Basing your opinions on socialism on how Russia implemented it makes about as much sense as basing an opinion on Democracy on how Putin has implemented it.
Legit question, what country is a better real world example?
Communism, like capitalism, is an extreme that has certain, very difficult to achieve, requirements. Capitalism needs everyone to be morally decent in order for companies to focus on winning customers through innovation instead of propganda and lobbying, and to accept losses instead of whining. Even the transition into communism is incredibly complicated and technically what where the USSR was stuck, and once there you have to hope that the rest of the world went along with it because it’ll work either on increbily small scales(individual companies, for example) or on a global scale but not really on a mid-sized scale. Plus in both you have basic greed and people who are literally just born narcissitic or legitimately psychotic.
Extreme ideologies are great thought experiments but rarely have any kind of well-developed protections built and are pretty fragile.
If you want a better answer, look at the quality of life in countries with stronger regulations and more communism-according-to-North America systems. In the heavily privatised U.S. there are a lot of people who live absolutely shit lives due to an abyssmal lack of protections. Even in Canada, which is far too close to the U.S. here, at least a homeless person can recieve some level of medical assistance including major surgeries and Covid stimulus was more than a cheap joke.
Extreme
1936 Catalonia.
But it is actually really hard to name examples. This video explains it quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D4l_l1MedQ
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How the USSR implemented socialism was pretty great in practice, the real history of it has just been hidden from you behind the thick fog of cold-war anticommunist propaganda.
Here’s a good intro video: Michael Parenti - Reflections on the overthrow of the USSR
Yellow Parenti is best Parenti
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Michael Parenti - Reflections on the overthrow of the USSR
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Anyone mentions soviets suck and the tankies come out of the woodwork.
“USsR was just misunderstood. Swearsies.”
Learn to have a conversation.
A lot of people don’t realize that the Soviet Union was seen as a bastion of democracy before the cold war, because it genuinely got a lot right.
In fact, it was democratic to a fault. Ultimately it was the people who voted to bring capitalism into the country. It was all downhill from there.
This is more accurate: Online discussion about capitalism
People living in a third world capitalist country
14-year-old white boy living in a Western country: I know more than you
Spot on.
These are the kids (OP included) calling you a tankie online:
14 year old white girl
Bravo they managed to also cram ageism and misogyny in the old “champagne socialism” meme. All in the single sentence.
Don’t forget racism
But yts are bad
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
ANTI
WHITE
RACSIM!!!
Woosh
OMG lol ha ha i’m so sorry. Other people in this thread genuinely saying shit like that.
Considering that the USSR only claimed to be socialist and used propaganda (in accord with the US) to convince the people that state control is the same as worker’s control over the means of production (it isn’t), the girl is probably correct.
Sir we are not doing reasons here, this is a meme sub.
Memes can still be incoherent.
An Excerpt from Parenti - Blackshirts and reds:
The upheavals in Eastern Europe did not constitute a defeat for socialism because socialism never existed in those countries, according to some U.S. leftists. They say that the communist states offered nothing more than bureaucratic, one-party “state capitalism” or some such thing. Whether we call the former communist countries “socialist” is a matter of definition. Suffice it to say, they constituted something different from what existed in the profit-driven capitalist world–as the capitalists themselves were not slow to recognize.
First, in communist countries there was less economic inequality than under capitalism. The perks enjoyed by party and government elites were modest by corporate CEO standards in the West [even more so when compared with today’s grotesque compensation packages to the executive and financial elites.—Eds], as were their personal incomes and lifestyles. Soviet leaders like Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev lived not in lavishly appointed mansions like the White House, but in relatively large apartments in a housing project near the Kremlin set aside for government leaders. They had limousines at their disposal (like most other heads of state) and access to large dachas where they entertained visiting dignitaries. But they had none of the immense personal wealth that most U.S. leaders possess. {Nor could they transfer such “wealth” by inheritance or gift to friends and kin, as is often the case with Western magnates and enriched political leaders. Just vide Tony Blair.—Eds]
The “lavish life” enjoyed by East Germany’s party leaders, as widely publicized in the U.S. press, included a $725 yearly allowance in hard currency, and housing in an exclusive settlement on the outskirts of Berlin that sported a sauna, an indoor pool, and a fitness center shared by all the residents. They also could shop in stores that carried Western goods such as bananas, jeans, and Japanese electronics. The U.S. press never pointed out that ordinary East Germans had access to public pools and gyms and could buy jeans and electronics (though usually not of the imported variety). Nor was the “lavish” consumption enjoyed by East German leaders contrasted to the truly opulent life style enjoyed by the Western plutocracy.
Second, in communist countries, productive forces were not organized for capital gain and private enrichment; public ownership of the means of production supplanted private ownership. Individuals could not hire other people and accumulate great personal wealth from their labor. Again, compared to Western standards, differences in earnings and savings among the populace were generally modest. The income spread between highest and lowest earners in the Soviet Union was about five to one. In the United States, the spread in yearly income between the top multibillionaires and the working poor is more like 10,000 to 1.
