You make a good point about rights. In particular, I think of the USian fetishizing of the constitution. There are plenty who believe in it to an almost religious degree yet are more reactionaries than they are something resembling communists. And they don’t need to be communist to believe in it because the liberal framework does have belief in individual liberties and rights to a degree; in fact, it tries to have this exist alongside capitalism, in spite of how contradictory this can end up getting.

I tend to think that in the US context, and possibly similar western contexts in other countries too, communists need to be wary of playing into “you believe in rights too? yeah, let’s go” and instead focus on teaching people about power and where it derives from. That the reason the so-called rights keep falling short of the seeming ideal on paper is not because “humans are imperfect” or “the system is corrupt”, but because the system of power, who controls the means of production and distribution, is intentionally oriented toward an exploitative ruling elite, not toward public good. And that liberalism is designed not for the purpose of the common public good, but for legitimizing and sanitizing this model of an exploitative ruling elite. “Trickle down economics,” in spite of being said by a member of the US republican party, is I think a good example of liberal philosophy. The idea is that the ruling elite are creating something of value, which is then passed down to the greater public; instead of the reality, which is that the greater public is creating something of value and the ruling elite is seizing the majority of gain from the greater public for personal use. So it is not trickle down, but rather siphon up. I know I’m preaching to the choir on that, but I wanted to go through the thought process of it and why the distinction is so important.