cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11136332
Edit: I’m from the Global South, I should’ve clarified that on the post. The lesson has been learned.
Many leftist movements, legit or not, call themselves either Trotskyist or Maoist and keep dissing Stalin for his “socialism in one state” policy and “ruining” Comintern and Deng Xiaoping for his “liberal” policies.
I want to know what they are trying to do by distancing themselves from the USSR and PRC while fetishizing Cuba and Vietnam—you’ll only hear them talking about the Vietnam War, btw—and following either the guy who lost the power struggle or a literal Marxist-Leninist who supported one of the refused countries and founding the other.
Liberal democratic regime change projects tend to be about economic imperialism. The goal is never to install a democracy, so their rate of failure is a lot lower than it looks if you take the regime change explanation at face value.
One would hope that regime change projects which genuinely center proletarian liberation and are carried out by groups motivated by a more scientifically correct and useful ideology, would tend to be more successful, since there isn’t an ulterior motive of exploitation introducing basic contradictions in the project from the start. (And they have better tools for understanding reality and engineering conditions to produce favourable outcomes, without being so clouded by ones own propaganda.)
(I am not well read so I’m just doin layperson stuff here, I would appreciate being corrected in my thinking if there’s a better way to understand this.)
Read about the attempts to export revolution to Poland at the start of the USSRs life and how the party quickly learned that it was an utterly fruitless campaign and the people of Poland were not at all ready to accept proletarian lead installed by a foreign entity.