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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You're commiting a type of McNamara fallacy here by accounting for financial income and ignoring the ability of people in charge of a command economy to, well... command.
If you are in charge of people, you don't need to pay for their services. You can command them to get things done. Imagine paying a company to asphalt 10 kilometres of road to your dacha. It would cost millions, but could be organised by most second-tier bureaucrats. Even now, Vladimir Putin doesn't need money. He can ask for anything he wants and if some people die for that, it's okay.
And yet, the intelligentsia often starved, because they had little to offer to the shadow economy. Even the people with thousands of roubles in their drawers had very little that money could buy, you could walk to a store with a full wallet and leave with nothing. And if it had anything, you would wait in a queue for several hours. People would queue up without knowing what they are waiting for.
It was far more important to have friends that can command some stuff your way. A cashier at a store or a cook at a cafeteria could get you the best food. A sailor could get you import magazines and electronics. A machine worker could get you tools and make you spare parts.
To a western person, this might seem obscene, but it's how those economies have operated for decades and something people have to actively unlearn.
Ok, what you described with so many words is "corruption". Corruption exists in any system, not specially in communism. Now you have the burden of providing numeric evidence that corruption was more widespread than it was in comparably developed countries at the time, and that it was big enough to generate differences in access to purchase power comparable to the ones we see nowadays.
It's not just corruption when most people engage in it to some extent. You would literally see factory workers bring stuff from their work without hiding it en masse and nobody would get fired. And then you would trade or share stuff you stole with your friends who stole from their jobs. Try stealing stuff from your own job openly every day, see how well that goes.
Yes, because there is an easy way to measure how much everything costs in a system where monetary value means next to nothing. How much would a sirloin steak cost if somebody offered it to you on the street? What if your friend gave it to you? What if no steaks were available at a grocery store? Would you trust any estimate of a price when money is mostly meaningless?
Asking about purchasing power is also meaningless, you either knew someone who could get you stuff or you didn't. In a weird way, Soviet shadow economy ran like a prison: if you know a guy, you can get stuff, if you don't, you make do what is given to you or lie, cheat and steal to get what you need.
Also, official statistics would lie and as the lies travelled upwards, they would stray further and further from the truth. So no reliable statistics are available or possible. But you take what numbers you can find, ignore any you can't get, and claim that Soviet Union was somehow a paradise, thus commiting McNamara fallacy:
Damn, that's a lotta words to say "I have no evidence to support my claim of inequality in the USSR". Your entire analysis is vibes-based so it can be entirely disregarded.
So what is it, was it only the party leaders commanding everyone at their will creating huge inequality, or is it everyone engaging in it? Because the original claim was the former. If everyone engaged in it, it's not a mechanism for inequality.
Literally yes. You can measure so-called baskets and translate the goods and services to international prices. The fact that you can't source up this data simply means you're making it up, not that it's not possible. If everyone had access to free healthcare, education to the highest level, housing costing 3% of the monthly income, there was no unemployment, and as you say a huge chunk of consumption was heavily subsidized, all of that points to inequality being low.
In capitalism, if you're richer than your neighbor and you pay for a car they can't afford, that's legal and creates inequality. In Soviet communism, if you are owed a favor by an official and you get placed earlier on the list of car recipients, that's illegal and it creates inequality. The entire point that you're making, apparently, is that while in capitalism the mechanisms that lead to inequality of consumption are legal, in the USSR they were illegal. That's not pointing in the direction you want it to point, and you're only looking ridiculous because you're clearly not speaking from data but from vibes.
Unlike in capitalism, where companies deciding how to do their own accounting without external supervision are surely not lying to anyone (wink wink) that's why we constantly have banking and financial crises because banks and companies constantly lie about everything and anything which leads to huge bubbles and bursts. Don't be ridiculous. Just admit you're going off vibes and let it go.
I was born right after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I have experiences of my parents. I have experiences of my parents' friends. I have experiences of my teachers.
Yes it is, because some things are in higher demand than others. Cashiers and cooks were like gods that got the first picks and everyone else had to pick what's left.
