> On the other hand, life was secure. There were no bank loans, therefore there were no bank fees or percents. There was no real worry over one’s job or workplace; one was available for everyone. Wages were low, but fear of losing one’s job was almost nonexistent. A person pretended to work; the state pretended to pay him. Living accommodations were crowded and faint hope existed to find a better apartment, but all had a roof over their heads.There had to be, since homelessness was forbidden by law.
> Nowadays, there exist people who yearn for that mollusk-like life.
This isn't an inaccurate description, and yes, it's not exactly a utopian state to find yourself in.
But I'm not going to chuckle at the hypothetical people we're supposed to pity for wanting this; I bet there are quite a few people in the United States alone who would love to have this life, who would love to have a guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof over their heads, and the heads of their children.
> I bet there are quite a few people in the United States alone who would love to have this life, who would love to have a guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof over their heads, and the heads of their children.
I'd almost venture to say the majority of people, and definitely those who suffer from a disability of some sort; especially mental health, where one may not mentally function well enough from one day to the next to be able to reliably hold a job.
The description is not too dissimilar from a badly photoshopped motel ad. Yes, it nominally resembles reality but just barely and doesn’t tell you about all the nasty things that come with the tiny pool.
Yes, everyone had a job. It was illegal not to have one. Jobs were basically assigned by the state. Most “normal” people could choose among a few OK-ish options. But if you got a hair out of line or crossed wrong people you could get assigned shoveling coal in a small boiler room or building railroads in Siberia. And if you didn’t want that job you became a criminal and went to some mine or quarry working double shifts for gruel in Gulag.
Yes, everyone had a roof over their head. But that doesn’t mean space, comfort, or even privacy. It wasn’t uncommon to have no more than a bed and a small cabinet or chest. Most of the living spaces and urban areas were extremely depressing. It’s all grey boxes and muddy trails. The best you could hope for in most places is some trees and bushes adding a bit of green in the summer.
There was very little people could do to change any of that. You couldn’t move elsewhere just because you wanted. People in cities with better professions could move if they managed to know the right people and could get a job elsewhere. People in villages were basically pinned to their colhozes. Their only option to see other places were a holiday trip if the managed to save up a little or to go into military and be stationed wherever.
This lack of agency resulted in mass depression and alcoholism.
Where do you think the grim and drunk russian stereotype comes from? It’s just the soviet reality.
It's also almost on the level of self-parody:
"In Soviet Russia we have eliminated all capitalist social ills. Unemployment is demoralizing and unproductive, so it is now illegal. Homelessness is unsafe and ruinous to the health of the mind, so it is against the law. Cancer is a terrible, deadly disease and also very expensive, so we have also banned it. And just like that, our surveys show 0% unemployment, 0% homelessness, and 0% cancer! Can your vaunted capitalistic West say the same?"
It would be a funny parody, if the path to 0% homelessness wasn't so brutal:
1) start a civil war killing a few % of the population
2) take every large property in the country killing or driving into exile its owners
3) deport ethnic minorities and take their property
4) artificially create a major famine killing many millions of people and driving half the country into slave like labour
5) start a major war killing a double digit fraction of your population
6) rely massively on foreign labour and foreign aid during and after the war.
7) cause smaller wars and crises around the world to extort more foreign aid.
8) jail and send to forced labour camps everyone not performing a government assigned job.
9) collapse, the second you can't extort labour internally or funds and goods internationally
The problem is you'll probably live on something like $300/month, and the $ won't even be exchangeable internationally - think like food stamps but for everything. Or less. Unless you have connections in the nomenklatura, i.e. those who decide who gets which positions. University admission is handled by a similar circle.
Let me quote the text:
> An anecdote on this very topic became popular in the later Soviet Union. A young communist proclaimed victoriously: “We have founded a society where there are no rich people!” To which an old social democrat shook his head and muttered, “Actually our intention was to found a society were there were no poor people.”
>>University admission is handled by a similar circle.
So obviously I welcome any anecdotes to the contrary, but I was always told that in my formely communist country(Poland) university admissions were extremely fair. Everyone had equal chance if they passed exams well enough - in fact messing around with this system was guaranteed to get you in prison for corruption. And in there were many examples of poor families from very disadvantaged backgrounds sending kids to top universities because they studied hard enough to pass the entrance exams - there was no bribe you could give anyone to get you in, because the principles of fair admissions were upheld as the greatest value. I'm sure there are examples of it happening that we could find, but my understanding is that it was incredibly rare.
Now, top posts at universities - that's a different situation. To be the dean you had to be in the party and know the right people to be considered for the position. But students? Anyone could get anywhere and study completely for free.
I don't know about Poland, but within the USSR, a Jewish person would be unable to go to a good university without paying a bribe (which for many families was beyond their means). Jewish applicants would get a different set of test questions that would be nearly impossible to solve.
> unable to go to a good university
Or rather to a one of TOP 3 best universities in a one of TOP 3 largest cities in the country unless choosing some engineering specialization.
> a different set of test questions that would be
really hard to solve, indeed.
I'm using "good" to include the prestigious engineering subfields. For those, even minor schools in smaller cities would be barred to Jews.
The main issue was not the general admission being itself corrupt (though I can't imagine you could not get a top party member child in if you wanted).
The main issue was that anyone the state was not comfortable with was banned from higher education, including their children.
Have any connection to the pre-communist politics, be involved in religion, be reported by your neighbors as speaking against the regime or just got in the way of someone i power - congratulation comrade, you and your children (regardless of how gifted) are now second class, can't go to university & are relegated to second class jobs, for ever!
And this basically applied to everything the communist state could miss-use to award or punish people - jobs, internal and foreign travel, housing, being able to do art or write books, etc.
And any time the single party that could never do any wrong decided to punish you - there was no recourse.
> We have founded a society where there are no rich people!”
Many in the west would like this idea. Try goggle "communism support young americans".
People in general love utopias when they weren't exposed to their real incarnations.
Same with the RETVRN types who dream of an ancient-like societal structure without realizing that they would likely be slaves.
This is like hardcore libertarians, anarchy-capitalists. If they were dropped into a stateless (failed state) area, where they would have complete formal sovereignty, any but the super wealthy (who could afford private security, water and food quality systems, etc.), would soon leave, become impoverished, or die tragically at the behest of other legally unencumbered "self-sovereign" actors.
The excuses they might make, that libertarianism requires some basically supportive context (provided by who? and in what system?) to get off the ground, also undermine the arguments of the hard-independent individual crowd.
(I happen to think that "libertarianism" is a fruitful collection of ideas and insights, but in the context of many other systems with complementary ideas and insights. On a practical level, we need the best of many systems working together.)
Libertarianism has always been an ideology where the state should do what I want, but not what you want since that costs money.
They rationalize why the things they want (like property rights) aren't really a state.
> "Try goggle "communism support young americans"."
