You wouldn’t think of a European community of being so insanely pro Russia, yet on every single post mentioning Russia, any negative comments about Russia or their government will get downvoted to hell, some people get banned. I would not be surprised if I am banned or downvoted for posting this. People who are not just blatantly spamming Kremlin propaganda, please say why you are so pro Russia, to someone confused.
Russia is in a contest with European empire and basically has been for centuries. Napoleon invaded Russia. The Americans invaded Russia. The Germans invaded Russia.
Did they do this because Russia is inherently “bad”? No. They did it to advance European empire. In the case of the Germans and the Americans, they explicitly did it to stop the working class from holding power and directing their own government to develop along the communist path.
Russia became capitalist and liberal and then it tried to join the Western Empire. It really thought it could be part of the club that rules the world so brutally and violently. But the West rebuffed Russia multiple times and then demonstrated that they had not yet given up their goal of subjugating Russia and exploiting it for resources. So Russia took up the position, finally, that the West cannot be trusted and that Russia must prevent the West from ever being able to subjugate it.
In the current contest between Russia and Ukraine, everyone in the political spheres understands this as a proxy war between Russia and the West. US military leaders have said it, NATO leaders have said it. It’s not a Russian expansionist project. It’s a proxy war, which is how the West has been fighting with Russia for at least 6 decades. This is not a wild claim. It’s a historically continuous one.
In a contest between Russia and the West, we want Russia to win. Because the alternative is that the West expands its empire to include the vast territory, resources, and peoples of Russia. This would be very bad for the whole world (except white people in the Empire). The evidence for that is plain to see. What Europe and its colonies have done to the world is beyond the largest evil the world has ever seen.
In the end, we are forced into a brutal calculus - do we support the end of the Western empire or do we support the continuation of the Western empire? If we support the end of the Western empire, we have to acknowledge that we support the Empire’s enemies. And if we would rather oppose the Empire’s enemies, we have to acknowledge that we therefore support the expansion and maintenance of the empire. There is, unfortunately, no alternative.
Adding on to this, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, and Ho Chi Minh had to make similar choices during WWII. Ally with liberals like France and even reactionaries (such as the KMT) to fight against the Axis Powers or fight the Axis alone while maintaining ideals, but risk other nations joining them (especially the UK and US).
Materialism of their situation led them to joining the rest of the Allies, especially when it meant getting Lend-Lease deals or intelligence through their spy networks. Communist states of today find themselves in the same situation regarding Russia and Iran. Maintain ideological purity or actually have a shot at destroying capitalism. Furthermore, they can plant the seeds for future revolution by supporting reactionaries in their struggles against other reactionaries.
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You can explain why you think it’s baffling. I don’t think it’s pointless
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Please read Yogthos reply here: https://lemmy.ml/post/49690377/26558932
It basically encapsulates most of the important reasoning.
Why do we support Iran against the US? Objectively Iran is a theocracy that is socially backwards, it oppresses women, it oppresses LGBTQ people, it has a reactionary social character. Why then do we support it? Because it is the lesser evil. And importantly we would support it if it aggressed first against the zionist entity because it’s not about aggression or simplistic victim/aggressor dynamics but about liberation for the region and the world. And because Iran exists the way it does today because of western meddling and it cannot move beyond its present character as long as the west is there serving as a foil. Take away that, take away the zionist entity and the aggression and siege situation, allow development and these things have an opportunity to change.
Anyways you use the term “totalitarian” which was itself invented by a Nazi apologist zionist to equate communism to Nazism. But why do you suppose that Russia is this but the west with its vast surveillance nets, its ICE, its camera systems, its global communications intercept network run by the eyes groups with NSA, GCHQ, and its brutal wars with atrocities against civilians across the middle east is not? I mean you can be arrested in Britain for the most trivial of things. You can be sent to prison for saying “I support Palestine Action” while peacefully protesting. How is it that these countries are not also “totalitarian” but Russia is? It cannot be and people only think that way because of propaganda. You have been blinded to the police state and brutality of the west while the brutality of Russia is hyped up, they hide the atrocities and human rights violations of the west and play down the problems while playing up, highlighting every instance and pounding the drums in your ears that scream “this is totalitarianism” to convince you of this fact.
