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Lol, european here from country that got buttsexed by ussr back in the day. Fuck off with communism. Period.
However. Socialism is something hella important and should baselined across the world. People need safety net in their lives.
Funny thing is, if you say "socialism" where I live a lot of people will bare they fangs at a commie. But shorten it to social and all people think of is said safety net. Suddenly no problem. Heh.
You do realise your aversion to communism is just the same as Americans, right? Like the USSR has more in common with the Nazis than any actual implementation of a classless, hierarchical less, stateless system.
Shit, like the name is literally the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
To quote Stalin himself from a 1936 interview with Roy Howard
Our Soviet society is socialist society, because the private ownership of the factories, works, the land, the banks and the transport system has been abolished and public ownership put in its place.
[…]
Yes , you are right, we have not yet built communist society. It is not so easy to build such a society.
Re-think your fear of the word communism and wonder why you’re fine with socialism despite it literally being what the country you rightfully dislike called and viewed itself as.
tl;dr: Communism good. USSR bad.
It's similiar, not the same. From what I recall, Americans didn't have their country violently buttfucked behind a curtain, something that is still visible where I live - thankfully less so in the country itself, but it's still embedded into people. And I don't fear communism. I despise it. I do admit, maybe unjustly. Hard to feel otherwise though, seeing effects of one of the greatest, or at least highest scale shots at it's implementation.
However, yeah, my definition of socialism must be fucked, will educate myself further before making fool out of myself again. :|
I’d quite happily argue that the USSR never tried to implement it in the slightest.
Can you imagine the politburo actually fighting to give up their privileged position? I can’t.
To be quite honest, it seems to me - and I can be wrong - that it simply substituted power of wealth for power of position. Where I live I know that during occupation people were deemed as important based on where they worked - because where they worked dictated what they could
stealobtain, be it items, access or favors.There always will be someone on top, one way or the other. In capitalist society, it's the guy who has the most money. In co- ... socialist...? society it's the guy with most connections.
Because there is not a way for communism to work... sounds great on paper but always ends the same.
There’s no way for people to work together without someone at top benefiting?
X.
You can doubt it all you want, but communism's fatal flaw is humans. They will always want more.
Why is it bad for people to want more in Communism? Do you think once a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society would be reached, people would want to regress?
This is an aspect I'm genuinely curious about (as someone who is relatively uneducated on this subject) because my answer would be that yes, there will definitely be people who want to regress. There have always been individuals who are willing to sacrifice absolutely anything to obtain more material wealth or power. They're a minority, but their existence has to be assumed and accounted for. For all of capitalism's failings, one of its strengths is that it does give these people a path to follow that produces (some) benefit to society. How does a fully-implemented communist society deal with these individuals without them subverting and corrupting the system?
I think a big misconception on your own part is that Communism would put a ceiling on people. It would, perhaps, in the sense that it wouldn't let people lord over others, but it would absolutely not prevent people from working to improve their own material conditions. In fact, that's one of the base assumptions made by Marx when proposing a Communist system!
The goal is a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society, where you can get what you need from what you can give. It isn't a society where everyone lives in a 700 Sq ft 2 bedroom apartment made of concrete, it's a complex system meant to be built up towards, that would allow people to work on whatever they want and get whatever they want by working for it, as long as what they want isn't a business to lord over people.
That's not how human nature works. You really think you can sit there and tell me that someone who did 10 years of school and has the knowledge to operate and save people should be getting the same as someone who's job is to cook you fast food? You live in a fantasy land where the Star Trek replicators exists. No one is going to do more work for the same amount as someone who does less. Society doesn't work this way.
That's not what Communism is, though. Even Marx says that Skilled labor is represented in value by that which labor power is required to recreate it, ie training adds value to labor.
Communism has never existed. What about it sounds good on paper but is separate from reality?
I don't agree with you, but I just wanted to give you kudos for reading another viewpoint and admitting you could be better educated on the subject. This is the internet I want to see.
The problem is that people point to the problems of the USSR and say it's because of communism, but when the USA does similar things, it's just them fucking up, not because they're capitalist. It's a double standard hinted at by OP.
The problem with the USSR was not that they were communist. I think that communism worked well for them, which magnified both their successes (beating nazis, reducing poverty, increasing literacy, getting to space, etc), but also magnified their mistakes (suppressing religion, art, etc).
