Thread by @TheTattooedProf

So as tweets about Venezuela go by on my TL, I'd suggest what we're seeing from much of the Left in this case gets at the conundrum that's been on my mind a lot lately-a paradox for Marxians and socialists. /1

We're told by some in the Left to support Maduro, because he's an opponent of US imperialism and all it's done in LatAm. And that's true. But he's also an authoritarian kleptocrat under whose role ordinary Venezuelans have suffered mightily. He is no Marxian/socialist avatar. /2

Instead, he embodies the trend of an initially liberatory socialist movement decaying into an authoritarianism which is a living betrayal of that movement's ideals. But, some on the Left tell me, I should support him bc, basically, 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.' /3

How can I, as a socialist, support a regime that immiserates its people, that wages violence and not emancipation on the lower classes? I'm told that I need to be realistic; that this is how the world works. 'You have to break the to make an omelette.' And here's the conundrum /4

Those of us who are Marxians and socialists tell our critics that a better world is possible, if we can only throw off the hegemonic capitalist structures that bind our imaginations, and thus bind our will. To be a Marxist is to be an optimist. It's baked into the cake. /5

Yet we sometimes refuse to hold ourselves, and the regimes we support, to the same standard. Authoritarianism, even swathed in Marxism, is not emancipatory--that was true for Stalin, Hoxha, Caeucescu, and it's true for Maduro. But we settle in the name of calculating pragmatism/6

And we do this at the same time we tell capitalists their failure to conceive of-to imagine-a better, post-capitalist, world is the reason for our current hellscape. Well, which is it? I think we betray Socialism when we prop up dictators just bc they are anti-imperialists /7

I think we betray Socialism, and make a mockery of Marx's faith in the power of ordinary people, when we contort our will to make a small, mean, and ruthless figure like Maduro out to be the savior of Western Leftism simply bc he represents dissent against the US /8

I know that revolutions are messy, that in politics you sometimes have to dance with who brung ya, etc etc. And I am no Guaidarista. But who's doing more damage to Socialism, and to the masses in general, both in the immediate context and for the future? /9

There are no easy answers. I certainly don't have any. But whatever the answer might be, it ain't in the knee-jerk US Pure Left™ 'ride-or-die with Maduro' takes flying around. If we can't do better than this, we've no business lecturing anyone about a failure of imagination. /10

Other people cannot be the props for Marxist-Leninist cosplay. Starvation and sickness for others should not be the purity test for some dogmatic Leftism which confuses nihilism with critique. Can we not imagine anything better than selling out to the loudest Lefty sloganeer? /11

We're either working for the liberation of all peoples, or we aren't. I don't know exactly what that looks like, but damn it, this ain't it. /fin

(Pure Left™ hot takes incoming)

*break the egg.