NATO is bad, though. It’s the “defensive” alliance for the world’s imperialist powers, similar to how “Israel” “defends itself” with the IDF. It’s used to prevent the people of the global south from directly retaliating against imperialism.
Jabril is being honest, not sarcastic.
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.
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.
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.
The USSR abolished the imperial system of Tsarist Russia. The soviets then established protections for ethnic minorities, even giving more land to Ukraine in order to solidify their identity. The national question was taken incredibly seriously. It isn’t at all the same as the USA, which is a genocidal settler-colony that wiped out indigenous peoples and brought countless slaves over, and to make that comparison and equate them is to minimize the actual, real crimes of the US Empire.
The USSR had steady and consistent economic growth, and provided free, high quality education and healthcare, full employment, cheap or free housing, and fantastic infrastructure and city planning that still lasts to this day despite capitalism neglecting it. This rapid development resulted in dramatic democratization of society, reduced disparity, doubling of life expectancy, tripling of functional literacy rates to 99.9%, and much more. Living in the 1930s famine would not have been good, but it was the last major famine outside of wartime because the soviets ended famine in their countries.
Literacy rates, societal guarantees in the 1936 constitution, reports on the healthcare system over time, and more are good sources for these claims.
The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union.
The truth, when judged based on historical evidence and contextualization, is that socialism was the best thing to happen to Russia in the last few centuries, and its absence has been devastating.
Death rates spiked:
And wealth disparity skyrocketed alongside the newly impoverished majority:
Capitalism brought with it skyrocketing poverty rates, drug abuse, prostitution, homelessness, crime rates, and lowered life expectancy. An estimated 7 million people died due to the dissolution of socialism and reintroduction of capitalism, and the large majority of post-soviet citizens regret its fall. A return to socialism is the only path forward for the post-soviet countries.
When you look at the US Empire and western Europe as having higher quality of life than the USSR, you are looking at the benefits of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism and wishing the USSR also practiced this, instead of helping liberate colonies and the global south. Russia in particular was a semi-feudal backwater in 1917, and made it to space 5 decades later. The USSR was not the picture of wealth, but was for its time the picture of development and rapid progress.
The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union.
Lysenkoism in particular was a mistake of dogmatic interpretations of dialectical materialism, and was discarded as hard proof advanced and disproved its interpretations of things like genetics.
The current government overthrew the US backed monarchy, so in a way it was caused by US intervention but indirectly.
I’m supporting the world’s first federation of socialist states, and accurately describing the Russo-Ukrainian War, both from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. Stalinism does not exist beyond specific socioeconomic policies of Stalin, the ideology of the USSR was Marxism-Leninism. If you want to learn more about Marxism-Leninism, I wrote a basic study guide.
You haven’t really backed up any of your own claims or attacked any of mine. You just called my points “propaganda,” as though the accusation alone is a point. Please bring a real point, or reconsider your strategy.
The petite bourgeoisie is the most reactionary class that drives fascism. As capitalism decays, small business owners are the most threatened into becoming proletarian, so they adopt the most reactionary positions advocating for open terror against the working classes.
Oil can flow if traded in Yuan, it’s an attack on the petrodollar.
I’m a communist, I think my support for Marxism made that obvious.
Before or after the dissolution of socialism? People became far more impoverished after the dissolution, and the destruction of safety nets meant to help people.
The fact that NATO was ran by many Nazis, including Adolf Heusinger, is being shown. Further, NATO is essentially the armed wing of imperialism, as defensive as the IDF is. NATO defends imperialist countries from any backlash they may recieve from plundering the global south.
There is no such thing as the “political upper class.” Bureaucrats do not form their own class, but are instead a subsection of a broader class, in the case of the USSR, the working classes. Socialism in the USSR and PRC brought a tremendous democratization of society, and solidified power in the hands of the working classes as a whole, who are not distinct from the members of the working classes in the government. Stalinism is not a thing, beyond Stalin’s specific economic policies. The ideology of the USSR and PRC is Marxism-Leninism.
Further, there is no genocide against Ukrainians, unless you mean the ethnic repressions against native Russians in the Donbass region by Kiev. War is not genocide. The genocide of Palestinians is absolutely genocide as “Israel” is an apartheid regime, but the Russo-Ukrainian war is not a genocide.
No, they would not. Statesians are aware of both. The masses are not foolish, the problem is that a majority still believe that they benefit more from the system than they stand to lose by opposing it. Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing”
Unsurprisingly, I’m a communist. Collectivized production and distribution along a common, scientific plan is the way to go.