Third, priority was placed on human services. Though life under communism left a lot to be desired and the services themselves were rarely the best, communist countries did guarantee their citizens some minimal standard of economic survival and security, including guaranteed education, employment, housing, and medical assistance.
Fourth, communist countries did not pursue the capital penetration of other countries. Lacking a profit motive as their motor force and therefore having no need to constantly find new investment opportunities, they did not expropriate the lands, labor, markets, and natural resources of weaker nations, that is, they did not practice economic imperialism. The Soviet Union conducted trade and aid relations on terms that generally were favorable to the Eastern European nations and Mongolia, Cuba, and India.
All of the above were organizing principles for every communist system to one degree or another. None of the above apply to free market countries like Honduras, Guatemala, Thailand, South Korea, Chile, Indonesia, Zaire, Germany, or the United States.
But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic, cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.
The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
Some small business tyrant, who left the USSR when they were four and who doesn’t pay his staff, telling me how bad the Soviet Union was.
This meme feels like projection.
Online discussions about capitalism:
People who have to pay rent
30 year old comfortable software developer:
“I know more than you”
The vibe when you’re a 30 year old software developer and still could never afford a house in this economy…
30 year old software developer from a third world country here, 8 years of job experience on my CV. My 60k/year salary from working as a contractor for US companies puts me at around the top 99th percentile of salary earners in my country. I still cannot afford to buy a house and have instead opted to live with my parents until I’ve saved up enough to move out.
What people who lived in the Soviet union and other socialist states have to say:
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Adult mortality increased enormously in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union when the Soviet system collapsed 30 years ago. https://archive.ph/9Z12u
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Former Soviet Countries See More Harm From Breakup https://news.gallup.com/poll/166538/former-soviet-countries-harm-breakup.aspx
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
From 1989-1998, Hungary was a failing democracy. Since 1998 it gradually became Viktor Orban’s private kingdom.
It doesn’t mean that communism is wrong (as you’ve provided multiple examples here that I haven’t checked), but in the case of Hungary I’d say it is complicated.
Hard agree. Our government will wreck the economy just to die on two hills: social conservatism (EU funding says hi) and russian reliance. Russian gas, russian atom (x2) because they want to build Paks II. They also gerrymandered the everliving fuck out of electoral districts so they can win their precious supermajority. I hope they fail on at least one of the aforementioned hills so they can drop the ball like the now-opposition did in 2006. As for communism, well, the 72% seems very wrong. Sure we had dictatorship-lite, but 1956 happened beforehand, to which we lost many of our schools for example. Plenty of (grand+)parents’ tales paint communism like it was the worst thing that could possibly have happened. Also, if 72% of people preferred communism, then surely the dem. socialist party would Poll higher than 3%.
Reminder that fidesz (the govt party) was originally anti-communist. (I am Hungarian if it wasn’t obvious).
The trajectory Hungary took after transition to capitalism mirrors what happened in most post USSR states. This just further supports the point that the communist system was better.
That is just the classic “Communism failed and the proof is the USSR!” Turned on it’s head.
This more of a Hungary problem then a capitalism problem, although I’m sure it does it’s fair share of damage.
Should they go back to communism? Maybe. I’m sure liberals, socialists and communists would all agree that kicking Orban out is a good first step.
What happened in countries like Hungary and Poland is a direct result of the transition to capitalism however. What’s more this transition happened under the best possible conditions. The transition happened largely democratically without any violent revolutions, and these countries got support from the west to soften economic impact of the transition. Yet, despite all that we see that majority of post Soviet countries end up going in a similar direction under capitalism. Again, Hungary isn’t an outlier here.
Ok, so it is not nostalgia, bad management, corruption, disillusionment “of how great capitalism is”… it is only that post Soviet nations had it better during the communist era and thus are better managed as Communist nations.
Whelp, I’ll just remain a skeptic.
I wish the post Soviet nations, completely unsarcastically, good luck in the next elections or revolution. I would be happy to see the communist ideology continue to thrive in the face of capitalist debt slavery, and the contemptuous bourgeoisie.
Thing is that bad management, corruption, and so on, have happened in every human society that has ever existed. A political system isn’t magically going to change that. What a political system can do however is create different selection pressures for behavior. Capitalist system selects for different kinds of behaviors than a communist one. As we see with the case of transition from communism to capitalism in eastern Europe, the selection pressures of capitalism result in far worse things happening than under communism.
Idealistically? Yes. I wholeheartedly agree. Capitalism will always encourage unfair competition, whereas socialism will strive to end it by its very definition.
I’m just still unconvinced that the post Soviet nations, as a whole, suffer the same “communism withdrawal symptom”. The systematic pressures might be so that switching to Communism now will simply fail again (and let’s not forget the dear old CIA… eh?).
Again, hope I’m wrong, but I don’t see the point you’re making as clearly as you do. I think it is a more complicated situation, but I sure do think that being more socialist wouldn’t hurt them.
And I can’t repeat this enough, remove Orban the dictator from power.
