> On the other hand, life was secure. There were no bank loans, therefore there were no bank fees or percents. There was no real worry over one’s job or workplace; one was available for everyone. Wages were low, but fear of losing one’s job was almost nonexistent. A person pretended to work; the state pretended to pay him. Living accommodations were crowded and faint hope existed to find a better apartment, but all had a roof over their heads.There had to be, since homelessness was forbidden by law.
> Nowadays, there exist people who yearn for that mollusk-like life.
This isn't an inaccurate description, and yes, it's not exactly a utopian state to find yourself in.
But I'm not going to chuckle at the hypothetical people we're supposed to pity for wanting this; I bet there are quite a few people in the United States alone who would love to have this life, who would love to have a guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof over their heads, and the heads of their children.
> I bet there are quite a few people in the United States alone who would love to have this life, who would love to have a guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof over their heads, and the heads of their children.
I'd almost venture to say the majority of people, and definitely those who suffer from a disability of some sort; especially mental health, where one may not mentally function well enough from one day to the next to be able to reliably hold a job.
The description is not too dissimilar from a badly photoshopped motel ad. Yes, it nominally resembles reality but just barely and doesn’t tell you about all the nasty things that come with the tiny pool.
Yes, everyone had a job. It was illegal not to have one. Jobs were basically assigned by the state. Most “normal” people could choose among a few OK-ish options. But if you got a hair out of line or crossed wrong people you could get assigned shoveling coal in a small boiler room or building railroads in Siberia. And if you didn’t want that job you became a criminal and went to some mine or quarry working double shifts for gruel in Gulag.
Yes, everyone had a roof over their head. But that doesn’t mean space, comfort, or even privacy. It wasn’t uncommon to have no more than a bed and a small cabinet or chest. Most of the living spaces and urban areas were extremely depressing. It’s all grey boxes and muddy trails. The best you could hope for in most places is some trees and bushes adding a bit of green in the summer.
There was very little people could do to change any of that. You couldn’t move elsewhere just because you wanted. People in cities with better professions could move if they managed to know the right people and could get a job elsewhere. People in villages were basically pinned to their colhozes. Their only option to see other places were a holiday trip if the managed to save up a little or to go into military and be stationed wherever.
This lack of agency resulted in mass depression and alcoholism.
Where do you think the grim and drunk russian stereotype comes from? It’s just the soviet reality.
"In Soviet Russia we have eliminated all capitalist social ills. Unemployment is demoralizing and unproductive, so it is now illegal. Homelessness is unsafe and ruinous to the health of the mind, so it is against the law. Cancer is a terrible, deadly disease and also very expensive, so we have also banned it. And just like that, our surveys show 0% unemployment, 0% homelessness, and 0% cancer! Can your vaunted capitalistic West say the same?"
The problem is you'll probably live on something like $300/month, and the $ won't even be exchangeable internationally - think like food stamps but for everything. Or less. Unless you have connections in the nomenklatura, i.e. those who decide who gets which positions. University admission is handled by a similar circle.
Let me quote the text:
> An anecdote on this very topic became popular in the later Soviet Union. A young communist proclaimed victoriously: “We have founded a society where there are no rich people!” To which an old social democrat shook his head and muttered, “Actually our intention was to found a society were there were no poor people.”
>>University admission is handled by a similar circle.
So obviously I welcome any anecdotes to the contrary, but I was always told that in my formely communist country(Poland) university admissions were extremely fair. Everyone had equal chance if they passed exams well enough - in fact messing around with this system was guaranteed to get you in prison for corruption. And in there were many examples of poor families from very disadvantaged backgrounds sending kids to top universities because they studied hard enough to pass the entrance exams - there was no bribe you could give anyone to get you in, because the principles of fair admissions were upheld as the greatest value. I'm sure there are examples of it happening that we could find, but my understanding is that it was incredibly rare.
Now, top posts at universities - that's a different situation. To be the dean you had to be in the party and know the right people to be considered for the position. But students? Anyone could get anywhere and study completely for free.
I don't know about Poland, but within the USSR, a Jewish person would be unable to go to a good university without paying a bribe (which for many families was beyond their means). Jewish applicants would get a different set of test questions that would be nearly impossible to solve.
The main issue was not the general admission being itself corrupt (though I can't imagine you could not get a top party member child in if you wanted).
The main issue was that anyone the state was not comfortable with was banned from higher education, including their children.
Have any connection to the pre-communist politics, be involved in religion, be reported by your neighbors as speaking against the regime or just got in the way of someone i power - congratulation comrade, you and your children (regardless of how gifted) are now second class, can't go to university & are relegated to second class jobs, for ever!
And this basically applied to everything the communist state could miss-use to award or punish people - jobs, internal and foreign travel, housing, being able to do art or write books, etc.
And any time the single party that could never do any wrong decided to punish you - there was no recourse.
This is like hardcore libertarians, anarchy-capitalists. If they were dropped into a stateless (failed state) area, where they would have complete formal sovereignty, any but the super wealthy (who could afford private security, water and food quality systems, etc.), would soon leave, become impoverished, or die tragically at the behest of other legally unencumbered "self-sovereign" actors.
The excuses they might make, that libertarianism requires some basically supportive context (provided by who? and in what system?) to get off the ground, also undermine the arguments of the hard-independent individual crowd.
(I happen to think that "libertarianism" is a fruitful collection of ideas and insights, but in the context of many other systems with complementary ideas and insights. On a practical level, we need the best of many systems working together.)
> "Try goggle "communism support young americans"."
"According to a new Yale Youth Poll, a survey affiliated with the Yale Institution for Social and Political Studies, voters aged 18 to 21 lean Republican by 11.7 points when asked who they would support in the 2026 Congressional elections, while voters aged 22 to 29 favored Democrats by 6.4 points." from https://www.newsweek.com/republican-support-poll-young-gen-z... Whatever else they might be (and I can think of quite a few unprintable descriptors), I'm pretty sure the Republicans aren't communists or leftists.
Neither are the Democrats, so I'm not sure what you're going for here.
This is like Apple dropping the iPhone Mini. Everyone who wanted a small phone didn't just want a screen that's harder to read, or a marginally lower volume to carry in their pockets. They wanted the ergonomics of the original iPhone. My regular-sized (not plus) iPhone is too big for my hands. A lot of the interactions have to be done with both hands, or risk dropping the phone (which has happened many times) doing acrobatics to reach the far edges and corners.
The iPhone Mini never solved that. It was still uncomfortably large, so I never bothered with it because the tradeoffs weren't there. No doubt a smaller screen is worse, but if the ergonomics were significantly better, that would have been my choice.
Tradeoffs. One is willing to cope with some downsides if they perceive the gains to overcome the losses.
Truth is, even present-day UK Labour who are quite centre-right neolibs leaning more to the right, are closer to communism than the US Democrats are.
That is terrifying. Do they just not teach in schools how devastating every Marxist/Communist regime has been? Do people really think somehow that next time will magically be different despite all historical evidence pointing to the fact that this ideology is flawed at its very core?
Not in any detail. In my experience, Americans actually know very little about the Soviet Union, beyond that they were the "adversary" in the Cold War.
“Ideology” is just any system of values. Like “politics” people tend to pretend that ones they like are some other category while the label only applies to things they don't like, but...
> Do they just not teach in schools how devastating every Marxist/Communist regime has been?
Even if they do, when you're living somewhere that's free to fail you before you're even born, the second-worst case can still look good. And also the absolute worse case is Pol Pot, and there's many examples equally awful showing that a lot of people just flat out refuse to accept humans can be that evil.
But also, basically all types of governments can demonstrate the sorts of failure mode that Communism is famous for. Holodomor and Great Leap Forward's famines were Communist failures, the Irish Potato Famine and several in India under the British were Capitalist failures.
> the fact that this ideology is flawed at its very core?
You may be surprised if you read a copy of The Communist Manifesto. Several parts of it have been considered "common sense" in capitalist nations for over a century.
Me, I think Karl Marx made the same error as Adam Smith, that both think humans free from rules are naturally amazing and they largely ignore power seeking behaviours and the consequences of that. Hence Smith is associated with laissez-faire, and "socialist" and "anarchist" were seen by the authorities of the 19th c. as being much the same*.
(I over simplify a bit, this is just a comment and not a script for a replacement idiology).
I've read The Communist Manifesto. There are indeed parts of it that are sensible in isolation. The problem is that taken as a whole, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, etc. are deeply flawed ideologies doomed to catastrophic failure and devastating results. History has shown us this repeatedly.
To Quote Ronald Reagan...
“How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”
What history has shown us is somewhat weaker than you say — for all the stuff they did badly, for all that they wildly missed their own raison d'être and became just another power structure for just another bunch of essentially aristocrats, it did also get Russia from the Tzars to orbit in 40 years.
But that aside, when you're already getting failed and the people failing you specifically hate one thing, it's very easy to reach for that thing.
To your quote: Well, I'm not a communist (unlike a previous partner)… but I'm also not a capitalist, because I see that capitalism also is a deeply flawed ideology doomed to catastrophic failure and devastating results, and that history has shown us this, too, repeatedly.
I'm also not "anti-" either of them, because I'd rather see someone take the best of both and find some new mechanism to deal with the other repeatedly observed historical fact: that a non-trivial fraction of the population are power-hungry sadistic arses. To quote, albeit from fiction: "To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416-the-major-problem-mdas...
(Both capitalism and communism have failure modes separate from the problem of dark triad personalities, but both sets are much easier to deal with if your society has also solved the problem of dark triad personalities, and a society does also need to solve the problem of dark triad personalities irregardless of what else it does).
It’s almost like… how can we take the nice social parts from communism - and mix them benefits of capitalism. Almost like, some sort of democratic socialism.
Good thing when people "support communism" they're not calling for a specific system like the Soviet Union, but just for a higher adoption rate of the good things that fall under the umbrella term.
How do you achieve this without creating a brutal authoritarian regime to seize the means of production and silence opposition? How do you allocate resources and labor fairly?
Marxism is a flawed ideology because it doesn’t account for human nature.
I recently started reading Henry Ford books and to me it looks like he has achieved the best of both worlds - at least until he passed away. One thing especially resonates with me - decreasing the prices without reducing the wages so that the profit gets close to zero, then find ways to make the manufacturing more efficient and less costly. While the new profit gradually grows - gradually increase the salaries. Then rinse and repeat. In the end people have good salary, can buy cheap (but still high quality) products and have joy while working.
I agree with you that Marxism is flawed, that as you say it doesn’t account for human nature.
But: There's no additional overhead to "seize the means of production" vs. any other system of governance and organisation, given that corporations, money, ownership, and the law are all things that any functioning system of government controls anyway, regardless of if they want these things to be collectively owned (/nationalised) or privately controlled.
Now, my former partner who is a self-identified Communist of some kind (I can't remember which kind), she wants to abolish money, and abolishing it rather than using it would need quite a lot of extra effort.
> How do you allocate resources and labor fairly?
I believe the general claim here is "democratically". This doesn't really work too well, but on the other hand, neither does letting people accumulate so much money they become the de-facto leadership with the carrots and sticks of "I will move my business to whoever has the lowest tax/cheapest labour/least expensive safety requirements".
Consider also that normal people are nowhere near as carful with language use as you or I may wish; some of the people you're worried about may be identifying themselves as "Communists" in the first place only because they're exactly one step to the left of the Democrat Party's Overton window while also repeatedly observing the US Republican party describe the Democrats as "socialists".
(Conversely, my former is one of the people I expect you to be correctly worried about, as she agreed with my assessment that she was to the left of the Cuban communist party).
Adam Smith did nit think that. He warned about the danger of business “conspiracy against the public” and thought ethics more important afield than economics. The idea the invisible hand was perfectible is a amplification of his idea
> Potato famine was caused by blight, a natural virus, and Irelands inability to handle the situation.
Ireland was a British colony ruled by absentee landlords at the time, and British policy made the famine far worse by not only refusing to provide aid, but continuing to export vast amounts of food while the Irish starved.
What you are arguing here is factually false and the exact kind of communist apologetics the article is trying to combat. The Soviets deliberately starved the Ukrainians who would otherwise have been fine. In Ireland Britain used its Royal Navy to deliver regular relief supplies then deployed every available steamship in Ireland to deliver aid. They cut taxes and took on massive debts to fund employing half a million Irish in public works programmes - all aid to try and help them, even as the Irish themselves exported their food.
The idea these are in any way comparable shows up the true weakness of communism - there are no capitalist equivalents to far left barbarities anywhere. The fact that the best anyone can find for a capitalist Holodomor is a massive aid programme shows just how wide the gulf truly is.
Ultimately this confusion is rooted in economics. The potato famine aid was structured in a similar way to modern aid programmes. Why, because the only sort of "aid" the left deem acceptable is price controls, but they ignore the demand side. If you force prices down without addressing that then you just bankrupt all the farmers as income drops below production costs.
If your response to a famine is to bankrupt all the farmers, you just made things worse instead of better. It puts the country into permanent dependency that means everyone will die if the flow of aid is ever interrupted (like, say, by a World War).
The smart thing to do is to provide targeted immediate relief if you can, whilst simultaneously channelling money to people so they can afford to buy food and build up their economy so they can stand alone again. All modern aid programmes work this way, or try to. And it's what Britain did.
You might disagree about the best way to help desperately poor countries recover from natural disasters, but to draw an equivalence with man-made famines in the USSR or China is a category error of the worst kind.
> even as the Irish themselves exported their food.
That's a similarity. Ukraine and Ireland both exported food during their respective famines.
> The fact that the best anyone can find for a capitalist Holodomor is a massive aid programme shows just how wide the gulf truly is.
"Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, but also because some in power believed in divine providence or that the Irish lacked moral character, with aid only resuming to some degree later. Large amounts of food were exported from Ireland during the famine and the refusal of London to bar such exports, as had been done on previous occasions, was an immediate and continuing source of controversy, contributing to anti-British sentiment and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in tens of thousands of households being evicted, exacerbated by a provision forbidding access to workhouse aid while in possession of more than one-quarter acre of land."
> The smart thing to do is to provide targeted immediate relief if you can, whilst simultaneously channelling money to people so they can afford to buy food and build up their economy so they can stand alone again. All modern aid programmes work this way, or try to. And it's what Britain did.
This is so wrong I don't know where to begin.
The farmers were the ones doing the dying. Their primary need wasn't money, it was food. The extent to which money would have helped was that their landlords demanded money and evicted them because they didn't have enough food to sell.
Before getting to the Irish-specific details, we must observe that there is no historical debate about whether the Holodomor was deliberate. The Soviets deliberately imposed far-left ideology onto the farmers which destroyed their productivity, and then continued enforcing it through massive violence even as the whole Soviet Union plunged into famine. So the Soviets deliberately starved the Ukrainians, who if they had never been conquered by the Red Army would have been fine.
That's why this argument shows the deep immorality of left wing thought. The Soviets could have ended the famine at any moment by ending the revolution and restoring free market capitalism. They did not, because they were insane.
You probably are referring to the question of whether the Soviets deliberately took grain from Ukraine rather than other regions due to hatred of the Ukrainians specifically. That is debated. But what is not debated, is that the famine was a deliberate choice.
But Britain didn't create the potato blight nor the famine that followed. The Irish opened themselves to that risk when they chose to overwhelmingly farm a single strain of a single crop, despite knowing that crop disease has existed since the dawn of agriculture. Moreover there was nothing Britain could have done to avoid the famine, despite what left-biased Wikipedia tells you. Here is another quote, from in fact another left biased source, but it is nonetheless still more honest than Wikipedia. Google it if you wish.
"The food gap created by the loss of the potato in the late 1840s was so enormous that it could not have been filled, even if all the Irish grain exported in those years had been retained in the country. In fact, far more grain entered Ireland from abroad in the late 1840s than was exported-probably almost three times as much grain and meal came in as went out."
Banning exports - something leftists claim was a magical solution not done only due to nasty capitalist ideology - would simply not have solved the famine at all, because the Irish situation was entirely unsaveable. In fact the famine happened even when there was large amount of imported food sitting at the docks because the Irish were unable to properly distribute it internally due to bad transport infrastructure, so food just sat there rather than reaching the famine struck areas.
Yet Britain did what it could to help the Irish despite the logistical problems:
- Imported huge quantities of aid using every available ship.
- Employed vast numbers of people to give them an artificial income, labouring the English with large debts to support this.
- Ran soup kitchens that at their peak fed three million people daily.
The biggest criticism the left can make of this situation is that they think Britain should have, somehow, fed the entirety of Ireland for five whole years despite there being no logistical way to do that, no financial means to do it, and no moral obligation to do so either.
So, once again, the idea this is comparable to the Holodomor just shows how uniquely brutal far-leftism really is. There is nothing like it anywhere in the history of capitalism. A large multi-year foreign aid programme is the opposite of what the Soviets did.
That inability was due to capitalism as it was understood and practiced at the time. Indeed, it overlapped with the writing of the Communist Manifesto.
Capitalism has been forced to change a lot since then. Laissez-faire hasn't been popular in a long time.
Nobody wants the Soviet Union. People do want a fair society. Quite arguably, the Soviet Union wasn't even communist (it was only called that, like how the N**s called themselves socialist and North Korea calls itself a democratic republic)
The problem is that communism can’t give you a fair society. You have to seize the means of production by force. This force has always created a brutal authoritarian regime that refuses to cede power willingly. Like in the book Animal Farm, some animals are more equal than others. The top members of the party always live better than the proletariat. Marxism just isn’t compatible with human nature.
By the exact same reasoning, no system can give you a fair society. All systems rely on seizing things by force.
Now that's out of the way, perhaps some systems give you better unfair society that seizes things by force, compared to others. Perhaps we could calmly deliberate about which system that creates an unfair society by seizing things by force is the best, and then implement that system, creating the best possible unfair society that seizes things by force.
You underestimate the inability of the Soviet regime to provide its own people with basic consumer goods.
You would have a job and some money, but your money would buy nothing, because goods were scarce. Even finding good shoes would be a challenge and you would need to cultivate relationships with warehouse clerks etc. to get some access to stuff before it was stealthily distributed by underground channels to relatives, friends etc.
Modern Americans would go absolutely ballistic if they came to a shop with empty shelves and a bored arrogant assistant who would jeer at their very question "I want to buy X".
> Modern Americans would go absolutely ballistic if they came to a shop with empty shelves and a bored arrogant assistant who would jeer at their very question "I want to buy X".
Reminds me of an old Russian joke. In stores, you'd typically go to one counter to get some produce weighed, then to a cashier to pay for it.
So, someone goes up to the meat counter, and asks, "Can you weigh me out half a kilo of sausage?" And the guy behind the counter replies: "Sure, bring some in, and I'll weigh it out for you."
At the cost that the Soviet union imposed? I doubt there's even 100.
There is nothing stopping people from living like communists in the US. There have been many communist communes here and in other countries, like famously Israel and Columbia. All but single digits have been abandoned or sold by their inhabitants.
So we've got plenty of historical evidence whether people would choose to have this life. All but a few dozen, out of hundreds of million, choose against it. Including all socialists, everyone in those demonstrations, ... demonstrating extremely clearly:
> There is nothing stopping people from living like communists in the US.
Capitalism stops them. The state has expectations of everyone. They will have to deal with things from outside that will force them into some level of capitalistic thinking which will ultimately eat the project from within.
> All but single digits have been abandoned or sold by their inhabitants.
The fact that the death of these experiments comes with a sale is illustrative of the point above
> without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
Is that so? It sounds like red scare propaganda honestly, and I don't think you could reasonably make an argument for this without conceding that the same is true of capitalism.
> Capitalism stops them. The state has expectations of everyone. They will have to deal with things from outside that will force them into some level of capitalistic thinking which will ultimately eat the project from within.
This is not a difference between capitalism and communism, and so not a valid complaint. You will pay taxes in a communist system. You will have to deal with all sorts of external influences in a communist system.
> The fact that the death of these experiments comes with a sale is illustrative of the point above
No it isn't. These were voluntary sales (especially since most were abandoned, not sold. There was no profit in leaving, except in some cases). It is illustrative of the simple fact that given the choice, all but a rare exception chooses against communism.
Or to put it another way: people REALLY don't want communism, and after trying it, that becomes worse. In many cases abandoning these communes required a large-ish group of people taking the decision together. In other words: they organized themselves to destroy their little patch of communism. Which illustrates the next point:
> > without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
> Is that so? It sounds like red scare propaganda honestly, and I don't think you could reasonably make an argument for this without conceding that the same is true of capitalism.
You just made an argument in favor of this. Your argument is that people cannot be allowed to have access to the external world, or they will abandon communism. That must be prevented, in your argument.
> This is not a difference between capitalism and communism, and so not a valid complaint
I don't understand. You're saying that also in communism, capitalism comes in from outside and stops you practicing communism?
The USA did bomb and/or coup most communist countries until they were not communist, so you may have a point but it wasn't clear if this is what you meant.
> Your argument is that people cannot be allowed to have access to the external world, or they will abandon communism. That must be prevented, in your argument.
The US used the word socialist is very strange way. Socialists and communists are not the same thing at all – except in the US, which is one of the very very rare countries that never had a socialist party as far as I know. A socialist party (labor, “social democrat”, etc) is what most countries consider “left” (as opposed to communists which are “far left”)
Socialists want councils and the political discussion to happen inside the party by party members, which is what there idea of democracy is. (The self-labeling as democratic isn't a lie, but what they perceive to be democratic.)
A social democrat wants a welfare state with a democracy with multiple parties.
In practice socialists strive to create communism, which hasn't really worked out anywhere yet. Some declared that it was achieved, but than later backpedaled and claimed it didn't really happened yet.
They definitely does not aware of soviet reality that “roof over head” usually is not in the place where human want to live, same with job. if student after university decided (not by student, by state distributing workforce) to go work at city on polar circle - that means that student will go live and work here, without sunlight for the rest of his life! not joking, personal story with soviet collapse as happy ending (moved to normal place after that)
I assume by "white Russian" you really mean someone of Russian ethnicity and not Belarus - which is what that phrase means to a Russian speaker - but you might want to clarify.
Yes. White male with Slavic face who speaks russian language without an accent because he knows no other language.
A friend of mine had a grandfather, who was born in central Asia (Samarkand) had Ukrainian parents, but also had written in his passport that he was a russian. Soviets erased his roots, history, ethnicity. He never spoke Ukrainian in his life.
Btw, that is what current russian government is doing. They have stolen thousands of Ukrainian kids and erased their identity. Few more years and some of them are ready to be sent to the frontline.
> ... speaks russian language without an accent because he knows no other language.
At least Belorussians and Ukrainians can speak Russian without an accent despite knowing their own languages.
> Soviets erased his ...
I doubt the USSR had such power solely on its own. It depends mostly on the will of parents (and grandparents) and the type of a young person. If a kid likes art, it's more likely the kid would be interested in national memory, if a kid is more into tech, then it seems not that important, which nevertheless can change later.
Russian Germans (not necessary all of them) consider themselves as Germans even after hundreds of years living in Russian Empire and then in the USSR.
If a kid in the Soviet Union was interested in art and used that to express national memory, then there would be consequences. As an adult, they'd probably be sent to a gulag and never seen again. This is how the Soviet Union crushed national memories beyond just the name (never the name itself, making sure they knew they were "different" somehow).
They didn't succeed in completely crushing all national memories, but a few more decades and who knows what might have happened.
The culture has been preserved using non-provocative way by not mixing it with politic. Surely we must be respectful and thankful to those going rather provocative way and suffering.
The daily Soviet system issues have been successfully mentioned in a subtle way in films since middle 60s, which became classic. I'm not aware of similar from movies from China.
Famous Belorussian and Ukrainian songs have been performed in public on radio, TV in the USSR.
Even today some western world artists say, that sure, of course, the culture is not separate from politic while the others say they are doing art not politics and welcome questions about their public art not their private political opinions and preferences. Similar to many singers and actors dislike questions about their private life and lovers instead of what actually matters: their art of doing music, singing, performing.
> ... what might have happened.
Since middle 80s the level of freedom started rapidly to increase.
Only bits and pieces of culture can survive through such methods. It is enough to escape full assimilation, but only just. All it would take is the whim of another Stalin. The damage is such that those who went through it may not even realize what has been lost, until one day they (or future generations) find evidence on the outside of what culture was once like.
> The culture has been preserved using non-provocative way by not mixing it with politic. Surely we must be respectful and thankful to those going rather provocative way and suffering.
Local cultural symbols themselves were seen as "political" and "provocative". The definition of political and provocative was broad.
Small bits a pieces passing through the barriers are not "it".
I didn't mean to blame victims. I just mean that under totalitarian regime one need to put extra work to compensate the pressure from the state and try to do it wise. Right after the Stalin rule there have been official De-Stalinization and rehabilitation of Gulag prisoners. That's why under USSR I usually don't mean Stalin period. There was no one single and equal USSR whole 70+ years long. Every new party leader is a new era.
> singing Ukrainian songs you can go to the russian prison
I'm not sure how is this right now, I fear it got worse, but on August 2022 it was possible(*). Russian guitarist performed a Ukrainian song in Ukrainian original in public:
And it is not just some beautiful Ukrainian song. It is a prominent "I will not surrender without a fight" (2005). Which sounds provocative enough these days. Yeah, he did not continue doing it again and again, thus it's by no means a prove one can safely practice this on a daily basis.
This song must be known by almost every Russian (and Belorussian), since this song was used once Zelensky played the main male role in the rus-ukr movie "Office Romance. Our Time" (2011) remake of the famous 1977 USSR original.
OTOH one of the most prominent (former) Ukrainian singers and since 2014 Russian singer Taisia Povaliy could sing her Ukrainian songs on December 2024 at the main State Kremlin Palace in Moscow. (Obviously, because she openly supports the state.)
From what hints I've been able to piece together, suppression of religion may have actually gotten worse during the Krushchev years. So it's not quite as simple as there being ups and downs - different aspects of culture got suppressed in different ways at different times.
I have never seen an english speaker use “white Russians” for Belarusians – the only uses I know of this idiom are (i) for the non-red/non-green participants to the Russian civil war, and, by extensions, their diaspora, and (ii) the cocktail, which of course, is by far the most common occurence nowadays.
