Basing your opinions on socialism on how Russia implemented it makes about as much sense as basing an opinion on Democracy on how Putin has implemented it.
How the USSR implemented socialism was pretty great in practice, the real history of it has just been hidden from you behind the thick fog of cold-war anticommunist propaganda.
Here’s a good intro video: Michael Parenti - Reflections on the overthrow of the USSR
Yellow Parenti is best Parenti
Anyone mentions soviets suck and the tankies come out of the woodwork.
“USsR was just misunderstood. Swearsies.”
Learn to have a conversation.
A lot of people don’t realize that the Soviet Union was seen as a bastion of democracy before the cold war, because it genuinely got a lot right.
In fact, it was democratic to a fault. Ultimately it was the people who voted to bring capitalism into the country. It was all downhill from there.
Legit question, what country is a better real world example?
Communism, like capitalism, is an extreme that has certain, very difficult to achieve, requirements. Capitalism needs everyone to be morally decent in order for companies to focus on winning customers through innovation instead of propganda and lobbying, and to accept losses instead of whining. Even the transition into communism is incredibly complicated and technically what where the USSR was stuck, and once there you have to hope that the rest of the world went along with it because it’ll work either on increbily small scales(individual companies, for example) or on a global scale but not really on a mid-sized scale. Plus in both you have basic greed and people who are literally just born narcissitic or legitimately psychotic.
Extreme ideologies are great thought experiments but rarely have any kind of well-developed protections built and are pretty fragile.
If you want a better answer, look at the quality of life in countries with stronger regulations and more communism-according-to-North America systems. In the heavily privatised U.S. there are a lot of people who live absolutely shit lives due to an abyssmal lack of protections. Even in Canada, which is far too close to the U.S. here, at least a homeless person can recieve some level of medical assistance including major surgeries and Covid stimulus was more than a cheap joke.
Extreme
This you? https://hexbear.net/comment/3889149
Typical Russian bullshit. I hope the dwindling, future generations of Russian scum know why they’re pariahs, unable to travel outside of their smoldering wreck of a never-great, failed state
Cause honestly this comes off as incredibly racist and nationalist.
What? The guy subscribing to anti-white racism rhetoric would also be a raging fascist? Say it isn’t so.
Holy shit lmao
Who would have thunk the anticommunist was racist.
Once again, are you suggesting there’s such a thing as the Russian race? For real?
And a Matt Walsh fan
Transphobic too? How surprising.
Wow. I comment on discussions of Communism and suddenly I’m afraid of transsexuals? Where is this coming from?
What on Earth are you talking about?
Yeah that’s me! Wow, you really took the time. Nice.
LOL how is it racist? You do realise “Russian” is not a race, right?
And how is it “nationalist”? Because it mentions a nationality?
Yeah this is fairly common opinion of russian occupants in post-soviet countries outside russia. Wonder why.
What people who lived in the Soviet union and other socialist states have to say:
-
-
-
-
-
-
Adult mortality increased enormously in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union when the Soviet system collapsed 30 years ago. https://archive.ph/9Z12u
-
Former Soviet Countries See More Harm From Breakup https://news.gallup.com/poll/166538/former-soviet-countries-harm-breakup.aspx
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
deleted by creator
The trajectory Hungary took after transition to capitalism mirrors what happened in most post USSR states. This just further supports the point that the communist system was better.
deleted by creator
What happened in countries like Hungary and Poland is a direct result of the transition to capitalism however. What’s more this transition happened under the best possible conditions. The transition happened largely democratically without any violent revolutions, and these countries got support from the west to soften economic impact of the transition. Yet, despite all that we see that majority of post Soviet countries end up going in a similar direction under capitalism. Again, Hungary isn’t an outlier here.
deleted by creator
Thing is that bad management, corruption, and so on, have happened in every human society that has ever existed. A political system isn’t magically going to change that. What a political system can do however is create different selection pressures for behavior. Capitalist system selects for different kinds of behaviors than a communist one. As we see with the case of transition from communism to capitalism in eastern Europe, the selection pressures of capitalism result in far worse things happening than under communism.
deleted by creator
-
※The person who lived in the USSR was born in December of 1991
LOL, I knew this sub was digging for old memes but bringing back actual red-baiting? chef’s kiss
2 things:
-
The victors write history
-
After Lenin the USSR was not really communist anymore but more really a totalitarian state that didn’t believe in the values of communism. Just like China.
Everything would probably have been better if Lenin didn’t die so fast and then Trotsky would have ruled.
Trotsky would have ruled.
Mask off trot lmao
To be clear, the alternative here is Stalin. There are like only five people who would be worse choices
-
On Lemmy it is more like 40 something year old neckbeards that haven’t seen the light of day in 2 decades. They claim to struggle to make friends at parties but could easily run a country.
Some small business tyrant, who left the USSR when they were four and who doesn’t pay his staff, telling me how bad the Soviet Union was.
This is a stupid meme. Most people alive today that lived there before its collapse wish it had not.
Furthermore its dissolution was literally illegal and undemocratic.