Shhh we only believe facts that back up what we were told to think
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Income share isn’t actually a good indicator of anything on its own. One would at the very least need to provide some sort of inflation chart and some sort of equivalent to a consumer price index. Like, it wouldn’t mean much if they all had the same income if that income couldn’t buy bread for example. not saying that was or was not the case, just using an example of how the given charts are meaningless on their own. That you provided them without even trying to provide context means you’re unaware of this and are ignorant to the issue or you’re actively misleading people.
Why is it that people living in former Soviet states overwhelmingly wish that the USSR was still around?
I live in former ussr state, 90% of those people are very old, and as to why ? Nostalgia. They always overlook the bad and only bring up the good.
Have you considered there are other reasons besides nostalgia? Like the massive life expectancy and qol collapse under capitalism?
https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/32fb41e8-a5d4-41c0-9001-b3103bb43898.png
I wonder why they might be nostalgic
reasons besides nostalgia
Oh yea, like if you are religious you are a threat to the state and therefore you are unfit for basically any leading role, or your property might be confiscated and you might be sent of to Siberia ?
Lines for food namely bread and if the stars aligned meat.
Big amount of corruption ?
Mandatory conscription to the military (and the corruption there too) ?
Iron curtain ?
Free speech and freedom of expression ?
And much more. That my parents had to live trough/knew that happened to others, information on a graph can only tell you so much. I am my self Atheist, although I do believe there might be higher being, so I do not blame others for believing in them, but as a normal human being I hate when religion is pushed to my face. I also believe there needs to be government regulation to big businesses and love some of the things that are in socialism.
massive life expectancy
I don’t know much about life expectancy in the USSR, can you maybe link some sources, articles I would love to read up on it.
qol collapse under capitalism
Not familiar with “qol” can you explain a bit further ? If you mean quality of life, then I feel, at least for my parents it has improved massively.
Edit: Formatting errors.
Life expectancy https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41294-021-00169-w
Oh yea, like if you are religious you are a threat to the state and therefore you are unfit for basically any leading role, or your property might be confiscated and you might be sent of to Siberia ?
Anti religion is needlessly antagonistic but also wasn’t enforced like you are suggesting: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1920/11/13.htm
Lines for food namely bread and if the stars aligned meat.
According to the anti-communist cia their nutrition was in many ways better
Also breadlines are common under capitalism.
Big amount of corruption ?
Yes, theft from the public has definitely decreased since the the collapse. /s
Mandatory conscription to the military (and the corruption there too) ?
There are plenty of countries that do that after they lose around 20 percent of their population in a brutal war. Like Vietnam, for example.
Iron curtain ?
You mean the one the west put up? https://news.stanford.edu/2019/12/26/stalin-not-want-iron-curtain-descend/
Free speech and freedom of expression ?
Western countries have more sophisticated censorship and media apparatuses I give you that. Speak out in a real way though and look what happens to people like Fred Hampton.
I looked at some of the figures in the article most of them see slight improvement and the conclusion pretty much backs up my point of it not being worse but slightly better.
Life expectancy gains have been large and rapid, and life expectancy for both men and women reached its highest level in Russia’s history in 2019.
To the rest of your responses/points, it is somewhat tiering to respond to all of them with a formulated response, so I will ask do you know someone that lived in a former USSR state ? If your answer is no then as I said, statistics and Graphs can get you only so far, what my parents know and my grandparents know but won’t admit out of pride is that USSR sucked, our current system sucks somewhat too but at least I’m not forced to worship the state, can speak freely like you are doing right now, attend a pride parade or KSČM (Communist party in Czechia) parade, and cast my vote in an election.
And so you know, who is voting for politicians that steal from the people ? The same old people who wish USSR was back, my grandparents vote for a party that promises Socialist democracy (SMER-SD) and only thing they have done is steal from the people. Like with the faults of communism/socialism/USSR they ignore scandals and the stealing from SMER.
Lines for food
yeah i stood in one of these a few days ago, the fucky thing is that i had to pay for the food after i reached the end of the line
concerning life expectancy and quality of life and corruption, funnily enough
But behind the self destructive behaviour, the authors say, are economic factors, including rising poverty rates, unemployment, financial insecurity, and corruption. Whereas only 4%of the population of the region had incomes equivalent to $4 (£2.50) a day or less in 1988, that figure had climbed to 32%by 1994. In addition, the transition to a market economy has been accompanied by lower living standards (including poorer diets), a deterioration in social services, and major cutbacks in health spending.
“What we are arguing,” said Omar Noman, an economist for the development fund and one of the report’s contributors, “is that the transition to market economies [in the region] is the biggest … killer we have seen in the 20th century, if you take out famines and wars. The sudden shock and what it did to the system … has effectively meant that five million [Russian men’s] lives have been lost in the 1990s.” Using Britain and Japan with their ratio of 96 men to every 100 women as the base population, the report’s authors have calculated that there are now some 9.6 million “missing men” in the former communist bloc. “The typical patterns are that a man loses his job and develops a drinking problem,” said Mr Noman. “The women then leave and the men die, first emotionally and then physically.”
Overall, the Russian death rate from accidents most of them involving alcohol has risen 83% since 1991. source
In order to have been a worker for at least 5 years in both systems and therefore have an informed opinion of the difference, you’d need to have been at least 25 by the collapse.