Many of the Russian speakers I know do this when speaking English - I'm guessing that's how they think of the phrase in Russian and want to translate it literally.
I know both usages, and as an Englishman I am a native English speaker. However, I would agree that the most common usage would be the non-Red opponents of the communistic takeover of Russia in the early 1920s. Isn't the cocktail named as a direct reference to these people?
The matters of race occupy a much smaller percentage of the brains of people outside of the USA. I say this completely without malice. It simply means that the trauma of segregation is still too raw in American society.
The rest of your statement doesn't make any sense. One went to a gulag for opposing the Soviet government, not for having a particular ethnicity. Stalin was ethnically Georgian. Many prominent members of the politburo were Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or Jews. In the later Soviet Union there were many politicians from the "ethnic" republics who had high-powered careers.
In fact, look at the list of Russian politicians who are currently under international sanctions and tell me with a straight face that they are all white and Russian. Well, they are Russian of course, but not in the way you meant.
> The matters of race occupy a much smaller percentage of the brains of people outside of the USA. I say this completely without malice.
But do you say it with first-hand experience?
Having gone back to Russia to meet with relatives, it was very clear that they considered "Tajiks" to be somewhere below them on a social ladder, and one relative directly inquired whether I felt safe living in America with all the "Africans" living in New York. (Granted, that last statement could back up your point that it only matters in America - but it didn't feel that way at the time.)
Antisemitism in Europe has a long history stemming from the church wanting to paint Jews as "Christ-killers" and "other". There was a much more famous and murderous contemporary antisemitic movement in Germany. Singling out Russia is simply weird.
The Jews in the later Soviet Union did still face discrimination, but it was of the variety of being denied university admissions due to quotas. Kind of like what the Ivy League does to kids of Asian descent in the USA these days.
There is so much wrong in this statement, but more history required to explain it than a single post can cover. I'll try to cover only a few right now:
- The more famous antisemitic movement in Germany, while still fully responsible for its actions, used earlier Russian-published conspiracy theories as its foundational documents.
- The antisemitism of the late Russian empire was to the point that millions left to escape it.
- In the late Stalin years, Jewish figures of note would end up either assassinated or imprisoned, with rumors abounding of a mass deportation coming.
- In the years beyond and up to the collapse, Jewish culture, language, and religion were almost completely suppressed. References to the Holocaust could not mention Jews as victims. Systematic and state antisemitism was tacitly allowed, even encouraged.
- By the time of the collapse, almost all Jewish cultural knowledge had ceased to exist, only the most basic and vague knowledge remained. (Contrary to popular belief, the Nazis only played a partial role here once they lost - much of this culture still existed in 1945).
To diminish the intense level of antisemitism by comparing it to anything in America is absurd, and highly problematic.
I think you got your timelines mixed up in your effort to portray me as a neo-Nazi.
I know Russians are responsible for everything wrong in the world ever, but when I say that there is a rich tradition of antisemitism in Europe, I mean since at least the time of Shakespeare. Merchant of Venice kind of thing.
In Germany, Nazis didn't just invent antisemitism out of thin air. They exploited a common sentiment held by the working class. If you think that's due to Russian propaganda, well, we are also under your bed. Be very afraid.
Lastly, there is a trend lately to label "problematic" any sentiment of insufficient piety towards all things Semitic. This is a great culture, but it has shown that like any other great culture it is capable of genocide.
Have you ever heard of Protocols of the Elders of Zion? This was the central source of the Nazi's specific claims, even when antisemitism was nothing new to Germany. It was created by a pro-Tsar Russian publishing house. All the conspiracy theories relating to communism came from this source.
If you see a timeline discrepancy, point it out. But if you've never heard of the Doctor's Plot or Soviet "Zionology", maybe consider looking them up.
I think this might have changed for the worst since the soviet times (or at least is now less covert ?). IIRC when someone interviewed one of the warlords from Chechnya he mentioned he would probably be a high ranking officer in the soviet military by this point if the soviet union still exiated. With this no longer being possible, they ended up doing other things.
Fascinating man, really. If you do read the article - notice that while he resigned rather than follow orders to suppress a rebellion in Estonia, and there are streets named after him in the places that hate Russia, he also won elections with 90% of the vote once he became a warlord and disbanded parliament. History, it would seem, is not black and white.
Yes, I speak from first hand experience. I have family and friends in Russia. Nobody in my circles is a racist. If someone would speak of a "churka" I'd be concerned for my friend and try to get them to see a psychiatrist.
Do racist people exists? Yes, they do. They tend to live in small insular towns. Kind of like they do in the rest of the world. If someone hails from a small town they may have a racist uncle. Kind of like someone from Texas might. The correct reaction is the same - an eye roll.
If I were to hazard a guess, these racist relatives are probably not university professors. I don't mean this disparagingly - I do not have an elite pedigree myself. But I suspect you are comparing against your knowledge worker acquaintances in the US. You should try speaking to some American tradespeople some time and see if you still think Russians are more racist.
>> Do racist people exists? Yes, they do. They tend to live in small insular towns
And Moscow. And other big cities. People of color are beaten routinely in Moscow, local police will do nothing about that, may not even register it.
A friend of mine has relative in Moscow, son of high rank Soviet scientist. They transfered their son to the religious school under russian orthodox church explicitly mentioned the reason: no Tajiks there.
Let me point out the fly in the ointment: in the enlightened SF Bay Area high-flying tech workers who would never dare be associated with anything less than 100% liberal leanings... still send their own kids to private schools rather than a public in East San Jose, for much the same reasons.
And this is generally true. Ask any of these enlightened non-racists if they would send their kids to a school in Compton, and watch them squirm.
There have been a ton of states passing laws, starting in 2022 but really hitting stride in 2024/2025, where the Republican party has pushed laws or changes to state constitutions to prevent Ranked Choice Voting.
Example, in Missouri there was a ballot initiative called Amendment 7. The first part of the Amendment was to enshrine banning non-citizens from voting. I want to be clear, this was already against state law. This didn't change anything.
The second part of Amendment 7 was to ban ranked choice voting and require a plurality. That was the REAL intent of the Amendment.
Ranked-choice voting sucks anyway. It's nominally better than first past the post, but only because FPTP is so broken that it can still be the loser in a competition between bad voting systems. Use a cardinal voting system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rated_voting
And framing this as a partisan issue is how you lose. Changes to the voting system that allow multiple parties aren't going to cause Democrats to win more seats in Missouri. Missouri is red regardless of which voting system you use. But it will cause Republicans to lose seats, to libertarians or some other right-leaning third party running candidates there. Which is perfectly to the advantage of the right-leaning voters there, because it better represents their interests.
It's not to the advantage of the incumbent party insiders, who then trick people with crooked amendments like that. But if you pin that generically on "Republicans", implying a contrast with Democrats and need for all right-leaning people to line up against you, you're not going to win in Missouri.
You have to pin it specifically where it belongs, on the fat cats trying to sustain their privileged position as a one-party monopoly in the state at the expense of all voters.
Not one of these laws were put forth or passed by anyone other than Republicans in any of these states, and there is more pending legislation in other states before the end of the year.
If it makes noises like a duck, looks like a duck, does duck things, it's a duck!
I'm not running for office, just applying proper attribution!
The "game" is not worth playing, especially now. Time to bail. Sucks. (Reminder that there are far more registered independents than any political party affiliation.)
You can play the same game and call them "Americans" or "adults" or "politicians" but the reason you want to call them Republicans is that you're stuck in a partisan frame.
If you need majority support in a state where Republican candidates get 60-70% of the vote then you need to get some "Republicans" on your side, which in turn means you need to distinguish between the ones who are your enemies and the ones who could be your friends.
Yes, like all propaganda, the Western version is great at producing catchphrases. The Iron Curtain. The Axis of Evil. The Prison of Nations. Or, self-referentially, the White Man's Burden and Manifest Destiny. For internal consumption there are epithets like Convicted Criminal and Sleepy Joe (take your pick).
The best propaganda relies on some degree of truth before adding the imagery. But I am willing to bet that most commenters here have a fuzzy mental image of some vaguely menacing tyrant in a fur hat making people starve just for kicks. Other than Holodomor - can you name another mass starvation of an ethnic non-Russian region?
>> can you name another mass starvation of an ethnic non-Russian region
Asharshylyk. And it's not the only one I can name.
Maybe western propaganda is good in creating labels, but russians are good in killing is own people. Stalin killed more people in USSR than Hitler. Even now in their army ethnic minorities have disproportionally high KIA and WIA rates.
Hey, Russian genocides can never match the sheer killing power of American efforts to bring democracy to various parts of the world. And the Yanks have better marketing. Putin is jealous.
Just so that you understand, what that inevitably brings is alcoholism, domestic violence and other depressive deformities. My grandpa died from daily drinking with his factory pals and my grand-grandma has axe damage on her wooden furniture and it was normal.
I'm sorry about your family history, but I have American friends who've grown up here for generations with identical family histories - alcoholism, domestic violence, depressive deformities and all.
I think that lifestyle is easily achieved by basically anyone, you don't need much money to live that kind of life. The problem is that life is only enjoyable if everyone lives the same life. You could save a ton of money and not have to work much if you lived a 70s lifestyle. Many even long for that lifestyle, but it only works if everyone lives it. If you're the only one living in the 70s and everyone else lives in the 2020s, most people would not be happy. Somehow, enduring things is much easier as a group. I remember talking to a Chinese person who said for most of their youth they spent their days studying until 11pm with breaks for lunch and dinner. That would be hell for most western kids, but apparently they didn't suffer too much because they were studying together with their friends who all had to endure the same schedule.
This is averaging across ~40 years of history (none of this applied until mid-50s and certainly not before WWII) and comparing "middle class" with low income. The "guaranteed, if low-paying, job and roof over head" was the norm, but it certainly didn't apply to everyone, the modern Russian word for a homeless person is of soviet origin. I. e. a criminal convict would lose their home automatically.
That was not a threat if you slacked off. Slacking off was basically completely normalized.
That was a treat if you was political inconvenient. Or if someone seen you as a threat in his career ascent and denounced you (falsely or truthfully). Which, in a roundabout way caused more of that slacking culture. It was literally safer to NOT look like the best worker with initiative.
Probably this. You would not want to stand out in any way. If you were such a slacker that it reflected badly on your boss, or if you were so productive that you became a threat to others, things could go badly. So your goal was to just exist, be a nobody, never challenge authority, never have a controversial opinion, just go home to your little cement apartment on the 5th floor and drink vodka. Sounds wonderful.
My dad used to say basically the same - he used to work at a coal mine in communist Poland and said that basically if you wanted to step up and work hard everyone else would put you back in your place. They'd get their gear, take 3 hours to get to wherever they were going, sit around and chat, then make the trip back and always have some excuse as to why the work couldn't be done.
And the thing is, at the end of the month they'd still be told that the mine has worked 150% of the norm and they are all getting letters of commendation from the the local mayor or something. Everyone knew it was nonsense, from top to bottom, and it was just how it worked. It's how on the news they said the wheat production is up 400% this year and western countries are jealous of their ability to grow crops and yet there was a shortage of bread.
So yeah, you just shut up and tried not to stick out.
Yeah. I've had friends who went unemployed for a long time because they considered themselves to be above certain jobs. Me? If my kid needs food, the burger at the local McDonald's is gonna look very flippable real quick.
> But I'm not going to chuckle at the hypothetical people we're supposed to pity for wanting this
We should.
What communists really want is to have their every need and desire magically provided for, as if they were fundamental rights. In other words, what they truly want is called post-scarcity: the absence of an economy.
Communism and socialism are economic models. There exists scarcity of goods and resources and therefore they must be economized. There's a system that chooses who gets access to said scarce resources.
Socialism is sold to people as
though it was post-scarcity. People think they'd be living comfortable "secure" lives where everything is guaranteed and provided for. Ah yes, the fabled memetic fully automated luxury space communism.
People who buy into this will probably end up doing forced hard labor in a field somewhere should communists actually come to power. They will not get to do what they want, they will work wherever the state puts them to work under penalty of death by firing squad. The state has no choice, anything else means mass starvation and millions of deaths.
Pity is far too lenient a reaction towards such reality distorting naïveté. If left unchecked, they will win elections and actually install socialism in your country.
We have a better chance of achieving post scarcity by collapsing capitalism with relentless automation.
In the Nordics, the governments don't really try to run the economy. They provide stable environment to their local capitalists, let them do business at their leisure, and then tax their profits.
That is a huge difference from the mass experiment with central-command economy that was run in the countries of the Soviet Bloc. Unsurprisingly, ideologues and bureaucrats cannot really create and sustain a competitive economy. That requires a different sort of mentality.
Nordic countries are not socialist regimes. They are free economies with welfare states. Socialism implies state control of the economy, industry and the means of production.
I think you missed the metaphors target. He was describing the lifestyle of just subsisting. Like a mollusk. This was objectively the majority of experiences under the Soviet system, not a comment on anyone’s political views.
I dont know how your life is, but my own impression is that life of many americans is worse than the life which was in the Soviet Union at least until the 80s (after Stalin). Maybe not in the sense of the capacity to buy junkfood and other junk, but as to sense of living and human relations. "Mollusk" sounds as the usual american antirussian propaganda.
Unless you are limiting your comparison to just the homeless in America, this is just not true. Most people don't know much about life in the Soviet Union in the first place, but even what people do know is typically limited only to life in Moscow and Leningrad. Dismissing the conditions as "capacity to buy junkfood" is uncalled for.
I don't know where in the Soviet Union you were born. But, the stories I've heard of life outside the cities are completely unrecognizable to the modern American experience outside of the most extreme rural and isolated environments available.
The really funny part is that this is probably fairly easy to achieve in the United States. The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency control regime.
Currently people all over the world are free to move to New York, which makes the city unaffordable. If you forbade anyone not born within it from moving there, Manhattan would be fairly affordable and homelessness would be much reduced.
All you need to do is to free yourself from that bourgeois delusion that a man from Mexico (or worse, West Virginia) has any right to live in that city.
> The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency control regime.
Ouch: straight to being against others.
No, the part you'd need to implement to get socialised housing is socialised housing. Similarly, there are modern equivalents to guaranteed jobs. Communism believed everyone had to work: today we have different ideas of purpose than Marx had, plus are more aware of those who cannot work, or the value of non-work social contributions, and tech folks like us might believe in or hope for an upcoming post-scarcity society, with a transition period of UBI.
I expect you want to control migration and residency in order to avoid freeloaders. Freeloaders are remarkably rare, most people have self-respect and enjoy being productive, and interestingly systems that exterminate freeloaders entirely tend to be less efficient.[1] Plus, if you have a wonderful system, the best way to handle other people wanting it is to help it grow, not limit it to yourself. A better policy would be one encouraging its growth elsewhere in other countries where all those folk who are coming to your shores are coming from. The US has a long (mixed) history of that approach re democracy.
What freeloaders are you talking about? This is complete nonsense.
Residency controls exist to solve the Economic Problem. The amount of people that want to live in global cities is endless. Even if you socialize all the housing in New York, there will be people that want to live in the city but won't be able to. It is the job of the economic system to determine who gets in and who doesn't.
That's why socialized housing requires residency controls, but if those were implemented in the United States, the country could reap the specified benefits of of the Soviet system.
Finally, you speak of encouraging growth elsewhere, but what can be more productive for the growth of West Virginia, than to tell every man born in that state that he shall also die in that state. What can be better for industrial development, but a labor force that can't move away?
It's so sad to see communists cling to capitalist concepts like that. Communism has no future so long as it's supporters refuse to understand that Marx's magnificent philosophical and political system rejects borgeous human rights.
> Residency controls exist to solve the Economic Problem. The amount of people that want to live in global cities is endless.
That isn't true. There are a finite number of living people and if you just kept building housing in every major city, there would be enough for everyone who wants to live there.
It might not be practical to build enough housing in one city to house the entire global population, but who is proposing that anyway? Build more housing everywhere.
> Finally, you speak of encouraging growth elsewhere, but what can be more productive for the growth of West Virginia, than to tell every man born in that state that he shall also die in that state. What can be better for industrial development, but a labor force that can't move away?
By implication you would also have an inability to import labor. And then if you don't e.g. have a local medical school, you don't have local doctors. If you have the local environment to sustain a major industry and a local population that could do 90% of the jobs, but the other 10% are specialists who would have to be paid to relocate then it can't open up there at all and you lose the other 90% of the jobs too.
Suppose you have a mining town somewhere until the mine is exhausted. What are the people who used to live there supposed to do other than move away? There is nothing there for them anymore.
> That isn't true. There are a finite number of living people and if you just kept building housing in every major city, there would be enough for everyone who wants to live there.
That's sort of of neither here nor there. Sure, it's probably true, but try explaining that to anyone who hates bourgeois democracy. "If only we let the greedy property developers have it their way."
But the point that I'm trying to get across here with no small amount of irony (that I hope is fairly obvious), is that all the benefits of living in a communist dictatorship come from the dictatorship, not from the communism. Collectivized agriculture, state industries, socialized housings - all those things are worse than useless. What provided safety, stability and a guaranteed standard of life was the semi-serfdom imposed by the state.
> By implication you would also have an inability to import labor. And then if you don't e.g. have a local medical school, you don't have local doctors. If you have the local environment to sustain a major industry and a local population that could do 90% of the jobs, but the other 10% are specialists who would have to be paid to relocate then it can't open up there at all and you lose the other 90% of the jobs too.
The Soviet system did allow for movement. When a factory was opened and had to be staffed, permits were issued for the necessary people. In fact that was the only significant way for people from rural areas to be allowed the privilege to move to a city. Similarly, the problem with doctors was dealt with rather elegantly - every graduate of a medical school was assigned a specific town or village and was forced to live and practice there for decades.
The Soviet Union didn't abolish the movement of people. In fact, in the 1940s it was probably something of a champion in terms of internal migration. It's the freedom of movement that was abolished.
> Sure, it's probably true, but try explaining that to anyone who hates bourgeois democracy. "If only we let the greedy property developers have it their way."
So just describe it as "don't let the greedy landlords have their way" because the greed landlords want to limit housing supply.
> But the point that I'm trying to get across here with no small amount of irony (that I hope is fairly obvious)
I kind of figured, but actual communists will occasionally show up to say the same sort of thing and then it's just Poe's Law again.
> What provided safety, stability and a guaranteed standard of life was the semi-serfdom imposed by the state.
And there are a lot of people who would willingly be serfs if it meant stability.
The trouble is, it actually doesn't. Monopolies and unaccountable bureaucrats have short-term stability, where short-term is often something like a few decades. But being insulated from competitive pressure makes them long-term unfit, and then they eventually crumble. And the years leading up to the fall have a tendency to be increasingly unpleasant.
> The Soviet system did allow for movement. When a factory was opened and had to be staffed, permits were issued for the necessary people. In fact that was the only significant way for people from rural areas to be allowed the privilege to move to a city. Similarly, the problem with doctors was dealt with rather elegantly - every graduate of a medical school was assigned a specific town or village and was forced to live and practice there for decades.
This is one of the other reasons that system tends to fall apart.
Suppose you need something that doesn't come from within your jurisdiction. You haven't got any rare earths in the ground where you are etc. Well, you can just buy them from whoever has them, but then that country is never going to want to join your system because then you'd be taking their natural resources and sending back politburos instead of cash money.
Meanwhile the same thing happens to anyone there who is producing more than they consume. They want to leave. The Berlin Wall wasn't there to keep the Americans out.
That's not true and the City of Vienna proved that thesis wrong a century ago. [0].
Even today, two-thirds of Viennese residents live in public housing, the city is Europe's largest landlord and as a result, housing is extremely affordable for a world-class city. It's not without reason that Vienna tends to top worldwide quality of life rankings - it's the achievements of Red Vienna.
The city of Vienna has a fairly unique history. It used to be the capital of a massive empire that's now gone, and thus suffered a period of fairly prolonged decline.
It's population declined from 2.4 million in 1914[1] to 1.5 million in the 1980s[2]. The only reason why it's currently considered even close to a world-class city is that after the fall of the Berlin wall it was the natural financial hub for oligarchic capital.
I think we can all agree not many great and global cities have tons of free housing emptied by a prolonged period of decline. And that we can't really evaluate if the city is solving the economic problem well or badly, as right now it's simply less acute for historical reasons that have nothing to do with it's housing policy.
> I think we can all agree not many great and global cities have tons of free housing emptied by a prolonged period of decline
That is not the case in Vienna, either. The government built enough units to supply ten percent of the total market and used that leverage to drive down prices. Before that, a large portion lived in squalor.
> But from 1923 to 1934, in a period known as Red Vienna, the ruling Social Democratic Party built 64,000 new units in 400 housing blocks, increasing the city’s housing supply by about 10 percent. Some 200,000 people, one-tenth of the population, were rehoused in these buildings, with rents set at 3.5 percent of the average semiskilled worker’s income, enough to cover the cost of maintenance and operation
> Communism has no future so long as it's supporters refuse to understand that Marx's magnificent philosophical and political system rejects borgeous human rights.
I was about 10 when the USSR has collapsed and have lived in the use for over 30 years yet I still see in my parents and even myself the remnants of dehumanizing ridiculousness that existed there. Eg my dad is instinctively terrified of dealing with anyone from the government even like the mailman because that person can wield their position against you even though that's not the case here at all.
Or for example I had to point out to my dad that his neighbor open carries. Like my dad is intellectually aware of the 2nd amendment but it didn't fit in his brain that people could actually exercise a freedom so his eyes were literally blind to it (obviously I drove him to the gun shop that evening)
Exactly this. There are other places where all 100% employees were replaced in recent years. Big companies' branches. If not for specific skin color it would be called definitely racism. The formal name for it is 'diversity'. That was eyes opening on what all wokenes is about. Open black racism.
No, I was confused as to what you're saying. I don't understand the point of your anecdote. Is your concern that it was improbable for that many black people to work at a hospital in an area where mostly non-black people live?
When I was an undergraduate working in a molecular biology lab my two mentors, Andrei and Svetlana were Russian emigrants. Andrei taught me, in the 00s, that he couldn’t do the level of molecular biology in Russia because the downstream effects decades later put them far behind in the technical and cultural knowhow. Genetics was banned.
> More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents.
It had elements of capitalism, like private ownership and focus on trade via monetary means, but its economy was largely based on slavery and your position within the system was based almost entirely on where you were born and to whom. It's a pre-industrial system, capitalism isn't really the correct description for it.
I mean, obviously not? History is way more complicated than this, just because certain elements fit doesn't mean we look at it and go "yeah that's capitalism mate". Historians generally use capitalism as a description for economic systems from 19th century onwards - before then the correct answer is usually "it's complicated". I appreciate that can be frustrating if we just want to slap a simple recognizable label on things, but history doesn't always fit what we want it to be.
Julius Rosenburg is an obvious one. The Nazis executed gobs of scientists. And I'm certain I could find other examples if needed, but that is off the top of my head.
The National Socialists were socialists so that undermines not reinforces your point:
- they implemented communist policies like mass nationalization schemes with some of the resulting "companies" being amongst the largest organizations in the world
- they wanted to fully nationalize the entire economy after the war
- they passed large amounts of left wing legislation
- they, obviously, called themselves socialists constantly. Hitler said "I am a fanatical socialist".
- they openly hated capitalism. A big part of their hate for Jews was that they associated Judaism with international capital. Same reason Marx was an anti-semite.
During the 1940-s. And yet it undermined the molecular biology research in the USSR. It's very easy to destroy the institutions of scientific research.
I'm sure, nothing like this can happen in the US. It's not possible that people in power will just use theological and ideological reasons to just deny sound scientific results.
Ah, I guess I made up that it was The Constant... what I must have been thinking of is the episode on Lysenkoism by the legendary Melvyn Bragg on In Our Time.
Apologies for leading you astray at first. I couldn't find it FOR THE LIFE OF ME either.
If you guys aren't already fans of In Our Time, I'm delighted to be the one to turn you on to it. It's the Liberal Arts education you didn't get in school... And I say that as someone who GOT a Lib Arts education.
There are over a thousand episodes and it's all a brilliant quick study on an unbelievable variety of subjects.
> In their subconscious hopes that a societal formula is as simple and as universal as the famous E=mc², people are prepared to believe nonsense if it only sounds good.
The Bolsheviks were the first to get a country to legalize elective abortion in 1920. They did so as a temporary measure because so many women would have difficulty raising a child in the post-war environment.
It got to the point where hospitals were overwhelmed and they started setting up dedicated clinics.
They tried making it illegal again in the 30s but brought it back in 1955 because there was such demand.
So, presumably this 170 million number is written by someone who believes a fetus is a unique human life and the prevalence of elective abortion was so high as to be a not insignificant number of "lost lives".
By what actual scientific definition is a fetus, not a unique human life? They have their own unique DNA, brain, circulatory system, fingerprints, etc, etc.
In my understanding, any definition that discounts there individuality is primarily there to depersonalize them and thus justify their killing.
That's a philosophical discussion, not scientific fact. (The scientific facts of fetal development are of course important for the discussion) I'm sure we would entirely disagree when a fetus gets qualia or becomes a human being, but that doesn't necessarily mean one of us is ignoring science.
Unique DNA is irrelevant (a clone would be a person), lacking a viable circulatory system or fingerprints doesn't mean lack of personhood. Someone completely braindead a person or closer to a cadaver? Not everybody agrees on the same.
>In my understanding, any definition that discounts there individuality is primarily there to depersonalize them and thus justify their killing.
That's bad faith. Let me try one myself, all anti-choice people are just useful fools in the ultra-conservative campaign to maintain authoritarian control of the relationships and bodies of the people. In my country divorce was illegal until 2004, the same party that maligned it's legalization took condoms out of UN care packages after an earthquake. They would absolutely prohibit Plan B, limit condoms to married couples and make homosexuality illegal if they in had the power.
In the US, the poor will be kept barefoot and pregnant, while the Republican senator and the megapastor will get an abortion for their mistress.
Well, that's easy. Just think everyone else is evil and stupid :^)
Depersonalizing a fetus is necessary to maintain the legality of abortion.
There are already plenty of conflicts in western laws- killing a pregnant woman in some jurisdictions will get you two counts of murder. Stillbirths can qualify for bereavement leave. Despite things like this, legalizing abortion means what would have gotten one person a murder charge is perfectly fine for another person to do.