Kleptocracy is also a meaningless term to communists. It’s almost like a slur which is selectively applied to the designated “bad guys”. All capitalist nations are run under a dictatorship of capital and capitalists to serve their interests. This is true in Russia and it is true in the US. If some places are a little more brazen with their corruption and others a little better at hiding it behind “lobbying” that doesn’t change the essential character in our opinion. People starve and sleep on the streets in every major US city while the wealthy sit atop their 12th mansion and party with models and use private jets to private islands. The wealthy do things like rape children and get a slap on the wrist because prison would be bad for them. The wealthy run pedophile networks like Jeffery Epstein and the government buries the evidence and ensures no one is held to account while fabricating lies about what really happened. They crash the economy like in 2008 and the government bails them out while shafting the average person. Does that sound like “kleptocracy”? Because that’s the US. Russian capitalist elites are no different, they steal from the people, they live lavishly while others suffer, they commit crimes and use connections to get away with it. It’s no different.
Russia is no more a kleptocratic police state than any other. The reason your metaphor is “anime villain” is because your understanding is cartoonish. Russia is a real country with a long history and over 140 million people. It has a total all-in police budget of $47B. The USA has ~350M people and an all-in police budget of $237B.
Russia’s per capita incarceration rate is significantly lower than the US. Russia recidivism rate is significantly lower than the US.
Essentially on all metrics you could measure a police state, the US is worse than Russia.
But of course, people will argue, just because the US is worse doesn’t mean that we can ignore Russia’s problems. And we don’t. We just understand that in a contest between Russia, who primarily has conflicts at its borders, and the US who primarily has conflicts in the periphery of the world where it does immense harm, we support any and all back pressure against the US even if that means a corrupt and violent state like Russia wins that contest.
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I don’t think it’s you being salty. I’m sure you can find point by point differences for everything, because every country is individually quite different. It doesn’t do anything about the macro perspective. Domestic policy is nearly irrelevant to the larger geopolitical contest.
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Your condescension is noted.
I will note that Russia has not conquered any of the countries it has had border disputes with. And again, the number is pretty telling. From 1992 to today Russia has been involved in handful of conflicts over its borders and national security. In that same time the US has destroyed 14 countries around the world. It’s not even comparable.
The reason I brought up Marxism-Leninism earlier is because many of us are Marxist-Leninists or adjacent to Marxism-Leninism here. Russia factually is not conquering neighboring countries, and has no actual reason to do so. In the conflict between a nationalist country and an imperialist coalition, ie Russia vs. the West, harming the position of imperialism strengthens the position of the global south, and therefore the prospects of socialism move forward.
This isn’t really an “absolutist” position, nuance exists. Ideally, Russia and Ukraine both return to socialism. However, this does not appear to be an immediate prospect, we do not pick the conditions we live in, we must deal with the hands we are dealt the best we can.
How familiar are you with Marxism-Leninism?
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The idea of a political vanguard was already present with Marx and Engels. Lenin advanced Marxism to the era of imperialism. Further, characterizing socialist democracy as “a small group of people [with] absolute power” is just not how socialist democracy or vanguards function in reality.
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I don’t have 50+ pages on why the next revolution will be different. In many ways, the next revolution will be very similar, such as concentrating political power in the hands of the working classes, and the violent reaction towards counterrevolutionaries. This is generally true of revolution. We do live in a different time, so different conditions will lead to different results (for example, Eastern European socialism may look more like China today than the USSR). However, I do have evidence supporting how your characterization of the distribution of power doesn’t actually hold up to scrutiny.
The soviet union was a dictatorship of the proletariat. The Soviets brutalized the capitalists, tsarists, fascists, landlords, and kulaks, while liberating the workers and peasants. The USSR had steady and consistent economic growth, and provided free, high quality education and healthcare, full employment, cheap or free housing, and fantastic infrastructure and city planning that still lasts to this day despite capitalism neglecting it. This rapid development resulted in dramatic democratization of society, reduced disparity, doubling of life expectancy, tripling of functional literacy rates to 99.9%, and much more. Living in the 1930s famine would not have been good, but it was the last major famine outside of wartime because the soviets ended famine in their countries.
