It’s one I’ve heard more than a few times before from liberal “allies” who love to talk down to any queer people that don’t debase themselves to whatever local liberal party that pretends to care about us and our rights while doing nothing to actually help us or even fight those trying to actively destroy us.
Like, I don’t know what gay or trans people had to go through under Stalin and it probably wasn’t good given this was the early 20th century and communist movements weren’t very good on queer rights back then but even if Stalin was personally ordering the execution of gay & trans people what does that even matter? How is that some kind of stunning rebuke of communism? One communist does some bad stuff and somehow all of communism is responsible as if Karl Marx himself wrote “kill them removed lmao” in the Manifesto or something?
Why is Stalin and Stalin alone the arbitrator of what is and isn’t communism? Do these people think he’s the only communist to have ever existed? What about all the gay & trans communists that were contemporaries of him? Do they just not matter? I don’t know, maybe this belongs more in the “Shit Reactionaries Say” community.
Stalin could’ve been the most queerphobic person in history for all I care. That doesn’t have any impact on whether or not queer people belong in the communist movement. It’s just an intellectually lazy argument. Like, I don’t care? Why would I care what Stalin would’ve done to me? I don’t live under Stalin. Stalin is dead. Stalin isn’t the only communist to exist, much less to lead a country. I don’t worship Stalin the way liberals worship Obama.
Castro had gay people tortured, later realized & admitted he was wrong to do so, and worked to expand queer rights in Cuba. Perfect? Not at all, but at least he was willing to grow and change things for the better even in old age.
Obama ran on a campaign of anti-gay marriage until Biden told him it was popular and he changed his stance so he could win, let the Supreme Court do all the work for him, then promptly did fuck all to improve the conditions of gays in the US. His party has since abandoned trans people and is now trying to abandon gays too.
It’s almost like communists have actual moral compasses and can change their views when presented with new information while liberals are self-serving ghouls that only care about what’s popular or financially beneficial to them.
Yet you point out that queer rights are only being taken seriously by Left-wing movements these days and libs cry about how it’s just commies trying to manipulate or deceive people. Pure fucking projection.
Sorry for the rant this ended up being longer than I intended.
I think this kind of question reveals an important difference in how liberal ideology, and liberal ideological hegemony, works and how dialectical materialist or otherwise counter-hegemonic thought works.
If I’m having a conversation with someone and they tell me something like this, which happens pretty often, I counter by trying to get at the person to see what they believe in and criticize the failures of the figures of that ideology. “Oh, you’re a liberal? I bet you support Churchill’s racism, then, or otherwise you can’t be a liberal.”
But that gets something backwards: For a socialist or communist, Stalin represents a (flawed) positive figure whose writing and action can inform how we should act. The reason criticising Stalin works as a criticism of socialism is that socialists have to either live in Stalin’s shadow, or actively work to distance themselves from it by distinguishing themselves from the bad socialists (see: DemSocs).
Meanwhile, criticising Churchill, FDR, Keynes, or some other equally relevant contemporary liberal is not a biting criticism of liberalism, because liberal ideological hegemony is a negative hegemony. It’s not made up of a series of values, mores, schools of thought, or models of the world that its adherents must defend. It’s made up of values, mores, schools of thought, and models of the world that its adherents know are bad. It’s just “what’s left” instead of “what’s right.” You tell the liberal “if you think Stalin is bad, you haven’t read Truman’s private thoughts” and they’ll just reply back “Why should I care about Truman? You’re the one who believes in what Stalin believed.” They don’t have to defend their beliefs because they don’t have any.
The Kingdom of Conscience will be exactly as it is now. Moralists don’t really have beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child’s toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn’t change – not even incremental change. It is control. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.
I’ve always thought that liberals do have morals and values, however one of those values is abstraction. The goal of liberalism was to break what was considered very arbitrary social bonds, namely the ones between city dwelling merchants and landed aristocrats. But the replacement for that was to make every human relationship a negotiation, or at least, present as a negotiation. It’s why liberals don’t view employers as exploitative because employees can hypothetically negotiate for better circumstances, or simply leave the relationship.
But you’re very right in regards to liberalism being empty and not something they need to defend. Liberals see it as an issue of incorrect leadership within the correct framework, so you can’t tell them that Joe Biden is genocidal and this is an indictment against American liberal imperialism. Or you can’t tell them about CIA crimes or how Reagan financed militant rebels in Afghanistan. They believe that it was supposedly always possible for a democratic negotiation, meaning the liberal system is still valid to them, regardless of its outcomes.
But Stalin to them is supposedly someone who wasn’t able to be negotiated with, despite that not being true since he held an elected position and attempted to resign multiple times. Liberals also have a hard time believing any socialist figure has legitimate popularity. I’ve seen numbers from China that show President Xi with an approval rating of 95% more. Rather than view this as a resounding success, liberals assume this is manipulation. Even if they were to believe it was legitimate popularity I think they’d still disagree with it. Since that means there’s no negotiation, no internal argument
It probably depends on the individual, but I think that generally if you get into an argument with a liberal and you poke them around to see what they believe about the relation between the employee and the employer, it’s very possible to get them to admit that it’s exploitative in some way. They might put up some resistance but I think it’s pretty common nowadays, especially with marginalized people, for them to see that the capitalist labor relations are inherently exploitative. But I think that the real suffocating ideological hegemony steps in when you try to suggest something positive to replace the status quo.