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.
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
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.
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
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
What? The guy subscribing to anti-white racism rhetoric would also be a raging fascist? Say it isn’t so.
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?
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.
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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Never did any research, did you ?
※The person who lived in the USSR was born in December of 1991
On Lemmy it is more like 40 something year old neckbeards that haven’t seen the light of day in 2 decades. They claim to struggle to make friends at parties but could easily run a country.
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.
LOL, I knew this sub was digging for old memes but bringing back actual red-baiting? chef’s kiss
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.
Pretty much Lemmy. I grew up in a communist civil war, hosing blood off my sidewalk was a weekly chore, the neighbors vanishing cause they pissed someone off and were labeled red. But yeah, Lemmy teens, you guys know all about it! /S
Erm pushes up glasses that wasn’t real communism because real communism works.
Lol ya right?!
The NSDAP was a real socialist party.
The Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea is actually democratic and governed by the people.
Did you still use money to buy goods and services? Was your father able to do speak up at work? Change jobs? Go on vacations?
Just because something called itself communism didn’t make it communism. The state owning everything is the opposite of communism. In extreme communism, there isn’t even a damn state as we know it.
The people in the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea do not live in a democracy nor a republic.
So communism = god?
A fictional impossibility
In many ways, yes. It is absolutely an ideal that is not compatible with current reality.
That’s why anyone who’s remotely realistic about it understands it’s an end state of pushing for anarcho-socialistic policies, one that maybe cannot be achieved. Like saying, “Humanity will walk on the moon.” when it’s 1910. Conceivable? Kinda’. Possible? Hell no.
The ussr may not have been communist, but it was definitely the initial goal. The idea of a revolution that leads to a dictatorship of the proletariat is inherently flawed. You just end up replacing a corrupt government with another corrupt government.
I wonder why communist leaders are some of the most popular leaders in their former socialist republics 🧐🧐
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.
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”
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?
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?
Facts, I hate communism
Communism as a concept is a brilliant thing. The problem is that in the past it never worked the way it was intended, but managed to cause a lot of harm.
The problem is that the 14 year old white girl here still thinks with all her heart that countries like China are communist and in generall the perfect place to be, which is just not true.
This is a silly argument because actual real world communism has to be compared to other real world alternative we have available which is capitalism. By every measure capitalism has created far more horrors than communism has.
Personally I find it going this way:
- some person, who at least knows what socialism is, even if they’re not the most well-read in the subject,
- some way better read one, but thinks state control of enterprises suffice and trusts the state way too much as long as it has hammers and sickles,
- some capitalism fan, who thinks socialism is evil, and that constructon company CEOs are workers, but underpaid office workers are “elites”.
Rarely you get a very well read one, who understands their stuff, or the old Soviet bloc ex-communist, who switched because the local far-right party started to be very concerned about “work morals”, and also think the construction company CEO is a worker and “against the elite”.
The problem is the way that most of those communism perfect people inform themselves. They usually know a lot of stuff about a certain topic where they can argue anyone to deth who doesn’t know as much about a topic. And because they know that much more than the other person they can use wrong statements that sound right in the mass of correct information. Then you get people who know everything about Kuba and are 100% sure it’s a democracy.