Type of Person: Radlibs Who Call Themselves Communists and Refuse to Read and So They Just Constantly End Up Regurgitating Western Imperialist Talking Points

I hate to be rude to these people, but you start talking about Actually Existing Socialist Countries and all of sudden you feel like you're talking to a libertarian who hates prisons. And I'm like have you read any of these... and its like nah.

That's why I often don't really suggest Naomi Klein and Bullshit Jobs because they are great points of entryism, but they just give permission for westerners to still have no historical understanding of the world around them. Spouting off about Totalitarianism.

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I don't think this is very different from radlibs in general. By some defintions of communist, you can easily get most of them to agree to the label, but they still behave how you say. I think it's question-begging to call most of the states you have in mind "AES," but the lines of objection radlibs raise to such states are usually incoherent (and at best deeply hypocritical), and they will oscillate between talking like an anarchist and a neoliberal point to point based on rhetorical convenience, because they love the language and aesthetic of radicalism but all they believe in is the lifestyle of being a person who knows better while protecting their own comfort. At least, that's my experience.
- lines of objection radlibs raise to such states are usually incoherent (and at best deeply hypocritical), and they will oscillate between talking like an anarchist and a neoliberal point to point based on rhetorical convenience
  This is some of the people in my life and they are absolutely insufferable to have any sort of conversation with politically. "Communists are all fascists waiting to seize power" and shit like that. This one person, they say this shit and then turn around and say "i dont know what to think and believe, but i have faith in anarchy" and im just sitting there like wtf you literally just called me and people i respect fascists and then admit to not having any ideological framework??? Like, if you dont actively develop your ideology you will end up adopting the cultural default ideology, we have talked about this and they agreed with me, like, deeply unserious people using punk and anarchist aesthetics because it "looks cool".
  
  There are many people who devote their entire lives and work to anarchy, but there are a lot of people who get into it because it's the "safest" radicalism because only rightist boomers bother to stigmatize it (via "antifa thugs" or whatever), though I honestly have a little more respect for them than the other "safe" radicalism of more precisely what I was talking about where you're an anarcho-neoliberal-socdem who just says "radical" things but opposes any radical practice, who will attack Mao for not being left enough and then concern troll that some Berniecrat is unrealistic, which is extremely typical among certain kinds of academics. Like, they will simultaneously say "Oh, Stalin says that those who do not work, neither shall they eat. So much for 'to each according to their needs!' Also, collectivization stifles innovation."
  But talking to you rather than myself, what you are saying reminds me a little of the better parts of that essay "Why Marxism?" where faux-radicals in the west will denounce anything and everything, seeming to be the most radical of all but really supporting the status quo in the west by denying that there's ever been anything better than it anywhere while certainly (and partially correctly) asserting that many things are worse than it. This lets them be at the apex, at a vast frontier where they have basically no one and nothing to learn from beyond liberal commentators and sometimes the most co-opted faux-left trash like Chomsky. The closest thing you'll see to decency in these people is some default socdemist fetishization of the New Deal and of Nordic "socialism," and that's still a far cry from actual decency.
  But yeah, if someone admits that they're just running on vibes (and the people I'm talking about are mainly pretentious academics who could never), then I don't see what could be better for them than to learn to exercise some epistemic humility until they have a framework by means of which to judge things that they can actually defend. If you aren't acting on behalf of your own ideology, you're uncritically acting on behalf of someone else's.
  Obligatory edit:
  If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
  Personally, if I wanted to be a powerful fascist in a place like the US, I'd just be a fucking fascist because it seems to be working out great for them. Being a communist in order to be a fascist later just means the other fascists will seize on you and every faction of corporate media will be your enemy, and even once you achieve the fascist turn (assuming you aren't jailed, killed, or otherwise crushed), your past is a liability that other rightists are liable to exploit and a huge segment of your original base of power will want to kill you almost as much as the fascists did. Being a secret rightist only makes sense in a communist status quo, like what Khrushchev did.
i beat them to death with a copy of blackshirts and reds
- Have you seen this video? Look its all yellow, isn't that wild? Sit down and watch and tell me what you think.
  
  YELLA PARENTI
David Graeber slander you could've just recommended Debt instead of Bullshit Jobs
- Debt is twice the book that BSJ is. It’s like they’re written by different people.
  
  Debt was written (at least partially) during the 2008 Financial Crisis so it makes sense that it is a lot different in tone/scope to Bullshit Jobs which was borne out of a bunch of essays.
  Idk why OP even put Bullshit Jobs in the same vein as anything of Naomi Klein's because Bullshit Jobs doesn't even talk about 'totalitarianism' lol; and to be fair, even Shock Doctrine talks about various points in Chile, China, Iraq, and the USSR's histories like Pinochet's coup and Yetslin's dissolution of the USSR.
I had a friend like this and introducing them to the right podcast based on their music tastes was the nudge that they needed.
- I like this strategy. I too often suggest podcasts, but how do you align their musical tastes to a political podcast?
  
  It's more about finding something to connect their current interest with something more radical.
- podcast based on their music tastes
  how does that work..
  
  They got into some
  sort of music so I steered them towards more radical takes on colonialism.
I like Klein but I don’t really see it as truly communist or socialist literature. Always gave off socdem/liberal vibes.
- Yeah I don't need to [edit] (keep) reading her work, but the suggestion comes from the same place as any point of entryism and at the very least its not very reactionary. I guess I just see the role of westerners is to support AES countries and to reject imperialist rhetoric rather than to first understand how their position in this system is also fucked and I guess one could do both at the same time, but if I have a place to start its the former.
  
  That's not what entryism means, but it's similar in its pathological aversion to confrontation. Why not just suggest Parenti? He's got some nice, accessible polemics, and also a lot of his material is in talks, so you're more likely to get a young person to engage with it (though I guess you didn't mention the demo).
  Are you going to get killed or fired if the person you are talking to discovers you to be a communist? If not, then hiding it is probably counter-productive if you're still advocating for your positions. You don't need to shout in people's faces demanding that they acknowledge the efficacy of Mao's land reform, but actively hiding behind lib academics is just silly.
  
  I generally agree with your perspective here, but not reading an author you reference in a post lambasting people who won’t read theory is a choice.
my ex was like this
The twelfth type of liberalism
what is annoying, that graeber been to global south, so him talking about bullshit jobs and not noticing that people doing marketing work on the best packaging for coffee in the midwest market for 6 months do be kinda dependent on kenya salary level.

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