pkill
Let's step back and contextualize. The Russian Revolution, for all its flaws and tragic outcomes, was not a singular, isolated event floating in a vacuum of historical inevitability. It emerged out of unimaginable conditions: the ruins of Tsarist autocracy, a regime that was arguably one of the most backwards and repressive in Europe, compounded by the catastrophic toll of World War I, which had already thrown the region back decades in terms of development. The Bolsheviks inherited a situation of near-total collapse: famine, mass illiteracy, civil war, and an international blockade that strangled the new state at its infancy. To blame the USSR's trajectory solely on Bolshevism or communism is to ignore this harrowing historical reality.
But there’s more to this story. Ask yourself why we don’t have multiple socialist success stories from the early 20th century. Why does history offer us no alternative points of reference? Let us turn to Germany, Austria, Italy, or Poland, where proletarian revolutions flickered between 1918 and 1924. The harsh truth is that the social democrats of the time, ideological forebears of today’s reformists, drowned these revolutions in blood. In Germany, the SPD actively collaborated with the Freikorps—proto-fascists, no less—to crush revolutionary uprisings like those of the Spartacists. The betrayal in Poland was no less devastating: under the leadership of a reactionary regime tied to German imperialism, Poland waged war against the fledgling Soviet state, attempting to reimpose the draconian terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
These betrayals left the Soviet Union in complete isolation, surrounded by hostile capitalist powers eager for its destruction. Without the support of an international revolution, the USSR faced an impossible dilemma: build socialism in one country or perish. The resulting “Stalinist caricature” of socialism was as much a product of this isolation as it was of internal contradictions.
From the ashes of Tsarist oppression, the Soviet Union undertook a massive and unprecedented experiment in societal transformation. This was no small feat. Lenin himself repeatedly warned of the dangers of bureaucratization and made efforts to curtail the growth of the party and state apparatus. However, his health declined rapidly after 1922, and contrary to the reactionary trope of Lenin as a dictator, his influence waned with his incapacitation. By the time Stalin rose to power, the bureaucracy had grown into a powerful force that would shape the course of Soviet history.
Nonetheless, for nearly a decade, the USSR remained one of the most progressive societies in the world, even under unimaginably difficult circumstances. Consider this: while half of the so-called "land of the free" still languished under Jim Crow apartheid, the Soviet Union was rapidly urbanizing, eradicating illiteracy, and introducing women's suffrage and workers' rights in ways that were unprecedented for the time. This was a country transitioning from a predominantly peasant society to an industrial power in record time.
Yes, concessions were made to private property owners. Yes, the Stalinist obsession with quantity over quality—manifested in the chaotic implementation of the Five-Year Plans—led to inefficiencies and waste. But here’s the rub: even with its deformations, the Soviet economy achieved staggering feats. It not only survived but outpaced many capitalist economies during the Great Depression. By the late 1930s, it had transformed a feudal backwater into an industrialized powerhouse capable of withstanding and defeating the Wehrmacht, the most formidable military machine of its time. And this was after enduring one of the most devastating invasions in human history.
And let’s not ignore the strides made in education, healthcare, and gender equality. The USSR turned an overwhelmingly illiterate population into one of the most educated in the world. Women gained access to professions and education in ways that far outpaced their counterparts in the West. And while Stalin’s purges and bureaucratic authoritarianism gutted much of the early revolutionary spirit, the foundations laid by the October Revolution persisted in remarkable ways. Even amid the Stalinist counterrevolution, the USSR managed to rebuild itself at an astonishing rate after the destruction of World War II, without relying on the Marshall Plan.
In conclusion, the failure of the USSR was not an inherent failure of socialism but a tragedy born of historical contingency: isolation, betrayal, and the crushing weight of imperialist opposition. The same forces that scoff at the USSR today—bourgeois ideologues and their reformist allies—bear responsibility for sabotaging the international revolutions that might have prevented the Stalinist degeneration. To use the USSR as a strawman against socialism is intellectually lazy and historically dishonest. The real question isn’t whether the USSR "worked out" but whether the world’s workers were ever given a fair chance to build a socialist alternative in the first place. The answer, dear reformist, is no—because your ideological ancestors made damn sure of it.
