and negative aspects.
When we point to USSR or China as examples, we’re not saying that we just want to copy that. We’re showing the positive achievements these systems accomplished that we too could accomplish by learning from their experience. However, as long as people keep refusing to even learn about these systems then no positive change is possible.