For former socialists, there’s one argument I see them use for why they are not socialist anymore.
That argument is that they felt guilty about wanting to push their ideology onto others and so they started believing in parliamentary politics again where every opinion is valuable. My dad who used to be an anarchist as a teenager used this reasoning, as well as one of my teachers.
But this argument doesn’t make sense to me, because it makes politics into something which only revolves around opinions, while we communists and the capitalist class know it’s about power.
I feel like these people never learned much about their ideology when they were socialists. I think I will never stop being a communist, I know too much.
Have you seen this reasoning yourself?
It’s a very interesting case. I think it could be a culmination of various factors, like:
Maybe teaching Marxism through formal education, like any other discipline, isn’t as effective to disseminate the ideology. It would seem like a mandatory chore than a voluntary venture.
The children of the communist partisans did not live through the harsh times of feudal oppression or fascist rule. The more time that passes, the less the people are connected to the original spirit of the revolution, especially when the later generations of the USSR were living in very comfortable conditions.
nr 2 is definitely a thing. the people that did the counterrevolution in hungary took all the advantages the system provided to them as granted, and imagined they would keep all that but also get treats and riches, like the workers in mythical western european welfare states.