"According to a new Yale Youth Poll, a survey affiliated with the Yale Institution for Social and Political Studies, voters aged 18 to 21 lean Republican by 11.7 points when asked who they would support in the 2026 Congressional elections, while voters aged 22 to 29 favored Democrats by 6.4 points." from https://www.newsweek.com/republican-support-poll-young-gen-z... Whatever else they might be (and I can think of quite a few unprintable descriptors), I'm pretty sure the Republicans aren't communists or leftists.
Neither are the Democrats, so I'm not sure what you're going for here.
This is like Apple dropping the iPhone Mini. Everyone who wanted a small phone didn't just want a screen that's harder to read, or a marginally lower volume to carry in their pockets. They wanted the ergonomics of the original iPhone. My regular-sized (not plus) iPhone is too big for my hands. A lot of the interactions have to be done with both hands, or risk dropping the phone (which has happened many times) doing acrobatics to reach the far edges and corners.
The iPhone Mini never solved that. It was still uncomfortably large, so I never bothered with it because the tradeoffs weren't there. No doubt a smaller screen is worse, but if the ergonomics were significantly better, that would have been my choice.
Tradeoffs. One is willing to cope with some downsides if they perceive the gains to overcome the losses.
Truth is, even present-day UK Labour who are quite centre-right neolibs leaning more to the right, are closer to communism than the US Democrats are.
That is terrifying. Do they just not teach in schools how devastating every Marxist/Communist regime has been? Do people really think somehow that next time will magically be different despite all historical evidence pointing to the fact that this ideology is flawed at its very core?
Not in any detail. In my experience, Americans actually know very little about the Soviet Union, beyond that they were the "adversary" in the Cold War.
In the US, most history and social studies classes are "taught" by football coaches. Most students don't retain anything important.
Every ideology is flawed - even the utopias. Perhaps the humanity should try without ideologies?
“Ideology” is just any system of values. Like “politics” people tend to pretend that ones they like are some other category while the label only applies to things they don't like, but...
> Do they just not teach in schools how devastating every Marxist/Communist regime has been?
Even if they do, when you're living somewhere that's free to fail you before you're even born, the second-worst case can still look good. And also the absolute worse case is Pol Pot, and there's many examples equally awful showing that a lot of people just flat out refuse to accept humans can be that evil.
But also, basically all types of governments can demonstrate the sorts of failure mode that Communism is famous for. Holodomor and Great Leap Forward's famines were Communist failures, the Irish Potato Famine and several in India under the British were Capitalist failures.
> the fact that this ideology is flawed at its very core?
You may be surprised if you read a copy of The Communist Manifesto. Several parts of it have been considered "common sense" in capitalist nations for over a century.
Me, I think Karl Marx made the same error as Adam Smith, that both think humans free from rules are naturally amazing and they largely ignore power seeking behaviours and the consequences of that. Hence Smith is associated with laissez-faire, and "socialist" and "anarchist" were seen by the authorities of the 19th c. as being much the same*.
(I over simplify a bit, this is just a comment and not a script for a replacement idiology).
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_anarchism_and_li...
I've read The Communist Manifesto. There are indeed parts of it that are sensible in isolation. The problem is that taken as a whole, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, etc. are deeply flawed ideologies doomed to catastrophic failure and devastating results. History has shown us this repeatedly.
To Quote Ronald Reagan...
“How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”
What history has shown us is somewhat weaker than you say — for all the stuff they did badly, for all that they wildly missed their own raison d'être and became just another power structure for just another bunch of essentially aristocrats, it did also get Russia from the Tzars to orbit in 40 years.
But that aside, when you're already getting failed and the people failing you specifically hate one thing, it's very easy to reach for that thing.
To your quote: Well, I'm not a communist (unlike a previous partner)… but I'm also not a capitalist, because I see that capitalism also is a deeply flawed ideology doomed to catastrophic failure and devastating results, and that history has shown us this, too, repeatedly.
I'm also not "anti-" either of them, because I'd rather see someone take the best of both and find some new mechanism to deal with the other repeatedly observed historical fact: that a non-trivial fraction of the population are power-hungry sadistic arses. To quote, albeit from fiction: "To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416-the-major-problem-mdas...
(Both capitalism and communism have failure modes separate from the problem of dark triad personalities, but both sets are much easier to deal with if your society has also solved the problem of dark triad personalities, and a society does also need to solve the problem of dark triad personalities irregardless of what else it does).
It’s almost like… how can we take the nice social parts from communism - and mix them benefits of capitalism. Almost like, some sort of democratic socialism.
Democratic Socialism still entails collectivization of the economy.
If you're thinking of countries like Sweden and Norway, those would be called social democracy.
Good thing when people "support communism" they're not calling for a specific system like the Soviet Union, but just for a higher adoption rate of the good things that fall under the umbrella term.
How do you achieve this without creating a brutal authoritarian regime to seize the means of production and silence opposition? How do you allocate resources and labor fairly?
Marxism is a flawed ideology because it doesn’t account for human nature.
I recently started reading Henry Ford books and to me it looks like he has achieved the best of both worlds - at least until he passed away. One thing especially resonates with me - decreasing the prices without reducing the wages so that the profit gets close to zero, then find ways to make the manufacturing more efficient and less costly. While the new profit gradually grows - gradually increase the salaries. Then rinse and repeat. In the end people have good salary, can buy cheap (but still high quality) products and have joy while working.
You're right, I cannot think of any possible way to raise the minimum wage without creating a brutal authoritarian regime that silences opposition.
I agree with you that Marxism is flawed, that as you say it doesn’t account for human nature.
But: There's no additional overhead to "seize the means of production" vs. any other system of governance and organisation, given that corporations, money, ownership, and the law are all things that any functioning system of government controls anyway, regardless of if they want these things to be collectively owned (/nationalised) or privately controlled.
Now, my former partner who is a self-identified Communist of some kind (I can't remember which kind), she wants to abolish money, and abolishing it rather than using it would need quite a lot of extra effort.
> How do you allocate resources and labor fairly?
I believe the general claim here is "democratically". This doesn't really work too well, but on the other hand, neither does letting people accumulate so much money they become the de-facto leadership with the carrots and sticks of "I will move my business to whoever has the lowest tax/cheapest labour/least expensive safety requirements".
Consider also that normal people are nowhere near as carful with language use as you or I may wish; some of the people you're worried about may be identifying themselves as "Communists" in the first place only because they're exactly one step to the left of the Democrat Party's Overton window while also repeatedly observing the US Republican party describe the Democrats as "socialists".
(Conversely, my former is one of the people I expect you to be correctly worried about, as she agreed with my assessment that she was to the left of the Cuban communist party).
Adam Smith did nit think that. He warned about the danger of business “conspiracy against the public” and thought ethics more important afield than economics. The idea the invisible hand was perfectible is a amplification of his idea
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> Potato famine was caused by blight, a natural virus, and Irelands inability to handle the situation.
Ireland was a British colony ruled by absentee landlords at the time, and British policy made the famine far worse by not only refusing to provide aid, but continuing to export vast amounts of food while the Irish starved.
So imperialism was the cause.