The fact that you cannot even see how ridiculuous this piece of propaganda is, says also about your ability to reason. The great demographic drop in the Soviet Union happened after the WWII (you remember that Soviet Union defeated the nazis, right?), but even that was not "170 million people" and was due to the war started by the nazis (whatever your propaganda claims about that).
Yes, cherrypicking the pact when the relevant part is the international context back then.. Soviet Union had to defend itself not only from nazi Germany.
To remind you of western capitalists helping the nazis? Of the British royal family ties to the nazis?
Yes, yes, the "defense" where you occupy parts of Poland, attack Finland. And of course, providing resources and training facilities to the dear ally in Berlin. There is a reason why soviets always talked about "BoB" and never about WWII - they've entered the latter as allies of Hitler, which does not fit to the soviet victim narrative.
The USA had their share of nazi-related business (IBM, e.g.), but no amount of whataboutism will save you from the simple fact that soviets entered the war as active allies of nazi germany.
You wrote above that Soviet Union was helping the nazis before 22 june 1945. I just told you that those who really helped to build the nazi war machine, were you (the american and other capitalists), and not the Soviet Union. Also the motives were quite clear, to "fight the judeo bolshevism".
I am not denying the existence of Molotov Ribbentrop pact, only the emphasis western propaganda puts on it (for obvious reasons) is misleading, and deliberately does not take into account parts of the historical context.
> I just told you that those who really helped to build the nazi war machine, were you (the american and other capitalists), and not the Soviet Union.
Oh, this is not a point of blaming and finger pointing, looking for excuses why the communists are not to blame(are they ever?). It is to illustrate the very simple fact that the soviet union was an imperialist, expansive and warmongering state and one of the direct initiators of WWII - contrary to the usual soviet-russian victim narrative. Not that we would not know it in the retrospective looking at the soviet occupation of half of europe.
Half of Europe is nothing compared to what the US owns (de facto) now or what the British empire had. And they are (were) imperialist, expansive, and war mongering. Actually Soviet Union, compared to them, is an amateur.
As to who started the war, the basic fact is that the nazis attacked Soviet Union on 22 june 1941, that it was an immense tragedy, and that saying that the victim was the aggressor is a very unjust and evil thing to say.
The fact that Germany was some days earlier to start the planned attack on the other, didn't change that the plans were mutually. This was known by western leaders, which is why the support for the UdSSR was controversial. For example it lead to Churchill concluding that "we slaughtered the wrong pig.".
You forget that the Soviet Union's sphere of influence was a lot more than just half of Europe.
For the families who left, there is gratitude every day that the Soviet Union lacked the power to control more than it did - certainly not for lack of will.
> Half of Europe is nothing compared to what the US owns (de facto) now or what the British empire had.
Another case of whataboutism. Crimes of the british empire or USA do not whitewash the murderous regime of the soviet union.
> As to who started the war, the basic fact is that the nazis attacked Soviet Union on 22 june 1941, that it was an immense tragedy
It is a tragedy which happened to the population of an imperialist warmonger terrorstate — there is again nothing exclusive here. In fact, what you imply is that an experienced unjustice magically deletes all the crimes, but no such thing exists and in case of the soviet union there are too many crimes against populations of too many countries and ethnicities to get away with it.
> The fact that you cannot even see how ridiculuous this piece of propaganda is, says also about your ability to reason.
TBH, i don't believe he/she does not have the ability to reason, i think that HN has become a main place for state propaganda. Almost a third of articles are either bashing of US adversaries or "exploded but success, terrahertz transistor, could, may be, etc". The next third are AI propaganda.
The 170MM figure is referring to all losses of life like the purges, man-made famines (Holodomor), inept ww ii strategies, as well as “unborn” children. This last one has no reference so it’s impossible to know what that means or how many people they attribute to that.
That said, the problem is a cultural one. The communists poured gas on the tendencies of the Tsars and modern Russia suffers from that legacy still. The legacy is a peasant (serf) : master way of thinking.
Culture is hard to cure and the change has to come from within. Japan had a similar problem but most of the sharp edges were dulled when they made a deal (surrender) with the Americans.
You also see this tendency to cling to bad cultural habits by some enclaves of immigrants. It can take decades of new generations to wipe some of those bad tendencies away. Some people see that as erasure of culture as a bad thing but it can also bring good.
I don't know who is downvoting this comment, but the comment is correct. Russia is a state, not a nation. The Kremlin, in all incarnations - the Tsars, Stalin, the Communist Party, Putin, even the Mongols that used to run it before Moscow, have always been perceived more like an alien force that has landed onto this land, and now one has to submit to it, without questions. This is a lesson that parents pass onto their children, implicitly or explicitly. It could become a nation-state in a relatively short order, though that's certainly going to be bloody. And nukes could be on the table as well - this is why the US was actually opposed to the USSR collapse, a fact that's not widely known today.
It’s a bold and unsubstantiated claim. In English language there’s a lot of confusion because the same word Russian is used both for citizenship and ethnicity, but in Russian they are different and such confusion doesn’t exist. If you run polls in Russia, ethnic minorities won’t say that they are Russians using the word for ethnicity, but they will certainly confirm that they are Russian citizens belonging to the same cultural space (and in that sense some may even use the word for ethnicity, e.g. “I’m Tatar, but I’m Russian too”). Nation is defined not by the government but by shared history and culture and may cross ethnic boundaries. Russia is big, but its people have developed the shared culture, the pride, the sense of belonging which qualify it for a nation. This comes on top of all geographical and ethnic identities, which make the picture more diverse and complex, but those identities are rarely stronger (even in regions like Chechnya).
You can play with the scope to tell the story you want. If you scope in WW2 losses as well, about 30M Soviets died. Some other number were injured or disabled. If you look at fertility rates at the time, you can project how many children would have been born, and I’m sure you could be at that number.
Additionally, the after effects of the war and Stalin persisted - the loss of men resulted in higher numbers of childless women.
I lack the information to assess whether 170M is a meaningful number, but on a relative basis, the United States and even China didn’t contend with the sheer destruction and oppression that Soviet people did, and had higher fertility rates. It’s not a “pro” or “anti” Soviet/Russian discussion - the nation’s people suffered in various ways, which had an end result.
I look forward to the day when the capitalist and communist eras of the 19th-21st century are analyzed coldly, in the way we look at mercantilism or medieval market towns today.
Because it really seems like both are increasingly inadequate systems for handling modernity, and the obsession with defining one as intrinsically evil and the other the obvious superior option (I’ll let you choose which is which) is such a flattening, unhelpful approach.
Personally, having moved from capitalist America to post-communist Poland, a few things seem true to me:
…the communist era in Poland was a disaster and the country today is unquestionably better off as a modified capitalist one;
…contemporary American culture really seems to be struggling under an unquestioned capitalist ethic;
…the conflict seems artificially egged on from think tanks, corporations, academics, and maybe even the simple alliteration of the letter c (i.e., you don’t hear nearly as much about Capitalism vs. Socialism, even though historically that’s a more accurate label of what governments actually were.)
…and that neither capitalism or communism has ever really been implemented in a pure sense.
Which is all a long way of saying that Mark Fisher’s quote seems more true every day, not as a pessimistic statement but just one describing a lack of imagination and the inability to transcend the debate:
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
> having moved from capitalist America to post-communist Poland
Poland is definitely a very nice place to live right now, and improvements since the fall of the communist government is undeniable.
However, please note that not all Polish growth is just due to capitalism knocking to the door – the country is the recipient of a huge amount of EU funds[0]. To illustrate it, France, the 2nd largest net contributor to the EU budget, gives barely more than Poland receives, even though the population is a bit half as big.
Is it a bad thing? Not necessarily. But it is definitely not an illustration of a post-communist country standing by its own self.
And if you were bothered with not becoming a military dictature in the 20's-30's, trying to create a network of alliances with your neighbors instead of cutting yourself off from everyone (which is a great feat considered that you and all your neighbors were threatened by the looming USSR), and selling Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany for a couple villages, maybe two of my great uncles wouldn't have died and my whole country wouldn't have been occupied for 4 years in a war where we tried to save you, all for nothing but Poles complaining left and right that “the West should attacked the Soviets in '45”.
BTW, congrats for electing a PiS guy again even though the current state of your country is depending so much on the EU – great, forward thinking, move.
I tend to be in the camp that believes capitalism will generally produce better results than socialism but it will not produce anything close to a utopia. However, I don't believe capitalism is a stable economic system within a democratic society. It will inevitably lead to some results that are repugnant to the electorate who will advocate for political action to prevent such outcomes from occurring in the future. This will lead to stronger government authority and increasing market manipulation which will (potentially) prevent those outcomes but simultaneously it can produce different negative outcomes[1]. In the end it seems as though despite good intentions we end up with a system that nobody understands, nobody is satisfied with, and nobody can fix. I suppose it's like software engineering in a way, we want perfection but instead we are constrained by trade-offs and we never reach a state that everyone is happy with.
[1] A classic example is rent control which tends to lead to shortages.
A simple model is that most countries internally are made up of many "competing communist orgs". Each large company is internally a communist dictatorship. Employees don't choose their bosses, and have no voting power whatsoever in the general case. Employees share the means of production, and the fruits of their labour is redistributed largely evenly, even if some employees are 10x or 100x as productive as others. It's only entire companies that compete in the capitalist free market sense.
This is... fine. Capitalism encourages innovation and efficiency, while Communism provides individual safety and reduces wealth inequality. Neither works in pure form, so just about every country combines the two.
Employees can choose their boss, that's called a work contract. And in my country workers do have voting powers on the company, but that is rejected by the US, because they dislike unions.
Communism has no wealth inequality, because it's forbidden to have any wealth at all. Maybe you actually think of social democracy?
IMO the problem is extremes. The best system is capitalism with some “socialist” government regulation, services, and welfare. How much and what specific policies are unknown.
The best system for growth. It's important to point out that Capitalism won because it grew faster. But nothing can grow forever--certainly not exponentially--so we're now finding out how poorly late stage Capitalism copes with slowing growth and population. Oh, and that little looming thing about environmental consequences.
> Capitalism copes with slowing growth and population. Oh, and that little looming thing about environmental consequences.
During communism Czech Republic lost forests over whole mountain range, because they were melted away by acid rains because it was cheaper to run brown coal power plants without any filtration.
Rivers were used as sewers for big factories. Water being brown-red under the paper mill? That's normal comrade. Having massive clumps of foam under weirs and rivers smelling like swamp and detergent? Don't complain comrade if you don't want to have problems.
Oil spills (i.e. from oil pipes) weren't cleaned, they were just covered with earth, some found decades after fall of communism.
Nobody cared about filtration in general. It was kind of normal to have a smoke cloud over an industrial city forever, unless winds were blowing strong enough to gift this poisonous present to countryside.
Is it snowing in the summer? Yeah it is not, that's just ash from factory over there. Try to catch "snowflakes" on your tongue if you would like to have cancer in few years.
Agriculture was insane as well. Forced collectivization of land and making fields as big as possible so mechanization is as effective as possible has caused erosion of soil and thus increase of usage of fertilizers which were flushed into already polluted rivers during rains.
I could go on and on. Communism has nothing to do with environmentalism.
Was talking to an archeologist recently when touring a site of a big late bronze age settlement near Brno. There was a burial ground next to the fortified settlement on the hill as well, largely undisturbed for thousands of years, under regular fields used for agriculture.
But deep plowing in the 50s and 60s, incorrect plowing gradients in the steep terrain resulted in 30-40 centimeters of fertile land lost to erosion in less than a century.
And not just that, the ancient graves were lost woth it, all the pottery and remains churned to nothing.
> Communism has nothing to do with environmentalism.
No one claimed it does. Basically all of what you wrote above is because of pursuit of economic growth regardless of the -ism. Environmental destruction is the inevitable result of growth of industrial society. Governments without transparency, with no environmental protections, with burgeoning eminent domain, and with corruption and backstabbing make it worse.
This was pretty much compounded in the communist era - it was the state doing the environmental destruction & it was doing it for the most holly purpose of PROGRESS and HEAVY INDUSTRY.
So if you wanted to point out we are all gonna get poisoned to death and worse, you would not only be saying the state is wrong (impossible!) but that attacking its most its most important endeavors (reactionary provocateur, shoot on sight!!).
Like, in the capitalist countries you could at least say all the mercury in the fish is causing spike in birth defects without ending up in gulag.
Again, you mean the countries that didn't have authoritarian, unaccountable governments, where citizens have not only a history of free expression, but they constitutionally guaranteed rights. Whereas in the communist regimes they universally have been repressive, corrupt, brutal, stupid, and usually self-defeating.
> it was doing it for the most holly purpose of PROGRESS and HEAVY INDUSTRY.
Oh yeah, it was fucked. But the globalist capitalist society of today that can't survive without overconsumption and perpetual exponential growth isn't a whole lot better. It promises everyone that their greed is good and that billionaires are saints. For the time being we're awash in widgets and titillating entertainment, but dwindling resources and shocks to the biosphere will have their consequences. At least the communist regimes have had the good grace to fall apart once in a while.
Correlation does not mean causation. In that historical period environmental consequences of industrialization were not well known and greener solutions did not exist. Communist governments chose the easiest and fastest path back then. We do not know what would be their choice or how it would complicate establishing communist regimes today.
The most egregious ones were absolutely known, but fixing them would not fulfil 5 years plans, so it was not done. We absolutely knew what is a scrubber and that burning brown coal will release sulfur which will fall down as sulfurous acid. But comrade, can the power plant work without a scrubber and filtration system? Yes it can. So build it without it.
Chernobyl had exactly same problem - no containment around reactor. Why would you build it when power plant can work without it?
The main problem of communism vs environmentalism is that to get environmentalism working you need to question and complain to authorities and demand solutions for obvious problems which authorities are causing - there were no private enterprises, everything was owned by the state. But if secret police will just threaten the complainer with punishment, then you have solved the problem. No complain = no problem. Welcome to everyday realities of communism comrade.
I will point out that in capitalist systems, the money saved by the efficiencies can be put towards more environmentally positive products and technologies. Electric cars for example were very expensive, and it was the wealthy that were able to demand them, drive the market, push prices down so more middle class families can afford them. This is happening again with compostable plastics, B-corps that are more circular, efficient/recyclable packaging solutions, and other parts of our industry.
> Because it really seems like both are increasingly inadequate systems for handling modernity, and the obsession with defining one as intrinsically evil and the other the obvious superior option (I’ll let you choose which is which) is such a flattening, unhelpful approach
As the post-soviet Russian joke went:
everything the communists said about communism was false, everything they said about capitalism was true.
This is exactly the kind of low effort, no imagination response that I was referring to. No discussion of alternatives, no acknowledgement that maybe there are some issues with the current capitalist system, etc.
Just apocalyptic language, with no openness to the idea that yeah, communism was a terrible system, but maybe that doesn’t automatically imply that contemporary capitalism is inherently the best system.
Improving capitalism is possible in the abstract. The reason it's hard to imagine is that "capitalism" is not a real thing that exists concretely. It is a term used by communists to refer to the natural state of affairs that they wished to destroy.
To see this, get two people together and try to get them to agree on when capitalism started, or even what a country needs to be considered a capitalist country. Is it merely markets? If so then the Roman Empire was capitalist. Is it stock markets? Limited liability companies? Private property rights? All of the above? Who invented capitalism? If nobody did then is does it make sense to propose a replacement or is that like trying to propose a replacement for evolved things like natural wildlife ecosystems?
Once you realize that capitalism is just the naturally evolved system of mechanisms used to coordinate any advanced economy, the problem of discussing alternatives becomes clear. It doesn't make sense to try and propose a full alternative because capitalism is only really definable as "the thing that's not communism", so it's unclear what exactly you'd be proposing an alternative to.
As a naturally evolved system, the alternative to capitalism is therefore capitalism+some minor tweak. Not a radical overhaul.
> To see this, get two people together and try to get them to agree on when capitalism started, or even what a country needs to be considered a capitalist country.
this isn't actually an argument but an appeal; just because laypersons don't know how to frame something doesn't mean useful definitions don't exist
> As a naturally evolved system, the alternative to capitalism is therefore capitalism+some minor tweak.
thats not a strong argument; people could have said the same thing about feudal arrangements and slavery or kings and emperors at one time in the past
Although I would argue with you that the communist governments were socialist -- they were not, at least under our current understanding of socialism (says one person contradicting another on the internet, this is opinion, I know :)) -- you're right about the intellectual blindness about other possibilities.
I find Chesteron's distributism an interesting one, and personally really admire cooperative societies.
Do you have anything constructive to offer or are you going to stick with low effort criticism without even proposing an alternative? So far all you have are weak complaints, totally disconnected from objective reality.
Star Trek ignores real estate. Who gets the penthouse and who gets the first floor apartment next to the noisy space port. who gets the house with the beach view and who just get views of the wall of the neighboring building.
Who does all the really shit and boring jobs. Say mining or construction. And can they just take vacation in middle of project and let it hang for a few years? It is really distorted universe where either you have automation or do not... And timeline as whole really does not work...
I guess for projects people consider themselves important this could be done via personal honor system or even just interpersonal relation - I promised my friend the launch loop will be done by equinox & he would sad if I don't hold my word.
I guess if you press the post scarcity peddal hard enough youncould solve even that - space habitats potentially give so muc living space to make these issues moot.
So all its gonna take to end capitalism is matter replicators, FTL travel, interstellar colonization, and unifying under a one world government after a decade of horrifying eugenics wars fought between genetically enhanced supermen- And after all that Picard gets to live on a nice vineyard in France while thousands of voyager doctor clones toil away in the dilithium mines
Dang, you're so right, a post-scarcity society is obviously not feasible without renacting a fictional story.
Y'all took the example, and dove right onto the wackiest parts of that example, huh? We also haven't met a continuum of godlike sycophants, so I guess space travel isn't possible for us at all yet lmao
It's hilarious how anyone would consider a series of cheesy scifi stories by a collection of hack writers as a basis for discussion of economic systems. Regardless of technology, a post-scarcity is obviously not feasible. Sure we can make staple foods and mass manufactured products incrementally cheaper through automation. But the things that people really want as signaling mechanisms for social status will always be scarce. For example, prime real estate in geographically favorable areas.
If you're going to present Star Trek as a plausible example of what a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society looks like, it's fair to point out all of the BS behind Star Trek's portrayal. In the real world, we can't have free energy. In the real world, we can't have warp drives or replicators that can instantly and perfectly assemble anything from nothing.
And I think it's fair to point out that every vision of utopia necessarily comes at a high cost in blood and violence because you have to do something about the people who don't agree with the vision. Star Trek handwaves this away by saying humanity just "evolved" beyond their base desires and flaws and fully voluntarist socialism just works.
But without the Treknobabble and magitech, what's does the end of capitalism actually look like in a world where there are no easy solutions, and no benevolent space-elves descending from the heavens to save us from ourselves?
Nothing in Star Trek even makes any sense. It's a completely artificial universe, constructed as a background for telling fun stories. From the perspective of alternative economic systems it's no different than children's fairy tales.
I am an optimist and capitalism looks like success. It's the exact opposite of defeatism.
Yeah, even how they apply technology makes no sense - they have gravity control and yet they still care about planets ? Where are large scale habitats or for the record actually any mega scale engineering projects ?
You should take a look at how capitalism works, I’d start with like USA, see how many kids go to bed hungry, have no health insurance, etc. then I’d go to like inner City Philly or Chicago, then South to like Jackson Mississippi, check out how great all that shit is :)
Switzerland has mandatory universal health insurance where everyone must purchase basic coverage. The government provides premium reduction subsidies for lower-income individuals and families to ensure affordability.
The unemployment insurance system provides benefits for up to 400 days (about 18 months) for those who lose their jobs, with the amount based on previous earnings. There are also programs for job retraining and placement assistance.
Switzerland’s public pension system that provides retirement benefits starting at age 64 for women and 65 for men. It also includes survivor benefits for spouses and children.
Comprehensive coverage for people with disabilities, including rehabilitation services, vocational training, and financial support for those unable to work.
Monthly child allowances are provided to families for each child until age 16 (or 25 if in education or training). Additional birth and adoption allowances are also available.
Social Assistance via means-tested program that provides financial support for basic living needs when other social insurance benefits are insufficient. This serves as the ultimate safety net.
Mandatory coverage for all employees that covers medical costs and income replacement for work-related and non-work-related accidents.
Paid maternity leave for 14 weeks at 80% of salary, along with job protection during this period.
Switzerland’s system is notable for combining mandatory insurance schemes with income-based contributions and government subsidies to ensure broad coverage while maintaining work incentives.
So maybe not mention Switzerland… Any of the examples would be called “far-left” (or worse) in the US of A
And all it took to esablish all this was just ending up with all the treasure plundered from Holocaust ending ub being stored in the Swiss bank vaults...
That's soviet communism. Yugoslav communism looked like people with high standards of living and the strongest passports in the world, free to travel wherever they wanted and celebrating their history.
>> Yugoslav communism looked like people with high standards of living
You're just making things up as you go, aren't you?
More then a million Yugoslavs left the country as "Gastarbeiters" to be able to feed themselves and their families. Inflation was high and people had to convert their salaries into German marks the same day they got pay checks, otherwise the money was worthless the next day. Basic goods were unattainable. People had to smuggle coffee, bananas and jeans across the border. Of course if you were a part of the red nobility, your life was easier as you got access to special stores and got to enjoy the fruits of the labor of your fellow equals.
One thing that only the "survivors" realize is just how materialistic the Soviet Bloc societies were.
And I don't mean philosophically materialistic, like "there is no soul". That too, but I mainly mean that in the shortage of everything (and there usually was a shortage of everything) people would become fixated on owning relatively banal objects.
Girls would prostitute themselves for a nice pair of Western jeans, people would snitch and steal, break the law, run illegal smuggling rings while bribing the police, take bribes themselves etc., over things such as stockings, tires or calculators.
I was not able to persuade one young American that not paying a fat bribe to a doctor could have fatal consequences back then. "But in socialism, there must be a common free healthcare for everybody!" - Yeah, lad, on paper. Paper tolerates everything. The one thing that was never in shortage were slogans, propaganda, red flags and red stars.
The book tells a story of how bananas were nearly unobtainable and thus became an almost totemic status symbol.
An Estonian actress pilfers a banana from a high-level Party function, risking grave consequences, just so her daughter could taste one at least once in her life. Alas, the daughter is too young to appreciate this and declares that it tastes like "poopoo".
True. I visited a doctor friend in a fairly good institution (IKEM) and he showed me a comode. When he opened it, it was full of alcohol. Hard liquor and wine.
He said: "This is what the patients brought us last week. How are we supposed not to become alcoholics?"
He was seriously worried, btw. No light joking. In every work collective, healthcare included, there are some people prone to alcoholism and this is just a dangerous temptation to them.
I’m the farthest thing imaginable from a Bolshevik sympathizer but I often wonder whether big-C Communism could have survived and how it would have fared if the United States hadn’t engaged in sustained economic warfare against it. I imagine it might look something a bit like Chinese Communism does today, although perhaps those days came and went in the later eras of the Party system.
People who got too serious about communism tended to get eliminated by Stalin, and then the people in charge of the elimination (Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria) were in turn eliminated in later purges.
Chinese communism survives because the US spends an insane amount of money on their goods each year. It would have collapsed by now if not for the US demand for stuff.
Communism depended on the west and was sustained by it. Obviously they exported raw materials to purchase the many things they failed to produce themselves including food. But also particularly, the Soviets had no way to set prices in their centrally planned economy that actually worked, so they kept the show on the road by copying prices from western free market economies.
This is one reason the USSR was always lagging behind western economies despite being scientifically advanced. They had to wait for the west to develop products and do price discovery, because GOSPLAN didn't have any way to price things properly themselves.
The premise of its “success” was based on half the population working for free in the camps for the other half. Many major projects were executed with little thought for the slaves/workers that perished, all for the goals of socialism. Then oligarchy followed, without the way to increase worker productivity. The only well funded programmes were in the defence sector which bankrupted the country eventually
Important to understand that these are "absurdities" only when viewed from the angle of market economy and democratic society. For people living in Soviet Union this was just a "state of the world".
Communist values (or lack of values) shaped the political and social systems in which people were born and raised.
Yes. What I was trying to say that people who live within those rules (and keep propagating/making them!) can't just live in the constant congitive dissonance state. They rationalize this state of the world, they tell stories (to themselves and to each other) to make sense of these rules, so it doesn't feel insane.
They absolutely can live in the constant congitive dissonance state. I did 30 years of my life. Many of us did. I know it's hard to believe for people living all their life in the free world, but constant congitive dissonance was just part of the reality for us.
> While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II, making the return of this form of totalitarianism impossible
Even written in 2021 rather than today, it's difficult to take the OP seriously after this. Both Hitler's nazism and Stalin's communism are manifestations of the deeper authoritarian sympathies that infect the human psyche and to which the modern world is quickly succumbing.
It is not that but systematic destruction of any institution standing in the way. Once that is done it is easier to wield power and suppress people to do stuff. Just look at Russia today, where dissent is extremely risky to you and people around you, where shitnews television is pumping people with weird narratives, etc. Similarly T.Snyder argues that a precursor to the atrocities (not the war per se) in WWII were the destruction of the institutions.
Communism was quite different from nazism, whatever they tell and told you in the west. You just did not live there, and some people rewrote the history for you. Equating communism and nazism is one of the most abominable aspects of western propaganda
They are both the same. One wants one true race society and the the other one true class society. The only way tho achieve one or the other state is by eliminating those who don't conform (Holocaust and Holodomor). It's despicable some pretend one is better then the other.
In the view of the whole world you (probably) belong to the very rich. Does that statement apply to you? Are you willing to donate all your goods to Africa?
I'm not saying USSR was a panacea or that Stalin did nothing wrong (Tankies are the fucking worst. I hung out on /r/communism for a while, and, as the kids used to say "gross").
I take writing like the OP with a HUGE grain of salt.
There are plenty of crimes and problems with what happened in the Soviet Union. Some of these were intentional by the leadership both before, during, and after Stalin. Some of these were self-owns (War Communism much?) some of these were forced errors (when doing battle one makes tough choices, and this includes in ideological/economic/actual war). Some of these were straight up evil policies (gulags, great purges, Katyn, etc...)
