A brief history of the absurdities of the Soviet Union
laurivahtre.ee
laurivahtre.ee
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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...
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
Stalin couldn't have put it better himself.
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'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.
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.
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.
With enough demotivation due to freeloaders, the whole system creaks under its own weight.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> I don't understand. You're saying that also in communism, capitalism
We were talking about external influences. Period. Mentioned was taxes (ie. effort you have to put in to keep a state structure operational), and other external influences. By which I mean from acquiring food to dealing with the weather, and indeed, occasionally dealing with the fact that there are people outside working under other systems. But I bet for most communists it's, ironically, the communist state. That's the biggest external influence they have to deal with. This will include "capitalist expectations" ie. an amount of work you have to perform, without any reward, because that's what the state needs. That's what the state needs to exist, and of course to make the Kremlin look like it looks.
> Don't strawman people.
Then by all means do tell: how will you prevent people either individually or in groups from banding against the communist system? After all, almost by definition, that's in their individual interest because ... communist system. You agreed that it's necessary to stop this but neglected to say HOW you'd do it. In history the "white terror" is one example of how far people will go to band together to destroy communism ...
Every historical communist state (after a short while) chose state terror: indiscriminate, industrial-level violence against individuals. Given that they didn't immediately chose this gives at least an indication that they tried other methods, which badly failed. Even Israel initially did that (well, the Arabs, not yet called Palestinians, did most of it for them), but then switched to give people a choice, which lead to near-total abandonment of communism (even though they kept much of the state institutions communism built).
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.
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.
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
> Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems[1] characterised by social ownership of the means of production,[2] as opposed to private ownership.
A social democrat isn't opposed to private ownership. In fact he cares that everyone has enough private ownership.
However the Wikipedia article than uses the term also as a super category for socialism and social democraty, which confuses, because now the term is overloaded in the very same article.
This meaning assignment comes from this:
> Social democracy originated within the socialist movement, supporting economic and social interventions to promote social justice.
They were often in the same party, before the last century, but split as soon as they came anywhere near starting to implement their ideas. If anything, the fact that some english-speaking countries seam to be lenient with the difference, comes from never having experienced a socialist government.
> The US have a very strange definition of the word
As a descendant in a former socialist country, no that definition isn't US-specific. If anything grouping the meanings as the same is lenient and only helps to normalize those who want to implement real socialism. Like their effort to also call them democratic, this is just a way of undermining a democracy by a radical ideology.
> Socialist has been used by members of the political right as an epithet, including against individuals who do not consider themselves to be socialists and against policies that are not considered socialist by their proponents.
I'm not familiar with the notion of socialist in the US, but I would expect it to be like that, i.e. right-wing parties labeling social-democracy as socialist in order to make them deemed unvotable by a majority?
> As an example, the european socialist party
Note how this very party does NOT call itself socialistic in my language and for very good reason. When you look at the different names in different languages, you see that it is only called socialist in countries in West-Europe, whose government had never been socialistic, so they still think that they don't need that distinction.
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.”
Many in the west would like this idea. Try goggle "communism support young americans".
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...
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.”
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).
If you're thinking of countries like Sweden and Norway, those would be called social democracy.
Marxism is a flawed ideology because 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).
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.
Same with the RETVRN types who dream of an ancient-like societal structure without realizing that they would likely be slaves.
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.)
They rationalize why the things they want (like property rights) aren't really a state.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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."
"Capitalism is based on exploitation of a man by another man. In Communism, it is the other way round!"
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?"
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
Yes. That was the author's point.
They could do much worse, they could send you to prison camp.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The infinite money glitch has been helpful.
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).
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.)
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.
Something something best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, second best time is today, etc.
Everything has its season.
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.)
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.
- 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 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.
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.
Were the leading Bolsheviki not of Jewish descent? And leading scientists until the very unfortunate "Doctors' plot".
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.
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.
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.
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.
No one of mentioned high ranks could freely use native language.
You probably know how they called USSR the prison of nations.
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?
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.
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.
No, not for russians.
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.
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.
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.
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".
But the policy in the early Soviet Union was in fact opposite:
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
Scientists were executed… ok wow
I can't find the link at the moment, apologies.
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...
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.
