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.
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.