People claim that i cannot be communist because my family is wealthy. This argument is just stupid in many ways, its as if you told a white person he cannot be against racism because he is part of a more privileged group. The people argumenting this pile of diarrhea which they interpret as a “gotcha” moment also seem to forget that a lot of revolutionaries were from wealthy families like Friedrich Engels, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Marx etc. Being communist has nothing to do with your class-background but your solidarity and the willingness to commit yourself to the liberation of the working class. Having petit-bourgeois, or even bourgeois parents does not make one hypocrit, you are a hypocrit the moment you exploit workers yourself. I myself met a lot of fake-intellectuals who made this argument which made me, as a baby leftist at that time, feel really insecure about the ideas i hold but at the end no true communist cares about wealth, power, luxury or anything as such. If somebody made me the offer that if i had to live the rest in my life in a small, cold, concrede apartment with no kithcen, bedroom or toilet in return all the people would be supplied with food, clothing and shelter…i wouldnt take a second to aggree.
What good intentions but a focus on aesthetics and lack of theory get you
I’d say it’s more an obsession with theory above all, for Maoists at least. That “reading theory” is a badge of honor, rather than understanding theory. Every conversation I’ve had with a Maoist has had them break out some obscure socialist thinker, some of whom I’ve never heard of, and uses that as a “gotcha” because they are “more well read” therefore anything I say is invalid.
Ironically Mao himself talked about this sort of thing in Oppose Book Worship, but they are big on memorizing theory to use cherry picked examples in arguments, not so much on actually understanding theory and using it to improve their cause.