I'm not a huge fan of folks reading The Communist Manifesto as their first forray into socialism/communism. It was a pamphlet for workers in the 19th century and has some weaknesses if you're not part of that audience.

I would recommend Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti to most people instead. We live under a more advanced stage of capitalism and it does a great job of explaining a lot of how "the reds" worked, who opposed them, and dispels common myths.

Usually it means someone that actually reads history and will specifically debunk common anticommunist myths about it, i.e. historical revisionism.

The term "authoritarian" is also used selectively by anticommunists and this pervades capitalist societies, who continue to teach cold war nonsense. It is implicitly reserved for actions of the state, for example, but this is a false distinction made solely because after any kind of a left takeover, the state is the most powerful tool the people have. Universal government healthcare is authoritarian by this selective definition. On the other hand, the assertion of massive control over people's lives is not described as authoritarian when it comes from the private sector. Workers spend 8-16 hours per day working in petty dictatorships, working around the personalities and whims of business owners and managers, just to ensure some kind of steady income lest they lose basic human security. They are forced to migrate by poverty forced by capitalism, this system creates marginalised groups and then (sometimes slowly) treats them genocidally. Much of it was built on colonialism and neocolonialism, with the richness of the West built on uneven exchange with everyone else, a system set up at gunpoint. None of this is described as authoritarian.

Please read more widely.

Thanks for being open-minded!

I might say that capitalism does work, but only for the ruling class (business owners) and those they can rope into doing their anti-worker dirty work. The system isn't broken and need fixing, it's working exactly how they want it to and it must be destroyed.

Being vaguely socialist is 100% cool btw. No need to get too deep into labels. The most helpful thing is to be class conscious and be active in your community in a way that's cognizant of that. Helping people get better wages, win unions, support politicians antithetical to capital (they're very rare and nobody in the squad would count), support strikes, support social housing, oppose war that your country supports, and so on. Never supporting cops in capitalist countries. Diving deep into left theory is handy for doing those things better and having clear eyes about what is coming next, but it's less important than doing some of these clearly good anti-capitalist things. It can also help you choose a group to organize with, as some groups are do-nothing orgs.

Also nothing wrong with wanting to live in a smaller community or even a reclusive life. Alienated city life is an imposition that violates the connection and community most people want to have. Folks can't plant roots long enough to know their neighbors, let alone create a community. That's a consequence of real estate, rent, and unemployment, a whole other can of worms.

There's a recent book you might enjoy called The Dawn of Everything. It's co-written by David Graeber, who had anarchist leanings but respected Marxist thought. It has many examples of societies defining and redefining themselves relative to material conditions snd relative to one another.

I guess you have to ask yourself, are we spreading ideas and looking to chip away at the predominant hegemony, or do we want to self isolate?

One of the nice things about lemmy.ml is that it starts from a far left perspective and as a result of reddits own unmaking, places normies in a position of no longer being the predominant opinion in the room.

This has two outcomes from what I can guess: