Socialism
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic and constructive discussion from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
A certain knowledge of socialism is expected, if you are new to/interested in socialism, please visit c/Socialism101 before participating here. Socialism101 will gladly help you by answering questions, providing resources etc.
Memes go in c/Lefty Memes
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, upvoting good contributions and downvoting those of low-quality!
Rules
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith discussion is enforced here.
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such,
as well as condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavour.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry.
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Xenial Xerus" when answering question 2)
6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
7. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Queerphobia
- Ableism
- Classism
- Rape or assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)
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Okay, cool, so the USSR was, by your words, less prone to creating a wealth disparity. And lets just not talk about the several million that died under Stalin. Now, the USSR may not have funneled wealth, but in the end, it still collapsed on itself. It did not last, and this was largely due to internal affairs.
As per the second part, sure, I'll concede to you the pedantic semantics of the word utopia. My point still stands. Don't get me wrong, if someome were to ask, "Would you rather live in a functioning capitalist society, or a functioning socialist society," I would choose and tell others they should join the socialist one. My point is that, at some point, that government is still going to go to shit, just because people are people. Though, please do not take this as any sort of statement like, "don't even try," because a better life is a better life. If it's feasable, go for it. It's just that the core problem (human nature) isn't going to be solved by a political ideology, rather, human nature will eventually fuck that ideology up.
Let's also talk about the tens of millions that were saved under Stalin from Nazi extermination, and about the tens of millions that were saved from hunger, poverty and treatable disease under Stalin, who took over a Soviet Union with a life expectancy of 27 years and died with a Soviet Union with a life expectancy of 60+ years. If you run the numbers, by any reasonable metric, the Soviet Union saved easily 30-40 million people in those years.
That sounds like a sophism, not like any real argument. What's your point? Socialism fell not because it's not sustainable, it fell because it appeared in a backward feudal country 100 years behind the capitalist west at its inception, and couldn't keep up with the progress and technology that the industrialized west + colonies were able to put out. This is changing now, as the biggest communist country is China and it has already overtaken the west in terms of economic output, and it's a matter of time before communism finally spreads to the rest of the world.
Cool, people were saved, even if you put it to a ratio of dead to saved, it's still a shitty ratio. And again, it still fell.
I don't give an ass's arse that you think it sounds like sophistry. Human beings will fuck an ideology up, full stop. And while China is definitely doing well, modern China isn't communist.
Is it? Europe at the time was full of colonial powers carrying out genocide in India, Southern Asia and in many places of Africa, the USA was a colonial power emerged out of the genocide of native Americans keeping the entirety of Latin America underdeveloped... The USSR never had a colony and it was a self-sufficient system that didn't rely on colonialism or neocolonialism, both of which kept and keep billions impoverished and overworked in the global south. Take those things into the ratio, compare countries, and you'll find that there hasn't been a country as moral and fair as the USSR.
"This may sound like I'm making shit up, but I'm very sure of it, full stop."
Chinese people often call it "Socialism with Chinese characteristics". You don't wanna call it like that, that's fine, it's just terminology. The point is that it's a fundamentally different economic and political system, and I think it's measurably better than the west in many metrics. If you agree, then you probably agree that we should pursue a similar system, whether you decide to call it communist or not?
Picks up a map.
Siberia? The Baltics? Caucasus? Central Asia? Warsaw pact countries?
Those were all Soviet colonies. A lot of them still are Russian colonies. Russia is the last colonial empire that refuses to die.
"USSR BAD!!!" picks map from Tsarist Empire
Workers in those regions had the same rights as workers anywhere, had self a representation in the government and local administration, and received massive boosts in quality of life through state investment in infrastructure, which ensured similar amounts of hospital beds per capita all over the country. You literally don't know what "colony" means, there's a reason why Central Asian countries for example overwhelmingly voted in favour of maintaining the USSR in the 1990 referendum.
