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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Wait, you’re lumping the USSR into “crimes of capitalism”.

As another commenter has pointed out, from a people's perspective, if you leave propaganda aside, there was really not drastic difference between USSR and capitalist countries. Depending on the local implementation, you may have had more or less women's rights or gay rights, or more or less free healthcare, but at the end of the day ordinary people are still destroying their bodies working in fields and factories all day long and going hungry at times while an enlightened elite will drown in luxury, and if those people dare question the status quo the police or secret political police will imprison, torture, or assassinate them.

Apart from the specific forms they take, there's not much difference between working life and political repression under USSR, and that under USA. For more reading on KGB-like political repression in the USA, i recommend to check out COINTELPRO. For more reading on how USSR was not communist, i recommend to read Emma Goldman's fantastic accounts of her time in Russia and her disillusions with the Bolsheviks, one of which is very brief entitled "There is no communism in Russia": https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-there-i...

TLDR: In USSR there was no abolition of property to develop the commons. There was seizure of some forms of private property to become State property instead.

There was no free market, thus the USSR was not capitalist.

I can't believe I'm even arguing this point. It seems like some weird attempt to rewrite history with a narrative "if something went wrong with communism, its capitalisms fault".

No, the USSR collectivized the entire country, everything was state owned, the state determined what was produced (to the point of murdering citizens who tried to stop them). It was as close to communism as anyone has every gotten and it failed miserably.

> There was no free market, thus the USSR was not capitalist.

Of course there was a free market, at least after the NEP was implemented in 1921. Yes there were taxes, but in the USA too, that doesn't make USSR non-capitalist. It's like if you were to say 2022 China is not capitalist for some reasons: yes it has "communist" in the name, and no billionaires are not 100% above the law (contrary to the USA) but there is still money, class, property, gentrification, and everything else that defines capitalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy

> I can't believe I'm even arguing this point. It seems like some weird attempt to rewrite history with a narrative "if something went wrong with communism, its capitalisms fault".

Well if you can't believe it, you probably rarely spoke with anarchists. That's the main historical disagreement between anarchists (and anti-authoritarian marxists who are a tiny minority but still exist) and marxist-leninists. The latter claim the "dictatorship of the proletariat" is the road to communism by seizing everything that defines capitalism (State, police, prisons, factories) and placing it under proletarian State governance, while the former consider it's impossible to build communism (freedom and equality for all) with the exploitative tools of capitalism.

I agree with you there's some history rewriting which took place, but it took place about a century ago and it was done by the bolsheviks who erased the memory of the militants who drove the revolution in early 1917 before they seized State power in October and massacred all who disagreed. They were a well-armed minority party who seized State power and applied a dictatorship. They rewrote history and called "counter-revolutionaries" everyone who disagreed, including proper communists who wanted all power to the people. The memories of Emma Goldman, Nestor Makhno, or Volin are really useful to understand the political context of that time, and whatever happened when Lenin and Trotsky (who was chief of the Red Army at that time) had the Communes of Cronstadt and Ukraine massacred in blood.

> No, the USSR collectivized the entire country

That's doubly false. First, social status and private property were never really abolished in the USSR (or rather, were reestablished shortly after being abolished), so you had luxury homes for the cadre of the Party and miserable living conditions for ordinary people. Second, the State nationalized everything, which has nothing to do with collectivization: the Bolsheviks actively repressed the local communities who tried to organize collectivization of land/resources (see also Cronstadt/Makhnovtchina i mentioned earlier).

Maybe give the Emma Goldman link i posted earlier a read? It's really short and you may learn a thing or two about history of that time and place. She's in a unique position because she was an ardent proponent of the 1917 revolution when she was in the USA, but when she was imprisoned and deported from the USA for anti-militarist propaganda, she was confronted with the reality of life under Bolshevik rule and how her anarchist comrades were hunted down by the regime. Her autobiography is a great read, but even the shorter pamphlets are informative.

Well, they are really similar, at some angle. As in capitalism, you promised freedoms, wealth and appreciation for you work hard enough. As in capitalism, all your work in going to entitled few, wars and keeping you enslaved. Also both are fiction and never existed.

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