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Cross-posted from “TRUE communism!” by @[email protected] in [email protected]
Cross-posted from “TRUE communism!” by @[email protected] in [email protected]
The Marxist equivalent of “but the GDP…”
You’re so right, it would have been way better for everyone in the territory of the USSR to be illiterate and poor and starving, so they wouldn’t have cared so much when the Nazis effortlessly murdered everyone from western Poland to eastern Siberia. Who even needs industrial output when you could have a “”“horizontally-organized”“” bandit kingdom named after its unelected leader?
Ye ofc the only alternative the the Stalin regime was stagnation and defeat, clearly nothing else could have possibly have happened…
Why would there need to be an alternative? It was already the best possible version of what could have happened, within the bounds of a crushing siege by the entire capitalist world on one hand, and basic human fallibility on the other. There is no other political leader in history with a higher proportion of correct decisions to mistakes than Stalin, and they were mistakes, as in consequences not intended from actions taken earnestly to protect the people of the USSR - unlike the actual unspeakable atrocities being committed constantly by every single imperialist nation at the time, as well as before and since.
Even just on its own terms, the USSR was unimaginably more humane than what came before:
what existed outside of it:
and what came after:
This is called the “Eastern Cross” by the way, a demographic phenomenon unique to former nations of the USSR, where the death rate and birth rate suddenly cross over each other in the 90s. It’s way better that this happened, of course, than the USSR being run by “”“authoritarians”“” who would protect their people from sabotage and murder using the necessary amount of violence (that is, still less than their enemies).
But I forgot, we’re comparing an actual nation that had to actually exist in the dirt and blood of the real world, to the geometrically perfect platonic anarchist society that lives in your head, so I guess I have to concede. I’ll go tell all the communists in the third world to pack it up and disband their organizations and scratch out all the hammers and sickles so you can go tell them how to avoid being assassinated by the CIA the right way.
Thanks, and to add even further, this had global effects too
High living standards and strong workers’ rights and compensation in the USSR forced capitalist nations around the world to make concessions to their workers. Once the USSR had been destroyed, the concessions could be rolled back and the profits guzzled by the capitalists.
Nice list of pre-prepped propaganda.
Did pootin give you those?
If we argue based just on principles and philosophy, we’re dogmatists.
If we argue based on lived experience of people who lived in socialist countries, we’re nitpicking.
If we argue based on statistics and empirical evidence, we’re using pre-prepped propaganda.
If we argue based on more basic knowledge about communism defeating fascism, we’re oversimplifying history.
So how do you want us to argue? Would you rather the communists just not explain their case at all, McCarthy?
It’s crazy that the absolute lowest mortality rate the empire ever managed was still like double the Soviet Union’s mortality rate during the middle of WW2.
it’s not like stalin purged the census statisticians for months when he didn’t get the statistics he wanted
eh we all know capitalist oligarchies are always worse comrades
is it just me or is literally every single liberal rebuttal in this thread purely spoken from an armchair deep within a mind palace?
Damn, I didn’t know you could bluff the Wehrmacht with fake industrial output. Who knew you could just lie about how much steel you were producing and simply will more divisions of tanks into existence?
Also, more importantly than that, what the fuck are you talking about? Do you have a single shred of evidence to back up that claim? In fact, do you have a single shred of evidence to back up ANY of your claims? I’ve never even heard a claim like that before. Did you just make it up off the cuff? Do you care about evidence? Do you read books? Have you even the slightest singlest iota of interest in the actual factual history of the world, or are you just a larper who prefers a particular set of drapery on the society they idly daydream about?
I care because these were people who actually lived and fought and bled for a better world and I will not have some imperial core shitstain besmirching their name by drooling out the cheapest CIA propaganda ever produced. Are you stupid? What do you think living inside a successful propaganda campaign would look like? Have you ever considered why your opinions align exactly with the interests of the US State Department? Go and read Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti, it’s short and you’ll learn something.
I didn’t say anything about Soviet voluminous military output or the prowess of determined command planning under Stalin at rapid industrialization. I was talking about their human statistics, their mortality statistics.
https://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/knigi/polka/gold_fund08.html is Soviet academia rehosted on Demoscope, a neutral website on the publications in demography—not democracy.
I’ve read that part of that book. On the topic of prison mortality, it just repeated the historical consensus of 799,455 official executions between 1921 and 1953, and 1.5–1.7 million additional deaths in the Gulag out of the 18 million that passed through between 1930 and 1953. 1.5 million ÷ 18 million is over 8%. Meanwhile, the review article “‘A Dark Cloud Will Go Over’: Pain, Death, and Silence in Texas Prisons in the 1930s” lambastes the suffering of state prisoners, weeps over “the prison population swelled from 5,000 prisoners in 1930 (itself cause for much concern in prison Annual Reports) to crisis levels of 7,177 in April 1939, making the Texas Prison System one of the largest in the country” and denounces the 68 deaths per year. ( 68 + 21 lynching deaths ) ÷ 5,000 is 0.178%.
Damn, I wonder what events occurred betwen 1930 and 1953 that would have caused a spike in both occupancy of Soviet prisons, and the death rate in them.