If someone can do real analysis I'm down, but once you start quoting Black Book of Communism, I know you're coming with an agenda and it's hard for me to take you in good faith. Especially if you're counting "The Unborn" - go on, just call the US a "Nazi Nation with the unborn holocaust" (I grew up in that shit, so saw the propaganda first hand).
Are you contending existence of mass murders under almost any communist regime? What agenda are you talking about? You are making it sound communism is a noble idea, which someone is trying to discredit undeservingly.
>>2. "Unborn"
It was about an estimation of how much more people would Soviet Union have in time if it hadn't murdered so many of its citizens. Imagine children of children of missing 20 million people.
> While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II [...] this has not happened with communism.
This resonates quite deeply. In my country nazis go straight to jail but communists walk our soil completely unpunished. They have half a dozen political parties, are well coordinated, are popular and are constantly elected by the population when they promise them heaven on earth. This is especially ironic since nazism is short for national socialism.
Communism is alive and well in Latin America. Brazilian president Lula declared to CNN his intention to install communism in my country not even a week ago. It has been his intention for over 40 years. He and his party has been in power for over 20 years. Yet people act as though it was fake news.
It absolutely can. Nazis, like socialists, centralized control of the economy in the state. It's just that they did it in order to further the goals of the so called Aryan nation as a whole. That's why it's called national socialism.
"Naziism had economic principles therefore it is a peer of any general economic system." Nah. Capitalism and communism don't have all those racist tenets. Nor the expansionism.
Principles have nothing to do with it. The key feature is totalitarian government control over the economy and the means of production. Nazi Germany certainly had it.
Accelerated transition to it likely does. Gradual transition probably doesn’t. In social market economies redistribution is relatively strong but it can become even stronger, to the point where it’s indistinguishable from socialism. If done carefully while rewarding entrepreneurial initiative and penalizing rent seeking, it may be even not that bad.
My country's current president had the exact same idea: install socialism in Brazil slowly to get people used to it so they don't launch a counter-revolution.
We are currently a dictatorship of the judiciary and very much en route to become a Venezuela tier country.
People work nearly half a year just to pay taxes and I'm not even accounting for inflation.
The future already seems hopeless and bleak and he hasn't even fully won yet.
> If done carefully while rewarding entrepreneurial initiative and penalizing rent seeking
"Careful" is the understatement of the century. Many a socialist has tried, only to discover they are on the wrong end of the Laffer curve.
Nobody really enjoys being utterly crushed by taxes in order to pay for the welfare of people they couldn't care less about.
Taxes are tolerated because people believe they will indirectly benefit from it. Taxpayers expect taxes to be converted into useful infrastructure and services for everyone, themselves included.
Socialism in practice is actually just wealth redistribution: taking from productive people to give to the poor and unproductive. Quite literally. Very often they find a way to exclude you based on your means. If you're rich or even middle class, it's not for you.
Your reasoning is a fallacy of generalization of a bad example. Move to Europe and see how it might work. I pay a lot of taxes, but I do see value in paying them.
> Socialism in practice is actually just wealth redistribution: taking from productive people to give to the poor and unproductive.
This is wrong. Poor people can be productive. If salary inequality is high, the workers earn bare minimum doing most of the job while managers get their bonuses. Landlords may capture significant share of their income despite being absolutely unproductive. In such cases socialist policies may simply minimize inverse redistribution (exploitation).
The welfare states of Europe are unlikely to keep working much longer if too many people start moving there in order to benefit from them.
> Poor people can be productive.
I didn't mean to imply they couldn't be. They are distinct groups.
I meant to say that socialism frequently targets the poor with charity, and straight up demands that the unproductive be taken care of. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Socialism demands that you work for others at no benefit to yourself.
Nothing wrong with such charity, provided that people freely choose to engage in it. Socialism seeks to force the costs of it upon everyone whether they want it or not, turning it into a burden. It's easy to be the good guy when others are paying for it.
> Landlords may capture significant share of their income despite being absolutely unproductive.
Are landlords not responsible for the maintenance of the property?
> In such cases socialist policies may simply minimize inverse redistribution (exploitation).
Minimization of exploitation is just normal regulation, not socialism. I agree that this is necessary. Billionaires are a sign people are exploiting a lack of regulation in some area. Surveillance capitalism is my favorite example.
Of course, how else can you achieve classless society. Do you expect people to freely give everything they have to the state, so it can redistribute their wealth around? Don't you know the concept of a class enemy and why so much of mass murdering was going on in communist countries?
Not true, Catholic priests still have private property. But sure there are other religions that have this. It's voluntary and the percentage of people doing this is tiny.
Yes, it has happen that some people have given away all their property and secluded themselves. I'm afraid to ask what is the point of your question. You surely don't think everyone will give up their wealth to the avant-garde and submit to them voluntarily. You do know how many millions had to die because of such ideas?
Nazis had racial laws. As you did, by the way, just not towards jews, remember? Something which the communists have not done. And I think it ruins your theory, as well as the communusm equals nazism equation, so beloved by your propaganda
The original statement was "they cannot be compared". I said they could be compared. In order to demonstrate that, I drew parallels between both ideologies.
That's because the communists found a workaround; they were the first to invent the idea that they could just officially target discrimination against "Zionists" and "cosmopolitans" and just lob that accusation against any Jew, effectively legalizing state antisemitism under a different name.
Easy to claim, only that the claim is false. It was not so much about jews being jews (would you claim that there were no jews in science, engineering, hospitals?).
Having quotas in top universities is what you try to do now with asian students (by this I do not mean to negate the fact that lives of many jews were ruined because of these quotas).
And the true nature of "Zionism" can be seen by everyone today. The "zionists" do not even try to hide it. I mean Zionism in the "Zeev" Zhabotinskiy sense. Go read his "Wall of Iron".
Funny you mention Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky's beliefs were formed from the proof playing out in front of him, that not even the Ukrainians, the second largest ethnicity in the Russian empire, could get even a semblance of fairness out of the Russian empire. If the Ukrainians failed, what chance did the even fewer Jews have? Trying to understand Jabotinsky without understanding the world he was born into is like trying to put modern beliefs onto Alexander the Great.
If you were a Jewish person of ordinary means, certain engineering paths were completely barred to you in the USSR. Keep in mind, engineering and math were the most prestigious forms of STEM for the Soviets.
So are you trying to claim the Doctor's Plot case, the assasination of Solomon Mikhoels, the rootless cosmopolitan campaign, Soviet "Zionology", that all those just didn't happen? People were around for those you know.
To the person who replied, saying "some engineering paths were barred". I have not negated the facts, just tried to put them in true perspective, which I think is lacking in your response.
You said that my claim is false. I'm not sure what true perspective you are referring to that could show that. The situation was far more severe than just "quotas at top universities". That the Stalin years ended in a campaign of barely disguised antisemitism is also just fact.
Again, cannot reply directly. What I said was false, is saying, or suggesting, that what happened to the jews in Soviet Union was like what happened to the jews in nazi Germany. It was not.
By this I am not negating not Stalin repressions, not the "Doctors affair", not the fact that many gifted people could not realize their potential in a way they could have had otherwise.
If you open the comment separately as its own page, it should allow you to reply there.
Not trying to claim that they're the same at all, especially not in a physical sense. Maybe in a spiritual or cultural sense the consequences could be compared, and maybe Stalin was planning something more (we'll never know). The goals were completely different. As I mentioned somewhere else, the full scope of the Nazis goals were so much worse than most people know.
The only claim here is that Soviets did not have racial laws at all - they essentially did.
Ok, they "essentially had racial laws", with Gelfand and Landau being godlike in the Soviet science, Kantorovich having his prizes, not speaking of the jews with the title of "Hero of Soviet Union". Not speaking of people who founded the Israeli science (together with jews from other European countrues). Where did they go to university? In some parallel world?
This is not to negate the facts, but to put things in perspective.
I don't know why the topic of Soviet universities specifically is so touchy, out of everything else. Notice a detail I mentioned earlier - "Jewish person of ordinary means". As with most things in the Soviet Union, bribes, or even just who you know, can make problems go away. But not every family had the sort of means or connections.
Before you compare to American tuition - I'm not talking about the top universities. I'm talking about effectively being completely barred from an entire career path, despite having the talent for it.
For about a year - and only because of a perceived alignment on socialism. That went away as soon as Israel was perceived to be allying more with Britain. So, whatever you think "Israel does", it wouldn't have even had a chance to happen yet.
Except when they effectively enslaved people on the basis of their ethnicity (the reality of being Soviet German, Crimean Tatar or Chechen in 1940-early 1950s). My German grandfather was taken into Labor Army (forced labor institution) as soon as he turned 16 (in 1952). He obviously wasn’t a Nazi collaborator. He was fully rehabilitated only in 1990.
Soviet communist policies towards ethnic minorities often did involve oppression and almost genocidal treatment. That fact of course should not be used to paint an all-black picture. Late USSR wasn’t bad at all for our family, creating a lot of opportunities.
Entertaining, but not to be taken too seriously. The author himself says that it’s very subjective and not thoroughly fact-checked. Even then, the digs at the Kievan Rus’ are… well, absurd. Also, I don’t know of any European country without its share of demented and paranoid rulers. But England is not Henry VIII and Germany is not Hitler.
Also, this
> But let us start with the Communist Manifesto which is the holiest tome of communist ideology and can be called the red gospel.
is a pearl of unintended absurd humour. In this case, when someone applies their beliefs and frame of mind to a foreign object without actually understanding it.
In the end I agree with the author that all life if absurd, it’s just a matter of point of view.
I feel like some people are trying for the sequel right now.
Moral relativism is like digging a latrine. Almost nobody wants to do it for somebody else, it's a chore to do it for one's self, but pretty much everyone appreciates when it's already done for them.
Anyway, I feel like 'liberalism' is under broad attack by both conservatives and progressives, largely because it is very unsatisfying right now.
Speaking for myself, liberalism is a way to understand the world. Liberalism in this sense does not especially imply progressivism or conservatism, and can be practiced by anyone. To re-phrase the Robustness Principle: "be opinionated in what you do, be open minded in what you accept from others".
I feel like the stronger you push your opinions into your understanding of the world, the harder it gets to actually understand what is going on in the world. As Colbert said: "reality has a well-known liberal bias". This statement makes more sense if run in reverse: "An open-minded understanding of the world is more likely to be durably and broadly true than a strongly opinionated understanding".
Unfortunately, it has become VERY difficult to talk about what is going on in the world right now, largely because a lot of disparate groups are pushing their opinions into their understanding very very hard. There are many people who currently disagree with their own in-group, but are restricted in what they can say because of social loyalty constraints. If you can't be the first person to speak up, consider being the second.
The absolute strongest superpower that humans have is the the ability to tell another story. Don't get stuck in the first satisfying story you hear.
----
If you are satisfied with blame, try examining the situation closer. If you are satisfied that a whole political party is evil, try examining the situation closer.
Here are some questions:
What is the person or organization doing
socially
economically
emotionally
political as in policy objectives
political as in electoral strategy
political as in internal power structure - is the internal power structure sound or fragmented?
When a person or organization says something, is it
complete
accurate
satisfying (to anyone? to someone? to me?)
Sometimes, it is a trap to fight the obvious fight. Perhaps the other side is fine with losing the obvious fight for some reason.
People don't believe crazy things because of correct facts, they believe them because of satisfying stories.
---
May I humbly ask 2 things of you:
1. Please don't assume I'm saying or implying something beyond what I've said here. You may feel free to go beyond what I've said, just don't put it on me.
2. Please don't join a death cult. You can look up the characteristics of a high control group; a death cult is all that plus their definition of morality narrows over time, excluding more and more people. Death cults ramp up anger over time. It's very easy to fall into one right now, and they are not exclusive to either side of the political spectrum. It's better to endure a little moral dissatisfaction than to join a high control group.
Thank you. When the head of the labor stats department is fired for reporting labor stats (she has a PhD), when the head of the public health agency is a vaccine skeptic lawyer .. I know where we in the US are headed.
We have the closest things to counterfactuals when it comes to history we're likely to get comparing these two systems... Communism has killed more people. I don't know why your first instinct is to "wonder" when we have actual comparisons.
Capitalism can be inhumane, especially if it is not controlled by democracy.
Communism is always inhumane. It cannot be established democratically, it cannot be run democratically. It will always end in misery, poverty and death.
By definition, capitalism is inhumane. Even if you are worried about the market looking unkindly on your accural of capital, you're doing so in a fashion that prioritizes their perception rather than actual virtue.
You are right that democracy can reign capitalism's amoralism in, but so can any other form of government. I don't see why the same can't be said for communism, beyond the standard "it hasn't happened before".
You mean: It has never happened once, no matter how often tried. How many communist experiments, how many ruined lives will it take until you and your kind finally get it? But I know the answer already ...
Not entirely true. Jews willing to leave had to pay an exit tax so high that it basically meant leaving all your wealth behind. Later, they weren't permitted to emigrate at all.
I'm virulently opposed to communism and the Soviet Union, as well as Nazism, and it is tempting to say that the Soviet Union was worse than Nazi Germany.
In some ways that's true if you look at the number of their own citizens that were killed by Stalin vs Hitler. On the other hand, Stalin had a longer period of time for his mass murder than Hitler did. But Hitler caused the almost complete destruction of Germany with the war he started.
In terms of living conditions, you are probably correct; although again, Hitler's starting point in terms of economy, civilization, and living conditions was much better than Stalin's, and we didn't see Nazism play out over decades.
Nazi Germany's soldiers on the advance engaged in systematic killing and regarded most of the population of the conquered territories as vermin; Soviet soldiers merely raped most of the women and did not engage in systematic killing campaigns, with some exceptions (e.g. Katyn massacre)
I'd say it's difficult to say which is more deplorable: Hitler killing millions just because of their ancestry, or Stalin killing millions in the Gulag because of paranoia and because it was a convenient source of labor.
If we're just looking at the success of the economic systems, leaving aside the mass murder and the devastating war, then what you're saying is correct.
IMO, when thinking about this question it's useful to look at the full scope of their objectives. We don't know much about what else Stalin planned, but given the time he had it probably would not fundamentally change the order of magnitude. On the other hand, we do know some of what the Nazis planned to do if they had won, and it was on a scale far beyond even the millions they did murder.
Millions did not die in gulags. Gulags were not death camps and while deaths did happen, it was not the goal and if you go and check the numbers, USRR's numbers are very very different than nazi death camps.
Stalin's repressions toll, whether in Gulag camps, forced labor or mass executions, was in the millions; though not tens of millions, as americans and their mercenaries from ex Soviet republics like to tell. The conditions in Gulag camps in Stalin's time, and also quite a bit after, were horrible.
In Germany it's punishable libel to say anything bad about any identifiable person, whether it's true or not. Even saying "Adolf Hitler was pure evil" is technically again the law.
So you're saying people in death camps could have just walked away but didn't because being in a death camp in germany was better than the alternative?
I find that really hard to believe. Do you have a source?
I don’t think this was the fault of that socioeconomic system known as “communism”. Yet the article tries to push that assumption a few times.
> Hitler as the biggest criminal and murderer of the 20th century. It is hard to believe that, actually, Stalin murdered significantly more. Not only are the crimes of communism not condemned, but they are by and large not known.
Right, so it was this particular implementation of communism, epitomized by Stalin’s policies.
That wasn't the only issue with communism. It was so inefficient it failed to make enough food. Soviet style central planning was popular in India as well, which was a democracy. Resulting shortages and low economic growth led to what was avoidable deaths and malnutriton. Once you take price out of the picture, society stops being self-organizing and has to be told what to do. That socioeconomic system failed horribly and yet people keep trying to spin fantasies about it.
But if we want to be precise, he is right - in theory, it wasn't the fault of that socioeconomic system itself, and logically you can't exclude the possibility that in the future there might be a communist system without causing millions of deaths, unfortunately in practice all such systems, including the one in Russia and China, had enormous toll.
The reason for it, in my opinion, stems from the origin: in an ideal world, the whole population would agree the system is fantastic and introduce it, based on mutual respect. What actually happens is that crowds get furious and start killing and introduce a new system by violence, so it's hard to expect a nice fruit from a rotten seed.
I think you've got it the wrong way around. All ideology is wrong, incorrect and fails in contact with reality. The true purpose of ideology (or 'the system') is to provide its adherents with the excuse they need to act badly. It could be relatively mild attempts to increase social status through hypocrisy and virtue-signalling. Or it could be to commit murder, torture and so on.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it:
Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.
What obscures matters is that evil tends to operate in layers with each layer deceived by the layer above it in the hierarchy (or below it, if you prefer a lowerarchy). So at the bottom there is a multitude of relatively decent people who don't want to kill and really do believe in the system.
The theory is a perfectly spherical cow - impossible in practice, laughable in imagination. We have a firm understanding from historical data of how it fails, even if it doesn't match the imagination of its proponents.
You almost had it right there at the end. Communism isn't compatible with how humans normally act. You can't introduce a system which is incompatible with humans and expect it to work.
Anyway next time you experiment with utopias, try not to bring along hundreds of millions of unwilling participants.
I think Communism is a 19th century pseudoscience idea like phrenology. There’s no evidence these things are real but phrenology was easy to discount while many people still choose to believe in Communism despite lack of evidence of it working long term.
> Communism isn't compatible with how humans normally act.
A correction: most humans. There are a few who like communism. Why not them live their lives as they want? Communities like the Longo Maï are a living proof this is absolutely possible on a tiny scale when a willing subset is involved.
> A correction: most humans. There are a few who like communism. Why not them live their lives as they want?
Because those people then starting to kill all the problematic people, as we saw in Soviet and China. They put all the blame on these "bad people" and sent them to the gulag.
You can't ever let people with this kind of thinking into power.
> Communities like the Longo Maï are a living proof this is absolutely possible on a tiny scale when a willing subset is involved.
At that tiny scale they depend on the surrounding capitalist people and therefore it makes sense they also abide by the laws of the country.
Communism is very widely defined as a classless, moneyless, stateless society. So no, it has not existed in any modern society. Criticise the Soviet Union all you like – any good Marxist should do the same – but this is a very weak put-down.
> On the other hand, life was secure. There were no bank loans, therefore there were no bank fees or percents. There was no real worry over one’s job or workplace; one was available for everyone. Wages were low, but fear of losing one’s job was almost nonexistent. A person pretended to work; the state pretended to pay him. Living accommodations were crowded and faint hope existed to find a better apartment, but all had a roof over their heads.There had to be, since homelessness was forbidden by law.
> Nowadays, there exist people who yearn for that mollusk-like life.
This isn't an inaccurate description, and yes, it's not exactly a utopian state to find yourself in.
But I'm not going to chuckle at the hypothetical people we're supposed to pity for wanting this; I bet there are quite a few people in the United States alone who would love to have this life, who would love to have a guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof over their heads, and the heads of their children.
> I bet there are quite a few people in the United States alone who would love to have this life, who would love to have a guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof over their heads, and the heads of their children.
I'd almost venture to say the majority of people, and definitely those who suffer from a disability of some sort; especially mental health, where one may not mentally function well enough from one day to the next to be able to reliably hold a job.
The description is not too dissimilar from a badly photoshopped motel ad. Yes, it nominally resembles reality but just barely and doesn’t tell you about all the nasty things that come with the tiny pool.
Yes, everyone had a job. It was illegal not to have one. Jobs were basically assigned by the state. Most “normal” people could choose among a few OK-ish options. But if you got a hair out of line or crossed wrong people you could get assigned shoveling coal in a small boiler room or building railroads in Siberia. And if you didn’t want that job you became a criminal and went to some mine or quarry working double shifts for gruel in Gulag.
Yes, everyone had a roof over their head. But that doesn’t mean space, comfort, or even privacy. It wasn’t uncommon to have no more than a bed and a small cabinet or chest. Most of the living spaces and urban areas were extremely depressing. It’s all grey boxes and muddy trails. The best you could hope for in most places is some trees and bushes adding a bit of green in the summer.
There was very little people could do to change any of that. You couldn’t move elsewhere just because you wanted. People in cities with better professions could move if they managed to know the right people and could get a job elsewhere. People in villages were basically pinned to their colhozes. Their only option to see other places were a holiday trip if the managed to save up a little or to go into military and be stationed wherever.
This lack of agency resulted in mass depression and alcoholism.
Where do you think the grim and drunk russian stereotype comes from? It’s just the soviet reality.
It's also almost on the level of self-parody:
"In Soviet Russia we have eliminated all capitalist social ills. Unemployment is demoralizing and unproductive, so it is now illegal. Homelessness is unsafe and ruinous to the health of the mind, so it is against the law. Cancer is a terrible, deadly disease and also very expensive, so we have also banned it. And just like that, our surveys show 0% unemployment, 0% homelessness, and 0% cancer! Can your vaunted capitalistic West say the same?"
It would be a funny parody, if the path to 0% homelessness wasn't so brutal:
1) start a civil war killing a few % of the population
2) take every large property in the country killing or driving into exile its owners
3) deport ethnic minorities and take their property
4) artificially create a major famine killing many millions of people and driving half the country into slave like labour
5) start a major war killing a double digit fraction of your population
6) rely massively on foreign labour and foreign aid during and after the war.
7) cause smaller wars and crises around the world to extort more foreign aid.
8) jail and send to forced labour camps everyone not performing a government assigned job.
9) collapse, the second you can't extort labour internally or funds and goods internationally
The problem is you'll probably live on something like $300/month, and the $ won't even be exchangeable internationally - think like food stamps but for everything. Or less. Unless you have connections in the nomenklatura, i.e. those who decide who gets which positions. University admission is handled by a similar circle.
Let me quote the text:
> An anecdote on this very topic became popular in the later Soviet Union. A young communist proclaimed victoriously: “We have founded a society where there are no rich people!” To which an old social democrat shook his head and muttered, “Actually our intention was to found a society were there were no poor people.”
>>University admission is handled by a similar circle.
So obviously I welcome any anecdotes to the contrary, but I was always told that in my formely communist country(Poland) university admissions were extremely fair. Everyone had equal chance if they passed exams well enough - in fact messing around with this system was guaranteed to get you in prison for corruption. And in there were many examples of poor families from very disadvantaged backgrounds sending kids to top universities because they studied hard enough to pass the entrance exams - there was no bribe you could give anyone to get you in, because the principles of fair admissions were upheld as the greatest value. I'm sure there are examples of it happening that we could find, but my understanding is that it was incredibly rare.
Now, top posts at universities - that's a different situation. To be the dean you had to be in the party and know the right people to be considered for the position. But students? Anyone could get anywhere and study completely for free.
I don't know about Poland, but within the USSR, a Jewish person would be unable to go to a good university without paying a bribe (which for many families was beyond their means). Jewish applicants would get a different set of test questions that would be nearly impossible to solve.
> unable to go to a good university
Or rather to a one of TOP 3 best universities in a one of TOP 3 largest cities in the country unless choosing some engineering specialization.
> a different set of test questions that would be
really hard to solve, indeed.
I'm using "good" to include the prestigious engineering subfields. For those, even minor schools in smaller cities would be barred to Jews.
The main issue was not the general admission being itself corrupt (though I can't imagine you could not get a top party member child in if you wanted).
The main issue was that anyone the state was not comfortable with was banned from higher education, including their children.
Have any connection to the pre-communist politics, be involved in religion, be reported by your neighbors as speaking against the regime or just got in the way of someone i power - congratulation comrade, you and your children (regardless of how gifted) are now second class, can't go to university & are relegated to second class jobs, for ever!
And this basically applied to everything the communist state could miss-use to award or punish people - jobs, internal and foreign travel, housing, being able to do art or write books, etc.
And any time the single party that could never do any wrong decided to punish you - there was no recourse.
> We have founded a society where there are no rich people!”
Many in the west would like this idea. Try goggle "communism support young americans".
People in general love utopias when they weren't exposed to their real incarnations.
Same with the RETVRN types who dream of an ancient-like societal structure without realizing that they would likely be slaves.
This is like hardcore libertarians, anarchy-capitalists. If they were dropped into a stateless (failed state) area, where they would have complete formal sovereignty, any but the super wealthy (who could afford private security, water and food quality systems, etc.), would soon leave, become impoverished, or die tragically at the behest of other legally unencumbered "self-sovereign" actors.
The excuses they might make, that libertarianism requires some basically supportive context (provided by who? and in what system?) to get off the ground, also undermine the arguments of the hard-independent individual crowd.
(I happen to think that "libertarianism" is a fruitful collection of ideas and insights, but in the context of many other systems with complementary ideas and insights. On a practical level, we need the best of many systems working together.)
Libertarianism has always been an ideology where the state should do what I want, but not what you want since that costs money.
They rationalize why the things they want (like property rights) aren't really a state.
> "Try goggle "communism support young americans"."
"According to a new Yale Youth Poll, a survey affiliated with the Yale Institution for Social and Political Studies, voters aged 18 to 21 lean Republican by 11.7 points when asked who they would support in the 2026 Congressional elections, while voters aged 22 to 29 favored Democrats by 6.4 points." from https://www.newsweek.com/republican-support-poll-young-gen-z... Whatever else they might be (and I can think of quite a few unprintable descriptors), I'm pretty sure the Republicans aren't communists or leftists.
Neither are the Democrats, so I'm not sure what you're going for here.
This is like Apple dropping the iPhone Mini. Everyone who wanted a small phone didn't just want a screen that's harder to read, or a marginally lower volume to carry in their pockets. They wanted the ergonomics of the original iPhone. My regular-sized (not plus) iPhone is too big for my hands. A lot of the interactions have to be done with both hands, or risk dropping the phone (which has happened many times) doing acrobatics to reach the far edges and corners.
The iPhone Mini never solved that. It was still uncomfortably large, so I never bothered with it because the tradeoffs weren't there. No doubt a smaller screen is worse, but if the ergonomics were significantly better, that would have been my choice.
Tradeoffs. One is willing to cope with some downsides if they perceive the gains to overcome the losses.
Truth is, even present-day UK Labour who are quite centre-right neolibs leaning more to the right, are closer to communism than the US Democrats are.
