Political Maturity Is Realising The Communists Were Correct
Political Maturity Is Realising The Communists Were Correct
No group’s criticisms of the current status quo world order are more incisive and accurate than theirs
By Caitlin Johnstone, February 5, 2026
Political maturity is finally admitting to yourself that the angriest, most disconcerting communist you’ve ever met was pretty much right about everything.
If you learn enough, stay humble enough, and pay close enough attention, eventually that’s what happens. You realise that, generally speaking, the really high-octane commies have the most lucid understanding of the world out of any group out there, and the only reason this wasn’t always obvious to you was because you live under a capitalist power structure which aggressively indoctrinates its populace from birth into believing that communism is No No Bad Bad.
They have the most lucid and correct understanding of capitalism. They have the most lucid and correct understanding of imperialist extraction. They have the most lucid and correct understanding of western warmongering, global power dynamics, white supremacy, institutional racism and misogyny. That’s why they keep being proven right, about everything from US military actions to the fascism of the far right to the abusive nature of the so-called “moderate” liberal to the moral depravity of billionaires and the capitalist class.
It’s still an open question how best to give rise to their vision for the world, because it would be a world that has never existed before, and because all their efforts to build that world have consistently been aggressively assaulted and sabotaged by the capitalist empire. But no group’s criticisms of the current status quo world order are more incisive and accurate than theirs.
If you’ve spent your life moving in sufficiently diverse and interesting circles, you’ve encountered outspoken Marxists in the past. What they said may have made you uncomfortable at the time, either because you were still too indoctrinated into the worldview of the capitalist empire or because you were still too interested in youthful frivolity to grapple with the serious subjects they were discussing. And eventually you realise that the discomfort you were experiencing is called cognitive dissonance, which is what being wrong feels like.
Maybe you got annoyed because they took their politics way too seriously and made it their whole thing, constantly pointing out the injustices and abuses in whatever subject came up when you were just trying to relax and enjoy life. And eventually you realise that the only reason you were able to just drift along without thinking about politics too much was because your worldview was sufficiently aligned with the political status quo to keep you from noticing all the exploitation, oppression, injustice and propaganda which pervades every aspect of our society. You didn’t notice it because it didn’t clash with your understanding of the world at the time.
If you keep your mind open, keep learning about the world, stay humble enough to see your errors and course-correct accordingly, you eventually see through all those distortions and understand that you had 'the commies' all wrong.
There are still individual communists who get things wrong, of course, ... [and many marxist-leninists suffer from wounds and battle fatigue after lifetimes of relentless struggle for humanity in an environment of demonisation, percecution and dehumanisation]. But there’s no group which perceives the abusive dynamics of this civilisation with a greater degree of intellectual clarity as a whole.
Source - edited
Lenin:
«An end to wars, peace among the nations, the cessation of pillaging and violence – such is our ideal, but only bourgeois sophists can seduce the masses with this ideal, if the latter is divorced from a direct and immidiate call for revolutionary action.»— "The Question of Peace" (July–August 1915); Collected Works, Vol. 21, p. 293.
Poster from Komintern; the Third Communist Internationale
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