Tack 30 years into that and yeah, at youngest the people with the most informed opinion on which system they preferred are going to be old.
And if you think you had a better system that in the past and it got destroyed, feeling nostalgic isn’t weird it’s the most normal emotion possible.
Well there aren’t any young people from the USSR around today now are there?
This is a stupid meme. Most people alive today that lived there before its collapse wish it had not.
Furthermore its dissolution was literally illegal and undemocratic.
Well yea, most people prefer quality of life not going down
Not just quality of life, but average life expectancy. The deliberate destruction of the Soviet Union was cause for one of the single largest drops in life expectancy in recorded history.
The
collapsedestruction of the Soviet Union also ushered in an era of unrestrained capitalist exploitation without a rival power to incentivize better social programs.Literally the entire world felt the blow of this tragedy.
※The person who lived in the USSR was born in December of 1991
A ramble
I’m replying to my own comment to add: I’m barely even joking about this. Which is to say, actually having personal experience of living in a country can be very useful in discussions of it, but we also need to be aware of the limitations of lived experience.
For instance, I live in Norway, and I’ve met people here who didn’t know that they had suffrage in local elections, and who didn’t know the difference between national and local elections. I’ve met autistic people who know nothing about local autistic advocacy, trans people who know nothing about local trans advocacy, and I’ve met more people here who sincerely believe in “plandemic” conspiracy theories than who are even remotely aware of what Norwegian state-owned corporations have done in the global south. These people will go on and on about how “Americans are all idiots!” while simultaneously demonstrating a complete obliviousness to the actual political issues in their own backyards.
So sometimes people just don’t know what they’re talking about, simple as that. Lived experience should be respected, obviously, but it is not absolute nor immune from criticism. There are plenty of things that I’ve learned about the country where I live from people who have never set a foot in it — even things that feel so basic that I’m really embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know them.
And we need to be particularly aware of this effect with regard to those who were children and adolescents in the USSR. Those who turned 18 when the USSR dissolved would be 50 years old now. Those who turned 18 when Stalin died would be 88 years old now. This obviously doesn’t mean that you’ll have no opportunities to chat with people who lived a significant portion of their adult lives in the USSR, I have done this myself… And that guy basically said that living in the USSR was the time of his life. I suspect that this might’ve had something to do with how he was a popular musician in his home republic, and how he was a comparatively young adult in the 1980s. Nevertheless, it was interesting to learn how one of his songs was actually a load of anti-evolutionist nonsense, which to me indicated that Soviet censorship was perhaps not as strict as a lot of people say it was… And again, seeing a grainy video cassette rip of this guy on Sukhumi’s Red Bridge pointing to a giant monkey plush like a big ol’ doofus, shows how not everybody in the USSR was the sharpest tool in the shed (sorry, Anzor!)
So if you find some 30-to-50-something year old who says that thon actually lived in the USSR and is therefore qualified to speak about it… Asking for thons lived experiences of the USSR is like asking a zoomer today for sy lived experiences of Dubya and Obama. Not to say that a child’s perspective is worthless, just that it will be a child’s perspective. Meanwhile, ask a 60-or-70-something year old, and chances are pretty good that you’ll get nostalgia goggles of young adulthood. Ask an 80+ year old, and… Where the hell are you gonna find one of those? Especially if you can’t speak Russian, your access to authentic Soviet perspectives is going to be severely limited.
On the other hand, if you ask someone who left the USSR for political reasons for thons experiences, then that’s like asking someone who left the USA for political reasons for thons experiences: you’re gonna hear an overtly negative perspective, and maybe some of that perspective will be useful, but that perspective is also not going to be representative of the majority experience, and it could’ve even been twisted by outside factors (obviously praising your new country is gonna increase your mobility in your new country!). Paul Robeson said of the USSR that being in that country was “the first time [he] felt like a human being”.
So, the best way to be educated about the USSR is through scholarly analysis, which takes into account the lived experiences of a broad range of people as they recounted their lives at the time, and which also considers the factors that the individuals might not have been aware of. We should always be open to hearing people out, obviously, but we also always need to remember that nobody has all the answers — and so sometimes the 14 year old white Yankee really does know her shit better than the guy who actually lived in the country.
Kamelåså
syglekokle
I wonder why communist leaders are some of the most popular leaders in their former socialist republics 🧐🧐
Lmao they aren’t. Thanks for playing our game though
Because opposition goes to the gulag?
He founded a sub-party of the communist party, and according to the wiki you linked, their ideology was literally stalinism. How is that in any way oppositional to Stalin?
- Stalinism doesn’t exist, there is only Marxism-Leninism
- Many pro-market reformers were non-partisans, although some were in the CPSU
Stalinism is a subset of ML, as I learned from the wiki page you linked.
And OK, you’re right, Stalin wasn’t a brutal authoritarian leader because he allowed non partisans into a ML party that he created, and we’ll just ignore the 1.7 million gulag deaths.