Political action is violent by definition. To rule somebody essentially means nothing else than to enforce your will upon somebody by force.
There can be no talk of consensual politics in a society where opinions are shaped by media owned and managed by the ruling tiny, very wealthy minority.
No, the question boils down to the effect it has on consciousness. How many people broke free from the defeatist disbelief in the possibility of upending the rule of those who may have seemed untouchable to them less than a week ago is hard to fathom.
Not to mention that it was yet another instance of a large scale masks-off event for the exploiter class, with both Democrats and Trump as well as their media lackeys proving once again that they are really just one single party of capital.
Of course however, this does not mean that it also poses a threat of some people falling into the erroneous conviction that risks resulting in anything more than repression by the authorities, that the problem is personal and not structural.
The exploiter and the exploited cannot be equal.
This truth (...) forms the essence of socialism.
Another truth: there can be no real, actual equality until all possibility of the exploitation of one class by another has been totally destroyed.
The exploiters can be defeated at one stroke in the event of a successful uprising at the centre, or of a revolt in the army. But except in very rare and special cases, the exploiters cannot be destroyed at one stroke. It is impossible to expropriate all the landowners and capitalists of any big country at one stroke. Furthermore, expropriation alone, as a legal or political act, does not settle the matter by a long chalk, because it is necessary to depose the landowners and capitalists in actual fact, to replace their management of the factories and estates by a different management, workers’ management, in actual fact.
(Proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky by Vladimir Lenin)
Revolution is undoubtedly the most authoritarian thing in the world. Revolution is an act in which one section of the population imposes its will upon the other by means of rifles, bayonets and guns, all of which are exceedingly authoritarian implements. The victorious party is necessarily compelled to maintain its rule by means of that fear which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. If the Paris Commune had not employed the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie, would it have maintained itself more than twenty-four hours? And are we not, on the contrary, justified in reproaching the Commune for having employed this authority too little?
(On authority by Frederich Engels)
I chucked though this would mean that the American solutions are...short-term? Headlines will fleet, the ruling class will become a little bit more vigilant. And then shit will return to business as usual. Unless this sparks a mass movement.
btw, the NHS in the UK offers a cautionary tale. Once it was a beacon of universal care. But look at how the decades of privatization have chipped away at its promise. Even now, UK workers defend it against the creeping tide of market logic, which has not ceased under Starmer because warfare matters more than healthcare to them.
It's absolutely clear: systems run for the many must remain in the hands of the many. This fight really requires worker control—why should administrators and profiteers dictate care when the expertise and needs of frontline medical workers and patients could lead?
Even if a mass movement for universal healthcare is born and somehow the government with both parties being virtually on the insurance profiteers' payslip somehow concedes, it will be immediately subject to sabotage.
And then the billionaire media would point a finger at the alleged inefficiency of "public services", all while it is implemented in a way where it isn't at the expense of
- the military-industrial complex
- the wealth of the mega-rich and their corporations' profits
so if not that, then it'd be financed at the expense of the already ballooning public debt, which would then be paid in austerity.
If universal healthcare is to succeed in the U.S., it must be accompanied by bold economic realignments: ending absurd military expenditures, expropriating billionaires and putting critical industries under public and worker control. Otherwise, the promise of care for all will collapse under the weight of contradictions, and the media will be more than happy to point fingers at "socialist inefficiency" while the real culprits—corporate greed and the war machine—walk away unscathed.
If an oak blocks the sunlight, you don't pick an acorn, but chop the whole tree down
Yes that's why the rotten system of choosing a slave master every few years, of the duopoly of parties which are equally complicit in war crimes and are on the payslip of big business must be replaced with bottom-up system of lively democracy within worker, student and tenant councils
That's where the permanent revolution would help. The workers must not allow splitting the revolution into stages of concessions and compromises but fight until total victory and the dissolution of the state.
Also this is the reason why communists are not pacifists — the working class has the right and a duty to defend itself and it's gains. That's what Marx meant when he wrote that under no pretense must workers be disarmed.
(1/2)
Your comment reads like a manifesto for maintaining the status quo dressed up as pragmatic wisdom. It’s almost charming, in the same way, an infomercial about a "miracle" weight-loss pill is charming, assuming the audience hasn’t read the fine print. But let’s get to the real business of dismantling this labyrinth of myths you’ve built.
