It’s difficult to find compiled data going over each member state of the USSR. The earliest I can find for Ukraine only goes back to 1950, but reflects the same trends in life expectancy as Russia: a doubling of life expectancy following the completion of collectivizing agriculture in the 1930s and coming out of World War II.
The USSR was not imperialist, the RSFSR was also not imperialist towards other SSRs and SFSRs. This highlights a terrible misunderstanding of socialist economics. Across the board, Russia was in general more developed due to having started off earlier, but this was not at the expense of other socialist states in the soviet bloc.
Finally, the 1930s famine was neither intentional nor did it only impact Ukraine. Surrounding areas were met with the same weather disasters and problems with kulaks, bourgeois farmers, resisting collectivization by killing livestock, burning crops, and taking up arms. The combination of struggles over collectivization with weather disasters caused agricultural output to plummet, even though collectivization increased agricultural output once it was completed, ending famine in areas where it was historically common.
Why don’t you take all this misplaced energy defending an authoritarian state with really excellent propaganda and use it to support a group actually doing some good like the Zapatistas or something
It’s a good thing for the working classes to use the boot against capitalists, landlords, and fascists, actually, and this is precisely what the Zapatistas have done with their state, something they have in common with the USSR. “Stalinism” isn’t a thing beyond specific policies of Stalin, the ideology of the USSR is Marxism-Leninism, which was a key inflence guiding Zapatismo.
I’m defending the world’s first federation of socialist states from undue slander, because I’m a Marxist-Leninist, and support socialist states like the PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. that carry over its legacy. The Zapatistas are cool, but small, and their own movement that isn’t really Marxist nor anarchist but is their own. They aren’t relevant to the current conversation.
Secondly, I already addressed this elsewhere, but the categorization of the USSR as “authoritarian” is meaningless without class analysis. Rather than being the tyranny of capitalists and landlords over the working classes, the USSR used state power against those former ruling classes, as well as fascists that sought to overthrow the socialist system. Any effective, lasting socialist state needs to have the mechanisms to defend itself both internally and externally, something the Zapatistas have in common with the USSR.
The reason socialists need to defend the USSR from Red Scare narratives is because the Red Scare is used as a cudgel against anyone trying to improve the world. The horrifying version that exists purely in imagination is something relentlessly thrown at us. Rather than distancing ourselves from former socialism, we should dispel the slander, because of 2 main reasons:
It is entirely unconvincing to paint a purer and purer pucture of a hypothetical socialism free from all of the imagined USSR’s sins for those who have not studied it. Why should this time be so far removed from the USSR? Obviously conditions are different, but many struggles faced by the USSR and its real problems are common for any socialist state.
Even if we play along with the Red Scare, it will still be used as a cudgel.
That’s why it’s best to take an honest approach and cede no ground to liberalism and bourgeois historiography. As socialists, we need to tell history from a proletarian perspective, advancing the cause of socialism.
Marxists have been discussing the class nature of authority since Marx and Engels themselves, see Marx’s Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy and Engels’ On Authority. On the whole, soviet prisons and the justice system itself were more progressive than their peers, Mary Stevenson Callcott documented it quite well in Russian Justice. The term “gulag” came from the GULAG administration, and doesn’t mean “torture/execution camp” or anything of the sort.
Defending the USSR from undue slander is the only correct path for a socialist to take. We defend the USSR because we defend the achievements of real, existing socialism, and we want to criticize the USSR’s shortcomings from an accurate point of view. Any comparisons equating communists to Nazis contributes to Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization. I’ll leave you with a quote:
To place Russian communism on the same moral level with Nazi fascism, because both are totalitarian, is, at best, superficial, in the worse case it is fascism. He who insists on this equality may be a democrat; in truth and in his heart, he is already a fascist, and will surely fight fascism with insincerity and appearance, but with complete hatred only communism.
If you consider yourself a socialist, you owe it to our predecessors to wipe away the sludge cast onto their graves, and carry the mission for socialism forward.
It’s difficult to find compiled data going over each member state of the USSR. The earliest I can find for Ukraine only goes back to 1950, but reflects the same trends in life expectancy as Russia: a doubling of life expectancy following the completion of collectivizing agriculture in the 1930s and coming out of World War II.
The USSR was not imperialist, the RSFSR was also not imperialist towards other SSRs and SFSRs. This highlights a terrible misunderstanding of socialist economics. Across the board, Russia was in general more developed due to having started off earlier, but this was not at the expense of other socialist states in the soviet bloc.