Literacy rates, societal guarantees in the 1936 constitution, reports on the healthcare system over time, and more are good sources for these claims.
The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union.
The truth, when judged based on historical evidence and contextualization, is that socialism was the best thing to happen to Russia in the last few centuries, and its absence has been devastating.
Death rates spiked:
And wealth disparity skyrocketed alongside the newly impoverished majority:
Capitalism brought with it skyrocketing poverty rates, drug abuse, prostitution, homelessness, crime rates, and lowered life expectancy. An estimated 7 million people died due to the dissolution of socialism and reintroduction of capitalism, and this is why the large majority of post-soviet citizens regret its fall. A return to socialism is the only path forward for the post-soviet countries. A lot of Eastern European countries were swarmed with western capital during the destruction of socialism, which is what temporarily caused the rise of the far-right in these countries, but in time their problems will no longer be able to be ignored.
Regarding the death rate and life expectancy, I believe I mentioned this before but the graphs don’t support what you’re saying here. Death rates started climbing since the 1960s in Russia, and that trend was only reversed post-collapse (in your graph). And the supposed spike is not wildly out of line with that rising trend line since the 1960s. Furthermore, it seems to line up with a birth rate spike approx. 70 years earlier, which matches the life expectancy in Russia during that time. So it’s not clear that the collapse caused these extra deaths, or that there were just more people dying of natural causes/old age-related ailments because a large cohort of the population reached life expectancy at that time. The graph certainly does not seem to support the reading that it was due to the collapse. Birth rates also started climbing post-collapse (but that can be interpreted both positively as well as negatively so it’s harder to judge in isolation).
Similarly with life expectancy, trend line largely flatlined during the Soviet era after an initial strong climb (caused mostly by advancements in treatments for common age-related issues like heart diseases, same reason it climbed similarly in the West during this time), saw a dip post-collapse but then started rising again, for the first time in decades. That’s not because the Soviets did materially worse necessarily, it’s likely again due to advancements in medicine discovered in the West now spreading properly to the former Soviet states.
The collapse was certainly rough and had plenty of bad effects (see your income graphs for example, excellent example), don’t get me wrong. But death rate/life expectancy are imo very weak evidence of this, or can even be construed as counter-evidence.
We’ve discussed this before, at best I can say we agreed to disagree. With the immense economic collapse came, internally to the Soviets, an extreme drop in the ability to feed themselves and get proper healthcare. Prostitution skyrocketed, and with it came sexually transmitted diseases (this wasn’t regulated prostitution, but the criminal kind that is even more dangerous). Same with drug and alcohol abuse, violent and organized crime, and more. These are all standard effects from economic collapse.
Outside of the USSR, trading partners that relied heavily on the Soviets, like Cuba and the DPRK, underwent extreme turmoil. The Special Period in Cuba and the Arduous March in the DPRK could have been mitigated by a standing Soviet Union, but instead they had to largely fend for themselves, creating mass famine. While there was no famine of the same scale and intensity in the former Soviet Union, the economic collapse was still significant enough to result in excess deaths internally that amounted to a major tragedy.
did you have that one prepared or are you chatgpting me.
Prepared. I talk about Marxism-Leninism a lot, and as such have a big backlog of effort-comments I can draw from. I have one about the PRC as well:
PRC general effortpost
In China, the backbone of the economy is in the public sector, in huge State Owned Enterprises. The large firms and key industries in China are overwhelmingly publicly owned, while private ownership is relegated to small industry and highly competitive industries. As for working hours, the average is between 40 and 48 hours, usually hovering around 44-46. 996 is illegal, was largely in big tech firms, and is overall rare.
