I believe in socialism, but I feel Stalin shouldn’t be idolised due to things like the Gulag.
I would like more people to become socialist, but I feel not condemning Stalin doesn’t help the cause.
I’ve tried to have a constructieve conversation about this, but I basically get angry comments calling me stupid for believing he did atrocious things.
That’s not how you win someone over.
I struggle to believe the Gulag etc. Never happened, and if it happened I firmly believe Stalin should be condemned.
The abolition of private property under communism is akin to the abolition of chattel slavery. So let me ask you this. Do you think abolition of slavery is too extreme and total slavery (whatever that means) is too extreme, and therefore something in the middle like only chattel slavery for a subset of the population is where the system will be optimized?
There is a lot of truth to your main point that centralization and decentralization are a dialectic, but I don’t think you understand that they are a dialectic. Instead of seeing the dialectic, I think what you’re doing is arguing against a strawman. Marxist theory does not posit that everything everywhere at all times in all ways should be centralized. Centralization and decentralization cannot exist without each other. The question is one of the relationship between the two. Stalin was not pursuing a policy of centralizing everything everywhere all the time, nor was the USSR. You are not arguing against a real position. You are accidentally landing on the Marxist position without understanding it.