People claim that i cannot be communist because my family is wealthy. This argument is just stupid in many ways, its as if you told a white person he cannot be against racism because he is part of a more privileged group. The people argumenting this pile of diarrhea which they interpret as a “gotcha” moment also seem to forget that a lot of revolutionaries were from wealthy families like Friedrich Engels, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Marx etc. Being communist has nothing to do with your class-background but your solidarity and the willingness to commit yourself to the liberation of the working class. Having petit-bourgeois, or even bourgeois parents does not make one hypocrit, you are a hypocrit the moment you exploit workers yourself. I myself met a lot of fake-intellectuals who made this argument which made me, as a baby leftist at that time, feel really insecure about the ideas i hold but at the end no true communist cares about wealth, power, luxury or anything as such. If somebody made me the offer that if i had to live the rest in my life in a small, cold, concrede apartment with no kithcen, bedroom or toilet in return all the people would be supplied with food, clothing and shelter…i wouldnt take a second to aggree.
Anyone can be a communist, all it takes is your want to destroy capitalism and the inequality and oppression it brings, coming from rich or poor means nothing, as you said many famous marxists, including marx himself, were materially bourgeois, but they didnt oppress the proletariat and were genuine revolutionaries who actually wanted to end the oppression of the proletariat, these people were class traitors to the bourgeoisie and aided the proletariat against their class interests, calling these people anything but socialist or communist is plainly absurd to be honest.
And this is coming from someone who regularly deals with food issues.
Someone’s internal desires are irrelevant here. Someone who doesn’t actually practice theory is apolitical.
You mean Engels. Marx was a journalist/writer. Engels owned a factory and did exploit the proletariat.
But all this is missing the point. We live under capitalism. Subjecting yourself/family to extreme poverty is not going to bring about the revolution, and will prevent you from various methods of supporting it.
When someone pulled the “Engels was a factory owner” card on me, I did some minimal searching and found that it was his father who owned the factory, with him getting appointed to a menial desk job. But even if that’s not true (and the reason I didn’t search any further) is that it doesn’t really matter, even if he was a hypocrite the analyses he did with Marx and the actions they propose seem valid.
Regardless of whether Engels owned the factory, @alcoholicorn@hexbear.net’s point that action, not beliefs, is what makes someone a communist still stands.
And read theory.