The PRC is a socialist state, not a state capitalist state like the Republic of Korea, US Empire, or Singapore. China being socialist has nothing to do with the name of the party in control, and everything to do with the mode of production and distribution in China. Rather than a neoliberal paradise, it’s closer to a nightmare for neoliberals. This editorial from The Guardian explains it quite well, actually:
How then, does China’s economy work? Public ownership is the principal aspect of China’s economy. This means that public ownership governs the large firms and key industries, and is what is rising in China, as private ownership is kept to small and medium non-essential industries. No system is static, meaning identifying the nature of a system depends on identifying what is rising and what is dying away. Cpitalists are held on a tight leash, and are prevented from gaining political power as a class. The reason private ownership is allowed at all is because China has very uneven development due to their rapid industrialization, and private ownership does help with filling in gaps left by the primary aspects of the economy like SOEs.
The form of democracy and the mode of production in China ensures that there is a connection between the people and the state. Policies like the mass line are in place to ensure this direct connection remains. This is why over 90% of the Chinese population supports the government, and why they have such strong perceptions around democracy:
The Chinese political system is based on whole-process people’s democracy, a form of consultative democracy. The local government is directly elected, and then these governments elect people to higher rungs, meaning any candidate at the top level must have worked their way up from the bottom and directly proved themselves. Combining this consultative, ground-up democracy with top-down economic planning is the key to China’s success.
I highly recommend Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance. Socialist democracy has been imperfect, but has gone through a number of changes and adaptations over the years as we’ve learned more from testing theory to practice. Boer goes over the history behind socialist democracy in this textbook.
China does have billionaires, as you might then protest. China is in the developing stages of socialism. Between capitalism, which is characterized by private ownership being the principal aspect of the economy and the capitalists in control of the state, and communism, characterized by full collectivization of production and distribution devoid of classes and the state, run along the lines of a common plan, is socialism, where public ownership is principle and the working classes in control. China in particular is working its way out of the initial stages of socialism:
The reason China has billionaires is because China has private property, and the reason it has private property is because of 2 major factors: the world economy is still dominated by the US empire, and because you cannot simply abolish private property at the stroke of a pen. China tried that already. The Gang of Four tried to dogmatically force a publicly owned and planned economy when the infrastructure best suited to that hadn’t been laid out by markets, and as a consequence growth was positive but highly unstable.
Why does it matter that the US Empire controls the world economy? Because as capitalism monopolizes, it is compelled to expand outward in order to fight falling rates of profit by raising absolute profits. The merging of bank and industrial capital into finance capital leads to export of capital, ie outsourcing. This process allows super-exploitation for super-profits, and is known as imperialism.
In the People’s Republic of China, under Mao and later the Gang of Four, growth was overall positive but was unstable. The centrally planned economy had brought great benefits in many areas, but because the productive forces themselves were underdeveloped, economic growth wasn’t steady. There began to be discussion and division in the party, until Deng Xiapoing’s faction pushing for Reform and Opening Up won out, and growth was stabilized.
Deng’s plan was to introduce market reforms, localized around Special Economic Zones, while maintaining full control over the principle aspects of the economy. Limited private capital would be introduced, especially by luring in foreign investors, such as the US, pivoting from more isolationist positions into one fully immersed in the global marketplace. As the small and medium firms grow into large firms, the state exerts more control and subsumes them more into the public sector. This was a gamble, but unlike what happened to the USSR, this was done in a controlled manner that ended up not undermining the socialist system overall.
To dogmatically collectivize the entire economy would actually be a move undesirable by Marxist standards. Certain economies like the DPRK and USSR have had to do so in order to develop military deterrence, China managed to negotiate itself into the global economy and take advantage of the utility of markets in socializing the small industries, making them ripe for central planning.
I’m a big 'ol commie. Like you, I’m also woke and colonial history-pilled, I just try to use that to help persuade people towards what I believe is the correct political line for certifying a better future.
You are not the first person having a misguided opinion on the Soviet Union.
Shocker, I know. But it’s not necessarily your fault, obviously the bourgeoisie, who controls most of the media you have access to, makes sure to propagate those beliefs, and not only in the obvious and crude ways.
But seriously, Cowbee is one of the most prolific posters here, he has those posts ready on a couple different subjects.
Of course a piefed bot immediately rejects evidence
prepared. seen it many times