Now that those regions have gone back to capitalism, a form of colonialism has returned, leading to disastrous conflicts like the Chechen War and the defunding of local infrastructure in favour of Moscow. Go open a book.
If you think that creation of USSR destroyed the tsarist culture of oppression, your education system has failed you.
Provided they were Russian or Georgian.
Provided they were communists that spoke Russian.
A place that the core country exploits for resources and financial gain while abusing and exploiting their people?
Yeah I do. I live in a former one.
And why didn't they?
Because the tsar has returned and so will the repression? Or maybe, because they can't let more colonies leave them because the ones that did are doing so well?
Yeah, you too. But maybe next time read something good and not something that defends a dead, failed state that brought misery to millions?
Spicy, first time I've seen anti-georgian nationalism. Funnily enough, Khrushchev and Brezhnev were Ukrainian, I guess that's not political representation to you?
This is literally not what happened. I already provided you information about things like hospital beds. Furthermore, every republic had the right to determine its own official language, people had access to education in their language up to 18 years of age (some universities also taught in the local language), most published books and newspapers by number were in the local language, all regions got industrialized though some were at a much more backwards starting point... If your metric for colonization is "extraction of resources", then surely in the period between 1955 and 1990, in which the USSR was a net exporter of raw goods and hydrocarbons and net importer of industrial goods in the Eastern Block, Poland and Czechoslovakia were colonizing the USSR?
Exactly my point, the tsar returned because there was no Tsar in the USSR. That's why wealth inequality rose through the roof in all former republics after the change ro capitalism.
No, it's something taken from Stalin's purge of the military. He removed most of the people who weren't Russian or Georgian.
Nope:
And some absolutely did not:
Their industrialization was often misguided at best and purposefully rigged to fail after dissolution at worst. Most of the countries would be better off had they developed independently.
Sarah Paine refers to this as a Doughnut Empire:
But the end result is still the same. If Soviet Union left the Eastern Europe alone, it would be almost as prosperous as the Western Europe is now. They took our best and gave very little in return.
The sad reality of Russia was that the people who were in charge of the dark half of the shadow economy gobbled up most of the former state enterprises put up for sale. They knew how market economy worked and had amassed enough money to buy them out. (Not just rapidly value losing roubles, but US dollars too.) You know, the same shadow economy that you claim was a non-issue.
But at least you're not simping for Putin's Russia, so you have that going for you.
Huh? Are you doing racial essentialism? Surely someone born in Ukraine and upbrought there is Ukrainian?
Evil soviets planning the dissolution and disindustrialization of the peripheral regions? Don't be absurd.
This is true for a total of 0 of the countries. Everything west of the Urals would have been genocided and enslaved by Nazis, and would be very similar to places like India, Brazil or Phillipines. Central Asian regions like Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan are orders of magnitude better than neighboring Afghanistan or Pakistan, which were actual western colonies with similar pasts. Had tsarism continued or capitalism fluorished, the ethnic minorities in Russia proper would have been assimilated in the same way that they're being assimilated now with Putin. My girlfriend's mom and grandmom studied in their native language, but she was born after 1990 so she didn't have that right. It took one generation for her language to be erased from her family, while it was maintained for 70+ years under communism. You yourself speak Lithuanian and your family too. For comparison with a capitalist country, in 1920 there were above a million Occitan speakers in southern France. By 2020 there's barely 100k. THAT'S what erasure and assimilation looks like. Yakut people got to preserve their language, culture and traditions, so did Bashkir, Mari, Lithuanians and essentially all ethnic minorities in the USSR. Belarusians are specifically hard affected, I agree, and some other ethnicities like Crimean Tatars or Koreans were also targeted during WW2. Those are big mistakes and we must learn from them and never repeat them, but despite this, it was the most inclusive and multicultural state at the time. For comparison, my homeland Spain outright banned the use of Basque and Catalonia at the time. This is what happens when you don't have Bolsheviks protecting you from fascism.