It fit USSR interests to say that they were the standard bearer of communism back in the day. It fit US interests to say exactly the same. Neither had any reason to think about how the word was used prior to the USSR and if it actually applies at all.
It's no wonder that people who lived behind the Iron Curtain have just as bad an understanding of communism as people in the US. The USSR certainly didn't want you reading theory outside of Marxist-Leninist material.
Like the USSR has more in common with the Nazis than any actual implementation of a classless, hierarchical less, stateless system.
What’s your point exactly? I’m not reading some poorly written 10,000 word essay to try to figure out what you’re wanting to say.
Believing that the Nazis, who systematically gassed millions as a part of their ideology, is at all akin to any of the atrocities committed under the Soviet Union is historical revisionism in order to downplay the crimes of the fascists and, what you can clearly see in this thread already, foster anti communist sentiment with barely a reason why.
So it's actually a pretty interesting read but I think this paragraph gets the idea across pretty well:
(Obv out of context)
Most current antisemitism in Eastern Europe is closely related to these debates, as nationalists strive to “fix” their nations’ collaboration (or in the case of the Baltics and Ukraine, participation) in the Holocaust with revised paradigms that equal everything out. One of the poisons of ultranationalism is the perceived need to construct a perfect history (no country on the planet has one of those). Another is hatred of local Jewish communities who have memory, or family, or collective memory, of nationalist neighbors turning viciously on their neighbors in 1941, and of the Soviets being responsible for their own grandparents or parents being saved from the Holocaust. In America, this would be akin to someone hating African Americans for having a different opinion of Washington or Jefferson because they were slaveholders.
Okay, now I’m just confused as to the relevance of it being commented in response to my comment.
Hey man I'm just a third party don't look at me
A Jewish linguist/historian/activist talking about how equating the Soviets and the Nazis is rhetoric used to justify current and past antisemitism including holocaust collaboration.
Ah, so it’s being used as chud fud.
My comparison of the two stems from their harsh authoritarian/totalitarian nature as seen from an anarchist lens, nothing to do with genocide.
Yeah so the thing is you're still doing it, the whole "authoritarian" thing is another way of doing a false equivalence between the two.
If you want to do an anarchist critique compare the USSR to bourgeoise democracies, it is a closer comparison.
To do so would be to ignore the worst elements of the USSR, so I don't know why I would do that.
You don't know a lot of the history of bourgeois democracies if you think you can't compare the worst the USSR has done with what bourgeois democracies have done.
Maybe you'd want to do it to stop taking part in holocaust trivialization, but you also insulted the Dovid Katz essay so IDK.
Maybe you want to drop the fud and trying to inject the holocaust into a comparison as means to discredit a point when it was never made in the first place. There's no defending the USSR or ML, so I'm not going to bite and engage in an argument designed to downplay the evils of it.
And that essay was utter wank filled with needlessly gratuitous language that languished on for countless paragraphs. It easily could have been condensed into a paragraph or two with some historical examples thrown in to justify the argument.
There’s no defending the USSR or ML, so I’m not going to bite and engage in an argument designed to downplay the evils of it.
Lol, yes there is, and it is a very simple argument:
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A transitional state moving towards communism is less violent than a capitalist state.
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All large anarchist attempts at governing were basically the same as the USSR under war socialism(Catalonia, which started much more industrialized, and lost, because of, among other things, anarchist organizational failure) or worse (free state of Ukraine, which led to a wave of pogroms because they refused to suppress reactionary elements))
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Socialism is not "Social Safety Nets," and if you were knowledgeable about what you were talking about, you would say Socialism and attempts at Communism. Socialism is Worker Ownership of the Means of Production, and the USSR was a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Communist party had stated goals of reaching Communism, a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society, by using Socialism. They never made it to Communism.
The USSR of course isn't the only form of Socialism, and isn't the only method to achieve Communism, but what you just said makes absolutely no sense.
Do you think that maybe people begin to understand what you're talking about if you refer to Social Safety Nets as Social, not Socialism, because Social Safety Nets are not in fact Socialism?
As a side note: terrible choice to use rape as a casual term for doing something bad. Be more empathetic.