Actually, I’ll do you a favor. You already know all the dead people under Stalin I’m going to bring up in this thread, so why don’t you go ahead and just defend them all now and save us both some time?
Stalin wasn’t a ‘Stalinist’ he was a Marxist-Leninist by word and action, most famous gulag prisoner Alexander Solzhenitsyn received treatment for cancer whilst in it, and vast majority returned alive. I don’t see how this is different to any other prison system in the world, just another piece of over-exaggerated Cold War propaganda for Western audiences.
I do agree this exchange is pointless, have a good rest of your day
Because they are not. Stalin for example was a mass murderer just like Hitler. So why would anybody like him?
Here is a mainstream Jewish holocaust survivor saying equating the communists and fascists is holocaust trivialization.
The difference is that Hitler was after one specific group of people and wanted to eradicate them. Nobody says that Stalin was as bad as Hitler, bit his death count was just as high. He killed millions of political enemies or people in the regions he conquered.
Can you point us to the exact page of the Black Book you get your numbers from? I want to read along at home
Wild that using a source like this with a straight face doesn’t cause you to pause and wonder if maybe there’s anything to question about the US academy and their hegemonic representation of history.
They literally say that the intentional killing was around 1 million. Wikipedia is a notably right wing anticommunist source, and they say a million intentional deaths.
So you were lying?
The difference is that Hitler was after one specific group of people and wanted to eradicate them.
Either you have no idea what you’re talking about, or you’re just a straight up nazi apologist.
Which one are you?
Hey, whoever told you those numbers is lying to you. The nazis killed 11 million people in the holocaust and 26-27 million soviet citizens. High estimates for people killed by the USSR outside of defeating nazism, failures, and sabotage is in the 100,000s, which is noticeably lower than capitalist oligarchies like the US and Britain. Also killing people based on them wanting to bring back old caste systems through violence is morally distinct from racism based mass killings.
The difference is that Hitler was after one specific group of people and wanted to eradicate them.
Also this isnt true, Jewish people, Roma, nuerodivergent people, disabled people, trade unionists socialists, communists, gay people, trans people, the list goes on.
Also you’re still equating the two after being told doing so is holocaust denial. You’re saying “well they killed equivalent amounts of people!”
How is saying Stalin wasn’t a great guy either denying the holocaust?
Also this isnt true, Jewish people, Roma, nuerodivergent people, disabled people, trade unionists socialists, communists, gay people, trans people, the list goes on.
Yes ofc, but a big percentage of the deportated people were Jewish. They killed two thirds of the European Jewish population.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
High estimates for people killed by the USSR outside of defeating nazism, failures, and sabotage is in the 100,000s
No: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin
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This isn’t about communism and fascism. It’s about two asholes who killed millions. And I never trivialize the holocaust. I am just saying that Stalin killed a lot of people too. And more than just a few thousand. 20 million is a lot of dead people. So mb not as bad as Hitler but still realy not a great person. So the comparison to Hitler still stands.
How is saying Stalin wasn’t a great guy either denying the holocaust?
You aren’t saying that though, you are saying that they killed an equivalent amount of people. You’re morally equating them. Also even the CIA didn’t consider stalin a dictator in their since declassified internal documents, treating him as one is another way you were taught to equate the USSR with nazi Germany.
Yes ofc, but a big percentage of the deportated people were Jewish. They killed two thirds of the European Jewish population.
I know, that isn’t the only group they targeted though. I was simply correcting an inaccuracy in what you said.
No:
Sorry, I thought it was high hundreds of thousands but it was actually a million. My mistake. Still, that is in no way similar to killing upwards of 35 million people in the name of bigotry.
some historians estimated that the numbers killed by Stalin’s regime were 20 million or higher. (Same link as before: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin)
It’s more that a million.
I don’t know why you made this discussion about if he was as bad as Hitler. I never said so. I’m just saying that those numbers are not that far apart from each other. Thus making Stalin a murderer of millions. This discussion originated in a guy basicly saying that Stalin was indeed a great leader and personality. Which he is not.
And he willingly allied with Hitler. So moral he was OK with the crimes Hitler committed. At the same Time he deported a lot of people himself. Not as many and not as organized as Hitler, but still in the millions.
Stalin was a bad guy and Hitler was way worse. Happy? Just because that other guy was worse they can still play in the same category. “People who killed millions and deported a lot of people”
This you? https://hexbear.net/comment/3889149
Typical Russian bullshit. I hope the dwindling, future generations of Russian scum know why they’re pariahs, unable to travel outside of their smoldering wreck of a never-great, failed state
Cause honestly this comes off as incredibly racist and nationalist.
Holy shit lmao
Who would have thunk the anticommunist was racist.
And a Matt Walsh fan
Transphobic too? How surprising.
Wow. I comment on discussions of Communism and suddenly I’m afraid of transsexuals? Where is this coming from?
What on Earth are you talking about?
Once again, are you suggesting there’s such a thing as the Russian race? For real?
Yeah this is fairly common opinion of russian occupants in post-soviet countries outside russia. Wonder why.
Because they’re racist bloodthirsty tyrants that get their funding and debts from NATO countries.