Finally, the 1930s famine was neither intentional nor did it only impact Ukraine. Surrounding areas were met with the same weather disasters and problems with kulaks, bourgeois farmers, resisting collectivization by killing livestock, burning crops, and taking up arms. The combination of struggles over collectivization with weather disasters caused agricultural output to plummet, even though collectivization increased agricultural output once it was completed, ending famine in areas where it was historically common.
Why don’t you take all this misplaced energy defending an authoritarian state with really excellent propaganda and use it to support a group actually doing some good like the Zapatistas or something
Cowbee: brings receipts
You: But they were the Bad Evil Bad Guys, my government and 30,000 movies (not propaganda) told me so!
did you somehow miss subcommandante marcos explaining that the use of force to compel local antogonists to comply was helpful?
Why don’t you take all this misplaced energy attacking past socialist projects and instead so something good like organizing or reading theory
You can organize and read theory without supporting Stalinism et al. A boot by any other name still tastes like leather
It’s a good thing for the working classes to use the boot against capitalists, landlords, and fascists, actually, and this is precisely what the Zapatistas have done with their state, something they have in common with the USSR. “Stalinism” isn’t a thing beyond specific policies of Stalin, the ideology of the USSR is Marxism-Leninism, which was a key inflence guiding Zapatismo.
I really loved with the Zapatistas were authoritarian and took all the land from the plantation owners at gun point, it was very cool of them
The Zapatistas don’t have enough tanks for .ml to support them I guess
Yes, I think they should have more tanks. Don’t you?
Jabril is being honest, not sarcastic.
🫡
They have a state with a military that enforces their political power via weapons. They are just as authoritarian as every other leftist state
I’m defending the world’s first federation of socialist states from undue slander, because I’m a Marxist-Leninist, and support socialist states like the PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. that carry over its legacy. The Zapatistas are cool, but small, and their own movement that isn’t really Marxist nor anarchist but is their own. They aren’t relevant to the current conversation.
Secondly, I already addressed this elsewhere, but the categorization of the USSR as “authoritarian” is meaningless without class analysis. Rather than being the tyranny of capitalists and landlords over the working classes, the USSR used state power against those former ruling classes, as well as fascists that sought to overthrow the socialist system. Any effective, lasting socialist state needs to have the mechanisms to defend itself both internally and externally, something the Zapatistas have in common with the USSR.
The reason socialists need to defend the USSR from Red Scare narratives is because the Red Scare is used as a cudgel against anyone trying to improve the world. The horrifying version that exists purely in imagination is something relentlessly thrown at us. Rather than distancing ourselves from former socialism, we should dispel the slander, because of 2 main reasons:
It is entirely unconvincing to paint a purer and purer pucture of a hypothetical socialism free from all of the imagined USSR’s sins for those who have not studied it. Why should this time be so far removed from the USSR? Obviously conditions are different, but many struggles faced by the USSR and its real problems are common for any socialist state.
Even if we play along with the Red Scare, it will still be used as a cudgel.
That’s why it’s best to take an honest approach and cede no ground to liberalism and bourgeois historiography. As socialists, we need to tell history from a proletarian perspective, advancing the cause of socialism.
Quibbling over the definition of “authoritarian” is kind of a red flag for a country that invented the term “gulag”
Defending the Soviet Union in this way has the same energy as someone claiming that the Nazis actually did some really good scientific research
“Pointing out that my epithet is categorically meaningless is a real red flag for a country that had -checks notes- prisons.”
Are you just doing spooky Slavic word association at this point?
You’re like a parody of an anarchist lmao
Marxists have been discussing the class nature of authority since Marx and Engels themselves, see Marx’s Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy and Engels’ On Authority. On the whole, soviet prisons and the justice system itself were more progressive than their peers, Mary Stevenson Callcott documented it quite well in Russian Justice. The term “gulag” came from the GULAG administration, and doesn’t mean “torture/execution camp” or anything of the sort.
Defending the USSR from undue slander is the only correct path for a socialist to take. We defend the USSR because we defend the achievements of real, existing socialism, and we want to criticize the USSR’s shortcomings from an accurate point of view. Any comparisons equating communists to Nazis contributes to Double Genocide Theory, a form of Holocaust trivialization. I’ll leave you with a quote:
If you consider yourself a socialist, you owe it to our predecessors to wipe away the sludge cast onto their graves, and carry the mission for socialism forward.