What you are arguing here is factually false and the exact kind of communist apologetics the article is trying to combat. The Soviets deliberately starved the Ukrainians who would otherwise have been fine. In Ireland Britain used its Royal Navy to deliver regular relief supplies then deployed every available steamship in Ireland to deliver aid. They cut taxes and took on massive debts to fund employing half a million Irish in public works programmes - all aid to try and help them, even as the Irish themselves exported their food.
The idea these are in any way comparable shows up the true weakness of communism - there are no capitalist equivalents to far left barbarities anywhere. The fact that the best anyone can find for a capitalist Holodomor is a massive aid programme shows just how wide the gulf truly is.
Ultimately this confusion is rooted in economics. The potato famine aid was structured in a similar way to modern aid programmes. Why, because the only sort of "aid" the left deem acceptable is price controls, but they ignore the demand side. If you force prices down without addressing that then you just bankrupt all the farmers as income drops below production costs.
If your response to a famine is to bankrupt all the farmers, you just made things worse instead of better. It puts the country into permanent dependency that means everyone will die if the flow of aid is ever interrupted (like, say, by a World War).
The smart thing to do is to provide targeted immediate relief if you can, whilst simultaneously channelling money to people so they can afford to buy food and build up their economy so they can stand alone again. All modern aid programmes work this way, or try to. And it's what Britain did.
You might disagree about the best way to help desperately poor countries recover from natural disasters, but to draw an equivalence with man-made famines in the USSR or China is a category error of the worst kind.
> The Soviets deliberately starved the Ukrainians who would otherwise have been fine.
Even with the benefit of hindsight, this part is not clear and remains a debated topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Holodomor
> even as the Irish themselves exported their food.
That's a similarity. Ukraine and Ireland both exported food during their respective famines.
> The fact that the best anyone can find for a capitalist Holodomor is a massive aid programme shows just how wide the gulf truly is.
"Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, but also because some in power believed in divine providence or that the Irish lacked moral character, with aid only resuming to some degree later. Large amounts of food were exported from Ireland during the famine and the refusal of London to bar such exports, as had been done on previous occasions, was an immediate and continuing source of controversy, contributing to anti-British sentiment and the campaign for independence. Additionally, the famine indirectly resulted in tens of thousands of households being evicted, exacerbated by a provision forbidding access to workhouse aid while in possession of more than one-quarter acre of land."
> The smart thing to do is to provide targeted immediate relief if you can, whilst simultaneously channelling money to people so they can afford to buy food and build up their economy so they can stand alone again. All modern aid programmes work this way, or try to. And it's what Britain did.
This is so wrong I don't know where to begin.
The farmers were the ones doing the dying. Their primary need wasn't money, it was food. The extent to which money would have helped was that their landlords demanded money and evicted them because they didn't have enough food to sell.
Before getting to the Irish-specific details, we must observe that there is no historical debate about whether the Holodomor was deliberate. The Soviets deliberately imposed far-left ideology onto the farmers which destroyed their productivity, and then continued enforcing it through massive violence even as the whole Soviet Union plunged into famine. So the Soviets deliberately starved the Ukrainians, who if they had never been conquered by the Red Army would have been fine.
That's why this argument shows the deep immorality of left wing thought. The Soviets could have ended the famine at any moment by ending the revolution and restoring free market capitalism. They did not, because they were insane.
You probably are referring to the question of whether the Soviets deliberately took grain from Ukraine rather than other regions due to hatred of the Ukrainians specifically. That is debated. But what is not debated, is that the famine was a deliberate choice.
But Britain didn't create the potato blight nor the famine that followed. The Irish opened themselves to that risk when they chose to overwhelmingly farm a single strain of a single crop, despite knowing that crop disease has existed since the dawn of agriculture. Moreover there was nothing Britain could have done to avoid the famine, despite what left-biased Wikipedia tells you. Here is another quote, from in fact another left biased source, but it is nonetheless still more honest than Wikipedia. Google it if you wish.
"The food gap created by the loss of the potato in the late 1840s was so enormous that it could not have been filled, even if all the Irish grain exported in those years had been retained in the country. In fact, far more grain entered Ireland from abroad in the late 1840s than was exported-probably almost three times as much grain and meal came in as went out."
Banning exports - something leftists claim was a magical solution not done only due to nasty capitalist ideology - would simply not have solved the famine at all, because the Irish situation was entirely unsaveable. In fact the famine happened even when there was large amount of imported food sitting at the docks because the Irish were unable to properly distribute it internally due to bad transport infrastructure, so food just sat there rather than reaching the famine struck areas.
Yet Britain did what it could to help the Irish despite the logistical problems:
- Imported huge quantities of aid using every available ship.
- Employed vast numbers of people to give them an artificial income, labouring the English with large debts to support this.
- Ran soup kitchens that at their peak fed three million people daily.
The biggest criticism the left can make of this situation is that they think Britain should have, somehow, fed the entirety of Ireland for five whole years despite there being no logistical way to do that, no financial means to do it, and no moral obligation to do so either.
So, once again, the idea this is comparable to the Holodomor just shows how uniquely brutal far-leftism really is. There is nothing like it anywhere in the history of capitalism. A large multi-year foreign aid programme is the opposite of what the Soviets did.
> Irelands inability to handle the situation.
That inability was due to capitalism as it was understood and practiced at the time. Indeed, it overlapped with the writing of the Communist Manifesto.
Capitalism has been forced to change a lot since then. Laissez-faire hasn't been popular in a long time.
I mean, yes, in Texas for instance that kind of propaganda is state mandated.
I guess maybe the blue cities push the Marxism/Communism propaganda, but I don’t think the rest of the state does.
Nobody wants the Soviet Union. People do want a fair society. Quite arguably, the Soviet Union wasn't even communist (it was only called that, like how the N**s called themselves socialist and North Korea calls itself a democratic republic)
The problem is that communism can’t give you a fair society. You have to seize the means of production by force. This force has always created a brutal authoritarian regime that refuses to cede power willingly. Like in the book Animal Farm, some animals are more equal than others. The top members of the party always live better than the proletariat. Marxism just isn’t compatible with human nature.
By the exact same reasoning, no system can give you a fair society. All systems rely on seizing things by force.
Now that's out of the way, perhaps some systems give you better unfair society that seizes things by force, compared to others. Perhaps we could calmly deliberate about which system that creates an unfair society by seizing things by force is the best, and then implement that system, creating the best possible unfair society that seizes things by force.
I think this is the result of woke shit pushed in education.
More like MAGA rewriting US Soviet relations history.
Looks like today most people don't trust both sides. Some choose to ride one wave or another.
It's predictable backlash against the US whitewashing a lot of history. People are skeptical of the official narratives and do their own research
You underestimate the inability of the Soviet regime to provide its own people with basic consumer goods.
You would have a job and some money, but your money would buy nothing, because goods were scarce. Even finding good shoes would be a challenge and you would need to cultivate relationships with warehouse clerks etc. to get some access to stuff before it was stealthily distributed by underground channels to relatives, friends etc.
Modern Americans would go absolutely ballistic if they came to a shop with empty shelves and a bored arrogant assistant who would jeer at their very question "I want to buy X".