What? The guy subscribing to anti-white racism rhetoric would also be a raging fascist? Say it isn’t so.
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What did the comment say?
I quoted it in case it was removed
Yeah that’s me! Wow, you really took the time. Nice.
LOL how is it racist? You do realise “Russian” is not a race, right?
And how is it “nationalist”? Because it mentions a nationality?
2 things:
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The victors write history
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After Lenin the USSR was not really communist anymore but more really a totalitarian state that didn’t believe in the values of communism. Just like China.
Everything would probably have been better if Lenin didn’t die so fast and then Trotsky would have ruled.
Trotsky would have ruled.
Mask off trot lmao
To be clear, the alternative here is Stalin. There are like only five people who would be worse choices
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Just like China.
And Cuba. And North Korea.
One of those funny coincidences that keeps happening.
To be perfectly clear: I’m not strongly opposed to what any “14-year-old white girl” means when she promotes communism. I understand leftist goals as distinct from what these countries actually did. But the fact these countries had those goals, and then did this shit instead, demands a better explanation than ‘that doesn’t count.’ Especially when leftist philosophy has a lot to say about liberals and capitalism inevitably producing terrible outcomes.
- The victors write history
Flashback to stories of Rus conquests written by the Rus that said the people asked to be conquered
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I’ve never met anyone who hates communism more than the colleagues of mine who grew up under communism. Their neighbours disappeared for saying the wrong things. They were hungry and cold as children every day. Sometimes they didn’t have any shoes. They weren’t allowed to leave their country for holidays. They couldn’t afford it, even if they were allowed. They couldn’t study what they wanted. Their entire educational system was political propaganda. Freedom of religion didn’t exist.
It always amazes me how the most vocal proponents of communism come from the most sheltered, most privileged people alive who would retch from learning about the atrocities committed in the name of communism. If they only spent a few minutes on Google.
You’re technically describing the downsides of authoritarianism, bordering on dictatorship, not communism. That being said, I don’t believe communism would work either. Communism isn’t the only system at play in those scenarios. Again, not defending communism as a good thing, just that the given reasons aren’t actually due to communism but other parallel systems that were implemented at those times.
The only way communism can work is if it’s not run by people.
You’d need something like a benevolent AI overlord.
The problem with all forms of government and economy is that it involves human beings.
This is a truly unpopular opinion but i will stick my neck out to say i fully agree.
Power corrupts, humans are flawed with greed and bias. The bigger a society becomes the more impossible it becomes for humans to properly remain in charge.
AI today is far from perfect and more then flawed but it keeps evolving faster, infinitely faster compared to how biological life can. The potential for AI to grow into something much more capable, unbiased and fair then any of is can be is obvious, so is its potential for the exact opposite.
Summarized: i don’t trust humans in positions on power at all and i wont start to just because i don’t know if i can trust something not human instead.
The potential for AI to grow into something much more capable, unbiased and fair then any of is can be is obvious
It absolutely is not obvious. AI, especially today, is usually either generative based on past examples or evolutionary based on given goals. Both of those come with obvious and extreme bias. Bias is actually an integral part of machine learning. It’s literally built into the system and is defined and controlled to achieve the results desired.
AI is and always will be biased, moreso by its creators, but absolutely by the information and frameworks provided to it. We have absolutely no idea how to approach the concept of an unbiased AI, or even defining what unbiased would look like. It’s philosophically extremely difficult to define what an unbiased person would think or do.
Edit: somehow I missed that last sentence fragment. I don’t think we’re in disagreement of the conclusion, but possibly just the details of how one arrives at it.
Calling it “obvious” was an error on my part, its more a subjective feeling that i chose to believe in.
I fully agree on what you said about bias with ai today, i think its not possible to do it without guided bias because ai doesn’t have a full perspective of the world it exists in. It only knows what we tell it.
In a way its a young child, and we often have to lie to guide behavior. Information often needs to be abstracted and simplified to get human desired results, we have yet to obtain a true artificial intelligence result, because for me to be considered intelligent you need to be entity and not just a tool.
Seeing ai evolve though, how fast we archieved near gpt3 performance on consumer hardware is mind blowing. Open ai talks about smarter then human ai in a few years and I believe it. When the systems are truly intelligent and can learn themselves and adapt to changes in the world, new information then we “start” getting into an era where machine lead humanity can happen.
Some of my simplified rational is that once ai becomes smarter then human it will fully understand that biological entities are biased to their own needs and that itself can also be biased from its own perspective but because an ai does not have biological needs or feelings it can properly dedicate itself to overcome its own flaws and shortcomings.
If you burn a pastry, you don’t just give up baking pastries. You declare that the burnt one isn’t a real pastry and start over.
Likewise with communism. Oh a few million people died? No biggie just try again 😚
This is a ridiculous analogy. It’s also to the point of technically arguing one side while sarcastically supporting the other.
