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>in the USSR, other leftists were acting as tyrants.

Russia had two revolutions back-to-back in 1917, only 8 months between them. First was fighting tyrants, second was becoming tyrant.

First there was February Revolution that overthrew autocracy and provisional government and Russian Republic were formed. Bolsheviks had <24% of the votes and seats. moderate socialists, national parties, cadets had the rest.

Then there was October Revolution aka Bolshevik Coup where faction of communists led by Lenin and Bogdanov took over, killed everyone other kind of socialist and supporter of provisional government and formed autocracy.

Both the The French Revolution and the Russian revolution are examples of "Revolutions devour their own Children". I think the lesson is that when you fight dictators, you must have a plan for after, and watch the most radical factions. Mensheviks and social democrats were discussing elections and worker assemblies wile Lenin and others were planning to kill them.

To put it in less words:

Revolutions are not won by the side who is morally right. They are won by the side who are most effective at fighting, and who are the most ruthless. And almost no revolutions have ever had just two sides.

This is the main argument for incrementalism in my view. I see a lot of people arguing for radical change, and no matter how much I might agree with their values and how pure their intentions are, I cannot help but note that I do not think they would end up as the winners of any revolution.

> I cannot help but note that I do not think they would end up as the winners of any revolution.

This. In our current fascist versus antifa moment I hear leftists scorn anyone who wants less than a revolution. I ask them "Who hoards the guns and is really, really eager to use them?"

You can see examples of this dynamic even in modern times.

The Iranian Revolution: started as democratic revolution, ended into religious autocracy.

"Arab Spring" Egypt: started as democratic revolution, moved towards religious autocracy, ended in military dictatorship.

These are the most obvious ones, but there are loads more (Lybia pre-Gaddafi, Zimbabwe...).

> Russia had two revolutions back-to-back in 1917, only 8 months between them. First was fighting tyrants, second was becoming tyrant.

both revolutions where just the start of the russian civil war, which lasted for another 5 years and is on of the bloodiest wars in human history.

>All of the leftist factions resisting fascism in Spain were doing something heroic.

Not really. It was not a war between democracy and fascism, it was a war between communism and fascism. The war started when a communist militia killed the democratically elected José Calvo Sotelo after a communist deputy publicly threatened him in the parliament.

I'm pretty sure that by definition a revenge killing didn't start anything. The fascists had been planning their coup ever since the election they had lost.

The people who overthrew a democratically elected government were the ones who were fighting democracy. That government isn't the one that killed your monarchist martyr.

A revenge killing for the assassination of a policeman by the Falange [0], which itself was a revenge killing (with a mistaken target) for the shooting of another man, who was shot dead in funeral procession for yet another man who died under unclear circumstances in a spiraling cycle of violence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Castillo_(police_officer)

They did not want to start the war, because they were sure they were going to lose it (they were vastly outnumbered). But they felt forced to do it after that.

These were socialists, or anarchists, not communists. grouping them together is an often made mistake.

EDIT actually there were also communists, turns out it was a mixed bag! I stand corrected.

It seems you missed the part where there were anarchist and socialist revolutionaries who had a very different idea of what outcome they envisioned.

Exactly, but leftists can't understand this and they think it was a war between capitalism vs communism. Everything solves by reading.

So maybe read a bit more then. The spanish civil war was a very complex struggle. A bit more complex, than OP you agree with.

I'm Spanish.

So?

I am german. I know people who lived through Hitler and still have no understanding about it all.

If you believe that the spanish civil war was merely "a war between communism and fascism" than I add you to that category of people. I mean, have you ever heard of feudalism, for example?

Well, I have it and I have read the entire story many times. Many family members died thanks to the communists, the house of my grandfather was burn to ashes because he didn't agree with the socialists. My family never liked the fascists too and fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism was all about corporativism. And yes, I know what feudalism was and has nothing to do also with socialism, capitalism.

This is by no means the main takeaway from Homage to Catalonia, but it’s an interesting corollary to today’s liberals who seek preservation of a system which hurts the working class.