That is terrifying. Do they just not teach in schools how devastating every Marxist/Communist regime has been? Do people really think somehow that next time will magically be different despite all historical evidence pointing to the fact that this ideology is flawed at its very core?
Not in any detail. In my experience, Americans actually know very little about the Soviet Union, beyond that they were the "adversary" in the Cold War.
Every ideology is flawed - even the utopias. Perhaps the humanity should try without ideologies?
“Ideology” is just any system of values. Like “politics” people tend to pretend that ones they like are some other category while the label only applies to things they don't like, but...
In the US, most history and social studies classes are "taught" by football coaches. Most students don't retain anything important.
> Do they just not teach in schools how devastating every Marxist/Communist regime has been?
Even if they do, when you're living somewhere that's free to fail you before you're even born, the second-worst case can still look good. And also the absolute worse case is Pol Pot, and there's many examples equally awful showing that a lot of people just flat out refuse to accept humans can be that evil.
But also, basically all types of governments can demonstrate the sorts of failure mode that Communism is famous for. Holodomor and Great Leap Forward's famines were Communist failures, the Irish Potato Famine and several in India under the British were Capitalist failures.
> the fact that this ideology is flawed at its very core?
You may be surprised if you read a copy of The Communist Manifesto. Several parts of it have been considered "common sense" in capitalist nations for over a century.
Me, I think Karl Marx made the same error as Adam Smith, that both think humans free from rules are naturally amazing and they largely ignore power seeking behaviours and the consequences of that. Hence Smith is associated with laissez-faire, and "socialist" and "anarchist" were seen by the authorities of the 19th c. as being much the same*.
(I over simplify a bit, this is just a comment and not a script for a replacement idiology).
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_anarchism_and_li...
I've read The Communist Manifesto. There are indeed parts of it that are sensible in isolation. The problem is that taken as a whole, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, etc. are deeply flawed ideologies doomed to catastrophic failure and devastating results. History has shown us this repeatedly.
To Quote Ronald Reagan...
“How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”
What history has shown us is somewhat weaker than you say — for all the stuff they did badly, for all that they wildly missed their own raison d'être and became just another power structure for just another bunch of essentially aristocrats, it did also get Russia from the Tzars to orbit in 40 years.
But that aside, when you're already getting failed and the people failing you specifically hate one thing, it's very easy to reach for that thing.
To your quote: Well, I'm not a communist (unlike a previous partner)… but I'm also not a capitalist, because I see that capitalism also is a deeply flawed ideology doomed to catastrophic failure and devastating results, and that history has shown us this, too, repeatedly.
I'm also not "anti-" either of them, because I'd rather see someone take the best of both and find some new mechanism to deal with the other repeatedly observed historical fact: that a non-trivial fraction of the population are power-hungry sadistic arses. To quote, albeit from fiction: "To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416-the-major-problem-mdas...
(Both capitalism and communism have failure modes separate from the problem of dark triad personalities, but both sets are much easier to deal with if your society has also solved the problem of dark triad personalities, and a society does also need to solve the problem of dark triad personalities irregardless of what else it does).
It’s almost like… how can we take the nice social parts from communism - and mix them benefits of capitalism. Almost like, some sort of democratic socialism.
Democratic Socialism still entails collectivization of the economy.
If you're thinking of countries like Sweden and Norway, those would be called social democracy.
Good thing when people "support communism" they're not calling for a specific system like the Soviet Union, but just for a higher adoption rate of the good things that fall under the umbrella term.
How do you achieve this without creating a brutal authoritarian regime to seize the means of production and silence opposition? How do you allocate resources and labor fairly?
Marxism is a flawed ideology because it doesn’t account for human nature.
I recently started reading Henry Ford books and to me it looks like he has achieved the best of both worlds - at least until he passed away. One thing especially resonates with me - decreasing the prices without reducing the wages so that the profit gets close to zero, then find ways to make the manufacturing more efficient and less costly. While the new profit gradually grows - gradually increase the salaries. Then rinse and repeat. In the end people have good salary, can buy cheap (but still high quality) products and have joy while working.
I agree with you that Marxism is flawed, that as you say it doesn’t account for human nature.
But: There's no additional overhead to "seize the means of production" vs. any other system of governance and organisation, given that corporations, money, ownership, and the law are all things that any functioning system of government controls anyway, regardless of if they want these things to be collectively owned (/nationalised) or privately controlled.
Now, my former partner who is a self-identified Communist of some kind (I can't remember which kind), she wants to abolish money, and abolishing it rather than using it would need quite a lot of extra effort.
> How do you allocate resources and labor fairly?
I believe the general claim here is "democratically". This doesn't really work too well, but on the other hand, neither does letting people accumulate so much money they become the de-facto leadership with the carrots and sticks of "I will move my business to whoever has the lowest tax/cheapest labour/least expensive safety requirements".
Consider also that normal people are nowhere near as carful with language use as you or I may wish; some of the people you're worried about may be identifying themselves as "Communists" in the first place only because they're exactly one step to the left of the Democrat Party's Overton window while also repeatedly observing the US Republican party describe the Democrats as "socialists".
(Conversely, my former is one of the people I expect you to be correctly worried about, as she agreed with my assessment that she was to the left of the Cuban communist party).
You're right, I cannot think of any possible way to raise the minimum wage without creating a brutal authoritarian regime that silences opposition.
Adam Smith did nit think that. He warned about the danger of business “conspiracy against the public” and thought ethics more important afield than economics. The idea the invisible hand was perfectible is a amplification of his idea
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> Potato famine was caused by blight, a natural virus, and Irelands inability to handle the situation.
Ireland was a British colony ruled by absentee landlords at the time, and British policy made the famine far worse by not only refusing to provide aid, but continuing to export vast amounts of food while the Irish starved.
So imperialism was the cause.
What you are arguing here is factually false and the exact kind of communist apologetics the article is trying to combat. The Soviets deliberately starved the Ukrainians who would otherwise have been fine. In Ireland Britain used its Royal Navy to deliver regular relief supplies then deployed every available steamship in Ireland to deliver aid. They cut taxes and took on massive debts to fund employing half a million Irish in public works programmes - all aid to try and help them, even as the Irish themselves exported their food.
The idea these are in any way comparable shows up the true weakness of communism - there are no capitalist equivalents to far left barbarities anywhere. The fact that the best anyone can find for a capitalist Holodomor is a massive aid programme shows just how wide the gulf truly is.
Ultimately this confusion is rooted in economics. The potato famine aid was structured in a similar way to modern aid programmes. Why, because the only sort of "aid" the left deem acceptable is price controls, but they ignore the demand side. If you force prices down without addressing that then you just bankrupt all the farmers as income drops below production costs.
If your response to a famine is to bankrupt all the farmers, you just made things worse instead of better. It puts the country into permanent dependency that means everyone will die if the flow of aid is ever interrupted (like, say, by a World War).
The smart thing to do is to provide targeted immediate relief if you can, whilst simultaneously channelling money to people so they can afford to buy food and build up their economy so they can stand alone again. All modern aid programmes work this way, or try to. And it's what Britain did.
You might disagree about the best way to help desperately poor countries recover from natural disasters, but to draw an equivalence with man-made famines in the USSR or China is a category error of the worst kind.
> The Soviets deliberately starved the Ukrainians who would otherwise have been fine.
Even with the benefit of hindsight, this part is not clear and remains a debated topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Holodomor
> even as the Irish themselves exported their food.
That's a similarity. Ukraine and Ireland both exported food during their respective famines.
> The fact that the best anyone can find for a capitalist Holodomor is a massive aid programme shows just how wide the gulf truly is.
"Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, but also because some in power believed in divine providence or that the Irish lacked moral character, with aid only resuming to some degree later. Large amounts of food were exported from Ireland during the famine and the refusal of London to bar such exports, as had been done on previous occasions, was an immediate and continuing source of controversy, contributing to anti-British sentiment and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in tens of thousands of households being evicted, exacerbated by a provision forbidding access to workhouse aid while in possession of more than one-quarter acre of land."
> The smart thing to do is to provide targeted immediate relief if you can, whilst simultaneously channelling money to people so they can afford to buy food and build up their economy so they can stand alone again. All modern aid programmes work this way, or try to. And it's what Britain did.
This is so wrong I don't know where to begin.
The farmers were the ones doing the dying. Their primary need wasn't money, it was food. The extent to which money would have helped was that their landlords demanded money and evicted them because they didn't have enough food to sell.
Before getting to the Irish-specific details, we must observe that there is no historical debate about whether the Holodomor was deliberate. The Soviets deliberately imposed far-left ideology onto the farmers which destroyed their productivity, and then continued enforcing it through massive violence even as the whole Soviet Union plunged into famine. So the Soviets deliberately starved the Ukrainians, who if they had never been conquered by the Red Army would have been fine.
That's why this argument shows the deep immorality of left wing thought. The Soviets could have ended the famine at any moment by ending the revolution and restoring free market capitalism. They did not, because they were insane.
You probably are referring to the question of whether the Soviets deliberately took grain from Ukraine rather than other regions due to hatred of the Ukrainians specifically. That is debated. But what is not debated, is that the famine was a deliberate choice.
But Britain didn't create the potato blight nor the famine that followed. The Irish opened themselves to that risk when they chose to overwhelmingly farm a single strain of a single crop, despite knowing that crop disease has existed since the dawn of agriculture. Moreover there was nothing Britain could have done to avoid the famine, despite what left-biased Wikipedia tells you. Here is another quote, from in fact another left biased source, but it is nonetheless still more honest than Wikipedia. Google it if you wish.
"The food gap created by the loss of the potato in the late 1840s was so enormous that it could not have been filled, even if all the Irish grain exported in those years had been retained in the country. In fact, far more grain entered Ireland from abroad in the late 1840s than was exported-probably almost three times as much grain and meal came in as went out."
Banning exports - something leftists claim was a magical solution not done only due to nasty capitalist ideology - would simply not have solved the famine at all, because the Irish situation was entirely unsaveable. In fact the famine happened even when there was large amount of imported food sitting at the docks because the Irish were unable to properly distribute it internally due to bad transport infrastructure, so food just sat there rather than reaching the famine struck areas.
Yet Britain did what it could to help the Irish despite the logistical problems:
- Imported huge quantities of aid using every available ship.
- Employed vast numbers of people to give them an artificial income, labouring the English with large debts to support this.
- Ran soup kitchens that at their peak fed three million people daily.
The biggest criticism the left can make of this situation is that they think Britain should have, somehow, fed the entirety of Ireland for five whole years despite there being no logistical way to do that, no financial means to do it, and no moral obligation to do so either.
So, once again, the idea this is comparable to the Holodomor just shows how uniquely brutal far-leftism really is. There is nothing like it anywhere in the history of capitalism. A large multi-year foreign aid programme is the opposite of what the Soviets did.
> Irelands inability to handle the situation.
That inability was due to capitalism as it was understood and practiced at the time. Indeed, it overlapped with the writing of the Communist Manifesto.
Capitalism has been forced to change a lot since then. Laissez-faire hasn't been popular in a long time.
I mean, yes, in Texas for instance that kind of propaganda is state mandated.
I guess maybe the blue cities push the Marxism/Communism propaganda, but I don’t think the rest of the state does.
Nobody wants the Soviet Union. People do want a fair society. Quite arguably, the Soviet Union wasn't even communist (it was only called that, like how the N**s called themselves socialist and North Korea calls itself a democratic republic)
The problem is that communism can’t give you a fair society. You have to seize the means of production by force. This force has always created a brutal authoritarian regime that refuses to cede power willingly. Like in the book Animal Farm, some animals are more equal than others. The top members of the party always live better than the proletariat. Marxism just isn’t compatible with human nature.
By the exact same reasoning, no system can give you a fair society. All systems rely on seizing things by force.
Now that's out of the way, perhaps some systems give you better unfair society that seizes things by force, compared to others. Perhaps we could calmly deliberate about which system that creates an unfair society by seizing things by force is the best, and then implement that system, creating the best possible unfair society that seizes things by force.
I think this is the result of woke shit pushed in education.
More like MAGA rewriting US Soviet relations history.
Looks like today most people don't trust both sides. Some choose to ride one wave or another.
It's predictable backlash against the US whitewashing a lot of history. People are skeptical of the official narratives and do their own research
You underestimate the inability of the Soviet regime to provide its own people with basic consumer goods.
You would have a job and some money, but your money would buy nothing, because goods were scarce. Even finding good shoes would be a challenge and you would need to cultivate relationships with warehouse clerks etc. to get some access to stuff before it was stealthily distributed by underground channels to relatives, friends etc.
Modern Americans would go absolutely ballistic if they came to a shop with empty shelves and a bored arrogant assistant who would jeer at their very question "I want to buy X".
> Modern Americans would go absolutely ballistic if they came to a shop with empty shelves and a bored arrogant assistant who would jeer at their very question "I want to buy X".
Reminds me of an old Russian joke. In stores, you'd typically go to one counter to get some produce weighed, then to a cashier to pay for it.
So, someone goes up to the meat counter, and asks, "Can you weigh me out half a kilo of sausage?" And the guy behind the counter replies: "Sure, bring some in, and I'll weigh it out for you."
Yeah, the old jokes are first class.
"Capitalism is based on exploitation of a man by another man. In Communism, it is the other way round!"
America is very egalitarian these days, even the rich women are empowered to exploit the poor women!
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At the cost that the Soviet union imposed? I doubt there's even 100.
There is nothing stopping people from living like communists in the US. There have been many communist communes here and in other countries, like famously Israel and Columbia. All but single digits have been abandoned or sold by their inhabitants.
So we've got plenty of historical evidence whether people would choose to have this life. All but a few dozen, out of hundreds of million, choose against it. Including all socialists, everyone in those demonstrations, ... demonstrating extremely clearly:
without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
> There is nothing stopping people from living like communists in the US.
Capitalism stops them. The state has expectations of everyone. They will have to deal with things from outside that will force them into some level of capitalistic thinking which will ultimately eat the project from within.
> All but single digits have been abandoned or sold by their inhabitants.
The fact that the death of these experiments comes with a sale is illustrative of the point above
> without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
Is that so? It sounds like red scare propaganda honestly, and I don't think you could reasonably make an argument for this without conceding that the same is true of capitalism.
> Capitalism stops them. The state has expectations of everyone. They will have to deal with things from outside that will force them into some level of capitalistic thinking which will ultimately eat the project from within.
This is not a difference between capitalism and communism, and so not a valid complaint. You will pay taxes in a communist system. You will have to deal with all sorts of external influences in a communist system.
> The fact that the death of these experiments comes with a sale is illustrative of the point above
No it isn't. These were voluntary sales (especially since most were abandoned, not sold. There was no profit in leaving, except in some cases). It is illustrative of the simple fact that given the choice, all but a rare exception chooses against communism.
Or to put it another way: people REALLY don't want communism, and after trying it, that becomes worse. In many cases abandoning these communes required a large-ish group of people taking the decision together. In other words: they organized themselves to destroy their little patch of communism. Which illustrates the next point:
> > without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
> Is that so? It sounds like red scare propaganda honestly, and I don't think you could reasonably make an argument for this without conceding that the same is true of capitalism.
You just made an argument in favor of this. Your argument is that people cannot be allowed to have access to the external world, or they will abandon communism. That must be prevented, in your argument.
HOW will you prevent it? State terror.
> This is not a difference between capitalism and communism, and so not a valid complaint
I don't understand. You're saying that also in communism, capitalism comes in from outside and stops you practicing communism?
The USA did bomb and/or coup most communist countries until they were not communist, so you may have a point but it wasn't clear if this is what you meant.
> Your argument is that people cannot be allowed to have access to the external world, or they will abandon communism. That must be prevented, in your argument.
Don't strawman people.
> without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
I don't think you have an accurate appraisal of many socialist countries (e.g. Norway, Denmark).
Meanwhile, it would appear that Capitalism inevitably leads to wars and requires frequent wars to feed the military industrial complex.
Those are capitalist, not socialist.
The US used the word socialist is very strange way. Socialists and communists are not the same thing at all – except in the US, which is one of the very very rare countries that never had a socialist party as far as I know. A socialist party (labor, “social democrat”, etc) is what most countries consider “left” (as opposed to communists which are “far left”)
socialist != social democracy
Socialists want councils and the political discussion to happen inside the party by party members, which is what there idea of democracy is. (The self-labeling as democratic isn't a lie, but what they perceive to be democratic.)
A social democrat wants a welfare state with a democracy with multiple parties.
In practice socialists strive to create communism, which hasn't really worked out anywhere yet. Some declared that it was achieved, but than later backpedaled and claimed it didn't really happened yet.
again, to each its definition, but you should be aware your definition does not align with wikipedia’s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
The US have a very strange definition of the word “socialist”, which other english-speaking countries (and seemingly wikipedia) do not share.
As an example, the european socialist party does _not_ strive to put communism in place.
socialist != communist
They definitely does not aware of soviet reality that “roof over head” usually is not in the place where human want to live, same with job. if student after university decided (not by student, by state distributing workforce) to go work at city on polar circle - that means that student will go live and work here, without sunlight for the rest of his life! not joking, personal story with soviet collapse as happy ending (moved to normal place after that)
Relevant nickname then? ;)
>> This isn't an inaccurate description,
That is quite inaccurate. Or partially accurate. Accurate for white russian people.
For others it was quite easy to loose a job and get a forced psychiatric treatment or gulag trip (depends on the year).
I assume by "white Russian" you really mean someone of Russian ethnicity and not Belarus - which is what that phrase means to a Russian speaker - but you might want to clarify.
Yes. White male with Slavic face who speaks russian language without an accent because he knows no other language.
A friend of mine had a grandfather, who was born in central Asia (Samarkand) had Ukrainian parents, but also had written in his passport that he was a russian. Soviets erased his roots, history, ethnicity. He never spoke Ukrainian in his life.
Btw, that is what current russian government is doing. They have stolen thousands of Ukrainian kids and erased their identity. Few more years and some of them are ready to be sent to the frontline.
> ... speaks russian language without an accent because he knows no other language.
At least Belorussians and Ukrainians can speak Russian without an accent despite knowing their own languages.
> Soviets erased his ...
I doubt the USSR had such power solely on its own. It depends mostly on the will of parents (and grandparents) and the type of a young person. If a kid likes art, it's more likely the kid would be interested in national memory, if a kid is more into tech, then it seems not that important, which nevertheless can change later.
Russian Germans (not necessary all of them) consider themselves as Germans even after hundreds of years living in Russian Empire and then in the USSR.
If a kid in the Soviet Union was interested in art and used that to express national memory, then there would be consequences. As an adult, they'd probably be sent to a gulag and never seen again. This is how the Soviet Union crushed national memories beyond just the name (never the name itself, making sure they knew they were "different" somehow).
They didn't succeed in completely crushing all national memories, but a few more decades and who knows what might have happened.
> to express national memory
The culture has been preserved using non-provocative way by not mixing it with politic. Surely we must be respectful and thankful to those going rather provocative way and suffering.
The daily Soviet system issues have been successfully mentioned in a subtle way in films since middle 60s, which became classic. I'm not aware of similar from movies from China.
Famous Belorussian and Ukrainian songs have been performed in public on radio, TV in the USSR.
Even today some western world artists say, that sure, of course, the culture is not separate from politic while the others say they are doing art not politics and welcome questions about their public art not their private political opinions and preferences. Similar to many singers and actors dislike questions about their private life and lovers instead of what actually matters: their art of doing music, singing, performing.
> ... what might have happened.
Since middle 80s the level of freedom started rapidly to increase.
Only bits and pieces of culture can survive through such methods. It is enough to escape full assimilation, but only just. All it would take is the whim of another Stalin. The damage is such that those who went through it may not even realize what has been lost, until one day they (or future generations) find evidence on the outside of what culture was once like.
> The culture has been preserved using non-provocative way by not mixing it with politic. Surely we must be respectful and thankful to those going rather provocative way and suffering.
Local cultural symbols themselves were seen as "political" and "provocative". The definition of political and provocative was broad.
Small bits a pieces passing through the barriers are not "it".
In the Stalin times, yes.
But the policy in the early Soviet Union was in fact opposite:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiia
>>I doubt the USSR had such power solely on its own. It depends mostly on the will of parents (and grandparents) and the type of a young person.
That is a pure victim blaming. If the system makes it dangerous to teach your kids your culture, most parents will no do it.
Nowadays for singing Ukrainian songs you can go to the russian prison. Imagine what could be under the Stalin rule.
I didn't mean to blame victims. I just mean that under totalitarian regime one need to put extra work to compensate the pressure from the state and try to do it wise. Right after the Stalin rule there have been official De-Stalinization and rehabilitation of Gulag prisoners. That's why under USSR I usually don't mean Stalin period. There was no one single and equal USSR whole 70+ years long. Every new party leader is a new era.
> singing Ukrainian songs you can go to the russian prison
I'm not sure how is this right now, I fear it got worse, but on August 2022 it was possible(*). Russian guitarist performed a Ukrainian song in Ukrainian original in public:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPu5WQKXsjM (cut)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82argH8zZXQ&t=1041s (full, 10.89 million views)
And it is not just some beautiful Ukrainian song. It is a prominent "I will not surrender without a fight" (2005). Which sounds provocative enough these days. Yeah, he did not continue doing it again and again, thus it's by no means a prove one can safely practice this on a daily basis.
This song must be known by almost every Russian (and Belorussian), since this song was used once Zelensky played the main male role in the rus-ukr movie "Office Romance. Our Time" (2011) remake of the famous 1977 USSR original.
OTOH one of the most prominent (former) Ukrainian singers and since 2014 Russian singer Taisia Povaliy could sing her Ukrainian songs on December 2024 at the main State Kremlin Palace in Moscow. (Obviously, because she openly supports the state.)
[1] https://www.mk.ru/social/2024/12/11/marshal-kadysheva-buynov... (rus.)
From what hints I've been able to piece together, suppression of religion may have actually gotten worse during the Krushchev years. So it's not quite as simple as there being ups and downs - different aspects of culture got suppressed in different ways at different times.
Plenty of stories of people being forced to "voluntarily" accept Russian passports on the territories occupied by Russia in Ukraine too.
I have never seen an english speaker use “white Russians” for Belarusians – the only uses I know of this idiom are (i) for the non-red/non-green participants to the Russian civil war, and, by extensions, their diaspora, and (ii) the cocktail, which of course, is by far the most common occurence nowadays.
Many of the Russian speakers I know do this when speaking English - I'm guessing that's how they think of the phrase in Russian and want to translate it literally.
Yeah - the group that eventually lost the Russian civil war is first that comes to my mind for this term: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_movement
I know both usages, and as an Englishman I am a native English speaker. However, I would agree that the most common usage would be the non-Red opponents of the communistic takeover of Russia in the early 1920s. Isn't the cocktail named as a direct reference to these people?
I don't think so, they're Belgian IIRC? I think “Russian” is just for the vodka base, and black/white for without/with cream.
The matters of race occupy a much smaller percentage of the brains of people outside of the USA. I say this completely without malice. It simply means that the trauma of segregation is still too raw in American society.
The rest of your statement doesn't make any sense. One went to a gulag for opposing the Soviet government, not for having a particular ethnicity. Stalin was ethnically Georgian. Many prominent members of the politburo were Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or Jews. In the later Soviet Union there were many politicians from the "ethnic" republics who had high-powered careers.
In fact, look at the list of Russian politicians who are currently under international sanctions and tell me with a straight face that they are all white and Russian. Well, they are Russian of course, but not in the way you meant.
> The matters of race occupy a much smaller percentage of the brains of people outside of the USA. I say this completely without malice.
But do you say it with first-hand experience?
Having gone back to Russia to meet with relatives, it was very clear that they considered "Tajiks" to be somewhere below them on a social ladder, and one relative directly inquired whether I felt safe living in America with all the "Africans" living in New York. (Granted, that last statement could back up your point that it only matters in America - but it didn't feel that way at the time.)
And don't forget Jews. Jews have always been the number one to be hated by common tovarish, as well as modern russians.
Antisemitism in Europe has a long history stemming from the church wanting to paint Jews as "Christ-killers" and "other". There was a much more famous and murderous contemporary antisemitic movement in Germany. Singling out Russia is simply weird.
The Jews in the later Soviet Union did still face discrimination, but it was of the variety of being denied university admissions due to quotas. Kind of like what the Ivy League does to kids of Asian descent in the USA these days.
There is so much wrong in this statement, but more history required to explain it than a single post can cover. I'll try to cover only a few right now:
- The more famous antisemitic movement in Germany, while still fully responsible for its actions, used earlier Russian-published conspiracy theories as its foundational documents.
- The antisemitism of the late Russian empire was to the point that millions left to escape it.
- In the late Stalin years, Jewish figures of note would end up either assassinated or imprisoned, with rumors abounding of a mass deportation coming.
- In the years beyond and up to the collapse, Jewish culture, language, and religion were almost completely suppressed. References to the Holocaust could not mention Jews as victims. Systematic and state antisemitism was tacitly allowed, even encouraged.
- By the time of the collapse, almost all Jewish cultural knowledge had ceased to exist, only the most basic and vague knowledge remained. (Contrary to popular belief, the Nazis only played a partial role here once they lost - much of this culture still existed in 1945).
To diminish the intense level of antisemitism by comparing it to anything in America is absurd, and highly problematic.
I think you got your timelines mixed up in your effort to portray me as a neo-Nazi.
I know Russians are responsible for everything wrong in the world ever, but when I say that there is a rich tradition of antisemitism in Europe, I mean since at least the time of Shakespeare. Merchant of Venice kind of thing.
In Germany, Nazis didn't just invent antisemitism out of thin air. They exploited a common sentiment held by the working class. If you think that's due to Russian propaganda, well, we are also under your bed. Be very afraid.
Lastly, there is a trend lately to label "problematic" any sentiment of insufficient piety towards all things Semitic. This is a great culture, but it has shown that like any other great culture it is capable of genocide.
Have you ever heard of Protocols of the Elders of Zion? This was the central source of the Nazi's specific claims, even when antisemitism was nothing new to Germany. It was created by a pro-Tsar Russian publishing house. All the conspiracy theories relating to communism came from this source.
If you see a timeline discrepancy, point it out. But if you've never heard of the Doctor's Plot or Soviet "Zionology", maybe consider looking them up.