The "baskets" were mostly empty, the pantries were often full. Things such as mayonnaise and canned peas were highly sought after deficit goods that were hard to acquire.
Bribing the doctor was expected if you needed anything more than a checkup.
was only available to the best students, once again encouraging bribery.
that you could hardly acquire, some people waited up to 30 years to be allowed to buy a flat and many lived in dorms with other people. I grew up sharing 67 square meter flat with 12 other people.
because it was illegal, but firing someone was very difficult as well, encouraging laziness, theft and alcoholism in the workforce.
Also, the competition for prestigious positions was fierce and often skewed by the favour system as well. My mother-in-law's math teacher gave her a bad grade because the in-laws' cousin got a position the teacher wanted for herself, sabotaging my mother-in-law's chances at a higher education as a result. My mother-in-law later became a cashier at a local store and never sold the teacher any under the counter goods. They are both still alive and still hate each other to this day.
So was most of the production, because most factories would have collapsed without it. If it wasn't for the oil fields in Siberia, Soviet Union would have collapsed much earlier.
Also, especially before Andropov, many factories produced things illegally just so they could buy things such as tools and machinery illegally. A nearby ship factory produced car trailers (a highly sought after deficit product) that they would sell for US dollars locally to buy other deficit goods needed for shipbuilding such as welding masks and gloves.
They were technically illegal but seldom punished. In fact, making deals and trading favours was a way of life.
At least you have the state statistics department and independent organisation checking their claims. As per Wikipedia:
Ok ok, so all public sector = bribery, all private sector = meritocracy, got it buddy! Free healthcare is bad because sometimes you'll need to pay your doctor to get something done (I thought money was worthless?), unlike in private healthcare where you always need to pay your doctor and so poor people can't get healthcare, so good!
In capitalism most people can't even afford to buy a flat, again you're proving you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Home ownership rate is 98% in Kazakhstan, 96% in China and Laos, 92% in Russia and Serbia, 90% in Cuba, and in glorious capitalist countries it's 69% EU average, 66% in the USA, 57% in South Korea, or 42% in Switzerland. You're just a propagandized anticommunist with absolutely 0 empirical data to back up what you're talking about, angry at communism because your life in capitalism was shit.
It sounds to me like you should blame capitalism. Out of those 12 other people, how many were unemployed adults who would have had a job in capitalism?
Your comment is full of anecdotes, but again you have 0 statistical data about what you're saying. Literally all of that takes place in capitalism even worse, and I'm giving you data for it. Keep crying about communism while your Eastern European country becomes a fascist hellhole with destroyed infrastructure, fucked up healthcare, and massive migration towards the EU because people can't find fucking jobs.
It was. You would mostly bribe people with stuff.
We inherited the living situation from the Soviet era. Gradually, other people moved out to their own places and we bought the rest of the flat from them.
My life IN "capitalism" is actually pretty good. But I also had a free education and get decent hybrid-system healthcare.
And you're just a propagandized anti-capitalist with 0 actual experience of life in USSR, angry at capitalism because your life in capitalism is shit.
Outside of our most recent government, most of those things are actually improving here, lol. If anything, Eastern Europe is the new land of opportunity. There's plenty of jobs for those willing to work, as well.
GDP:
QoL:
Absolute changes in potential road accessibility in the period 2007–2015. (a) Pan-European perspective; (b) macro-regional/CEE perspective.
Wow, GDP, the metric of capitalism, rose! Nothing to do with the financialization of the economy, I'm sure! On that same study, which BTW only takes into account 2007-onward investment from what I see and doesnt take into account disintegration of existing infrastructure, shows on Figure 8 how the entire rural regions of the country have been abandoned by capitalism. What a great way of rising GDP, let's force everyone through lack of infrastructure out of their homes and into big metropolises where housing is expensive (high GDP growth) and forget about the rest. Surely rural Eastern Europe is doing great!
You showed absolute quality of life, didn't compare it to Soviet times. Now go and ask people above 50 where QOL was better, in communism or capitalism. Most people in Eastern Europe who actually lived through communism will agree that it was better on average in Communism!
It's not a perfect measurement, but it creates a metric that is easy to calculate and it's easy to compare the economies of similar countries or the same country across time.