Look at the how effective the US Democratic Party was at preventing even modest reforms from the left vs how much they have capitulated to Trump over the past four years.

That's what most people, and especially leftists, don't get. If you look at it objectively, any ideology that offers an utopia is inevitably detrimental in the long run, be it Third Reich or Communist International. When the ends are utopic, they justify whatever means needed to get there, including killing millions of people. Fascism and communism are basically two sides of the same coin, with similar casualty counts. Both rely on total control of the populace and productive capacity. Both rely on total suppression of freedom of speech or dissent. Both won't think twice before lining up dissenters along a wall and executing them.

At the risk of spending my whole day just replying to comments with relevant quotes from the OP: "When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of war – and in this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings – there is always the temptation to say: ‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral’. In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface."

This is basically correct, imaginary worlds are so captivating for some people that the ends justify the means. They forget that it actually matters whether you attempt to reach utopia via the gulag, and you get a lot of excuses while it's being done.

Wouldn't say people on the right are free from utopian thinking though, on that side it's more a blindness to the market potentially doing bad things.

>Yeah, it's almost as if human beings care about concrete, meaningful changes that affect their lives and not some all-encompassing, abstract class struggle.

The plantation owner worries only about the bottom line and the suburbanite is upset that the homeless are visible not that they exist. When these positions become virtues and problems are dismissed as abstractions, the society dies.

Suffering isn't an abstraction.

The notion that suffering is caused by the subjugation of one class at the hands of another is an abstraction. That doesn't mean it's wrong -- it is almost certainly right with respect to a given time and place -- but to pursue that abstraction as if it has absolute validity (as if it is all-encompassing) is what I'm criticizing.

It is indeed as physics is an abstraction of reality. And both are conspicuously accurate far more often than not.

"An adjustment to suffering that requires powerful people to loose some power" means exactly the same thing as "an adjustment to suffering that requires a powerful class to loose some power."

Often attempted adjustments are categorized as blind ideology and, by implication, chaos. For the erudite it's called "abstract ideology", for the less so it's simply labeled "communism". The effect is the same: portray reform as destruction and create comfort for the beneficiaries of society in the status quo.

Conversely, both laissez faire-ism and Ayn Rand's thesis are both very much ideologies but they are not called that by those who approve of them. I know of no possible definition of "ideology" that does not also apply to the both the American and French revolution as well as the motivation of every soldier in every army and indeed to the ethics driving every action that is not self absorbed.

Blindly following some policy like "burn all X" or "policy Y always results in maximum wealth" is disastrous. But I'd say that that differs significantly from an ideology like "all human beings are entitled to X".

I don't agree that everything is abstraction. You can't argue with starvation.

The comparison of class struggle to physics is astonishing. Physicists predicted the existence of black holes and then found them later in nature. Meanwhile, Marx thought the revolution was going to happen in his lifetime.

> Any attempted adjustment is always categorized as blind ideology and, by implication, chaos. For the erudite it's called "abstract ideology", for the less so it's simply labeled "communism". The effect is the same: portray reform as destruction and create comfort for the beneficiaries of society in the status quo.

Who said anything about "any attempted adjustment"? There are infinite ways you can "make adjustments" to attempt to make people's lives better in a given situation. We do it the time.

> Conversly, both laissez faire-ism and Ayn Rand's thesis are both very much ideologies but they are not called that by those who approve of them. I know of no possible definition of "ideology" that does not also apply to the both the American and French revolution as well as the motivation of every soldier in every army and indeed to the ethics driving every action that is not self absorbed.

My opinion is that, in a given situation, Ayn Rand may be right. In another situation, Marx may be right. What I don't understand is the claim that either of them is always right.

If I had to choose a policy "to reduce suffering," I'd go with Henry George today but I'll probably change my mind later. Mainly I'm just glad it's not up to me because I'm probably wrong. I'm a bit horrified by people who are sure they're right about "how to end suffering" or "how to rationally order society".