> hated by common tovarish
Were the leading Bolsheviki not of Jewish descent? And leading scientists until the very unfortunate "Doctors' plot".
I think this might have changed for the worst since the soviet times (or at least is now less covert ?). IIRC when someone interviewed one of the warlords from Chechnya he mentioned he would probably be a high ranking officer in the soviet military by this point if the soviet union still exiated. With this no longer being possible, they ended up doing other things.
You're thinking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev
Fascinating man, really. If you do read the article - notice that while he resigned rather than follow orders to suppress a rebellion in Estonia, and there are streets named after him in the places that hate Russia, he also won elections with 90% of the vote once he became a warlord and disbanded parliament. History, it would seem, is not black and white.
Yes, I speak from first hand experience. I have family and friends in Russia. Nobody in my circles is a racist. If someone would speak of a "churka" I'd be concerned for my friend and try to get them to see a psychiatrist.
Do racist people exists? Yes, they do. They tend to live in small insular towns. Kind of like they do in the rest of the world. If someone hails from a small town they may have a racist uncle. Kind of like someone from Texas might. The correct reaction is the same - an eye roll.
If I were to hazard a guess, these racist relatives are probably not university professors. I don't mean this disparagingly - I do not have an elite pedigree myself. But I suspect you are comparing against your knowledge worker acquaintances in the US. You should try speaking to some American tradespeople some time and see if you still think Russians are more racist.
>> Do racist people exists? Yes, they do. They tend to live in small insular towns
And Moscow. And other big cities. People of color are beaten routinely in Moscow, local police will do nothing about that, may not even register it.
A friend of mine has relative in Moscow, son of high rank Soviet scientist. They transfered their son to the religious school under russian orthodox church explicitly mentioned the reason: no Tajiks there.
Let me point out the fly in the ointment: in the enlightened SF Bay Area high-flying tech workers who would never dare be associated with anything less than 100% liberal leanings... still send their own kids to private schools rather than a public in East San Jose, for much the same reasons.
And this is generally true. Ask any of these enlightened non-racists if they would send their kids to a school in Compton, and watch them squirm.
It seems you're making excuses for pretty much everything in this thread.
> It simply means that the trauma of segregation is still too raw in American society.
It feels more calculated than that -- there are people trying to keep it alive for use as a partisan wedge issue.
Replace first past the post voting (and therefore the two-party system) with score voting and see what happens to the issue.
There have been a ton of states passing laws, starting in 2022 but really hitting stride in 2024/2025, where the Republican party has pushed laws or changes to state constitutions to prevent Ranked Choice Voting.
Example, in Missouri there was a ballot initiative called Amendment 7. The first part of the Amendment was to enshrine banning non-citizens from voting. I want to be clear, this was already against state law. This didn't change anything.
The second part of Amendment 7 was to ban ranked choice voting and require a plurality. That was the REAL intent of the Amendment.
People got duped, badly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...
Ranked-choice voting sucks anyway. It's nominally better than first past the post, but only because FPTP is so broken that it can still be the loser in a competition between bad voting systems. Use a cardinal voting system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rated_voting
And framing this as a partisan issue is how you lose. Changes to the voting system that allow multiple parties aren't going to cause Democrats to win more seats in Missouri. Missouri is red regardless of which voting system you use. But it will cause Republicans to lose seats, to libertarians or some other right-leaning third party running candidates there. Which is perfectly to the advantage of the right-leaning voters there, because it better represents their interests.
It's not to the advantage of the incumbent party insiders, who then trick people with crooked amendments like that. But if you pin that generically on "Republicans", implying a contrast with Democrats and need for all right-leaning people to line up against you, you're not going to win in Missouri.
You have to pin it specifically where it belongs, on the fat cats trying to sustain their privileged position as a one-party monopoly in the state at the expense of all voters.
Not one of these laws were put forth or passed by anyone other than Republicans in any of these states, and there is more pending legislation in other states before the end of the year.
If it makes noises like a duck, looks like a duck, does duck things, it's a duck!
I'm not running for office, just applying proper attribution!
The "game" is not worth playing, especially now. Time to bail. Sucks. (Reminder that there are far more registered independents than any political party affiliation.)
You can play the same game and call them "Americans" or "adults" or "politicians" but the reason you want to call them Republicans is that you're stuck in a partisan frame.
If you need majority support in a state where Republican candidates get 60-70% of the vote then you need to get some "Republicans" on your side, which in turn means you need to distinguish between the ones who are your enemies and the ones who could be your friends.
Getting visas, not worth it. Won't be fixed in my lifetime, my children's lifetimes, my grandchildren's lifetimes.
Something something best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, second best time is today, etc.
That seems more like abandoning a place because it's currently full of weeds than planting a tree.
Faster we go, the faster the children can integrate.
Everything has its season.
Right, no etnic cleansing, no mass starvation of etnic non-russian regions. No forced deportations to the Syberia.
No one of mentioned high ranks could freely use native language.
You probably know how they called USSR the prison of nations.
Yes, like all propaganda, the Western version is great at producing catchphrases. The Iron Curtain. The Axis of Evil. The Prison of Nations. Or, self-referentially, the White Man's Burden and Manifest Destiny. For internal consumption there are epithets like Convicted Criminal and Sleepy Joe (take your pick).
The best propaganda relies on some degree of truth before adding the imagery. But I am willing to bet that most commenters here have a fuzzy mental image of some vaguely menacing tyrant in a fur hat making people starve just for kicks. Other than Holodomor - can you name another mass starvation of an ethnic non-Russian region?
>> can you name another mass starvation of an ethnic non-Russian region
Asharshylyk. And it's not the only one I can name.
Maybe western propaganda is good in creating labels, but russians are good in killing is own people. Stalin killed more people in USSR than Hitler. Even now in their army ethnic minorities have disproportionally high KIA and WIA rates.
> The Iron Curtain
That was literal iron fence with multiple rows guarded by army who killed anyone who tried to cross.
> Other than Holodomor - can you name another mass starvation of an ethnic non-Russian region?
One genocide is not enough?
> menacing tyrant in a fur hat making people starve just for kicks
That is what was actually happening.
>>One genocide is not enough?
No, not for russians.
Hey, Russian genocides can never match the sheer killing power of American efforts to bring democracy to various parts of the world. And the Yanks have better marketing. Putin is jealous.
But what about America though??
I'm pretty sure America never wiped out 97% of an ethnic group.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circassian_genocide
Just so that you understand, what that inevitably brings is alcoholism, domestic violence and other depressive deformities. My grandpa died from daily drinking with his factory pals and my grand-grandma has axe damage on her wooden furniture and it was normal.
I'm sorry about your family history, but I have American friends who've grown up here for generations with identical family histories - alcoholism, domestic violence, depressive deformities and all.
America had overall lower rates of alcoholism and lower rates of domestic violence then former eastern block.
Probably due to all the people with spanish culture living in the more southern areas lowering the average.
And farmers under the tzar had it better in your opinion?
We have more options for hobbies these days.
I think that lifestyle is easily achieved by basically anyone, you don't need much money to live that kind of life. The problem is that life is only enjoyable if everyone lives the same life. You could save a ton of money and not have to work much if you lived a 70s lifestyle. Many even long for that lifestyle, but it only works if everyone lives it. If you're the only one living in the 70s and everyone else lives in the 2020s, most people would not be happy. Somehow, enduring things is much easier as a group. I remember talking to a Chinese person who said for most of their youth they spent their days studying until 11pm with breaks for lunch and dinner. That would be hell for most western kids, but apparently they didn't suffer too much because they were studying together with their friends who all had to endure the same schedule.
This is averaging across ~40 years of history (none of this applied until mid-50s and certainly not before WWII) and comparing "middle class" with low income. The "guaranteed, if low-paying, job and roof over head" was the norm, but it certainly didn't apply to everyone, the modern Russian word for a homeless person is of soviet origin. I. e. a criminal convict would lose their home automatically.
Not if that guarantee came with some miserable factory job that was mandatory.
My understanding is that most of these jobs you could just slack off at and nothing would happen. They couldn't really fire you anyway.
> They couldn't really fire you anyway
They could do much worse, they could send you to prison camp.
That was not a threat if you slacked off. Slacking off was basically completely normalized.
That was a treat if you was political inconvenient. Or if someone seen you as a threat in his career ascent and denounced you (falsely or truthfully). Which, in a roundabout way caused more of that slacking culture. It was literally safer to NOT look like the best worker with initiative.
Probably this. You would not want to stand out in any way. If you were such a slacker that it reflected badly on your boss, or if you were so productive that you became a threat to others, things could go badly. So your goal was to just exist, be a nobody, never challenge authority, never have a controversial opinion, just go home to your little cement apartment on the 5th floor and drink vodka. Sounds wonderful.
My dad used to say basically the same - he used to work at a coal mine in communist Poland and said that basically if you wanted to step up and work hard everyone else would put you back in your place. They'd get their gear, take 3 hours to get to wherever they were going, sit around and chat, then make the trip back and always have some excuse as to why the work couldn't be done.
And the thing is, at the end of the month they'd still be told that the mine has worked 150% of the norm and they are all getting letters of commendation from the the local mayor or something. Everyone knew it was nonsense, from top to bottom, and it was just how it worked. It's how on the news they said the wheat production is up 400% this year and western countries are jealous of their ability to grow crops and yet there was a shortage of bread.
So yeah, you just shut up and tried not to stick out.
Most parents would.
Yeah. I've had friends who went unemployed for a long time because they considered themselves to be above certain jobs. Me? If my kid needs food, the burger at the local McDonald's is gonna look very flippable real quick.
And if you’re halfway serious and reliable you’ll get promoted into management pretty quickly and that gets you benefits.
> But I'm not going to chuckle at the hypothetical people we're supposed to pity for wanting this
We should.
What communists really want is to have their every need and desire magically provided for, as if they were fundamental rights. In other words, what they truly want is called post-scarcity: the absence of an economy.
Communism and socialism are economic models. There exists scarcity of goods and resources and therefore they must be economized. There's a system that chooses who gets access to said scarce resources.
Socialism is sold to people as though it was post-scarcity. People think they'd be living comfortable "secure" lives where everything is guaranteed and provided for. Ah yes, the fabled memetic fully automated luxury space communism.
People who buy into this will probably end up doing forced hard labor in a field somewhere should communists actually come to power. They will not get to do what they want, they will work wherever the state puts them to work under penalty of death by firing squad. The state has no choice, anything else means mass starvation and millions of deaths.
Pity is far too lenient a reaction towards such reality distorting naïveté. If left unchecked, they will win elections and actually install socialism in your country.
We have a better chance of achieving post scarcity by collapsing capitalism with relentless automation.
Idk the Nordics seem to be doing ok
In the Nordics, the governments don't really try to run the economy. They provide stable environment to their local capitalists, let them do business at their leisure, and then tax their profits.
That is a huge difference from the mass experiment with central-command economy that was run in the countries of the Soviet Bloc. Unsurprisingly, ideologues and bureaucrats cannot really create and sustain a competitive economy. That requires a different sort of mentality.
Nordic countries are not socialist regimes. They are free economies with welfare states. Socialism implies state control of the economy, industry and the means of production.
Nice. They found so much oil for their small country they have saved over a quarter million per citizen.
The infinite money glitch has been helpful.
They're not socialist by the classical definition. They're capitalist countries with social benefits.
And then, these strong social safety nets seem to only work well in countries that have highly homogenous populations.
They aren't. They're becoming fascist like the rest of EU.
Nordics are very capitalist, come and visit
The descriptor "mollusk-like" for people that have different political or social preferences from the author is really dehumanizing and not okay.
> really dehumanizing
Yes. That was the author's point.
I think you missed the metaphors target. He was describing the lifestyle of just subsisting. Like a mollusk. This was objectively the majority of experiences under the Soviet system, not a comment on anyone’s political views.
And I think you missed something as well
I dont know how your life is, but my own impression is that life of many americans is worse than the life which was in the Soviet Union at least until the 80s (after Stalin). Maybe not in the sense of the capacity to buy junkfood and other junk, but as to sense of living and human relations. "Mollusk" sounds as the usual american antirussian propaganda.
Unless you are limiting your comparison to just the homeless in America, this is just not true. Most people don't know much about life in the Soviet Union in the first place, but even what people do know is typically limited only to life in Moscow and Leningrad. Dismissing the conditions as "capacity to buy junkfood" is uncalled for.
"Most people do not know much about the life in Soviet Union"
Well, I was born there, and I think that limiting the comparison to your homeless people is maybe comforting for an american, but is a distorted view.
I don't know where in the Soviet Union you were born. But, the stories I've heard of life outside the cities are completely unrecognizable to the modern American experience outside of the most extreme rural and isolated environments available.
Have to compare extremes in that case. Probably everyone in the gulag had a worse life than every American complaining.
The really funny part is that this is probably fairly easy to achieve in the United States. The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency control regime.
Currently people all over the world are free to move to New York, which makes the city unaffordable. If you forbade anyone not born within it from moving there, Manhattan would be fairly affordable and homelessness would be much reduced.
All you need to do is to free yourself from that bourgeois delusion that a man from Mexico (or worse, West Virginia) has any right to live in that city.
> The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency control regime.
Ouch: straight to being against others.
No, the part you'd need to implement to get socialised housing is socialised housing. Similarly, there are modern equivalents to guaranteed jobs. Communism believed everyone had to work: today we have different ideas of purpose than Marx had, plus are more aware of those who cannot work, or the value of non-work social contributions, and tech folks like us might believe in or hope for an upcoming post-scarcity society, with a transition period of UBI.
I expect you want to control migration and residency in order to avoid freeloaders. Freeloaders are remarkably rare, most people have self-respect and enjoy being productive, and interestingly systems that exterminate freeloaders entirely tend to be less efficient.[1] Plus, if you have a wonderful system, the best way to handle other people wanting it is to help it grow, not limit it to yourself. A better policy would be one encouraging its growth elsewhere in other countries where all those folk who are coming to your shores are coming from. The US has a long (mixed) history of that approach re democracy.
[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
Freeloaders are rare but their behavior patterns spread to those that are working on a massive scale.
With enough demotivation due to freeloaders, the whole system creaks under its own weight.
What freeloaders are you talking about? This is complete nonsense.
Residency controls exist to solve the Economic Problem. The amount of people that want to live in global cities is endless. Even if you socialize all the housing in New York, there will be people that want to live in the city but won't be able to. It is the job of the economic system to determine who gets in and who doesn't.
That's why socialized housing requires residency controls, but if those were implemented in the United States, the country could reap the specified benefits of of the Soviet system.
Finally, you speak of encouraging growth elsewhere, but what can be more productive for the growth of West Virginia, than to tell every man born in that state that he shall also die in that state. What can be better for industrial development, but a labor force that can't move away?
It's so sad to see communists cling to capitalist concepts like that. Communism has no future so long as it's supporters refuse to understand that Marx's magnificent philosophical and political system rejects borgeous human rights.
> Residency controls exist to solve the Economic Problem. The amount of people that want to live in global cities is endless.
That isn't true. There are a finite number of living people and if you just kept building housing in every major city, there would be enough for everyone who wants to live there.
It might not be practical to build enough housing in one city to house the entire global population, but who is proposing that anyway? Build more housing everywhere.
> Finally, you speak of encouraging growth elsewhere, but what can be more productive for the growth of West Virginia, than to tell every man born in that state that he shall also die in that state. What can be better for industrial development, but a labor force that can't move away?
By implication you would also have an inability to import labor. And then if you don't e.g. have a local medical school, you don't have local doctors. If you have the local environment to sustain a major industry and a local population that could do 90% of the jobs, but the other 10% are specialists who would have to be paid to relocate then it can't open up there at all and you lose the other 90% of the jobs too.
Suppose you have a mining town somewhere until the mine is exhausted. What are the people who used to live there supposed to do other than move away? There is nothing there for them anymore.
> That isn't true. There are a finite number of living people and if you just kept building housing in every major city, there would be enough for everyone who wants to live there.
That's sort of of neither here nor there. Sure, it's probably true, but try explaining that to anyone who hates bourgeois democracy. "If only we let the greedy property developers have it their way."
But the point that I'm trying to get across here with no small amount of irony (that I hope is fairly obvious), is that all the benefits of living in a communist dictatorship come from the dictatorship, not from the communism. Collectivized agriculture, state industries, socialized housings - all those things are worse than useless. What provided safety, stability and a guaranteed standard of life was the semi-serfdom imposed by the state.
> By implication you would also have an inability to import labor. And then if you don't e.g. have a local medical school, you don't have local doctors. If you have the local environment to sustain a major industry and a local population that could do 90% of the jobs, but the other 10% are specialists who would have to be paid to relocate then it can't open up there at all and you lose the other 90% of the jobs too.
The Soviet system did allow for movement. When a factory was opened and had to be staffed, permits were issued for the necessary people. In fact that was the only significant way for people from rural areas to be allowed the privilege to move to a city. Similarly, the problem with doctors was dealt with rather elegantly - every graduate of a medical school was assigned a specific town or village and was forced to live and practice there for decades.
The Soviet Union didn't abolish the movement of people. In fact, in the 1940s it was probably something of a champion in terms of internal migration. It's the freedom of movement that was abolished.
> Sure, it's probably true, but try explaining that to anyone who hates bourgeois democracy. "If only we let the greedy property developers have it their way."
So just describe it as "don't let the greedy landlords have their way" because the greed landlords want to limit housing supply.
> But the point that I'm trying to get across here with no small amount of irony (that I hope is fairly obvious)
I kind of figured, but actual communists will occasionally show up to say the same sort of thing and then it's just Poe's Law again.
> What provided safety, stability and a guaranteed standard of life was the semi-serfdom imposed by the state.
And there are a lot of people who would willingly be serfs if it meant stability.
The trouble is, it actually doesn't. Monopolies and unaccountable bureaucrats have short-term stability, where short-term is often something like a few decades. But being insulated from competitive pressure makes them long-term unfit, and then they eventually crumble. And the years leading up to the fall have a tendency to be increasingly unpleasant.
> The Soviet system did allow for movement. When a factory was opened and had to be staffed, permits were issued for the necessary people. In fact that was the only significant way for people from rural areas to be allowed the privilege to move to a city. Similarly, the problem with doctors was dealt with rather elegantly - every graduate of a medical school was assigned a specific town or village and was forced to live and practice there for decades.
This is one of the other reasons that system tends to fall apart.
Suppose you need something that doesn't come from within your jurisdiction. You haven't got any rare earths in the ground where you are etc. Well, you can just buy them from whoever has them, but then that country is never going to want to join your system because then you'd be taking their natural resources and sending back politburos instead of cash money.
Meanwhile the same thing happens to anyone there who is producing more than they consume. They want to leave. The Berlin Wall wasn't there to keep the Americans out.
That's not true and the City of Vienna proved that thesis wrong a century ago. [0].
Even today, two-thirds of Viennese residents live in public housing, the city is Europe's largest landlord and as a result, housing is extremely affordable for a world-class city. It's not without reason that Vienna tends to top worldwide quality of life rankings - it's the achievements of Red Vienna.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/magazine/vienna-social-ho...
The city of Vienna has a fairly unique history. It used to be the capital of a massive empire that's now gone, and thus suffered a period of fairly prolonged decline.
It's population declined from 2.4 million in 1914[1] to 1.5 million in the 1980s[2]. The only reason why it's currently considered even close to a world-class city is that after the fall of the Berlin wall it was the natural financial hub for oligarchic capital.
I think we can all agree not many great and global cities have tons of free housing emptied by a prolonged period of decline. And that we can't really evaluate if the city is solving the economic problem well or badly, as right now it's simply less acute for historical reasons that have nothing to do with it's housing policy.
[1] https://ww1.habsburger.net/en/chapters/growing-city-vienna-e... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20107/vien...
> I think we can all agree not many great and global cities have tons of free housing emptied by a prolonged period of decline
That is not the case in Vienna, either. The government built enough units to supply ten percent of the total market and used that leverage to drive down prices. Before that, a large portion lived in squalor.
> But from 1923 to 1934, in a period known as Red Vienna, the ruling Social Democratic Party built 64,000 new units in 400 housing blocks, increasing the city’s housing supply by about 10 percent. Some 200,000 people, one-tenth of the population, were rehoused in these buildings, with rents set at 3.5 percent of the average semiskilled worker’s income, enough to cover the cost of maintenance and operation
> Communism has no future so long as it's supporters refuse to understand that Marx's magnificent philosophical and political system rejects borgeous human rights.
Stalin couldn't have put it better himself.
> It is the job of the economic system to determine who gets in and who doesn't.
Isn't that the point of capitalism? If you can afford to live in New York, you do. If you can't, you don't.
I was about 10 when the USSR has collapsed and have lived in the use for over 30 years yet I still see in my parents and even myself the remnants of dehumanizing ridiculousness that existed there. Eg my dad is instinctively terrified of dealing with anyone from the government even like the mailman because that person can wield their position against you even though that's not the case here at all.
Or for example I had to point out to my dad that his neighbor open carries. Like my dad is intellectually aware of the 2nd amendment but it didn't fit in his brain that people could actually exercise a freedom so his eyes were literally blind to it (obviously I drove him to the gun shop that evening)
> (obviously I drove him to the gun shop that evening)
Why would that be obvious?
Yeah to non-americans this sentence sounds so weird.
He might have meant it humorously too. You don't know about gun laws at all, so next stop is the gun store.
I'm an American, and it sounds wild to me. I still don't understand it.
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> At work only woke propaganda is allowed, woke training (brainwashing) is mandatory.
Is the woke propaganda in the room with us right now?
Yeah but the USA wokeness is only about words, not about solving anyone's problems for real.
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what
Nothing he's complaining there were too many black people working in the hospital. I presume doing the less paid jobs.
Exactly this. There are other places where all 100% employees were replaced in recent years. Big companies' branches. If not for specific skin color it would be called definitely racism. The formal name for it is 'diversity'. That was eyes opening on what all wokenes is about. Open black racism.
No, I was confused as to what you're saying. I don't understand the point of your anecdote. Is your concern that it was improbable for that many black people to work at a hospital in an area where mostly non-black people live?
Don't bother, it's a 45-day-old account made just to troll.
This may be covered but one absurdity that I came across was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
When I was an undergraduate working in a molecular biology lab my two mentors, Andrei and Svetlana were Russian emigrants. Andrei taught me, in the 00s, that he couldn’t do the level of molecular biology in Russia because the downstream effects decades later put them far behind in the technical and cultural knowhow. Genetics was banned.
> More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents.
Scientists were executed… ok wow
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Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
The article is in the present. /s
The flagged comment was in the present, and is now in the past, thankfully.
Of course HN has tankies.
And lots of them
"Same in the West" lmao, when were scientists executed in the West? The 1500s?
> scientists were surely executed in various contexts (same in the West)
Name one.
Giordano Bruno
As relevant to this discussion as Joan of Arc.
But it highlights the absurdity of the statement that West also purged scientists.
I can think about Turing, he was definitely is a victim of the system, but not because he was a scientist.
How about one that doesn't predate capitalism?
So… Giordano Bruno?
Giordano Bruno, 1548-1600.
Capitalism came to rise during the industrial revolution more than a hundred years later.
If you arbitrarily want to make it start there… sure
Wasn't it a capitalism, the system Roman empire had?
It had elements of capitalism, like private ownership and focus on trade via monetary means, but its economy was largely based on slavery and your position within the system was based almost entirely on where you were born and to whom. It's a pre-industrial system, capitalism isn't really the correct description for it.
Sounds like USA in the early days. Not a capitalism as well?
I mean, obviously not? History is way more complicated than this, just because certain elements fit doesn't mean we look at it and go "yeah that's capitalism mate". Historians generally use capitalism as a description for economic systems from 19th century onwards - before then the correct answer is usually "it's complicated". I appreciate that can be frustrating if we just want to slap a simple recognizable label on things, but history doesn't always fit what we want it to be.
Julius Rosenburg is an obvious one. The Nazis executed gobs of scientists. And I'm certain I could find other examples if needed, but that is off the top of my head.
> Julius Rosenburg is an obvious one.
Who was executed for being a spy, not for holding unorthodox scientific beliefs.
[dead]
The National Socialists were socialists so that undermines not reinforces your point:
- they implemented communist policies like mass nationalization schemes with some of the resulting "companies" being amongst the largest organizations in the world
- they wanted to fully nationalize the entire economy after the war
- they passed large amounts of left wing legislation
- they, obviously, called themselves socialists constantly. Hitler said "I am a fanatical socialist".
- they openly hated capitalism. A big part of their hate for Jews was that they associated Judaism with international capital. Same reason Marx was an anti-semite.
What? Wow. There’s a bot for every crackpot now eh?
Low quality bots are the most jarring.
> Genetics was banned.
During the 1940-s. And yet it undermined the molecular biology research in the USSR. It's very easy to destroy the institutions of scientific research.
I'm sure, nothing like this can happen in the US. It's not possible that people in power will just use theological and ideological reasons to just deny sound scientific results.
There's a great episode of the podcast The Constant about Lysenkoism. Definitely worth a listen.
I can't find the link at the moment, apologies.
Ah, I guess I made up that it was The Constant... what I must have been thinking of is the episode on Lysenkoism by the legendary Melvyn Bragg on In Our Time.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00bw51j
Thanks for the follow up I couldn’t find it!
Apologies for leading you astray at first. I couldn't find it FOR THE LIFE OF ME either.
If you guys aren't already fans of In Our Time, I'm delighted to be the one to turn you on to it. It's the Liberal Arts education you didn't get in school... And I say that as someone who GOT a Lib Arts education.
There are over a thousand episodes and it's all a brilliant quick study on an unbelievable variety of subjects.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl/episodes/player?pa...
Awareness of the concept has gained renewed importance in 2025.
Did they experience the rule of only studying soviet science ?
> In their subconscious hopes that a societal formula is as simple and as universal as the famous E=mc², people are prepared to believe nonsense if it only sounds good.
This is an interesting insight on human nature.
> Recent Russian studies put the count of lost lives and unborn children as high as 170 million people.
wait, does this just mean pregnancies that didn't reach full term? Or like, a hypothetical number of kids that could have been born?
The Bolsheviks were the first to get a country to legalize elective abortion in 1920. They did so as a temporary measure because so many women would have difficulty raising a child in the post-war environment.