> Modern Americans would go absolutely ballistic if they came to a shop with empty shelves and a bored arrogant assistant who would jeer at their very question "I want to buy X".
Reminds me of an old Russian joke. In stores, you'd typically go to one counter to get some produce weighed, then to a cashier to pay for it.
So, someone goes up to the meat counter, and asks, "Can you weigh me out half a kilo of sausage?" And the guy behind the counter replies: "Sure, bring some in, and I'll weigh it out for you."
Yeah, the old jokes are first class.
"Capitalism is based on exploitation of a man by another man. In Communism, it is the other way round!"
America is very egalitarian these days, even the rich women are empowered to exploit the poor women!
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At the cost that the Soviet union imposed? I doubt there's even 100.
There is nothing stopping people from living like communists in the US. There have been many communist communes here and in other countries, like famously Israel and Columbia. All but single digits have been abandoned or sold by their inhabitants.
So we've got plenty of historical evidence whether people would choose to have this life. All but a few dozen, out of hundreds of million, choose against it. Including all socialists, everyone in those demonstrations, ... demonstrating extremely clearly:
without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
> There is nothing stopping people from living like communists in the US.
Capitalism stops them. The state has expectations of everyone. They will have to deal with things from outside that will force them into some level of capitalistic thinking which will ultimately eat the project from within.
> All but single digits have been abandoned or sold by their inhabitants.
The fact that the death of these experiments comes with a sale is illustrative of the point above
> without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
Is that so? It sounds like red scare propaganda honestly, and I don't think you could reasonably make an argument for this without conceding that the same is true of capitalism.
> Capitalism stops them. The state has expectations of everyone. They will have to deal with things from outside that will force them into some level of capitalistic thinking which will ultimately eat the project from within.
This is not a difference between capitalism and communism, and so not a valid complaint. You will pay taxes in a communist system. You will have to deal with all sorts of external influences in a communist system.
> The fact that the death of these experiments comes with a sale is illustrative of the point above
No it isn't. These were voluntary sales (especially since most were abandoned, not sold. There was no profit in leaving, except in some cases). It is illustrative of the simple fact that given the choice, all but a rare exception chooses against communism.
Or to put it another way: people REALLY don't want communism, and after trying it, that becomes worse. In many cases abandoning these communes required a large-ish group of people taking the decision together. In other words: they organized themselves to destroy their little patch of communism. Which illustrates the next point:
> > without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
> Is that so? It sounds like red scare propaganda honestly, and I don't think you could reasonably make an argument for this without conceding that the same is true of capitalism.
You just made an argument in favor of this. Your argument is that people cannot be allowed to have access to the external world, or they will abandon communism. That must be prevented, in your argument.
HOW will you prevent it? State terror.
> This is not a difference between capitalism and communism, and so not a valid complaint
I don't understand. You're saying that also in communism, capitalism comes in from outside and stops you practicing communism?
The USA did bomb and/or coup most communist countries until they were not communist, so you may have a point but it wasn't clear if this is what you meant.
> Your argument is that people cannot be allowed to have access to the external world, or they will abandon communism. That must be prevented, in your argument.
Don't strawman people.
> > This is not a difference between capitalism and communism, and so not a valid complaint
> I don't understand. You're saying that also in communism, capitalism
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).
> without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
I don't think you have an accurate appraisal of many socialist countries (e.g. Norway, Denmark).
Meanwhile, it would appear that Capitalism inevitably leads to wars and requires frequent wars to feed the military industrial complex.
Those are capitalist, not socialist.
The US used the word socialist is very strange way. Socialists and communists are not the same thing at all – except in the US, which is one of the very very rare countries that never had a socialist party as far as I know. A socialist party (labor, “social democrat”, etc) is what most countries consider “left” (as opposed to communists which are “far left”)
socialist != social democracy
Socialists want councils and the political discussion to happen inside the party by party members, which is what there idea of democracy is. (The self-labeling as democratic isn't a lie, but what they perceive to be democratic.)
A social democrat wants a welfare state with a democracy with multiple parties.
In practice socialists strive to create communism, which hasn't really worked out anywhere yet. Some declared that it was achieved, but than later backpedaled and claimed it didn't really happened yet.
again, to each its definition, but you should be aware your definition does not align with wikipedia’s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
The US have a very strange definition of the word “socialist”, which other english-speaking countries (and seemingly wikipedia) do not share.
As an example, the european socialist party does _not_ strive to put communism in place.
socialist != communist
The definition of Wikipedia is not that different from mine:
> 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.
They definitely does not aware of soviet reality that “roof over head” usually is not in the place where human want to live, same with job. if student after university decided (not by student, by state distributing workforce) to go work at city on polar circle - that means that student will go live and work here, without sunlight for the rest of his life! not joking, personal story with soviet collapse as happy ending (moved to normal place after that)
Relevant nickname then? ;)
>> This isn't an inaccurate description,
That is quite inaccurate. Or partially accurate. Accurate for white russian people.
For others it was quite easy to loose a job and get a forced psychiatric treatment or gulag trip (depends on the year).
I assume by "white Russian" you really mean someone of Russian ethnicity and not Belarus - which is what that phrase means to a Russian speaker - but you might want to clarify.
Yes. White male with Slavic face who speaks russian language without an accent because he knows no other language.
A friend of mine had a grandfather, who was born in central Asia (Samarkand) had Ukrainian parents, but also had written in his passport that he was a russian. Soviets erased his roots, history, ethnicity. He never spoke Ukrainian in his life.
Btw, that is what current russian government is doing. They have stolen thousands of Ukrainian kids and erased their identity. Few more years and some of them are ready to be sent to the frontline.
> ... speaks russian language without an accent because he knows no other language.
At least Belorussians and Ukrainians can speak Russian without an accent despite knowing their own languages.
> Soviets erased his ...
I doubt the USSR had such power solely on its own. It depends mostly on the will of parents (and grandparents) and the type of a young person. If a kid likes art, it's more likely the kid would be interested in national memory, if a kid is more into tech, then it seems not that important, which nevertheless can change later.
Russian Germans (not necessary all of them) consider themselves as Germans even after hundreds of years living in Russian Empire and then in the USSR.
If a kid in the Soviet Union was interested in art and used that to express national memory, then there would be consequences. As an adult, they'd probably be sent to a gulag and never seen again. This is how the Soviet Union crushed national memories beyond just the name (never the name itself, making sure they knew they were "different" somehow).
They didn't succeed in completely crushing all national memories, but a few more decades and who knows what might have happened.
> to express national memory
The culture has been preserved using non-provocative way by not mixing it with politic. Surely we must be respectful and thankful to those going rather provocative way and suffering.
The daily Soviet system issues have been successfully mentioned in a subtle way in films since middle 60s, which became classic. I'm not aware of similar from movies from China.
Famous Belorussian and Ukrainian songs have been performed in public on radio, TV in the USSR.
Even today some western world artists say, that sure, of course, the culture is not separate from politic while the others say they are doing art not politics and welcome questions about their public art not their private political opinions and preferences. Similar to many singers and actors dislike questions about their private life and lovers instead of what actually matters: their art of doing music, singing, performing.
