Good post and points.

People are often caught at the roadblock of moral-if-tactical faux analysis, which accomplishes little for the reasons I tried to lay out previously, and is still just a moralist analysis dressed up in the language of a tactical analysis. Roughly paraphrasing Hobsbawm as one example. After the fall of the USSR: the “crimes of Stalin” might have been justified if they had resulted in global communism, but since that didn’t happen and the USSR eventually failed, they were all for nothing.

Sounds very much like “the ends justify the means”, so yeah, I agree that kind of thinking is its own kind of dead-end.

I do think morality is kind of an unavoidable piece of the puzzle, so to speak, in actually existing communist practice. The primary problem with Christian morality thought seems to be that it has a tendency to break things down into simplistic binary states. Good and evil, right and wrong, justified and unjustified, pure and corrupted, saved and damned, etc.

Then the idea goes something like, each time you do an act that lands on one end of a given binary, you move closer to or further from saved or damned. So judging a person or entity becomes this exercise in tallying up the good and the bad, and deciding whether they are good or evil in the end. But also, in practice, actually tallying up is hard, so what more tends to happen is people look for deeds that can be categorized as unforgivably evil or fantastically good and decide that those outweigh everything else in the analysis.

The most obvious problem with this being that most actions a given person or entity can/will take do not, in fact, fit into simplistic binary states and few actions are so thoroughly fucked that no restorative justice is possible and even then, the reason why usually has more to do with the intractableness of embedded institutions of power than to do with any kind of inherent impossibility of addressing grievances. For example, organic revolutions in history (I say organic cause color revolutions are their own beast) don’t tend to happen simply because there’s a grievance, but more like because a society reaches a point where there are many ongoing grievances and other options for resolving them face consistent violent repression.

In other words, Christian morality thought often gets lost in the weeds of which category we should view someone/entity in: good or evil. If they fall under good, we can look up to them, model after, etc. If they fall under bad, everything they do is suspect and nothing they do is of value. This is a very limiting view of the world. For example, under this mode of thinking, the western/white empire cannot possibly have ever done anything of note beyond pure evil. This would be foolish to say though, as clearly there’s a lot it has done effectively, else the legacy of colonialism and then imperialism would not have lasted so long. But at the same time, acknowledging this does not reverse the binary and now mean the empire is good.

For someone stuck in Christian morality thought, we could maybe say “how can you defeat darkness if you don’t understand how it operates?” Or on the flip side, “how can you work in muddy water if you are paralyzed by the fear of becoming dirt because dirt gets on you?” (e.g. how can you fix a problem if you’re too afraid that trying to fix it will taint you with the elements of a broken world). At any rate, the idea is to feel that it’s okay to view actions beyond a binary (without going to a different extreme like “everything is morally relative” silliness). And importantly, doing this while respecting the foundation of a thing, where it matters. For example, if the CPC were to pile dirt on Mao, this would undermine the foundations of the CPC itself and its history. At the same time, if they were to say that Mao can never be criticized, they would, by extension, be implying that the CPC itself is beyond criticism.