It got to the point where hospitals were overwhelmed and they started setting up dedicated clinics.
They tried making it illegal again in the 30s but brought it back in 1955 because there was such demand.
So, presumably this 170 million number is written by someone who believes a fetus is a unique human life and the prevalence of elective abortion was so high as to be a not insignificant number of "lost lives".
By what actual scientific definition is a fetus, not a unique human life? They have their own unique DNA, brain, circulatory system, fingerprints, etc, etc.
In my understanding, any definition that discounts there individuality is primarily there to depersonalize them and thus justify their killing.
To justify their killing and assuage the conscience of any who have had one/had their wife/girlfriend have one.
That's a philosophical discussion, not scientific fact. (The scientific facts of fetal development are of course important for the discussion) I'm sure we would entirely disagree when a fetus gets qualia or becomes a human being, but that doesn't necessarily mean one of us is ignoring science.
Unique DNA is irrelevant (a clone would be a person), lacking a viable circulatory system or fingerprints doesn't mean lack of personhood. Someone completely braindead a person or closer to a cadaver? Not everybody agrees on the same.
>In my understanding, any definition that discounts there individuality is primarily there to depersonalize them and thus justify their killing.
That's bad faith. Let me try one myself, all anti-choice people are just useful fools in the ultra-conservative campaign to maintain authoritarian control of the relationships and bodies of the people. In my country divorce was illegal until 2004, the same party that maligned it's legalization took condoms out of UN care packages after an earthquake. They would absolutely prohibit Plan B, limit condoms to married couples and make homosexuality illegal if they in had the power.
In the US, the poor will be kept barefoot and pregnant, while the Republican senator and the megapastor will get an abortion for their mistress.
Well, that's easy. Just think everyone else is evil and stupid :^)
Depersonalizing a fetus is necessary to maintain the legality of abortion.
There are already plenty of conflicts in western laws- killing a pregnant woman in some jurisdictions will get you two counts of murder. Stillbirths can qualify for bereavement leave. Despite things like this, legalizing abortion means what would have gotten one person a murder charge is perfectly fine for another person to do.
The fact that you cannot even see how ridiculuous this piece of propaganda is, says also about your ability to reason. The great demographic drop in the Soviet Union happened after the WWII (you remember that Soviet Union defeated the nazis, right?), but even that was not "170 million people" and was due to the war started by the nazis (whatever your propaganda claims about that).
> was due to the war started by the nazis
Soviet ally, nonetheless! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
Yes, cherrypicking the pact when the relevant part is the international context back then.. Soviet Union had to defend itself not only from nazi Germany.
To remind you of western capitalists helping the nazis? Of the British royal family ties to the nazis?
Yes, yes, the "defense" where you occupy parts of Poland, attack Finland. And of course, providing resources and training facilities to the dear ally in Berlin. There is a reason why soviets always talked about "BoB" and never about WWII - they've entered the latter as allies of Hitler, which does not fit to the soviet victim narrative.
Here are some documents about american capitalists financing the nazis
https://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=WallStHitler&C=...
The USA had their share of nazi-related business (IBM, e.g.), but no amount of whataboutism will save you from the simple fact that soviets entered the war as active allies of nazi germany.
You wrote above that Soviet Union was helping the nazis before 22 june 1945. I just told you that those who really helped to build the nazi war machine, were you (the american and other capitalists), and not the Soviet Union. Also the motives were quite clear, to "fight the judeo bolshevism".
I am not denying the existence of Molotov Ribbentrop pact, only the emphasis western propaganda puts on it (for obvious reasons) is misleading, and deliberately does not take into account parts of the historical context.
> I just told you that those who really helped to build the nazi war machine, were you (the american and other capitalists), and not the Soviet Union.
Oh, this is not a point of blaming and finger pointing, looking for excuses why the communists are not to blame(are they ever?). It is to illustrate the very simple fact that the soviet union was an imperialist, expansive and warmongering state and one of the direct initiators of WWII - contrary to the usual soviet-russian victim narrative. Not that we would not know it in the retrospective looking at the soviet occupation of half of europe.
Half of Europe is nothing compared to what the US owns (de facto) now or what the British empire had. And they are (were) imperialist, expansive, and war mongering. Actually Soviet Union, compared to them, is an amateur.
As to who started the war, the basic fact is that the nazis attacked Soviet Union on 22 june 1941, that it was an immense tragedy, and that saying that the victim was the aggressor is a very unjust and evil thing to say.
The fact that Germany was some days earlier to start the planned attack on the other, didn't change that the plans were mutually. This was known by western leaders, which is why the support for the UdSSR was controversial. For example it lead to Churchill concluding that "we slaughtered the wrong pig.".
You forget that the Soviet Union's sphere of influence was a lot more than just half of Europe.
For the families who left, there is gratitude every day that the Soviet Union lacked the power to control more than it did - certainly not for lack of will.
> Half of Europe is nothing compared to what the US owns (de facto) now or what the British empire had.
Another case of whataboutism. Crimes of the british empire or USA do not whitewash the murderous regime of the soviet union.
> As to who started the war, the basic fact is that the nazis attacked Soviet Union on 22 june 1941, that it was an immense tragedy
It is a tragedy which happened to the population of an imperialist warmonger terrorstate — there is again nothing exclusive here. In fact, what you imply is that an experienced unjustice magically deletes all the crimes, but no such thing exists and in case of the soviet union there are too many crimes against populations of too many countries and ethnicities to get away with it.
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> The fact that you cannot even see how ridiculuous this piece of propaganda is, says also about your ability to reason.
TBH, i don't believe he/she does not have the ability to reason, i think that HN has become a main place for state propaganda. Almost a third of articles are either bashing of US adversaries or "exploded but success, terrahertz transistor, could, may be, etc". The next third are AI propaganda.
The 170MM figure is referring to all losses of life like the purges, man-made famines (Holodomor), inept ww ii strategies, as well as “unborn” children. This last one has no reference so it’s impossible to know what that means or how many people they attribute to that.
That said, the problem is a cultural one. The communists poured gas on the tendencies of the Tsars and modern Russia suffers from that legacy still. The legacy is a peasant (serf) : master way of thinking.
Culture is hard to cure and the change has to come from within. Japan had a similar problem but most of the sharp edges were dulled when they made a deal (surrender) with the Americans.
You also see this tendency to cling to bad cultural habits by some enclaves of immigrants. It can take decades of new generations to wipe some of those bad tendencies away. Some people see that as erasure of culture as a bad thing but it can also bring good.
I don't know who is downvoting this comment, but the comment is correct. Russia is a state, not a nation. The Kremlin, in all incarnations - the Tsars, Stalin, the Communist Party, Putin, even the Mongols that used to run it before Moscow, have always been perceived more like an alien force that has landed onto this land, and now one has to submit to it, without questions. This is a lesson that parents pass onto their children, implicitly or explicitly. It could become a nation-state in a relatively short order, though that's certainly going to be bloody. And nukes could be on the table as well - this is why the US was actually opposed to the USSR collapse, a fact that's not widely known today.
It’s a bold and unsubstantiated claim. In English language there’s a lot of confusion because the same word Russian is used both for citizenship and ethnicity, but in Russian they are different and such confusion doesn’t exist. If you run polls in Russia, ethnic minorities won’t say that they are Russians using the word for ethnicity, but they will certainly confirm that they are Russian citizens belonging to the same cultural space (and in that sense some may even use the word for ethnicity, e.g. “I’m Tatar, but I’m Russian too”). Nation is defined not by the government but by shared history and culture and may cross ethnic boundaries. Russia is big, but its people have developed the shared culture, the pride, the sense of belonging which qualify it for a nation. This comes on top of all geographical and ethnic identities, which make the picture more diverse and complex, but those identities are rarely stronger (even in regions like Chechnya).
Lost lives and lost potential is how I read it.
You can play with the scope to tell the story you want. If you scope in WW2 losses as well, about 30M Soviets died. Some other number were injured or disabled. If you look at fertility rates at the time, you can project how many children would have been born, and I’m sure you could be at that number.
Additionally, the after effects of the war and Stalin persisted - the loss of men resulted in higher numbers of childless women.
I lack the information to assess whether 170M is a meaningful number, but on a relative basis, the United States and even China didn’t contend with the sheer destruction and oppression that Soviet people did, and had higher fertility rates. It’s not a “pro” or “anti” Soviet/Russian discussion - the nation’s people suffered in various ways, which had an end result.
No, the CIA just counted the lost sperm.
Somewhat related, one of my favorite 'absurdities' to come from the USSR was the hydraulic computer https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/12/vladimir-lukyanovs-wat...
I look forward to the day when the capitalist and communist eras of the 19th-21st century are analyzed coldly, in the way we look at mercantilism or medieval market towns today.
Because it really seems like both are increasingly inadequate systems for handling modernity, and the obsession with defining one as intrinsically evil and the other the obvious superior option (I’ll let you choose which is which) is such a flattening, unhelpful approach.
Personally, having moved from capitalist America to post-communist Poland, a few things seem true to me:
…the communist era in Poland was a disaster and the country today is unquestionably better off as a modified capitalist one;
…contemporary American culture really seems to be struggling under an unquestioned capitalist ethic;
…the conflict seems artificially egged on from think tanks, corporations, academics, and maybe even the simple alliteration of the letter c (i.e., you don’t hear nearly as much about Capitalism vs. Socialism, even though historically that’s a more accurate label of what governments actually were.)
…and that neither capitalism or communism has ever really been implemented in a pure sense.
Which is all a long way of saying that Mark Fisher’s quote seems more true every day, not as a pessimistic statement but just one describing a lack of imagination and the inability to transcend the debate:
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
> having moved from capitalist America to post-communist Poland
Poland is definitely a very nice place to live right now, and improvements since the fall of the communist government is undeniable.
However, please note that not all Polish growth is just due to capitalism knocking to the door – the country is the recipient of a huge amount of EU funds[0]. To illustrate it, France, the 2nd largest net contributor to the EU budget, gives barely more than Poland receives, even though the population is a bit half as big.
Is it a bad thing? Not necessarily. But it is definitely not an illustration of a post-communist country standing by its own self.
[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-...
> the country is the recipient of a huge amount of EU funds
What shaped Poland into something acceptable as a NATO member was USAID - the program Musk and Big Balls axed.
USAID allowed Poland to join NATO and later the EU. I've snatched the 188-pages long PDF[0] (English/Polish) before it was publicly erased.
[0] https://sysartist.com/usaid-and-the-polish-decade.pdf
West owed this to Poland after selling it to ussr in Yalta. West Germany got Marshall plan, we got 35 years of russian occupation.
> owed this to Poland
Polish spirit in a nutshell
If you bothered to pick up a history book, maybe you’d understand why.
And if you were bothered with not becoming a military dictature in the 20's-30's, trying to create a network of alliances with your neighbors instead of cutting yourself off from everyone (which is a great feat considered that you and all your neighbors were threatened by the looming USSR), and selling Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany for a couple villages, maybe two of my great uncles wouldn't have died and my whole country wouldn't have been occupied for 4 years in a war where we tried to save you, all for nothing but Poles complaining left and right that “the West should attacked the Soviets in '45”.
BTW, congrats for electing a PiS guy again even though the current state of your country is depending so much on the EU – great, forward thinking, move.
I tend to be in the camp that believes capitalism will generally produce better results than socialism but it will not produce anything close to a utopia. However, I don't believe capitalism is a stable economic system within a democratic society. It will inevitably lead to some results that are repugnant to the electorate who will advocate for political action to prevent such outcomes from occurring in the future. This will lead to stronger government authority and increasing market manipulation which will (potentially) prevent those outcomes but simultaneously it can produce different negative outcomes[1]. In the end it seems as though despite good intentions we end up with a system that nobody understands, nobody is satisfied with, and nobody can fix. I suppose it's like software engineering in a way, we want perfection but instead we are constrained by trade-offs and we never reach a state that everyone is happy with.
[1] A classic example is rent control which tends to lead to shortages.
A simple model is that most countries internally are made up of many "competing communist orgs". Each large company is internally a communist dictatorship. Employees don't choose their bosses, and have no voting power whatsoever in the general case. Employees share the means of production, and the fruits of their labour is redistributed largely evenly, even if some employees are 10x or 100x as productive as others. It's only entire companies that compete in the capitalist free market sense.
This is... fine. Capitalism encourages innovation and efficiency, while Communism provides individual safety and reduces wealth inequality. Neither works in pure form, so just about every country combines the two.
Employees can choose their boss, that's called a work contract. And in my country workers do have voting powers on the company, but that is rejected by the US, because they dislike unions.
Communism has no wealth inequality, because it's forbidden to have any wealth at all. Maybe you actually think of social democracy?
IMO the problem is extremes. The best system is capitalism with some “socialist” government regulation, services, and welfare. How much and what specific policies are unknown.
> The best system
The best system for growth. It's important to point out that Capitalism won because it grew faster. But nothing can grow forever--certainly not exponentially--so we're now finding out how poorly late stage Capitalism copes with slowing growth and population. Oh, and that little looming thing about environmental consequences.
> Capitalism copes with slowing growth and population. Oh, and that little looming thing about environmental consequences.
During communism Czech Republic lost forests over whole mountain range, because they were melted away by acid rains because it was cheaper to run brown coal power plants without any filtration.
Rivers were used as sewers for big factories. Water being brown-red under the paper mill? That's normal comrade. Having massive clumps of foam under weirs and rivers smelling like swamp and detergent? Don't complain comrade if you don't want to have problems.
Oil spills (i.e. from oil pipes) weren't cleaned, they were just covered with earth, some found decades after fall of communism.
Nobody cared about filtration in general. It was kind of normal to have a smoke cloud over an industrial city forever, unless winds were blowing strong enough to gift this poisonous present to countryside.
Is it snowing in the summer? Yeah it is not, that's just ash from factory over there. Try to catch "snowflakes" on your tongue if you would like to have cancer in few years.
Agriculture was insane as well. Forced collectivization of land and making fields as big as possible so mechanization is as effective as possible has caused erosion of soil and thus increase of usage of fertilizers which were flushed into already polluted rivers during rains.
I could go on and on. Communism has nothing to do with environmentalism.
Was talking to an archeologist recently when touring a site of a big late bronze age settlement near Brno. There was a burial ground next to the fortified settlement on the hill as well, largely undisturbed for thousands of years, under regular fields used for agriculture.
But deep plowing in the 50s and 60s, incorrect plowing gradients in the steep terrain resulted in 30-40 centimeters of fertile land lost to erosion in less than a century.
And not just that, the ancient graves were lost woth it, all the pottery and remains churned to nothing.
> Communism has nothing to do with environmentalism.
No one claimed it does. Basically all of what you wrote above is because of pursuit of economic growth regardless of the -ism. Environmental destruction is the inevitable result of growth of industrial society. Governments without transparency, with no environmental protections, with burgeoning eminent domain, and with corruption and backstabbing make it worse.
This was pretty much compounded in the communist era - it was the state doing the environmental destruction & it was doing it for the most holly purpose of PROGRESS and HEAVY INDUSTRY.
So if you wanted to point out we are all gonna get poisoned to death and worse, you would not only be saying the state is wrong (impossible!) but that attacking its most its most important endeavors (reactionary provocateur, shoot on sight!!).
Like, in the capitalist countries you could at least say all the mercury in the fish is causing spike in birth defects without ending up in gulag.
> in the capitalist countries
Again, you mean the countries that didn't have authoritarian, unaccountable governments, where citizens have not only a history of free expression, but they constitutionally guaranteed rights. Whereas in the communist regimes they universally have been repressive, corrupt, brutal, stupid, and usually self-defeating.
> it was doing it for the most holly purpose of PROGRESS and HEAVY INDUSTRY.
Oh yeah, it was fucked. But the globalist capitalist society of today that can't survive without overconsumption and perpetual exponential growth isn't a whole lot better. It promises everyone that their greed is good and that billionaires are saints. For the time being we're awash in widgets and titillating entertainment, but dwindling resources and shocks to the biosphere will have their consequences. At least the communist regimes have had the good grace to fall apart once in a while.
Correlation does not mean causation. In that historical period environmental consequences of industrialization were not well known and greener solutions did not exist. Communist governments chose the easiest and fastest path back then. We do not know what would be their choice or how it would complicate establishing communist regimes today.
The most egregious ones were absolutely known, but fixing them would not fulfil 5 years plans, so it was not done. We absolutely knew what is a scrubber and that burning brown coal will release sulfur which will fall down as sulfurous acid. But comrade, can the power plant work without a scrubber and filtration system? Yes it can. So build it without it.
Chernobyl had exactly same problem - no containment around reactor. Why would you build it when power plant can work without it?
The main problem of communism vs environmentalism is that to get environmentalism working you need to question and complain to authorities and demand solutions for obvious problems which authorities are causing - there were no private enterprises, everything was owned by the state. But if secret police will just threaten the complainer with punishment, then you have solved the problem. No complain = no problem. Welcome to everyday realities of communism comrade.
Unaccountable corrupt authorities are shit no matter what -ism is on the end.
I think this broken feedback cycle is one of the biggest isues for communist regimes, yet I don't see it mentioned often. :P
The exact same thing happens all the time in capitalist regimes.
That's where a proactive government comes in.
I will point out that in capitalist systems, the money saved by the efficiencies can be put towards more environmentally positive products and technologies. Electric cars for example were very expensive, and it was the wealthy that were able to demand them, drive the market, push prices down so more middle class families can afford them. This is happening again with compostable plastics, B-corps that are more circular, efficient/recyclable packaging solutions, and other parts of our industry.
> Oh, and that little looming thing about environmental consequences
Communists weren't great for the environment either. Look up the Aral Sea.
You should check out how Communism treated the environment.
Oh yes, some good ole black and white thinking will help the dialogue.
> Because it really seems like both are increasingly inadequate systems for handling modernity, and the obsession with defining one as intrinsically evil and the other the obvious superior option (I’ll let you choose which is which) is such a flattening, unhelpful approach
As the post-soviet Russian joke went:
everything the communists said about communism was false, everything they said about capitalism was true.
I can imagine a lot. In every possible scenario, the end of capitalism means disaster for the entire human race.
This is exactly the kind of low effort, no imagination response that I was referring to. No discussion of alternatives, no acknowledgement that maybe there are some issues with the current capitalist system, etc.
Just apocalyptic language, with no openness to the idea that yeah, communism was a terrible system, but maybe that doesn’t automatically imply that contemporary capitalism is inherently the best system.
Improving capitalism is possible in the abstract. The reason it's hard to imagine is that "capitalism" is not a real thing that exists concretely. It is a term used by communists to refer to the natural state of affairs that they wished to destroy.
To see this, get two people together and try to get them to agree on when capitalism started, or even what a country needs to be considered a capitalist country. Is it merely markets? If so then the Roman Empire was capitalist. Is it stock markets? Limited liability companies? Private property rights? All of the above? Who invented capitalism? If nobody did then is does it make sense to propose a replacement or is that like trying to propose a replacement for evolved things like natural wildlife ecosystems?
Once you realize that capitalism is just the naturally evolved system of mechanisms used to coordinate any advanced economy, the problem of discussing alternatives becomes clear. It doesn't make sense to try and propose a full alternative because capitalism is only really definable as "the thing that's not communism", so it's unclear what exactly you'd be proposing an alternative to.
As a naturally evolved system, the alternative to capitalism is therefore capitalism+some minor tweak. Not a radical overhaul.
Modern capitalism evolved from those old arrangements, so, yes they could! It wasn't invented as a replacement of society via intelligent design.
But OK, what's your definition?
Although I would argue with you that the communist governments were socialist -- they were not, at least under our current understanding of socialism (says one person contradicting another on the internet, this is opinion, I know :)) -- you're right about the intellectual blindness about other possibilities.
I find Chesteron's distributism an interesting one, and personally really admire cooperative societies.
Do you have anything constructive to offer or are you going to stick with low effort criticism without even proposing an alternative? So far all you have are weak complaints, totally disconnected from objective reality.
That seems awfully defeatist and with a very negative view of the human spirit.
I can imagine the end of Capitalism, and it looks like Star Trek.
Star Trek ignores real estate. Who gets the penthouse and who gets the first floor apartment next to the noisy space port. who gets the house with the beach view and who just get views of the wall of the neighboring building.
Who does all the really shit and boring jobs. Say mining or construction. And can they just take vacation in middle of project and let it hang for a few years? It is really distorted universe where either you have automation or do not... And timeline as whole really does not work...
I guess for projects people consider themselves important this could be done via personal honor system or even just interpersonal relation - I promised my friend the launch loop will be done by equinox & he would sad if I don't hold my word.
I guess if you press the post scarcity peddal hard enough youncould solve even that - space habitats potentially give so muc living space to make these issues moot.
Yeah just let the military run everything
So all its gonna take to end capitalism is matter replicators, FTL travel, interstellar colonization, and unifying under a one world government after a decade of horrifying eugenics wars fought between genetically enhanced supermen- And after all that Picard gets to live on a nice vineyard in France while thousands of voyager doctor clones toil away in the dilithium mines
Dang, you're so right, a post-scarcity society is obviously not feasible without renacting a fictional story.
Y'all took the example, and dove right onto the wackiest parts of that example, huh? We also haven't met a continuum of godlike sycophants, so I guess space travel isn't possible for us at all yet lmao
It's hilarious how anyone would consider a series of cheesy scifi stories by a collection of hack writers as a basis for discussion of economic systems. Regardless of technology, a post-scarcity is obviously not feasible. Sure we can make staple foods and mass manufactured products incrementally cheaper through automation. But the things that people really want as signaling mechanisms for social status will always be scarce. For example, prime real estate in geographically favorable areas.
If you're going to present Star Trek as a plausible example of what a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society looks like, it's fair to point out all of the BS behind Star Trek's portrayal. In the real world, we can't have free energy. In the real world, we can't have warp drives or replicators that can instantly and perfectly assemble anything from nothing.
And I think it's fair to point out that every vision of utopia necessarily comes at a high cost in blood and violence because you have to do something about the people who don't agree with the vision. Star Trek handwaves this away by saying humanity just "evolved" beyond their base desires and flaws and fully voluntarist socialism just works.
But without the Treknobabble and magitech, what's does the end of capitalism actually look like in a world where there are no easy solutions, and no benevolent space-elves descending from the heavens to save us from ourselves?
Nothing in Star Trek even makes any sense. It's a completely artificial universe, constructed as a background for telling fun stories. From the perspective of alternative economic systems it's no different than children's fairy tales.
I am an optimist and capitalism looks like success. It's the exact opposite of defeatism.
Yeah, even how they apply technology makes no sense - they have gravity control and yet they still care about planets ? Where are large scale habitats or for the record actually any mega scale engineering projects ?
Capitalism looks like exploited third world children in sweatshops making your t-shirts and phones.
It's easy to see an exploitative system as success as long as one is on the side that does the exploiting.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it is the reverse.
Communism looks like exploited people stripped of their history and culture in gulag building useless inefficient projects.
You should take a look at how capitalism works, I’d start with like USA, see how many kids go to bed hungry, have no health insurance, etc. then I’d go to like inner City Philly or Chicago, then South to like Jackson Mississippi, check out how great all that shit is :)
Or you can go to Zurich, take a look how capitalism looks there. And go check how socialism in North Korea works.
People are people, top rich minority always finds ways to exploit poor majority under any system.
Switzerland ….
Switzerland has mandatory universal health insurance where everyone must purchase basic coverage. The government provides premium reduction subsidies for lower-income individuals and families to ensure affordability.
The unemployment insurance system provides benefits for up to 400 days (about 18 months) for those who lose their jobs, with the amount based on previous earnings. There are also programs for job retraining and placement assistance.
Switzerland’s public pension system that provides retirement benefits starting at age 64 for women and 65 for men. It also includes survivor benefits for spouses and children.
Comprehensive coverage for people with disabilities, including rehabilitation services, vocational training, and financial support for those unable to work.
Monthly child allowances are provided to families for each child until age 16 (or 25 if in education or training). Additional birth and adoption allowances are also available.
Social Assistance via means-tested program that provides financial support for basic living needs when other social insurance benefits are insufficient. This serves as the ultimate safety net.
Mandatory coverage for all employees that covers medical costs and income replacement for work-related and non-work-related accidents.
Paid maternity leave for 14 weeks at 80% of salary, along with job protection during this period.
Switzerland’s system is notable for combining mandatory insurance schemes with income-based contributions and government subsidies to ensure broad coverage while maintaining work incentives.
So maybe not mention Switzerland… Any of the examples would be called “far-left” (or worse) in the US of A
And all it took to esablish all this was just ending up with all the treasure plundered from Holocaust ending ub being stored in the Swiss bank vaults...
we’ve been “spreading democracy” around the world since then so we should have enough too
Now compare the poor in North Korea to the “poor” in Switzerland.
Switzerland - no, America - 100%
If I had to choose between being poor in America or being poor in North Korea I'd choose NK every day of the week and twice on Sunday
That's soviet communism. Yugoslav communism looked like people with high standards of living and the strongest passports in the world, free to travel wherever they wanted and celebrating their history.
>> Yugoslav communism looked like people with high standards of living
You're just making things up as you go, aren't you? More then a million Yugoslavs left the country as "Gastarbeiters" to be able to feed themselves and their families. Inflation was high and people had to convert their salaries into German marks the same day they got pay checks, otherwise the money was worthless the next day. Basic goods were unattainable. People had to smuggle coffee, bananas and jeans across the border. Of course if you were a part of the red nobility, your life was easier as you got access to special stores and got to enjoy the fruits of the labor of your fellow equals.
Can you prove that capitalism isn't gonna end the entire human race ?
I'm sure you can imagine anything but that's not really helpful.
Can you prove that any other economic system isn't going to end the entire human race.
You're the one saying that capitalism is better. I didn't claim anything. Never said I knew what's best for the world.
You said you do. So, tell us ! Claims require evidences.
This is what ideological indoctrination looks like - it's worse than even amongst the CCP cadres.
One thing that only the "survivors" realize is just how materialistic the Soviet Bloc societies were.
And I don't mean philosophically materialistic, like "there is no soul". That too, but I mainly mean that in the shortage of everything (and there usually was a shortage of everything) people would become fixated on owning relatively banal objects.