Oh, so now we’re pretending that mass shifts in consciousness are irrelevant? History begs to differ. The abolition of feudalism, the rise of unions, civil rights movements—all were powered by collective awakenings. The Paris Commune was ridiculed as a blip, yet it shaped proletarian strategies worldwide. The suffragettes, who were once dismissed as a hysterical sideshow, rewrote the political landscape. Sure, individual enlightenment alone won’t topple billionaires—but dismissing the transformative potential of collective action? That’s some industrial-strength cynicism masquerading as “realism.”
This Hallmark sentiment belongs on a motivational poster, not in a serious discussion about systemic change. Who controls the ballots? Capitalist elites, through gerrymandering, corporate media, voter suppression, and lobbying. Let’s talk specifics: Tsipras in Greece was democratically elected to resist austerity. What did ballots deliver? Betrayal. Ask the Greeks who were prevented by the banksters from withdrawing more than 50€ a day. Bernie Sanders inspired millions, only to capitulate to the Democrat machine with imperialist war criminals at the helm, because Democrats were never a party that served the working people. They had so many chances to e.g. codify abortion when they were in power, before Roe v Wade got struck down. Meanwhile, Corbyn faced a relentless smear campaign and sabotage from within Labour and now virtually all of the Labour left is purged and Sir Starmer happily approves more and more money being wasted on warfare while denying the possibility of renationalizing the water companies which have turned British rivers into one of the most polluted in Europe, because his narrow reformist mindset rejects the possibility of expropriation without compensation, even if it's something so indusputably belonging to all, a common (outside_ the WEF and other ultra-rich psychopath meetings, of course).
The conclusion? Ballots are a tool wielded by the ruling class to manage dissent, not overthrow it.
Ohh the old pearl-clutching “violence begets chaos” trope. Conveniently ignores the systemic violence baked into capitalism: poverty, imperialist wars, environmental destruction, police brutality.
Over 100 million people displaced in the last year.
56 wars raging worldwide, the highest figure since WWII.
Nuclear warfare back in business after three decades.
Approx. 5-20 million people dying annually due to preventable causes
Revolutionary violence isn’t arbitrary carnage; it’s the oppressed defending themselves against the daily brutality of the ruling class. In fact, it is out of the fatigue with the incessant brutality, injustice and deprivation of the existing order that revolutions are born. Look at the revolutionary wave that followed after the Great Slaughter of WWI.
Capitalist states routinely murder and displace millions to maintain power. Revolutionary violence seeks to end that barbarism, not perpetuate it.
Take again the Russian Revolution—initially a relatively bloodless overthrow. More people got trampled over when the storming of Winter Palace was being reenacted 10 years later for a movie than during the actual event. The ensuing violence was primarily defensive, against counter-revolutionaries and imperialist invaders. Without the Red Army, the October Revolution would’ve been a footnote. If you don't believe me, read Ten days that shook the world by John Reed.
Capitalism's birth was hardly a bloodless affair—whether through the American or French Revolutions, Wars of the Three Kingdoms, La Conquista, Opium Wars, colonialism in Africa, India or Indonesia, it was drenched in violence. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and freedom of the press. The civil war resulted in the death of roughly 2.5% of the U.S. population. During the Russian Civil War, about 0.7% of the population died, a large portion of which can be attributed to the White Terror. Yet, the Bolsheviks, despite the brutal conditions, attempted to minimize violence. They first sought to rely on agitation among intervention forces, and even amid famine, Lenin organized the largest international aid operation of its time, importing vast amounts of grain into the USSR between 1918 and 1921—much of it sabotaged by the Whites, Esery or kulaks. The mutinies within the foreign troops and the strikes and blockades organized in solidarity by French or British workers also contributed to the withdrawal of many of the Allied troops. Still, you wouldn’t think of questioning the legitimacy of the bourgeois-democratic revolutions or the U.S. Civil War, would you? And in fact, if not then rightly so. Beacause freedom is the recognition of necessity. They played their progressive role at their time, along with capitalism. But that potential is long gone and now capitalism is holding human potential back.