We plant the seeds that will grow

Essays reflect solely their author's point of view. We ask only that they respect our Principles.

← Back to all essays | Author's essays We plant the seeds that will grow

by CriticalResist
Published: 2026-05-04 (last update: 2026-05-04)
1-10 minutes

Short analysis of a visitor to ProleWiki following a viral post, and how people who start off wanting to mock the 'tankies' may very well eventually become Marxists themselves.

Read more

Th picture is the first few pages visited by a random user today on ProleWiki. (This is okay to share as there is no identifiable information in it.)

All I know from this random reader is the pages they opened. I do not know them personally. But I can venture a pretty good guess as to what they were searching for on ProleWiki.

You see, yesterday Adolf Something (better known by his other name Adam Something) mockingly posted his ProleWiki page on his youtube community.

Predictably, this gained traction and led to a surge of visitors to the website. It's perfectly dialectical: he makes content and so gets impressions written about him. He reacts to these impressions, thus profiting off the bad press, and inevitably in the process must publish where that information came from, leading to visitors.

For this reason, to be attacked by the enemy is a good thing and not a bad thing.

This is only the first few pages of a 47 minute journey through the wiki for this one visitor. But today, they were far from the only one to follow a similar path.

Their visit begins on our homepage — predictable, as Adam did not post a link to the encyclopedia, but left our logo and name visible.

Then, it continues to a certain set of pages, pictured here: the history 'pill' button on our homepage, the Katyn Massacre, the Holodomor, Anne Applebaum, the thought leader behind study of the 'Holodomor', and then the Soviet Famine of 1931 (the page for the actual famine; the Holodomor page is reserved for the fictionalization by Ukrainian neo-nazis).

At each step, we see a specific thing happen: they are clicking on internal links, going deeper into our pages. The information is all out there, and we have it. We note Applebaum's ties to the NED, we note how she lies about the famine to push a certain narrative about it. We refer to Mark Tauger's counter-argument in his review of her book.

You don't see it in the screenshot, but their visit continues similarly across different topics and other 'bubbles'. Reading about other content creators, then pivoting to Xinjiang Educational centers, Operation Cyclone, and finally Adrian Zenz.

We can hazard a pretty good guess as to the reason of their visit with just two pieces of information: what pages they visited, and that one of them was the Adam Something page.

And we can infer, from the fact that they likely came from Adam's community and immediately visited the hot-button topics of communism, that they wanted to make fun of the "tankies". That they don't believe any of what we have to say.

That may be true, but here is the thing: they still read the pages. Not all of them, but some of them. 47 minutes spent in total on the website — that's not nothing.

And so we have another dialectical movement. To mock your enemy, you must inevitably become acquainted with him, even if it starts out with surface-level ideas.

Now consider this: this is just one visit out of several thousands in the past two days, a trend that is likely to continue for a few more days.

But here, we are planting the seeds that will grow into communists, even if it may not seem like it.

What we do as marxists is plant the seeds. Of course, the seed is the only one that can decide if it wants to grow. But even then, does a seed not need someone to water it to ensure it thrives into a beautiful tree? This is where the broader movement comes in — we have done the legwork, now the task is to welcome this potential new comrade into your ranks if they ever show interest about learning more.

Nobody flips immediately. Think about it: when you first learned about the narrative surrounding the famine of 1931, when you first learned about Stalin's actual life, did you immediately become his strongest supporter? No, it took time. You wrestled with yourself over the fact, and likely went to get several different opinions on the matter. Eventually though, you had no choice but to face reality.

Perhaps nothing will come of it. But as the material conditions around us continue to crumble, more and more people will be looking to alternatives and become open to them. We must prepare the groundwork ten, twenty, thirty(!) years in advance of when we will actually need it.

And part of that happens through exposing people to Marxism, perhaps for the first time in their life, through resources such as ProleWiki.