So if USSR extracts resources from some regions it's bad for said regions, but if it exports resources to other regions it's also bad. The conclusion is that USSR bad no matter what it does, got your logic now. True doublethinking.
There would be no Eastern Europe, there would be Greater Germany á-la British Empire.
This isn't a sad unfortunate mistake, it's literally the definition of capitalism, it's a "winner takes it all" system without regard to public well-being. This was directed to happen this way by economic authorities using neoliberal shock therapy that killed millions.
No, I don't simp for capitalist oligarchs, unlike you when you praise the capitalism that hollowed out 1/4th the population of your homeland and when you claim without evidence that "capitalist countries 100 years backwards in development would have somehow avoided Nazi invasion and caught up with western Europe standards of living without having colonies like western Europe, like other famous equally capitalist and developed countries at the time such as Indonesia, Brazil or Mexico".
Look at history: the only countries that developed close to western levels of industrialization since 1900 were either communist countries (Eastern Block and China) or USA-sponsored coldwar military bases (South Korea and to a lesser degree Taiwan. Japan was already an industrial power and imperialist country by the 1930s). Literally no other capitalist country developed, bring up an example otherwise and explain me how Lithuania would have developed so much better than Guatemala, Mexico or Brazil because Lithuanians are white
Not if they keep speaking Russian and follow Russian norms and customs, they are still Russian. There are plenty of people in the Baltic states who don't speak the languages of their corresponding countries but instead mostly use Russian. We do not consider them ethnically Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian, but Russian and treating them otherwise creates a warped perspective of their history.
And yet some countries did better in the transition than others.
Finland. During the interwar period, it was a poorer country than Estonia and the gap between us as seen now is considered as what Soviet occupation took from us.
You keep refusing to admit that you'd be a Nazi colony. Come on, argue against this, don't keep avoiding it. Tell me how Lithuania would have avoided being ethnically cleansed and enslaved if it weren't for the Soviets.
Finland is now with a far right government, and in this past year they've put hundreds of thousands of people into poverty through austerity policy. The trend of European nations is downwards, and it has been since the USSR stopped being the beacon of worker rights that it was. Now that we don't need some shiny microstates as examples of social democracy against communism, we can happily let them rot!
Just because one option was bad and the other option was worse, doesn't make the first option good.
We were ethnically cleansed and enslaved. By the Soviets, yes.
They still fit your definition though. A non-communist country that industrialized.
The trend downwards was caused by the Russian state actors meddling in our information space, but it sure is convenient to ignore that.
The USSR was not self-sufficient for starters, and again, it failed. Because of its own problems. And I'm not making anything up, you're the one putting massive amounts of spin on things.
Yes, I would agree, and I don't see why you seem to think otherwise. I already stated that given a choice between a functional capitalist society and a functioning socialist society I would choose and encourage others to pick the socialist one. You have very little going for you in this debate, and as a result you seem to be increasingly capitulating towards making me into something I'm not in order to cope.
Right now, China is in a good spot, and it also has the benefit of an absolutely massive population. If they can get 1.4 billion people organized, stabilized, and working together they will be an absolute force to be reckoned with, of which only India could compete (though they suck at getting their shit together, currently.) However, since Deng Xiaoping, China has increasingly embraced tactics from other political ideologies to suit the present needs and find what works. If anything, I would say the way China allows its government to evolve while keeping retraints on it is its strength. Also their soft power strategy, but that's not a topic for now.
The USSR was from the start banned from international trade for the sin of being communist, only after WW2 did world markets open to it. Even then, it didn't rely on any country for its energetic, food, material, or industrial needs. You can read about this on Robert C. Allen's "Farm to Factory" or Alec Nove's "An economic history of the USSR". I'm not making things up, this is widely known.
No comment on the China thing. But if that's the model that works, you should seek to establish a Communist Party rule in your country.