US liberals (which somehow have managed to become orders of magnitude more toxic than their carbon copies around the world) have done more damage to their image with their meltdown over this move than anything Musk could have achieved on his own.
This shit has been tried in nearly every recent alt-right campaign in Latin America and it never sticks.
IMO it’s because different countries have their own derogatory terms to refer to leftists and as far as I’m aware using “communist” as a slanderous word in mainstream politics is only practiced in the US nowadays. So it comes across as very out of touch and bizarre when used in a Latin American context. It’s a sign of a campaign which has sourced its ad strategy to clueless foreigners and which is doomed to fail.
Marx lived in a transitional period where the scientific method hadn’t fully taken hold.
Later scholars have resoundingly confirmed his economic theories with more rigorous methods, even though their focus may differ from his. For instance Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is incomparable for its thoroughness and absolutely trounces liberal economics.
You bring up an interesting example. Allende belongs to a long list of democrats targeted for regime change, like Arbenz, Sukarno and many others. However even revolutionaries fell prey to imperialist aggression, as was the infinitely sad case of the beloved Thomas Sankara.
In the XXth century the only way for a socialist government to survive was to turn into a police state. Just look at how quickly the USSR fell after political reform. But lately regime change attempts by western imperialists are failing more often than not. The coups in Honduras and Bolivia were overturned, and soon the same will happen in Brasil. Color revolution attempts in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Kazhakstan, Belarus and others have failed, as have the attempts to overthrow the Houthis and Al Assad.
IMO the reason for this is simple, neoliberalism has weakened the US and the West as eventually happens with all imperial powers. At the start of the XXth century the British empire missed out on the 2nd Industrial Revolution which took place in the US and Germany. The brightest british minds were devoted to extracting value from their high-margin rentier economy rather than innovating, which led the UK to simply stop being a world power after WWII. The US is currently on the same track, it’s been left out of the 4th Industrial Revolution which is raging in East Asia. Nowadays Asia represents more than half the purchasing power of the world and growing, that’s why the West can’t project power like it once did.
When people bring up death counts due to hardship under Communism they’re usually parroting propaganda derive wittingly or not from the Black Book of Communism and its ridiculously inflated figures.
I like Chomsky’s demolishing retort to that argument in this article, using the much superior research from Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, who won his award by researching famine:
… before closing the book on the indictment we might want to turn to the other half of Sen’s India-China comparison, which somehow never seems to surface despite the emphasis Sen placed on it. He observes that India and China had “similarities that were quite striking” when development planning began 50 years ago, including death rates. “But there is little doubt that as far as morbidity, mortality and longevity are concerned, China has a large and decisive lead over India” (in education and other social indicators as well). He estimates the excess of mortality in India over China to be close to 4 million a year: “India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame,” 1958-1961 (Dreze and Sen).
In both cases, the outcomes have to do with the “ideological predispositions” of the political systems: for China, relatively equitable distribution of medical resources, including rural health services, and public distribution of food, all lacking in India. This was before 1979, when “the downward trend in mortality [in China] has been at least halted, and possibly reversed,” thanks to the market reforms instituted that year.
Overcoming amnesia, suppose we now apply the methodology of the Black Book and its reviewers to the full story, not just the doctrinally acceptable half. We therefore conclude that in India the democratic capitalist “experiment” since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire history of the “colossal, wholly failed…experiment” of Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, tens of millions more since, in India alone. The “criminal indictment” of the “democratic capitalist experiment” becomes harsher still if we turn to its effects after the fall of Communism: millions of corpses in Russia, to take one case, as Russia followed the confident prescription of the World Bank that “Countries that liberalise rapidly and extensively turn around more quickly [than those that do not],” returning to something like what it had been before World War I, a picture familiar throughout the “third world.” But “you can’t make an omelette without broken eggs,” as Stalin would have said. The indictment becomes far harsher if we consider these vast areas that remained under Western tutelage, yielding a truly “colossal” record of skeletons and “absolutely futile, pointless and inexplicable suffering” (Ryan). The indictment takes on further force when we add to the account the countries devastated by the direct assaults of Western power, and its clients, during the same years.
In the developing world this is not a problem in the least for revolutionary Marxists. In fact “democratic socialists” of the global south, despite not being truly socialist, are definitely nationalistic, anti-globalization and anti-imperialism, so they are natural allies for revolutionary AES governments of the world.
In the global north the situation is reversed, as mainstream socialist parties serve as honeypots and controlled opposition for the status quo, never actually winning anything. Only thing to do is increase awareness of how they’re used to fool People.
Funnily enough the situation of the far right is the opposite. In the global south far right parties generally are fiercely imperialistic and in many cases are basically remote-controlled by Washington. In the developed West they are considered a threat by globalists.
Mango Press is an amazing source for Global South news, it doesn’t get as many updates on the conflict as those other channels dedicated to it though.
I find Gleb Bazov’s channel insightful and to the point (though with lower traffic), it’s worth a follow.