Well yea, most people prefer quality of life not going down
Not just quality of life, but average life expectancy. The deliberate destruction of the Soviet Union was cause for one of the single largest drops in life expectancy in recorded history.
The
collapsedestruction of the Soviet Union also ushered in an era of unrestrained capitalist exploitation without a rival power to incentivize better social programs.Literally the entire world felt the blow of this tragedy.
Heeeeere comes the hexbear brigade!
God all you people do is whine that you might have to see some anti-imperialist positions. I know you all come from reddit so you’re not used to seeing those.
Why not just go back to reddit, where they protect you from ever having to see any non-pro-west foreign-policy positions?
14 year old white girl
Bravo they managed to also cram ageism and misogyny in the old “champagne socialism” meme. All in the single sentence.
Personally I find it going this way:
- some person, who at least knows what socialism is, even if they’re not the most well-read in the subject,
- some way better read one, but thinks state control of enterprises suffice and trusts the state way too much as long as it has hammers and sickles,
- some capitalism fan, who thinks socialism is evil, and that constructon company CEOs are workers, but underpaid office workers are “elites”.
Rarely you get a very well read one, who understands their stuff, or the old Soviet bloc ex-communist, who switched because the local far-right party started to be very concerned about “work morals”, and also think the construction company CEO is a worker and “against the elite”.
The problem is the way that most of those communism perfect people inform themselves. They usually know a lot of stuff about a certain topic where they can argue anyone to deth who doesn’t know as much about a topic. And because they know that much more than the other person they can use wrong statements that sound right in the mass of correct information. Then you get people who know everything about Kuba and are 100% sure it’s a democracy.
Why is it that people living in former Soviet states overwhelmingly wish that the USSR was still around?
I live in former ussr state, 90% of those people are very old, and as to why ? Nostalgia. They always overlook the bad and only bring up the good.
Have you considered there are other reasons besides nostalgia? Like the massive life expectancy and qol collapse under capitalism?
https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/32fb41e8-a5d4-41c0-9001-b3103bb43898.png
I wonder why they might be nostalgic
reasons besides nostalgia
Oh yea, like if you are religious you are a threat to the state and therefore you are unfit for basically any leading role, or your property might be confiscated and you might be sent of to Siberia ?
Lines for food namely bread and if the stars aligned meat.
Big amount of corruption ?
Mandatory conscription to the military (and the corruption there too) ?
Iron curtain ?
Free speech and freedom of expression ?
And much more. That my parents had to live trough/knew that happened to others, information on a graph can only tell you so much. I am my self Atheist, although I do believe there might be higher being, so I do not blame others for believing in them, but as a normal human being I hate when religion is pushed to my face. I also believe there needs to be government regulation to big businesses and love some of the things that are in socialism.
massive life expectancy
I don’t know much about life expectancy in the USSR, can you maybe link some sources, articles I would love to read up on it.
qol collapse under capitalism
Not familiar with “qol” can you explain a bit further ? If you mean quality of life, then I feel, at least for my parents it has improved massively.
Edit: Formatting errors.
Life expectancy https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41294-021-00169-w
Oh yea, like if you are religious you are a threat to the state and therefore you are unfit for basically any leading role, or your property might be confiscated and you might be sent of to Siberia ?
Anti religion is needlessly antagonistic but also wasn’t enforced like you are suggesting: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1920/11/13.htm
Lines for food namely bread and if the stars aligned meat.
According to the anti-communist cia their nutrition was in many ways better
Also breadlines are common under capitalism.
Big amount of corruption ?
Yes, theft from the public has definitely decreased since the the collapse. /s
Mandatory conscription to the military (and the corruption there too) ?
There are plenty of countries that do that after they lose around 20 percent of their population in a brutal war. Like Vietnam, for example.
Iron curtain ?
You mean the one the west put up? https://news.stanford.edu/2019/12/26/stalin-not-want-iron-curtain-descend/
Free speech and freedom of expression ?
Western countries have more sophisticated censorship and media apparatuses I give you that. Speak out in a real way though and look what happens to people like Fred Hampton.
I looked at some of the figures in the article most of them see slight improvement and the conclusion pretty much backs up my point of it not being worse but slightly better.
Life expectancy gains have been large and rapid, and life expectancy for both men and women reached its highest level in Russia’s history in 2019.
To the rest of your responses/points, it is somewhat tiering to respond to all of them with a formulated response, so I will ask do you know someone that lived in a former USSR state ? If your answer is no then as I said, statistics and Graphs can get you only so far, what my parents know and my grandparents know but won’t admit out of pride is that USSR sucked, our current system sucks somewhat too but at least I’m not forced to worship the state, can speak freely like you are doing right now, attend a pride parade or KSČM (Communist party in Czechia) parade, and cast my vote in an election.
And so you know, who is voting for politicians that steal from the people ? The same old people who wish USSR was back, my grandparents vote for a party that promises Socialist democracy (SMER-SD) and only thing they have done is steal from the people. Like with the faults of communism/socialism/USSR they ignore scandals and the stealing from SMER.