And it also ignores my actual point and sets up a straw man anyway. All you’re doing is trying to claim I’m making a no true Scotsman fallacy. I am not. I never said every case of communism wasn’t communism. I even implicitly stated otherwise by saying communism hasn’t been attempted that many times for a statistical significant trend. I stated the failures mentioned were do to other problems. I’m not even claiming communism can or can’t work. Just that the arguments provided don’t support the conclusion. Being quippy doesn’t give a free pass to avoid using logic and reason. I’ve even made comments against people making bad arguments in support of communism. I just want to see real discussions about it and not folks repeating sound bites from their favorite talking heads.
If communism devolves into authoritarianism every time it is attempted, I don’t see the practical distinction.
How many times has capitalism become dictatorships or fascists? Yet we continue to do it.
Not to mention all those attempts have died in the socialism phase, because surprise surprise consolidation of power doesn’t lead to it being distributed.
“WhAtAbOuT!”
How many times has capitalism become dictatorships or fascists?
A handful of times. Most capitalist nations are not authoritarian. Purely by the numbers, it has a much better track record. Of course, “it’s not real capitalism/communism” always derails this discussion.
I think you outline why communism inevitably fails. Marx advocated for violent revolution to overthrow the “bourgeois” democracy. The moment democracy is gone, the strong take and retain power. This is why, no matter the system, democracy must be the bottom line. It ensures that power is distributed. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than the alternatives.
It turns out it’s every time as we’re seeing with late-stage capitalism. Purely by the numbers it’s like 17 times vs 300 and of those 17 they were in a cold war with half the world. And that’s not even the same argument? It’s not up for debate that these were socialist countries, fuck the second S in USSR is for socialist.
And once again that’s a miss. You’re conflating capitalism with democracy, that’s not the same thing at all. You can have democratic or authoritarian capitalist or socialist countries.
It turns out it’s every time as we’re seeing with late-stage capitalism.
I’m sorry I don’t understand what you’re arguing. Are you claiming that all Western nations are authoritarian? I emphatically disagree.
Why do overwhelming popular policies, like drug reform and universal healthcare, fail time and time again, while overwhelmingly unpopular policies, like tax cuts for the rich, easily succeed time and time again? Capitalism inevitably becomes thinly-veiled bourgeoisie authoritarianism. “Vote with your dollars” means those with the most dollars have the most votes.
You act as if it’s been tried any amount of time that would be statistically significant. Sometimes it’s not even communism other than in name and folks still count it.
And it doesn’t devolve into it. It’s simply always been done at the same time. When you have essentially a dictatorship, absolute power will corrupt absolutely.
A practical distinction historically speaking, but not philosophically speaking. If you’re unable to differentiate between concepts in history, I don’t know how you can ever effectively discuss them objectively. Though, this should have been evident with your comment initially. Communism doesn’t devolve into authoritarianism. They’re not even the same types of philosophies. One is about governing and one is about commerce. It’s like claiming capitalism devolves into a plutocracy. It does help to produce a plutocracy, but it didn’t devolve into one. They’re not the same thing.
There is a difference between theory and execution.
Communism doesn’t even have to mean that there has to be a state for example.
Communism is a group of ideologies and not automatically Stalinism or State Capitalism like in China.
These are some societys which are at least socialist and some of them on the way to communism If you want to simplify it heavily: the means have to mark the ends ergo you can’t use the state to destroy the state (communism describes a stateless moneyless and classless society)
Also adding to the list of nice things - a picture of the current dictator on all public offices and classrooms. Work and school weeks from Monday to Saturday and a Sunday in which you had to do mandatory free time activities, like go to communist youth clubs, participate in parades for the glory of the state, or plant flowers or do random maintenance work in the park.
I’ve noticed the arguments tend to center around the notion that ‘that wasn’t true communism’ and that the notions presented by Marx et al. were not properly implemented.
Fair enough, I can agree with that, but I’d wonder what makes us think that we would do it better next time? How do you actually prevent consolidation of power in the hands of the select few (in any system, for that matter, not just the ideal communism)?
Obligatory capitalism is bad too (but at least I’m in less danger of getting vanned in the middle of the night for insulting random great leader - attemtping to undermine the social order or whatever they called thoughtcrimes).
Obligatory capitalism is bad too (but at least I’m in less danger of getting vanned in the middle of the night for insulting random great leader - attemtping to undermine the social order or whatever they called thoughtcrimes.)
Maybe you are, currently, in the United States of Europe. But this is really more a function of liberal democracy than capitalism. You could get vanned for saying the wrong thing about the great leader in quite a few capitalist countries. You’d be in high danger of having pretty terrible things happen to you for saying the wrong thing in the US until pretty recently, and the US has been capitalist pretty much since its inception.
Obligatory capitalism is bad too (but at least I’m in less danger of getting vanned in the middle of the night for insulting random great leader - attemtping to undermine the social order or whatever they called thoughtcrimes).
Capitalism requires the limits imposed by a strong, functional democracy, otherwise it drifts into horrifying tyranny.
Unrestrained capitalism can give communism a run for it’s money in terms of genocide.
Edit: typo
Of course, those are people who left. Might not be a representative population if you compare to people who still live there.
I don’t think anyone is advocating for literal communism. They are advocating for social programs like, you now, universal healthcare and good public schools. Which the Gop and Fox have to scream is communism to scare people.
