I believe in socialism, but I feel Stalin shouldn’t be idolised due to things like the Gulag.
I would like more people to become socialist, but I feel not condemning Stalin doesn’t help the cause.
I’ve tried to have a constructieve conversation about this, but I basically get angry comments calling me stupid for believing he did atrocious things.
That’s not how you win someone over.
I struggle to believe the Gulag etc. Never happened, and if it happened I firmly believe Stalin should be condemned.
This question doesn’t even make sense. The dictatorship of the proletariat doesn’t start until the revolution is successful. When the revolution succeeds it replaces the pre-existing dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with the new dictatorship of the proletariat. These are definitional. The fact that you asked the question means you are missing some critical pieces of information that will make it quite literally impossible for you to analyze anything about history, communist theory, revolutionary politics, and left organizing.
You are describing libertarianism. Under current global conditions, people self-organizing into collectives creates warlords which reproduces feudalism which reproduces capitalism. People self-organizing into communes that best reflect their values is quite literally how we got to where we are today. Prehistoric human communities formed around shared values and splintered along values misalignment. They formed and disbanded and reformed. And eventually the technologies for hoarding became available (generally agriculture) and then conquest became a viable strategy for survival. Those conditions haven’t really changed yet. The point of a socialist transition to communism is actually to collectively organizing human activity to bring about the conditions whereby conquest is no longer a viable strategy for survival. That requires significant reorganization of production and distribution. So far, we’ve seen it takes longer than a century to pull that off.
Maybe next life then. Appreciate your efforts.
Definitely next life. Remember that the Europeans built their cultures for a few thousand years before setting sail to expand through conquest. That was about 550 years ago. If a life time is 100 years, then it took five and a half lifetimes to get here via global conquest. It will take multiple lifetimes to reverse this and several more to reverse it permanently.
This is the project we’re all here for. You and me and all our comrades.
The USSR was the first attempt. It was an experiment. We have a ton to learn from it. China, Korea, Vietnam, and Laos are other experiments. We have a lot to learn from them and they all learn from each other and they all learn from the USSR experiment. The number of capitalist experiments is easily a hundred and they’ve been in operating for a couple centuries. The number of communist experiments is less than 10 and none have made it to a century yet.
We are at the middle of the beginning of the process.