> ... what might have happened.
Since middle 80s the level of freedom started rapidly to increase.
> The culture has been preserved using non-provocative way by not mixing it with politic. Surely we must be respectful and thankful to those going rather provocative way and suffering.
Local cultural symbols themselves were seen as "political" and "provocative". The definition of political and provocative was broad.
Small bits a pieces passing through the barriers are not "it".
Only bits and pieces of culture can survive through such methods. It is enough to escape full assimilation, but only just. All it would take is the whim of another Stalin. The damage is such that those who went through it may not even realize what has been lost, until one day they (or future generations) find evidence on the outside of what culture was once like.
In the Stalin times, yes.
But the policy in the early Soviet Union was in fact opposite:
>>I doubt the USSR had such power solely on its own. It depends mostly on the will of parents (and grandparents) and the type of a young person.
That is a pure victim blaming. If the system makes it dangerous to teach your kids your culture, most parents will no do it.
Nowadays for singing Ukrainian songs you can go to the russian prison. Imagine what could be under the Stalin rule.
I didn't mean to blame victims. I just mean that under totalitarian regime one need to put extra work to compensate the pressure from the state and try to do it wise. Right after the Stalin rule there have been official De-Stalinization and rehabilitation of Gulag prisoners. That's why under USSR I usually don't mean Stalin period. There was no one single and equal USSR whole 70+ years long. Every new party leader is a new era.
> singing Ukrainian songs you can go to the russian prison
I'm not sure how is this right now, I fear it got worse, but on August 2022 it was possible(*). Russian guitarist performed a Ukrainian song in Ukrainian original in public:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPu5WQKXsjM (cut)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82argH8zZXQ&t=1041s (full, 10.89 million views)
And it is not just some beautiful Ukrainian song. It is a prominent "I will not surrender without a fight" (2005). Which sounds provocative enough these days. Yeah, he did not continue doing it again and again, thus it's by no means a prove one can safely practice this on a daily basis.
This song must be known by almost every Russian (and Belorussian), since this song was used once Zelensky played the main male role in the rus-ukr movie "Office Romance. Our Time" (2011) remake of the famous 1977 USSR original.
OTOH one of the most prominent (former) Ukrainian singers and since 2014 Russian singer Taisia Povaliy could sing her Ukrainian songs on December 2024 at the main State Kremlin Palace in Moscow. (Obviously, because she openly supports the state.)
[1] https://www.mk.ru/social/2024/12/11/marshal-kadysheva-buynov... (rus.)
From what hints I've been able to piece together, suppression of religion may have actually gotten worse during the Krushchev years. So it's not quite as simple as there being ups and downs - different aspects of culture got suppressed in different ways at different times.
Plenty of stories of people being forced to "voluntarily" accept Russian passports on the territories occupied by Russia in Ukraine too.
I have never seen an english speaker use “white Russians” for Belarusians – the only uses I know of this idiom are (i) for the non-red/non-green participants to the Russian civil war, and, by extensions, their diaspora, and (ii) the cocktail, which of course, is by far the most common occurence nowadays.
Many of the Russian speakers I know do this when speaking English - I'm guessing that's how they think of the phrase in Russian and want to translate it literally.
Yeah - the group that eventually lost the Russian civil war is first that comes to my mind for this term: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_movement
I know both usages, and as an Englishman I am a native English speaker. However, I would agree that the most common usage would be the non-Red opponents of the communistic takeover of Russia in the early 1920s. Isn't the cocktail named as a direct reference to these people?
I don't think so, they're Belgian IIRC? I think “Russian” is just for the vodka base, and black/white for without/with cream.
The matters of race occupy a much smaller percentage of the brains of people outside of the USA. I say this completely without malice. It simply means that the trauma of segregation is still too raw in American society.
The rest of your statement doesn't make any sense. One went to a gulag for opposing the Soviet government, not for having a particular ethnicity. Stalin was ethnically Georgian. Many prominent members of the politburo were Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or Jews. In the later Soviet Union there were many politicians from the "ethnic" republics who had high-powered careers.
In fact, look at the list of Russian politicians who are currently under international sanctions and tell me with a straight face that they are all white and Russian. Well, they are Russian of course, but not in the way you meant.
> The matters of race occupy a much smaller percentage of the brains of people outside of the USA. I say this completely without malice.
But do you say it with first-hand experience?
Having gone back to Russia to meet with relatives, it was very clear that they considered "Tajiks" to be somewhere below them on a social ladder, and one relative directly inquired whether I felt safe living in America with all the "Africans" living in New York. (Granted, that last statement could back up your point that it only matters in America - but it didn't feel that way at the time.)
And don't forget Jews. Jews have always been the number one to be hated by common tovarish, as well as modern russians.
Antisemitism in Europe has a long history stemming from the church wanting to paint Jews as "Christ-killers" and "other". There was a much more famous and murderous contemporary antisemitic movement in Germany. Singling out Russia is simply weird.
The Jews in the later Soviet Union did still face discrimination, but it was of the variety of being denied university admissions due to quotas. Kind of like what the Ivy League does to kids of Asian descent in the USA these days.
There is so much wrong in this statement, but more history required to explain it than a single post can cover. I'll try to cover only a few right now:
- The more famous antisemitic movement in Germany, while still fully responsible for its actions, used earlier Russian-published conspiracy theories as its foundational documents.
- The antisemitism of the late Russian empire was to the point that millions left to escape it.
- In the late Stalin years, Jewish figures of note would end up either assassinated or imprisoned, with rumors abounding of a mass deportation coming.
- In the years beyond and up to the collapse, Jewish culture, language, and religion were almost completely suppressed. References to the Holocaust could not mention Jews as victims. Systematic and state antisemitism was tacitly allowed, even encouraged.
- By the time of the collapse, almost all Jewish cultural knowledge had ceased to exist, only the most basic and vague knowledge remained. (Contrary to popular belief, the Nazis only played a partial role here once they lost - much of this culture still existed in 1945).
To diminish the intense level of antisemitism by comparing it to anything in America is absurd, and highly problematic.
I think you got your timelines mixed up in your effort to portray me as a neo-Nazi.
I know Russians are responsible for everything wrong in the world ever, but when I say that there is a rich tradition of antisemitism in Europe, I mean since at least the time of Shakespeare. Merchant of Venice kind of thing.
In Germany, Nazis didn't just invent antisemitism out of thin air. They exploited a common sentiment held by the working class. If you think that's due to Russian propaganda, well, we are also under your bed. Be very afraid.
Lastly, there is a trend lately to label "problematic" any sentiment of insufficient piety towards all things Semitic. This is a great culture, but it has shown that like any other great culture it is capable of genocide.
Have you ever heard of Protocols of the Elders of Zion? This was the central source of the Nazi's specific claims, even when antisemitism was nothing new to Germany. It was created by a pro-Tsar Russian publishing house. All the conspiracy theories relating to communism came from this source.
If you see a timeline discrepancy, point it out. But if you've never heard of the Doctor's Plot or Soviet "Zionology", maybe consider looking them up.