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)
Why would that be obvious?
wait, does this just mean pregnancies that didn't reach full term? Or like, a hypothetical number of kids that could have been born?
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.
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.
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".
In my understanding, any definition that discounts there individuality is primarily there to depersonalize them and thus justify their killing.
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 :^)
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.
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.
Soviet ally, nonetheless! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...
To remind you of western capitalists helping the nazis? Of the British royal family ties to the nazis?
https://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=WallStHitler&C=...
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is an interesting insight on human nature.
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.
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.
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".
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.”
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.
I find Chesteron's distributism an interesting one, and personally really admire cooperative societies.
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.
> As a naturally evolved system, the alternative to capitalism is therefore capitalism+some minor tweak.
But OK, what's your definition?
I can imagine the end of Capitalism, and it looks like Star Trek.
I am an optimist and capitalism looks like success. It's the exact opposite of defeatism.
It's easy to see an exploitative system as success as long as one is on the side that does the exploiting.
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.
People are people, top rich minority always finds ways to exploit poor majority under any system.
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
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
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
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?
I'm sure you can imagine anything but that's not really helpful.
You said you do. So, tell us ! Claims require evidences.
As the post-soviet Russian joke went:
everything the communists said about communism was false, everything they said about capitalism was true.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Communists weren't great for the environment either. Look up the Aral Sea.
[1] A classic example is rent control which tends to lead to shortages.
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-...
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.
Polish spirit in a nutshell
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.
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.
Communism has no wealth inequality, because it's forbidden to have any wealth at all. Maybe you actually think of social democracy?
And moreover that comparing the two is irrational and causes false equivalences.
I think the book makes a solid argument that Communism, Marxism or socialism whatever you call it is absurd. And invariably leads to absurd outcomes.
Granted I think it was pretty enlightening to point out that our free western economies are not without planning. We have subsidies, tax policies, social programs, etc. But that doesn't mean we're trying to do away money or private ownership.
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.
More seriously, redefining meanings of all the words is not conductive of a useful discussion. Feel free to consult a dictionary when you're in doubt about the meaning of extremely common words.
Ah yes, because of your dishonesty.
If I have to starve myself, I don't see what would it solve…
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.
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.
Just is a great word. It alerts the author and reader that there's little substance in the claim. Just trust me!
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.
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.
> 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.
I'm not proposing everyone to move. :) Besides, immigration crises are costly, but long-term effects of immigration are positive. It's not the migration itself is evil, it's how fast and why people move.
>Socialism demands that you work for others at no benefit to yourself.
Some results of your work will always be owned by others at no benefit to yourself. Socialism is not unique here. It also does not demand that all your work is for others (by definition, working people are supposed to be primary beneficiaries).
>Socialism seeks to force the costs of it upon everyone whether they want it or not, turning it into a burden
It is not unique property of socialism. Only in anarchy this is not happening, all other systems with a government do that. You pay taxes no matter what.
>Are landlords not responsible for the maintenance of the property?
They are incentivized to spend as less as possible on it to maximize profits and they won't spend more than you pay, so effectively they are just redistributing some share of your money towards maintenance.
Businesses provide plenty of benefits in return for the value they capture. I work for well managed companies that let me just show up, do my job, go home and get paid.
Anyone who wants to capture the full value can just start their own company and handle everything by themselves. I've done that too. It's liberating and at the same time a huge pain in the ass.
This is a perfectly good tradeoff to make.
> You pay taxes no matter what.
We pay taxes so the government can build useful infrastructure and handle all the natural monopolies. We want our tax money to be converted into useful services like fire departments and police forces.
We don't want governments literally giving away our money to people in the form of welfare checks. This is just politicians using our money to buy votes.
Where in Western and Central Europe exactly do we have Socialist countries?
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.
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.
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.
This is not to negate the facts, but to put things in perspective.
Yes
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.
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.
I never claimed they were equal. Not once.
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).
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.
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.
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?
complete
accurate
satisfying (to anyone? to someone? to me?)
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.
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.
Told that way, this is libel, one which the german revanchism very fond of. Not that people like you would care.
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.
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.
Anyway next time you experiment with utopias, try not to bring along hundreds of millions of unwilling participants.
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.
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.
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.
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.