Lines for food
yeah i stood in one of these a few days ago, the fucky thing is that i had to pay for the food after i reached the end of the line
concerning life expectancy and quality of life and corruption, funnily enough
But behind the self destructive behaviour, the authors say, are economic factors, including rising poverty rates, unemployment, financial insecurity, and corruption. Whereas only 4%of the population of the region had incomes equivalent to $4 (£2.50) a day or less in 1988, that figure had climbed to 32%by 1994. In addition, the transition to a market economy has been accompanied by lower living standards (including poorer diets), a deterioration in social services, and major cutbacks in health spending.
“What we are arguing,” said Omar Noman, an economist for the development fund and one of the report’s contributors, “is that the transition to market economies [in the region] is the biggest … killer we have seen in the 20th century, if you take out famines and wars. The sudden shock and what it did to the system … has effectively meant that five million [Russian men’s] lives have been lost in the 1990s.” Using Britain and Japan with their ratio of 96 men to every 100 women as the base population, the report’s authors have calculated that there are now some 9.6 million “missing men” in the former communist bloc. “The typical patterns are that a man loses his job and develops a drinking problem,” said Mr Noman. “The women then leave and the men die, first emotionally and then physically.”
Overall, the Russian death rate from accidents most of them involving alcohol has risen 83% since 1991. source
In order to have been a worker for at least 5 years in both systems and therefore have an informed opinion of the difference, you’d need to have been at least 25 by the collapse.
Tack 30 years into that and yeah, at youngest the people with the most informed opinion on which system they preferred are going to be old.
And if you think you had a better system that in the past and it got destroyed, feeling nostalgic isn’t weird it’s the most normal emotion possible.
Considering that the USSR only claimed to be socialist and used propaganda (in accord with the US) to convince the people that state control is the same as worker’s control over the means of production (it isn’t), the girl is probably correct.
An Excerpt from Parenti - Blackshirts and reds:
The upheavals in Eastern Europe did not constitute a defeat for socialism because socialism never existed in those countries, according to some U.S. leftists. They say that the communist states offered nothing more than bureaucratic, one-party “state capitalism” or some such thing. Whether we call the former communist countries “socialist” is a matter of definition. Suffice it to say, they constituted something different from what existed in the profit-driven capitalist world–as the capitalists themselves were not slow to recognize.
First, in communist countries there was less economic inequality than under capitalism. The perks enjoyed by party and government elites were modest by corporate CEO standards in the West [even more so when compared with today’s grotesque compensation packages to the executive and financial elites.—Eds], as were their personal incomes and lifestyles. Soviet leaders like Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev lived not in lavishly appointed mansions like the White House, but in relatively large apartments in a housing project near the Kremlin set aside for government leaders. They had limousines at their disposal (like most other heads of state) and access to large dachas where they entertained visiting dignitaries. But they had none of the immense personal wealth that most U.S. leaders possess. {Nor could they transfer such “wealth” by inheritance or gift to friends and kin, as is often the case with Western magnates and enriched political leaders. Just vide Tony Blair.—Eds]
The “lavish life” enjoyed by East Germany’s party leaders, as widely publicized in the U.S. press, included a $725 yearly allowance in hard currency, and housing in an exclusive settlement on the outskirts of Berlin that sported a sauna, an indoor pool, and a fitness center shared by all the residents. They also could shop in stores that carried Western goods such as bananas, jeans, and Japanese electronics. The U.S. press never pointed out that ordinary East Germans had access to public pools and gyms and could buy jeans and electronics (though usually not of the imported variety). Nor was the “lavish” consumption enjoyed by East German leaders contrasted to the truly opulent life style enjoyed by the Western plutocracy.
Second, in communist countries, productive forces were not organized for capital gain and private enrichment; public ownership of the means of production supplanted private ownership. Individuals could not hire other people and accumulate great personal wealth from their labor. Again, compared to Western standards, differences in earnings and savings among the populace were generally modest. The income spread between highest and lowest earners in the Soviet Union was about five to one. In the United States, the spread in yearly income between the top multibillionaires and the working poor is more like 10,000 to 1.
Third, priority was placed on human services. Though life under communism left a lot to be desired and the services themselves were rarely the best, communist countries did guarantee their citizens some minimal standard of economic survival and security, including guaranteed education, employment, housing, and medical assistance.
Fourth, communist countries did not pursue the capital penetration of other countries. Lacking a profit motive as their motor force and therefore having no need to constantly find new investment opportunities, they did not expropriate the lands, labor, markets, and natural resources of weaker nations, that is, they did not practice economic imperialism. The Soviet Union conducted trade and aid relations on terms that generally were favorable to the Eastern European nations and Mongolia, Cuba, and India.
All of the above were organizing principles for every communist system to one degree or another. None of the above apply to free market countries like Honduras, Guatemala, Thailand, South Korea, Chile, Indonesia, Zaire, Germany, or the United States.
But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic, cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.
The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.
Sir we are not doing reasons here, this is a meme sub.
Memes can still be incoherent.