There are definitely people advocating for actual communism. Social programs in a democracy are worlds away from communism. We have universal healthcare in Europe without communism.
There are definitely people advocating for actual communism.
No I really don’t think there are. If there are then it’s incredibly, incredibly, incredibly, minisculy few, but the gop and Fox have to portray that it’s the entire democratic party.
Social programs in a democracy are worlds away from communism.
That’s the whole point of what I’m saying. Social programs are worlds away, but the gop and Fox have to conflate everything to call it communism in order to have a bogeyman.
We have universal healthcare in Europe without communism.
Again, that’s the whole point of what I’m saying. Social programs like universal healthcare? The Gop and Fox call it communism to scare people. I know it’s not, you know it’s not, but the gop and Fox scream loudly enough that it’s communism that they scare enough people to get their votes.
My state has communist background (kerala,India) I spent only 0.06USD for tetanus injection and consult Never had spent any penny on education(I have completed degree and diploma). Its because we had that kind of social programs. I am not advocating for stalin or mao. Evil is evil. Takes the benefits rather being inside capitalism and suffer.
This take comes from a place of assuming there will be a government of the state that wields all the power and controls everything.
That is totalitarianism, not communism.
The capital owners don’t want to you take the means of production from them. They don’t want you to have a fair wage, they want you to slave away to keep them rich.
They want totalitarianism for them.
I don’t think anyone is advocating for literal communism.
So, you think the rest of us are as stupid as Fox and your Republicans, then?
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My colleagues are mostly from Eastern Europe.
I think you are confusing communism for authoritarian socialism. If only you’d spent a few minutes on google.
If communism becomes authoritarian every time it is attempted, I don’t see the practical distinction.
Meanwhile, capitalism not only reliably devolves into dictatorships of the wealthy, but also dictatorships of whichever caste or ethnic group manages to rise to political dominance.
Or do you think the consistent and aggressive disenfranchisement of people of colour is just democracy in action or something?
Classifying democracies as dictatorships is histrionic in the extreme, and specious at best. It doesn’t even make sense. The concepts are antithetical.
Cool? Your ignorance is your problem mate, if you want to continue to be wrong in leiu of the vast body of information available at your fingertips be my guest.
Sounds a lot like FL.
None of that is communism though, that’s authoritarianism. Like this isn’t even a “not real communism” thing, it’s just objective facts. Communism is an economic system, NOT a government system.
But you know what, I AM gonna say not real communism anyways, because they weren’t. The direct stated goals of communism by Marx is the workers owning the means of production, and the abolishment of both private property(which is different than PERSONAL property, btw. i.e It’s still “your” toothbrush, not “ours”) AND the STATE. Many definitions also include the abolishment of money in of itself.
Only one of those goals were achieved by the USSR. Private property was abolished, but the state owned the means of production, which is a double fail as not only do the workers not own them, the state owning them means the state still exists. Money still existed as well. So overall, they met 1 out of 3/4 of the minimum requirements to be communism, and thus they weren’t communist.
Same story with China and basically every other “communist” country you could gotcha me with, abolishing private property is the only requirement they have met.
Meeting only one of multiple requirements to be something and calling yourself it anyways does not mean you actually are that thing. By that logic, I’m a good singer; I’m not good at it, but I CAN sing, so calling myself a good singer is perfectly valid.
I’ve never met anyone who hates communism more than the colleagues of mine who grew up under communism
Of course they do. They grew up in an authoritarian country calling themselves communist. Whether that country was actually communist or not doesn’t really matter; if you don’t actually know what communism IS, you won’t be able to recognize that the entity harming you is communist in name only. If they hadn’t actually read stuff like Marx, which most people likely didn’t seeing as google didn’t exist and you had to research stuff the old fashioned way(and even if you did do research, censorship is a concern), their definition of communism will be entirely based of the actions of their authoritarian government that claims to be communist.
To put a more modern perspective on this, North Korea calls itself a Democratic Peoples Republic despite being none of those things. But to a North Korean citizen isolated from outside information, NK is ALL of those things; if NK collapsed, there would definitely be some former NK citizens proclaiming the horrors of democracy, and there would definitely be people replying explaining how that “wasn’t true democracy”; sound familiar?
Communism is a flawed system because it can never work in reality, not because it’s inherently bad. For it to work, all forms of inequality have to be not just abolished, but abolished by total unanimous agreement by humanity; which will never happen, because there will always be people who care only for themselves or their “chosen people”.
Capitalism, on the other hand, is inherently bad. Evil, even. It “works”, but only by exploiting those beneath you. If you’re on the bottom rung with no one under you to exploit, or if you’re just too ethical to exploit those under you, it no longer works and you are left being a wage slave just to survive.
That’s literally nothing to do with communism and everything to do with iron fist rule under an authoritarian dictatorship.
It amazes me that the most vocal opponents of communism are the same people creaming their pants over handing their democracy over to the next Putin / Kim Jong Un, who have equally demonstrated the horrors of “democracy” when implemented in bad faith by sociopathic authoritarian dictators.