> hated by common tovarish
Were the leading Bolsheviki not of Jewish descent? And leading scientists until the very unfortunate "Doctors' plot".
I think this might have changed for the worst since the soviet times (or at least is now less covert ?). IIRC when someone interviewed one of the warlords from Chechnya he mentioned he would probably be a high ranking officer in the soviet military by this point if the soviet union still exiated. With this no longer being possible, they ended up doing other things.
You're thinking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev
Fascinating man, really. If you do read the article - notice that while he resigned rather than follow orders to suppress a rebellion in Estonia, and there are streets named after him in the places that hate Russia, he also won elections with 90% of the vote once he became a warlord and disbanded parliament. History, it would seem, is not black and white.
Yes, I speak from first hand experience. I have family and friends in Russia. Nobody in my circles is a racist. If someone would speak of a "churka" I'd be concerned for my friend and try to get them to see a psychiatrist.
Do racist people exists? Yes, they do. They tend to live in small insular towns. Kind of like they do in the rest of the world. If someone hails from a small town they may have a racist uncle. Kind of like someone from Texas might. The correct reaction is the same - an eye roll.
If I were to hazard a guess, these racist relatives are probably not university professors. I don't mean this disparagingly - I do not have an elite pedigree myself. But I suspect you are comparing against your knowledge worker acquaintances in the US. You should try speaking to some American tradespeople some time and see if you still think Russians are more racist.
>> Do racist people exists? Yes, they do. They tend to live in small insular towns
And Moscow. And other big cities. People of color are beaten routinely in Moscow, local police will do nothing about that, may not even register it.
A friend of mine has relative in Moscow, son of high rank Soviet scientist. They transfered their son to the religious school under russian orthodox church explicitly mentioned the reason: no Tajiks there.
Let me point out the fly in the ointment: in the enlightened SF Bay Area high-flying tech workers who would never dare be associated with anything less than 100% liberal leanings... still send their own kids to private schools rather than a public in East San Jose, for much the same reasons.
And this is generally true. Ask any of these enlightened non-racists if they would send their kids to a school in Compton, and watch them squirm.
It seems you're making excuses for pretty much everything in this thread.
> It simply means that the trauma of segregation is still too raw in American society.
It feels more calculated than that -- there are people trying to keep it alive for use as a partisan wedge issue.
Replace first past the post voting (and therefore the two-party system) with score voting and see what happens to the issue.
There have been a ton of states passing laws, starting in 2022 but really hitting stride in 2024/2025, where the Republican party has pushed laws or changes to state constitutions to prevent Ranked Choice Voting.
Example, in Missouri there was a ballot initiative called Amendment 7. The first part of the Amendment was to enshrine banning non-citizens from voting. I want to be clear, this was already against state law. This didn't change anything.
The second part of Amendment 7 was to ban ranked choice voting and require a plurality. That was the REAL intent of the Amendment.
People got duped, badly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...
Ranked-choice voting sucks anyway. It's nominally better than first past the post, but only because FPTP is so broken that it can still be the loser in a competition between bad voting systems. Use a cardinal voting system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rated_voting
And framing this as a partisan issue is how you lose. Changes to the voting system that allow multiple parties aren't going to cause Democrats to win more seats in Missouri. Missouri is red regardless of which voting system you use. But it will cause Republicans to lose seats, to libertarians or some other right-leaning third party running candidates there. Which is perfectly to the advantage of the right-leaning voters there, because it better represents their interests.
It's not to the advantage of the incumbent party insiders, who then trick people with crooked amendments like that. But if you pin that generically on "Republicans", implying a contrast with Democrats and need for all right-leaning people to line up against you, you're not going to win in Missouri.
You have to pin it specifically where it belongs, on the fat cats trying to sustain their privileged position as a one-party monopoly in the state at the expense of all voters.
Not one of these laws were put forth or passed by anyone other than Republicans in any of these states, and there is more pending legislation in other states before the end of the year.
If it makes noises like a duck, looks like a duck, does duck things, it's a duck!
I'm not running for office, just applying proper attribution!
The "game" is not worth playing, especially now. Time to bail. Sucks. (Reminder that there are far more registered independents than any political party affiliation.)
You can play the same game and call them "Americans" or "adults" or "politicians" but the reason you want to call them Republicans is that you're stuck in a partisan frame.
If you need majority support in a state where Republican candidates get 60-70% of the vote then you need to get some "Republicans" on your side, which in turn means you need to distinguish between the ones who are your enemies and the ones who could be your friends.
Getting visas, not worth it. Won't be fixed in my lifetime, my children's lifetimes, my grandchildren's lifetimes.
Something something best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, second best time is today, etc.
That seems more like abandoning a place because it's currently full of weeds than planting a tree.
Faster we go, the faster the children can integrate.
Everything has its season.
Right, no etnic cleansing, no mass starvation of etnic non-russian regions. No forced deportations to the Syberia.
No one of mentioned high ranks could freely use native language.
You probably know how they called USSR the prison of nations.
Yes, like all propaganda, the Western version is great at producing catchphrases. The Iron Curtain. The Axis of Evil. The Prison of Nations. Or, self-referentially, the White Man's Burden and Manifest Destiny. For internal consumption there are epithets like Convicted Criminal and Sleepy Joe (take your pick).
The best propaganda relies on some degree of truth before adding the imagery. But I am willing to bet that most commenters here have a fuzzy mental image of some vaguely menacing tyrant in a fur hat making people starve just for kicks. Other than Holodomor - can you name another mass starvation of an ethnic non-Russian region?
>> can you name another mass starvation of an ethnic non-Russian region
Asharshylyk. And it's not the only one I can name.
Maybe western propaganda is good in creating labels, but russians are good in killing is own people. Stalin killed more people in USSR than Hitler. Even now in their army ethnic minorities have disproportionally high KIA and WIA rates.
> The Iron Curtain
That was literal iron fence with multiple rows guarded by army who killed anyone who tried to cross.
> Other than Holodomor - can you name another mass starvation of an ethnic non-Russian region?
One genocide is not enough?
> menacing tyrant in a fur hat making people starve just for kicks
That is what was actually happening.
>>One genocide is not enough?
No, not for russians.
Hey, Russian genocides can never match the sheer killing power of American efforts to bring democracy to various parts of the world. And the Yanks have better marketing. Putin is jealous.
But what about America though??
I'm pretty sure America never wiped out 97% of an ethnic group.
- [deleted]
Just so that you understand, what that inevitably brings is alcoholism, domestic violence and other depressive deformities. My grandpa died from daily drinking with his factory pals and my grand-grandma has axe damage on her wooden furniture and it was normal.
I'm sorry about your family history, but I have American friends who've grown up here for generations with identical family histories - alcoholism, domestic violence, depressive deformities and all.
America had overall lower rates of alcoholism and lower rates of domestic violence then former eastern block.
Probably due to all the people with spanish culture living in the more southern areas lowering the average.
And farmers under the tzar had it better in your opinion?
We have more options for hobbies these days.