Girls would prostitute themselves for a nice pair of Western jeans, people would snitch and steal, break the law, run illegal smuggling rings while bribing the police, take bribes themselves etc., over things such as stockings, tires or calculators.
I was not able to persuade one young American that not paying a fat bribe to a doctor could have fatal consequences back then. "But in socialism, there must be a common free healthcare for everybody!" - Yeah, lad, on paper. Paper tolerates everything. The one thing that was never in shortage were slogans, propaganda, red flags and red stars.
The book tells a story of how bananas were nearly unobtainable and thus became an almost totemic status symbol.
An Estonian actress pilfers a banana from a high-level Party function, risking grave consequences, just so her daughter could taste one at least once in her life. Alas, the daughter is too young to appreciate this and declares that it tastes like "poopoo".
Giving "presents" to doctors is still very much ingrained in the older generation up to this day. :P
True. I visited a doctor friend in a fairly good institution (IKEM) and he showed me a comode. When he opened it, it was full of alcohol. Hard liquor and wine.
He said: "This is what the patients brought us last week. How are we supposed not to become alcoholics?"
He was seriously worried, btw. No light joking. In every work collective, healthcare included, there are some people prone to alcoholism and this is just a dangerous temptation to them.
historians have described the USSR as an 'affirmitive action empire', a contradictory one
This might be a good article for such a perspective: https://reason.com/2021/11/01/yes-it-was-an-evil-empire/
Might this be available in some ebook format somewhere?
created epub for my personal use, obviously publicly available, therefore hoping not an issue to share: https://limewire.com/d/r2ZTu#rcSoipCE3E
Reminds me a bit of the “Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel.
I guess the post is caused by this article
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843605
What a load of politicised rubbish.
I’m the farthest thing imaginable from a Bolshevik sympathizer but I often wonder whether big-C Communism could have survived and how it would have fared if the United States hadn’t engaged in sustained economic warfare against it. I imagine it might look something a bit like Chinese Communism does today, although perhaps those days came and went in the later eras of the Party system.
What economic warfare? Even after WWII the USA literally sold food to the USSR. Without that their food shortages would have been even worse.
People who got too serious about communism tended to get eliminated by Stalin, and then the people in charge of the elimination (Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria) were in turn eliminated in later purges.
Chinese communism survives because the US spends an insane amount of money on their goods each year. It would have collapsed by now if not for the US demand for stuff.
Communism depended on the west and was sustained by it. Obviously they exported raw materials to purchase the many things they failed to produce themselves including food. But also particularly, the Soviets had no way to set prices in their centrally planned economy that actually worked, so they kept the show on the road by copying prices from western free market economies.
This is one reason the USSR was always lagging behind western economies despite being scientifically advanced. They had to wait for the west to develop products and do price discovery, because GOSPLAN didn't have any way to price things properly themselves.
The premise of its “success” was based on half the population working for free in the camps for the other half. Many major projects were executed with little thought for the slaves/workers that perished, all for the goals of socialism. Then oligarchy followed, without the way to increase worker productivity. The only well funded programmes were in the defence sector which bankrupted the country eventually
Important to understand that these are "absurdities" only when viewed from the angle of market economy and democratic society. For people living in Soviet Union this was just a "state of the world".
Communist values (or lack of values) shaped the political and social systems in which people were born and raised.
First we shape systems, then systems shape us.
This was written and edited by folks who lived in the USSR, so we know that these people held complexity. More than "just..."
Just is a great word. It alerts the author and reader that there's little substance in the claim. Just trust me!
People were shaped by the rules they lived under. That doesn't make the rules any less insane.
Yes. What I was trying to say that people who live within those rules (and keep propagating/making them!) can't just live in the constant congitive dissonance state. They rationalize this state of the world, they tell stories (to themselves and to each other) to make sense of these rules, so it doesn't feel insane.
They absolutely can live in the constant congitive dissonance state. I did 30 years of my life. Many of us did. I know it's hard to believe for people living all their life in the free world, but constant congitive dissonance was just part of the reality for us.
Well, the very real absurdities and nightmare of your "way of life", you don't see them as well. What happens now in Gaza? Do you "see" it?
Many were aware of the absurdities. The issue is that when one is inundated with absurdities around them, identifying what is true is impossible.
> While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II, making the return of this form of totalitarianism impossible
Even written in 2021 rather than today, it's difficult to take the OP seriously after this. Both Hitler's nazism and Stalin's communism are manifestations of the deeper authoritarian sympathies that infect the human psyche and to which the modern world is quickly succumbing.
> deeper authoritarian sympathies
It is not that but systematic destruction of any institution standing in the way. Once that is done it is easier to wield power and suppress people to do stuff. Just look at Russia today, where dissent is extremely risky to you and people around you, where shitnews television is pumping people with weird narratives, etc. Similarly T.Snyder argues that a precursor to the atrocities (not the war per se) in WWII were the destruction of the institutions.
Communism was quite different from nazism, whatever they tell and told you in the west. You just did not live there, and some people rewrote the history for you. Equating communism and nazism is one of the most abominable aspects of western propaganda
They are both the same. One wants one true race society and the the other one true class society. The only way tho achieve one or the other state is by eliminating those who don't conform (Holocaust and Holodomor). It's despicable some pretend one is better then the other.
Accusing Karl Marx of what Stalin did is like saying Lincoln is guilty of Trump.
And how can you achieve a classless society without violence?
Violence on the rich is justified. Unless of course they give it up willingly.
In the view of the whole world you (probably) belong to the very rich. Does that statement apply to you? Are you willing to donate all your goods to Africa?
If everyone else does, proportionally to their means, sure!
If I have to starve myself, I don't see what would it solve…
So, no then, if it would hurt you, but you are fine hurting others for your goals.
The other side says something similar. Violence on "not my race" is justified, because they are subhumans.
You can't change race, you can change wealth.
How exactly can you change wealth? Would you lobotomize more intelligent people, perhaps knee cap athletes, break fingers of musicians?
Wealth isn't a part of one's body… redistributing wealth is not the same as mutilating people. This comparison is insane.
I don't know about you, but for me my mind is my wealth. For an athlete their body is and so on. This is the basis for building all additional wealth.
Wtf is it with Russians (or their Estonian clients) needing 500 pages before getting to the point?
1. Black Book of Communism
2. "Unborn"
Yeah, no.
I'm not saying USSR was a panacea or that Stalin did nothing wrong (Tankies are the fucking worst. I hung out on /r/communism for a while, and, as the kids used to say "gross").
I take writing like the OP with a HUGE grain of salt.
There are plenty of crimes and problems with what happened in the Soviet Union. Some of these were intentional by the leadership both before, during, and after Stalin. Some of these were self-owns (War Communism much?) some of these were forced errors (when doing battle one makes tough choices, and this includes in ideological/economic/actual war). Some of these were straight up evil policies (gulags, great purges, Katyn, etc...)
If someone can do real analysis I'm down, but once you start quoting Black Book of Communism, I know you're coming with an agenda and it's hard for me to take you in good faith. Especially if you're counting "The Unborn" - go on, just call the US a "Nazi Nation with the unborn holocaust" (I grew up in that shit, so saw the propaganda first hand).
>>1. Black Book of Communism
Are you contending existence of mass murders under almost any communist regime? What agenda are you talking about? You are making it sound communism is a noble idea, which someone is trying to discredit undeservingly.
>>2. "Unborn" It was about an estimation of how much more people would Soviet Union have in time if it hadn't murdered so many of its citizens. Imagine children of children of missing 20 million people.
> While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II [...] this has not happened with communism.
This resonates quite deeply. In my country nazis go straight to jail but communists walk our soil completely unpunished. They have half a dozen political parties, are well coordinated, are popular and are constantly elected by the population when they promise them heaven on earth. This is especially ironic since nazism is short for national socialism.
Communism is alive and well in Latin America. Brazilian president Lula declared to CNN his intention to install communism in my country not even a week ago. It has been his intention for over 40 years. He and his party has been in power for over 20 years. Yet people act as though it was fake news.
A specific, racist form of fascism can't really be compared to an economic ideology.
It absolutely can. Nazis, like socialists, centralized control of the economy in the state. It's just that they did it in order to further the goals of the so called Aryan nation as a whole. That's why it's called national socialism.
"Naziism had economic principles therefore it is a peer of any general economic system." Nah. Capitalism and communism don't have all those racist tenets. Nor the expansionism.
Principles have nothing to do with it. The key feature is totalitarian government control over the economy and the means of production. Nazi Germany certainly had it.
Does communism require totalitarianism?
Of course. How else could you compel vast amounts of people to do hard labor for the benefit of others?
Accelerated transition to it likely does. Gradual transition probably doesn’t. In social market economies redistribution is relatively strong but it can become even stronger, to the point where it’s indistinguishable from socialism. If done carefully while rewarding entrepreneurial initiative and penalizing rent seeking, it may be even not that bad.
> Gradual transition probably doesn’t.
My country's current president had the exact same idea: install socialism in Brazil slowly to get people used to it so they don't launch a counter-revolution.
We are currently a dictatorship of the judiciary and very much en route to become a Venezuela tier country.
People work nearly half a year just to pay taxes and I'm not even accounting for inflation.
The future already seems hopeless and bleak and he hasn't even fully won yet.
> If done carefully while rewarding entrepreneurial initiative and penalizing rent seeking
"Careful" is the understatement of the century. Many a socialist has tried, only to discover they are on the wrong end of the Laffer curve.
Nobody really enjoys being utterly crushed by taxes in order to pay for the welfare of people they couldn't care less about.
Taxes are tolerated because people believe they will indirectly benefit from it. Taxpayers expect taxes to be converted into useful infrastructure and services for everyone, themselves included.
Socialism in practice is actually just wealth redistribution: taking from productive people to give to the poor and unproductive. Quite literally. Very often they find a way to exclude you based on your means. If you're rich or even middle class, it's not for you.
Your reasoning is a fallacy of generalization of a bad example. Move to Europe and see how it might work. I pay a lot of taxes, but I do see value in paying them.
> Socialism in practice is actually just wealth redistribution: taking from productive people to give to the poor and unproductive.
This is wrong. Poor people can be productive. If salary inequality is high, the workers earn bare minimum doing most of the job while managers get their bonuses. Landlords may capture significant share of their income despite being absolutely unproductive. In such cases socialist policies may simply minimize inverse redistribution (exploitation).
> Move to Europe and see how it might work.
Where in Western and Central Europe exactly do we have Socialist countries?
> Move to Europe and see how it might work.
The welfare states of Europe are unlikely to keep working much longer if too many people start moving there in order to benefit from them.
> Poor people can be productive.
I didn't mean to imply they couldn't be. They are distinct groups.
I meant to say that socialism frequently targets the poor with charity, and straight up demands that the unproductive be taken care of. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Socialism demands that you work for others at no benefit to yourself.
Nothing wrong with such charity, provided that people freely choose to engage in it. Socialism seeks to force the costs of it upon everyone whether they want it or not, turning it into a burden. It's easy to be the good guy when others are paying for it.
> Landlords may capture significant share of their income despite being absolutely unproductive.
Are landlords not responsible for the maintenance of the property?
> In such cases socialist policies may simply minimize inverse redistribution (exploitation).
Minimization of exploitation is just normal regulation, not socialism. I agree that this is necessary. Billionaires are a sign people are exploiting a lack of regulation in some area. Surveillance capitalism is my favorite example.
Of course, how else can you achieve classless society. Do you expect people to freely give everything they have to the state, so it can redistribute their wealth around? Don't you know the concept of a class enemy and why so much of mass murdering was going on in communist countries?
Catholic clergy do this.
They don't give their property to the state. They sell it and donate it to the poor.
Not true, Catholic priests still have private property. But sure there are other religions that have this. It's voluntary and the percentage of people doing this is tiny.
So people have done this?
Generally monastics rather than all clergy.
Yes, it has happen that some people have given away all their property and secluded themselves. I'm afraid to ask what is the point of your question. You surely don't think everyone will give up their wealth to the avant-garde and submit to them voluntarily. You do know how many millions had to die because of such ideas?
Nazis had racial laws. As you did, by the way, just not towards jews, remember? Something which the communists have not done. And I think it ruins your theory, as well as the communusm equals nazism equation, so beloved by your propaganda
The original statement was "they cannot be compared". I said they could be compared. In order to demonstrate that, I drew parallels between both ideologies.
I never claimed they were equal. Not once.
That's because the communists found a workaround; they were the first to invent the idea that they could just officially target discrimination against "Zionists" and "cosmopolitans" and just lob that accusation against any Jew, effectively legalizing state antisemitism under a different name.
Easy to claim, only that the claim is false. It was not so much about jews being jews (would you claim that there were no jews in science, engineering, hospitals?). Having quotas in top universities is what you try to do now with asian students (by this I do not mean to negate the fact that lives of many jews were ruined because of these quotas). And the true nature of "Zionism" can be seen by everyone today. The "zionists" do not even try to hide it. I mean Zionism in the "Zeev" Zhabotinskiy sense. Go read his "Wall of Iron".
Funny you mention Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky's beliefs were formed from the proof playing out in front of him, that not even the Ukrainians, the second largest ethnicity in the Russian empire, could get even a semblance of fairness out of the Russian empire. If the Ukrainians failed, what chance did the even fewer Jews have? Trying to understand Jabotinsky without understanding the world he was born into is like trying to put modern beliefs onto Alexander the Great.
If you were a Jewish person of ordinary means, certain engineering paths were completely barred to you in the USSR. Keep in mind, engineering and math were the most prestigious forms of STEM for the Soviets.
So are you trying to claim the Doctor's Plot case, the assasination of Solomon Mikhoels, the rootless cosmopolitan campaign, Soviet "Zionology", that all those just didn't happen? People were around for those you know.
To the person who replied, saying "some engineering paths were barred". I have not negated the facts, just tried to put them in true perspective, which I think is lacking in your response.
You said that my claim is false. I'm not sure what true perspective you are referring to that could show that. The situation was far more severe than just "quotas at top universities". That the Stalin years ended in a campaign of barely disguised antisemitism is also just fact.
Again, cannot reply directly. What I said was false, is saying, or suggesting, that what happened to the jews in Soviet Union was like what happened to the jews in nazi Germany. It was not.
By this I am not negating not Stalin repressions, not the "Doctors affair", not the fact that many gifted people could not realize their potential in a way they could have had otherwise.
If you open the comment separately as its own page, it should allow you to reply there.
Not trying to claim that they're the same at all, especially not in a physical sense. Maybe in a spiritual or cultural sense the consequences could be compared, and maybe Stalin was planning something more (we'll never know). The goals were completely different. As I mentioned somewhere else, the full scope of the Nazis goals were so much worse than most people know.
The only claim here is that Soviets did not have racial laws at all - they essentially did.
Ok, they "essentially had racial laws", with Gelfand and Landau being godlike in the Soviet science, Kantorovich having his prizes, not speaking of the jews with the title of "Hero of Soviet Union". Not speaking of people who founded the Israeli science (together with jews from other European countrues). Where did they go to university? In some parallel world?
This is not to negate the facts, but to put things in perspective.
Yes
I don't know why the topic of Soviet universities specifically is so touchy, out of everything else. Notice a detail I mentioned earlier - "Jewish person of ordinary means". As with most things in the Soviet Union, bribes, or even just who you know, can make problems go away. But not every family had the sort of means or connections.
Before you compare to American tuition - I'm not talking about the top universities. I'm talking about effectively being completely barred from an entire career path, despite having the talent for it.
It amuses me that the libertarians are bearing this torch now.
Uh? Initially USSR was in favour of Israel… Until they started to do what Israel does…
For about a year - and only because of a perceived alignment on socialism. That went away as soon as Israel was perceived to be allying more with Britain. So, whatever you think "Israel does", it wouldn't have even had a chance to happen yet.
Use your real account, don't hide :) Then reply to me and I'll take the time to reply.
> Something which the communists have not done.
Except when they effectively enslaved people on the basis of their ethnicity (the reality of being Soviet German, Crimean Tatar or Chechen in 1940-early 1950s). My German grandfather was taken into Labor Army (forced labor institution) as soon as he turned 16 (in 1952). He obviously wasn’t a Nazi collaborator. He was fully rehabilitated only in 1990.
Soviet communist policies towards ethnic minorities often did involve oppression and almost genocidal treatment. That fact of course should not be used to paint an all-black picture. Late USSR wasn’t bad at all for our family, creating a lot of opportunities.
It's not fake news it's good news.
Entertaining, but not to be taken too seriously. The author himself says that it’s very subjective and not thoroughly fact-checked. Even then, the digs at the Kievan Rus’ are… well, absurd. Also, I don’t know of any European country without its share of demented and paranoid rulers. But England is not Henry VIII and Germany is not Hitler.
Also, this
> But let us start with the Communist Manifesto which is the holiest tome of communist ideology and can be called the red gospel.
is a pearl of unintended absurd humour. In this case, when someone applies their beliefs and frame of mind to a foreign object without actually understanding it.
In the end I agree with the author that all life if absurd, it’s just a matter of point of view.
I feel like some people are trying for the sequel right now.
Moral relativism is like digging a latrine. Almost nobody wants to do it for somebody else, it's a chore to do it for one's self, but pretty much everyone appreciates when it's already done for them.
Anyway, I feel like 'liberalism' is under broad attack by both conservatives and progressives, largely because it is very unsatisfying right now.
Speaking for myself, liberalism is a way to understand the world. Liberalism in this sense does not especially imply progressivism or conservatism, and can be practiced by anyone. To re-phrase the Robustness Principle: "be opinionated in what you do, be open minded in what you accept from others".
I feel like the stronger you push your opinions into your understanding of the world, the harder it gets to actually understand what is going on in the world. As Colbert said: "reality has a well-known liberal bias". This statement makes more sense if run in reverse: "An open-minded understanding of the world is more likely to be durably and broadly true than a strongly opinionated understanding".
Unfortunately, it has become VERY difficult to talk about what is going on in the world right now, largely because a lot of disparate groups are pushing their opinions into their understanding very very hard. There are many people who currently disagree with their own in-group, but are restricted in what they can say because of social loyalty constraints. If you can't be the first person to speak up, consider being the second.
The absolute strongest superpower that humans have is the the ability to tell another story. Don't get stuck in the first satisfying story you hear.
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If you are satisfied with blame, try examining the situation closer. If you are satisfied that a whole political party is evil, try examining the situation closer.
Here are some questions:
What is the person or organization doing
When a person or organization says something, is it Sometimes, it is a trap to fight the obvious fight. Perhaps the other side is fine with losing the obvious fight for some reason.People don't believe crazy things because of correct facts, they believe them because of satisfying stories.
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May I humbly ask 2 things of you:
1. Please don't assume I'm saying or implying something beyond what I've said here. You may feel free to go beyond what I've said, just don't put it on me.
2. Please don't join a death cult. You can look up the characteristics of a high control group; a death cult is all that plus their definition of morality narrows over time, excluding more and more people. Death cults ramp up anger over time. It's very easy to fall into one right now, and they are not exclusive to either side of the political spectrum. It's better to endure a little moral dissatisfaction than to join a high control group.
Thank you. When the head of the labor stats department is fired for reporting labor stats (she has a PhD), when the head of the public health agency is a vaccine skeptic lawyer .. I know where we in the US are headed.
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We have the closest things to counterfactuals when it comes to history we're likely to get comparing these two systems... Communism has killed more people. I don't know why your first instinct is to "wonder" when we have actual comparisons.
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"Go live somewhere else" is a terrible argument. According to you after every election 49% of the population should move to another country.
What about the Vatican?
Capitalist Nigeria and Somalia must be thriving countries
Capitalism can be inhumane, especially if it is not controlled by democracy.
Communism is always inhumane. It cannot be established democratically, it cannot be run democratically. It will always end in misery, poverty and death.
By definition, capitalism is inhumane. Even if you are worried about the market looking unkindly on your accural of capital, you're doing so in a fashion that prioritizes their perception rather than actual virtue.
You are right that democracy can reign capitalism's amoralism in, but so can any other form of government. I don't see why the same can't be said for communism, beyond the standard "it hasn't happened before".
You mean: It has never happened once, no matter how often tried. How many communist experiments, how many ruined lives will it take until you and your kind finally get it? But I know the answer already ...
My kind?
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> While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II, making the return of this form of totalitarianism impossible [...]
This didn't age well.
Nazi Germany never put up fences to stop their people from leaving. The Soviet Union did. That’s my metric for the standard of living in them
Not entirely true. Jews willing to leave had to pay an exit tax so high that it basically meant leaving all your wealth behind. Later, they weren't permitted to emigrate at all.
Except for the ones around the concentration camps.
I'm virulently opposed to communism and the Soviet Union, as well as Nazism, and it is tempting to say that the Soviet Union was worse than Nazi Germany.
In some ways that's true if you look at the number of their own citizens that were killed by Stalin vs Hitler. On the other hand, Stalin had a longer period of time for his mass murder than Hitler did. But Hitler caused the almost complete destruction of Germany with the war he started.
In terms of living conditions, you are probably correct; although again, Hitler's starting point in terms of economy, civilization, and living conditions was much better than Stalin's, and we didn't see Nazism play out over decades.
Nazi Germany's soldiers on the advance engaged in systematic killing and regarded most of the population of the conquered territories as vermin; Soviet soldiers merely raped most of the women and did not engage in systematic killing campaigns, with some exceptions (e.g. Katyn massacre)
I'd say it's difficult to say which is more deplorable: Hitler killing millions just because of their ancestry, or Stalin killing millions in the Gulag because of paranoia and because it was a convenient source of labor.
If we're just looking at the success of the economic systems, leaving aside the mass murder and the devastating war, then what you're saying is correct.
IMO, when thinking about this question it's useful to look at the full scope of their objectives. We don't know much about what else Stalin planned, but given the time he had it probably would not fundamentally change the order of magnitude. On the other hand, we do know some of what the Nazis planned to do if they had won, and it was on a scale far beyond even the millions they did murder.
Millions did not die in gulags. Gulags were not death camps and while deaths did happen, it was not the goal and if you go and check the numbers, USRR's numbers are very very different than nazi death camps.
Stalin's repressions toll, whether in Gulag camps, forced labor or mass executions, was in the millions; though not tens of millions, as americans and their mercenaries from ex Soviet republics like to tell. The conditions in Gulag camps in Stalin's time, and also quite a bit after, were horrible.
"raped most of the women.."
Told that way, this is libel, one which the german revanchism very fond of. Not that people like you would care.
In Germany it's punishable libel to say anything bad about any identifiable person, whether it's true or not. Even saying "Adolf Hitler was pure evil" is technically again the law.
Source:
So you're saying people in death camps could have just walked away but didn't because being in a death camp in germany was better than the alternative?
I find that really hard to believe. Do you have a source?
> death toll of communist terror
I don’t think this was the fault of that socioeconomic system known as “communism”. Yet the article tries to push that assumption a few times.
> Hitler as the biggest criminal and murderer of the 20th century. It is hard to believe that, actually, Stalin murdered significantly more. Not only are the crimes of communism not condemned, but they are by and large not known.
Right, so it was this particular implementation of communism, epitomized by Stalin’s policies.
Don't try this at live human beings again. I don't care about your nice theory that could theoretically work.
Just don't. I was born in such a miserable system and I certainly don't want to die in one.
One century of hell was enough.
That wasn't the only issue with communism. It was so inefficient it failed to make enough food. Soviet style central planning was popular in India as well, which was a democracy. Resulting shortages and low economic growth led to what was avoidable deaths and malnutriton. Once you take price out of the picture, society stops being self-organizing and has to be told what to do. That socioeconomic system failed horribly and yet people keep trying to spin fantasies about it.
Ah ha, didn't have to wait long for "we've not tried real communism yet".
But if we want to be precise, he is right - in theory, it wasn't the fault of that socioeconomic system itself, and logically you can't exclude the possibility that in the future there might be a communist system without causing millions of deaths, unfortunately in practice all such systems, including the one in Russia and China, had enormous toll.
The reason for it, in my opinion, stems from the origin: in an ideal world, the whole population would agree the system is fantastic and introduce it, based on mutual respect. What actually happens is that crowds get furious and start killing and introduce a new system by violence, so it's hard to expect a nice fruit from a rotten seed.
I think you've got it the wrong way around. All ideology is wrong, incorrect and fails in contact with reality. The true purpose of ideology (or 'the system') is to provide its adherents with the excuse they need to act badly. It could be relatively mild attempts to increase social status through hypocrisy and virtue-signalling. Or it could be to commit murder, torture and so on.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it:
Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.
What obscures matters is that evil tends to operate in layers with each layer deceived by the layer above it in the hierarchy (or below it, if you prefer a lowerarchy). So at the bottom there is a multitude of relatively decent people who don't want to kill and really do believe in the system.
The theory is a perfectly spherical cow - impossible in practice, laughable in imagination. We have a firm understanding from historical data of how it fails, even if it doesn't match the imagination of its proponents.
You almost had it right there at the end. Communism isn't compatible with how humans normally act. You can't introduce a system which is incompatible with humans and expect it to work.
Anyway next time you experiment with utopias, try not to bring along hundreds of millions of unwilling participants.
I think Communism is a 19th century pseudoscience idea like phrenology. There’s no evidence these things are real but phrenology was easy to discount while many people still choose to believe in Communism despite lack of evidence of it working long term.
> Communism isn't compatible with how humans normally act.
A correction: most humans. There are a few who like communism. Why not them live their lives as they want? Communities like the Longo Maï are a living proof this is absolutely possible on a tiny scale when a willing subset is involved.
> A correction: most humans. There are a few who like communism. Why not them live their lives as they want?
Because those people then starting to kill all the problematic people, as we saw in Soviet and China. They put all the blame on these "bad people" and sent them to the gulag.
You can't ever let people with this kind of thinking into power.
> Communities like the Longo Maï are a living proof this is absolutely possible on a tiny scale when a willing subset is involved.
At that tiny scale they depend on the surrounding capitalist people and therefore it makes sense they also abide by the laws of the country.
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Communism is very widely defined as a classless, moneyless, stateless society. So no, it has not existed in any modern society. Criticise the Soviet Union all you like – any good Marxist should do the same – but this is a very weak put-down.