Dude, you just cut the legs off your own argument and declared victory as it bleeds to death. The system that abandoned the rural regions was actually the Soviet Union. First of all, they destroyed many smallholding estates that dotted the countryside under the guise of melioration (reverse irrigation). Second of all, they botched the collective farming (stealing was super common in those too). Third of all, they exiled the most productive and educated members of society, disproportionately from the countryside. Fourth of all, rapid industrialization created a massive demand for workers who would abandon the collective farms and move to cities in droves. This process is simply continuing because once it starts, it's very hard to stop.
So does Net Material Product. Why don't you bring data with those numbers instead of a metric by which an increase in rent costs and healthcare prices makes GDP increase? Ireland GDP for example is fucked up because of the obvious effect of financialization of the economy now that they're a tax haven. Surely the financialization of the economy has a lot to do? Let's compare instead stuff like tons of steel produced, number of housing units built, homelessness, access to healthcare, emigration rates... you know, the things actually affecting humans, not "line go up".
Bffffhahahahahha... Oh god, that's hilarious. How many abandoned rural hospitals are there in your country now that socialism is no more?
Smartest section in your comments so far. Yeah, that's a reality of the situation, but in that process life expectancy of people in the countryside was doubled. The rapid industrialization is a controversial policy of the USSR, I agree, but it's one not taken out of ideology, it's one taken out of necessity against external invasion. Famously, in 1931, 2 years after the beginning of collectivization and rapid industrialization, Stalin said in a speech (paraphrasing): "we are 100 years behind the rest of the world, and we need to catch up to them in 10 years. Either we do this, or they kill us". 10 years later, operation Barbarossa began, in which the Soviet Union saved most of your people from slavery and genocide. This was only possible thanks to the newly-created industrial might, which allowed for example the USSR's T-34 to be the most manufactured tank in WW2. Had there been no rapid collectivization and industrialization, you wouldn't have been born because your ancestors would have been entirely genocided by Nazis.
Speaking of your population. Assuming you're Lithuanian, the population peaked at about 3.7mn in 1990, then dropped to 2.7mn in 2020. Surely capitalism is working wonderfully for your country!
Because nobody uses it anymore?
Why would you measure steel production in a country with no iron or coal mining?
I could try to find some data for you to cherry pick and make conclusions that agree with your ideology but at this point, why would I bother?
Stalin also purged a lot of competent people and that made Hitler attack earlier too.
Just so he could do his own slavery and genocide?
It's easy to claim what would happen if something didn't, but fundamentally we will never know. If Stalin didn't do his purges or if Germany overextended into Siberia, or if Hitler was replaced with a less crazy leader. I could use the same argument: I'm sorry if you think I'm stupid, the teachers of my teachers died in Siberia.
It is. Of the million people who left, 200-300K were ethnic minorities, especially Soviet colonists, despite that unlike other Baltic states, we offered them Lithuanian citizenship. Nobody misses them.
Of the rest, a lot of people still have ties to this country and send back money, sometimes buy property. The 2000-2007 economic boom was mostly caused by that money. Also, our migration statistics are improving. Migration from third countries is increasing rapidly too.
Net migration to and from Lithuania:
Re-immigration (green) vs immigration (blue) by foreigners:
Except it's not even capitalism as you imagine it. We still have a lot of regulations, high taxation, massive safety nets, affordable education and the means to buy property. Lithuania is a poor country that is getting richer.
Most of you ”socialists that defend Soviet Union" are from rich countries that are getting poorer. But socialism as imagined by Soviet Union was a horrible system made by horrible people and it will not save you.
And every time you use the example of Soviet Union as an example of how great socialism is, your cause actually loses.
Aaaand that's where we stop. I don't discuss socialism with overtly racist people. There's no point arguing in good faith against people guided by racist beliefs. Burn in hell, bigot prick. I pray that the next time fascist want to exterminate you and your family you won't have alienated everyone who might protect you.
Should the people who were colonised mourn when colonisers return home?
I'm not racist in any way, shape or form. I have friends from every corner of the globe.
And the next time the socialist revolution comes, I hope the purges come for you, too.