I think that lifestyle is easily achieved by basically anyone, you don't need much money to live that kind of life. The problem is that life is only enjoyable if everyone lives the same life. You could save a ton of money and not have to work much if you lived a 70s lifestyle. Many even long for that lifestyle, but it only works if everyone lives it. If you're the only one living in the 70s and everyone else lives in the 2020s, most people would not be happy. Somehow, enduring things is much easier as a group. I remember talking to a Chinese person who said for most of their youth they spent their days studying until 11pm with breaks for lunch and dinner. That would be hell for most western kids, but apparently they didn't suffer too much because they were studying together with their friends who all had to endure the same schedule.
Not if that guarantee came with some miserable factory job that was mandatory.
My understanding is that most of these jobs you could just slack off at and nothing would happen. They couldn't really fire you anyway.
> They couldn't really fire you anyway
They could do much worse, they could send you to prison camp.
That was not a threat if you slacked off. Slacking off was basically completely normalized.
That was a treat if you was political inconvenient. Or if someone seen you as a threat in his career ascent and denounced you (falsely or truthfully). Which, in a roundabout way caused more of that slacking culture. It was literally safer to NOT look like the best worker with initiative.
Probably this. You would not want to stand out in any way. If you were such a slacker that it reflected badly on your boss, or if you were so productive that you became a threat to others, things could go badly. So your goal was to just exist, be a nobody, never challenge authority, never have a controversial opinion, just go home to your little cement apartment on the 5th floor and drink vodka. Sounds wonderful.
My dad used to say basically the same - he used to work at a coal mine in communist Poland and said that basically if you wanted to step up and work hard everyone else would put you back in your place. They'd get their gear, take 3 hours to get to wherever they were going, sit around and chat, then make the trip back and always have some excuse as to why the work couldn't be done.
And the thing is, at the end of the month they'd still be told that the mine has worked 150% of the norm and they are all getting letters of commendation from the the local mayor or something. Everyone knew it was nonsense, from top to bottom, and it was just how it worked. It's how on the news they said the wheat production is up 400% this year and western countries are jealous of their ability to grow crops and yet there was a shortage of bread.
So yeah, you just shut up and tried not to stick out.
Most parents would.
Yeah. I've had friends who went unemployed for a long time because they considered themselves to be above certain jobs. Me? If my kid needs food, the burger at the local McDonald's is gonna look very flippable real quick.
And if you’re halfway serious and reliable you’ll get promoted into management pretty quickly and that gets you benefits.
This is averaging across ~40 years of history (none of this applied until mid-50s and certainly not before WWII) and comparing "middle class" with low income. The "guaranteed, if low-paying, job and roof over head" was the norm, but it certainly didn't apply to everyone, the modern Russian word for a homeless person is of soviet origin. I. e. a criminal convict would lose their home automatically.
> But I'm not going to chuckle at the hypothetical people we're supposed to pity for wanting this
We should.
What communists really want is to have their every need and desire magically provided for, as if they were fundamental rights. In other words, what they truly want is called post-scarcity: the absence of an economy.
Communism and socialism are economic models. There exists scarcity of goods and resources and therefore they must be economized. There's a system that chooses who gets access to said scarce resources.
Socialism is sold to people as though it was post-scarcity. People think they'd be living comfortable "secure" lives where everything is guaranteed and provided for. Ah yes, the fabled memetic fully automated luxury space communism.
People who buy into this will probably end up doing forced hard labor in a field somewhere should communists actually come to power. They will not get to do what they want, they will work wherever the state puts them to work under penalty of death by firing squad. The state has no choice, anything else means mass starvation and millions of deaths.
Pity is far too lenient a reaction towards such reality distorting naïveté. If left unchecked, they will win elections and actually install socialism in your country.
We have a better chance of achieving post scarcity by collapsing capitalism with relentless automation.
Idk the Nordics seem to be doing ok
In the Nordics, the governments don't really try to run the economy. They provide stable environment to their local capitalists, let them do business at their leisure, and then tax their profits.
That is a huge difference from the mass experiment with central-command economy that was run in the countries of the Soviet Bloc. Unsurprisingly, ideologues and bureaucrats cannot really create and sustain a competitive economy. That requires a different sort of mentality.
Nordic countries are not socialist regimes. They are free economies with welfare states. Socialism implies state control of the economy, industry and the means of production.
Nice. They found so much oil for their small country they have saved over a quarter million per citizen.
The infinite money glitch has been helpful.
They're not socialist by the classical definition. They're capitalist countries with social benefits.
And then, these strong social safety nets seem to only work well in countries that have highly homogenous populations.
They aren't. They're becoming fascist like the rest of EU.
Nordics are very capitalist, come and visit
The descriptor "mollusk-like" for people that have different political or social preferences from the author is really dehumanizing and not okay.
> really dehumanizing
Yes. That was the author's point.
I think you missed the metaphors target. He was describing the lifestyle of just subsisting. Like a mollusk. This was objectively the majority of experiences under the Soviet system, not a comment on anyone’s political views.
And I think you missed something as well
I dont know how your life is, but my own impression is that life of many americans is worse than the life which was in the Soviet Union at least until the 80s (after Stalin). Maybe not in the sense of the capacity to buy junkfood and other junk, but as to sense of living and human relations. "Mollusk" sounds as the usual american antirussian propaganda.
Unless you are limiting your comparison to just the homeless in America, this is just not true. Most people don't know much about life in the Soviet Union in the first place, but even what people do know is typically limited only to life in Moscow and Leningrad. Dismissing the conditions as "capacity to buy junkfood" is uncalled for.
"Most people do not know much about the life in Soviet Union"
Well, I was born there, and I think that limiting the comparison to your homeless people is maybe comforting for an american, but is a distorted view.
I don't know where in the Soviet Union you were born. But, the stories I've heard of life outside the cities are completely unrecognizable to the modern American experience outside of the most extreme rural and isolated environments available.
Have to compare extremes in that case. Probably everyone in the gulag had a worse life than every American complaining.
The really funny part is that this is probably fairly easy to achieve in the United States. The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency control regime.
Currently people all over the world are free to move to New York, which makes the city unaffordable. If you forbade anyone not born within it from moving there, Manhattan would be fairly affordable and homelessness would be much reduced.
All you need to do is to free yourself from that bourgeois delusion that a man from Mexico (or worse, West Virginia) has any right to live in that city.
> The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency control regime.
Ouch: straight to being against others.
No, the part you'd need to implement to get socialised housing is socialised housing. Similarly, there are modern equivalents to guaranteed jobs. Communism believed everyone had to work: today we have different ideas of purpose than Marx had, plus are more aware of those who cannot work, or the value of non-work social contributions, and tech folks like us might believe in or hope for an upcoming post-scarcity society, with a transition period of UBI.
I expect you want to control migration and residency in order to avoid freeloaders. Freeloaders are remarkably rare, most people have self-respect and enjoy being productive, and interestingly systems that exterminate freeloaders entirely tend to be less efficient.[1] Plus, if you have a wonderful system, the best way to handle other people wanting it is to help it grow, not limit it to yourself. A better policy would be one encouraging its growth elsewhere in other countries where all those folk who are coming to your shores are coming from. The US has a long (mixed) history of that approach re democracy.
[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...
Freeloaders are rare but their behavior patterns spread to those that are working on a massive scale.
With enough demotivation due to freeloaders, the whole system creaks under its own weight.
What freeloaders are you talking about? This is complete nonsense.
Residency controls exist to solve the Economic Problem. The amount of people that want to live in global cities is endless. Even if you socialize all the housing in New York, there will be people that want to live in the city but won't be able to. It is the job of the economic system to determine who gets in and who doesn't.
That's why socialized housing requires residency controls, but if those were implemented in the United States, the country could reap the specified benefits of of the Soviet system.
Finally, you speak of encouraging growth elsewhere, but what can be more productive for the growth of West Virginia, than to tell every man born in that state that he shall also die in that state. What can be better for industrial development, but a labor force that can't move away?
It's so sad to see communists cling to capitalist concepts like that. Communism has no future so long as it's supporters refuse to understand that Marx's magnificent philosophical and political system rejects borgeous human rights.
> Residency controls exist to solve the Economic Problem. The amount of people that want to live in global cities is endless.
That isn't true. There are a finite number of living people and if you just kept building housing in every major city, there would be enough for everyone who wants to live there.
It might not be practical to build enough housing in one city to house the entire global population, but who is proposing that anyway? Build more housing everywhere.
> Finally, you speak of encouraging growth elsewhere, but what can be more productive for the growth of West Virginia, than to tell every man born in that state that he shall also die in that state. What can be better for industrial development, but a labor force that can't move away?
By implication you would also have an inability to import labor. And then if you don't e.g. have a local medical school, you don't have local doctors. If you have the local environment to sustain a major industry and a local population that could do 90% of the jobs, but the other 10% are specialists who would have to be paid to relocate then it can't open up there at all and you lose the other 90% of the jobs too.
Suppose you have a mining town somewhere until the mine is exhausted. What are the people who used to live there supposed to do other than move away? There is nothing there for them anymore.
- [deleted]
> That isn't true. There are a finite number of living people and if you just kept building housing in every major city, there would be enough for everyone who wants to live there.
That's sort of of neither here nor there. Sure, it's probably true, but try explaining that to anyone who hates bourgeois democracy. "If only we let the greedy property developers have it their way."
But the point that I'm trying to get across here with no small amount of irony (that I hope is fairly obvious), is that all the benefits of living in a communist dictatorship come from the dictatorship, not from the communism. Collectivized agriculture, state industries, socialized housings - all those things are worse than useless. What provided safety, stability and a guaranteed standard of life was the semi-serfdom imposed by the state.
> By implication you would also have an inability to import labor. And then if you don't e.g. have a local medical school, you don't have local doctors. If you have the local environment to sustain a major industry and a local population that could do 90% of the jobs, but the other 10% are specialists who would have to be paid to relocate then it can't open up there at all and you lose the other 90% of the jobs too.
The Soviet system did allow for movement. When a factory was opened and had to be staffed, permits were issued for the necessary people. In fact that was the only significant way for people from rural areas to be allowed the privilege to move to a city. Similarly, the problem with doctors was dealt with rather elegantly - every graduate of a medical school was assigned a specific town or village and was forced to live and practice there for decades.
The Soviet Union didn't abolish the movement of people. In fact, in the 1940s it was probably something of a champion in terms of internal migration. It's the freedom of movement that was abolished.
> Sure, it's probably true, but try explaining that to anyone who hates bourgeois democracy. "If only we let the greedy property developers have it their way."
So just describe it as "don't let the greedy landlords have their way" because the greed landlords want to limit housing supply.
> But the point that I'm trying to get across here with no small amount of irony (that I hope is fairly obvious)
I kind of figured, but actual communists will occasionally show up to say the same sort of thing and then it's just Poe's Law again.
> What provided safety, stability and a guaranteed standard of life was the semi-serfdom imposed by the state.
And there are a lot of people who would willingly be serfs if it meant stability.
The trouble is, it actually doesn't. Monopolies and unaccountable bureaucrats have short-term stability, where short-term is often something like a few decades. But being insulated from competitive pressure makes them long-term unfit, and then they eventually crumble. And the years leading up to the fall have a tendency to be increasingly unpleasant.
> The Soviet system did allow for movement. When a factory was opened and had to be staffed, permits were issued for the necessary people. In fact that was the only significant way for people from rural areas to be allowed the privilege to move to a city. Similarly, the problem with doctors was dealt with rather elegantly - every graduate of a medical school was assigned a specific town or village and was forced to live and practice there for decades.
This is one of the other reasons that system tends to fall apart.
Suppose you need something that doesn't come from within your jurisdiction. You haven't got any rare earths in the ground where you are etc. Well, you can just buy them from whoever has them, but then that country is never going to want to join your system because then you'd be taking their natural resources and sending back politburos instead of cash money.
Meanwhile the same thing happens to anyone there who is producing more than they consume. They want to leave. The Berlin Wall wasn't there to keep the Americans out.
That's not true and the City of Vienna proved that thesis wrong a century ago. [0].
Even today, two-thirds of Viennese residents live in public housing, the city is Europe's largest landlord and as a result, housing is extremely affordable for a world-class city. It's not without reason that Vienna tends to top worldwide quality of life rankings - it's the achievements of Red Vienna.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/magazine/vienna-social-ho...
The city of Vienna has a fairly unique history. It used to be the capital of a massive empire that's now gone, and thus suffered a period of fairly prolonged decline.
It's population declined from 2.4 million in 1914[1] to 1.5 million in the 1980s[2]. The only reason why it's currently considered even close to a world-class city is that after the fall of the Berlin wall it was the natural financial hub for oligarchic capital.
I think we can all agree not many great and global cities have tons of free housing emptied by a prolonged period of decline. And that we can't really evaluate if the city is solving the economic problem well or badly, as right now it's simply less acute for historical reasons that have nothing to do with it's housing policy.
[1] https://ww1.habsburger.net/en/chapters/growing-city-vienna-e... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/20107/vien...
> I think we can all agree not many great and global cities have tons of free housing emptied by a prolonged period of decline
That is not the case in Vienna, either. The government built enough units to supply ten percent of the total market and used that leverage to drive down prices. Before that, a large portion lived in squalor.
> But from 1923 to 1934, in a period known as Red Vienna, the ruling Social Democratic Party built 64,000 new units in 400 housing blocks, increasing the city’s housing supply by about 10 percent. Some 200,000 people, one-tenth of the population, were rehoused in these buildings, with rents set at 3.5 percent of the average semiskilled worker’s income, enough to cover the cost of maintenance and operation
> Communism has no future so long as it's supporters refuse to understand that Marx's magnificent philosophical and political system rejects borgeous human rights.
Stalin couldn't have put it better himself.
> It is the job of the economic system to determine who gets in and who doesn't.
Isn't that the point of capitalism? If you can afford to live in New York, you do. If you can't, you don't.