1942, I wonder what was happening in that year?
Anyway, nice cherry-picked comparison, let’s take a look at the actual mortality statistics:
Well would you look at that, as soon as the genocidal Nazi threat against the Soviet people was destroyed, their life expectancy almost instantly doubled from pre-communist times. I believe neutral demographs would call that the second highest rate of increase in life expectancy in human history.
So a prison system in the incredibly wealthy imperial core, where the denizens can raise themselves up on the plundered blood and gold of South America and later the entire third world, has a lesser need for incarceration than a nation under siege from an entire planet of enemies who would stop at nothing to sabotage and destroy their state, and then enslave and murder their people. And the US has absolutely zero external threats on its entire continent - how did that happen again?
And how’s the US prison system going now?
(It’s the highest incarceration rate in the world, and by a looooooong way.)
And why are we only focusing on one communist state? Let’s take a look at another one:
It’s China, with the first highest rate of increase of life expectancy in human history. As a bonus, here’s a comparison with India’s historical life expectancy - almost the perfect experiment, as it gained independence around the same time as the PRC was established, had a similar climate and demographics, but did not have the benefit of communist central planning:
Simply taking the integral between these two curves and multiplying up by their populations means that the Chinese people were collectively afforded literally tens of billions more years of human lifespan - thanks entirely to the communist party and the communist people who supported it - making Mao Zedong the greatest humanitarian of all time.
surely you know that prisoners in wartime go instead to the frontline? gulag occupancy in fact decreased during the great patriotic war despite an initial increase from including petty criminals.
let’s compare 1942. 157,514 total prisoners. 111 executed, 912 dead otherwise. that’s 0.65%. for 1944, 130,805, 63, 756, 0.63%.
that’s a LOW bar. pre-communist times are a very low bar. nobody here argued that russian life was better before the sfsr
when were we comparing that? when were we justifying the US?
among colonizing countries definitely, but among the rest of the world no. El Salvador has nearly triple that of the US, and surprisingly Cuba is second. and I definitely prefer the Cuban state over the US (though not to live there due to the sanctions).
what are we even arguing over? i sense we have a different conception of the topic at hand due to how much seemingly irrelevant stuff you bring up
again what are you talking to? where’d your series of questions about the purging of the statisticians go? if what you want is to expand the argument, that chart looks quite similar to that of south korea
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no?
Yeah, doing the same thing without imperialism, massacres, oppression, population displacements, secret police, thought crimes, and other stalinist atrocities was just not possible. I understand now. Those are things are a necessary path to a society which will eventually transform into a liberal capitalist cleptocracy.
Likewise imperialism, slave trade, enclosures, exploitation was clearly the only way for the UK to transform into a democracy you see, and they too fought the fascists so they were clearly on the right side of history.
I swear, MLs and their fetishizing of stats are exactly like the nroliberals fetishize GDP growth.
Oh shit yeah, I forgot about all that bullshit the CIA made up.
Wait a second, THOUGHT CRIMES??? THOUGH CRIMES??? Do you think ‘Thought Crimes’ were a real thing that existed outside of the anticommunist screed ‘1984’?
Anyways, on to your next point, oh, it’s the most unreasonable fucking false equivalency I’ve ever seen in my life. The UK is not and has never been a democracy, it is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that has occasional political pageantry where it pretends the people have any power at all, just like every single nation that is not communist. Fighting the Nazis is the literal only time the British Empire did a single good thing, and their problem with German fascism was the German part, not the fascism part. And then they immediately started drawing up ‘Operation Unthinkable’, the plan to resume an invasion of the USSR using mainly Wehrmacht soldiers, a plan I assume you support wholeheartedly as it would have destroyed what was obviously the most evil nation in the world at the time, the one whose soldiers liberated Auschwitz.
didnt they fight the boers at one point. would have been much better if they beat the amerikkkans too tbh
That’s true and good, but even then, in the process they also invented the concept of the concentration camp. I mean, rounding up civilians into cramped, unsanitary conditions with little food so that they all die of disease is a pretty obvious idea, but they systematized and came up with the euphemism for it.
FTFY
… They said while “AES“ China is massively oppressing it’s LGBT populace from expressing LGBT ideas.
But I know the typical delusions of campists, any criticism about “communist” nations is “CIA lies”, (until it’s irrefutably proven, at which point it becomes an “unfortunate mistake”) much like any criticism of fascist nations is “fake news”. Just one of those wacky coincidences.
Chinese people both feel that their country is more democratic, and that democracy is more important, than every other country in the world.
What the fuck are you talking about?? When you make a claim you have to back it up with evidence. It is obviously much, much safer to be LGBT in China than in most other countries in the world, ESPECIALLY the US - and if you want the most progressive legislation on LGBT rights, womens rights and the rights of children then you have to go to the communist state of Cuba.
Ah, of course, I forgot that protesting against claims that are false is exactly the same as protesting against claims that are true, you’re so balanced and wise. Saying that the Holocaust didn’t happen and saying that Stalin didn’t actually personally eat all of the corn in Ukraine with a giant spoon are exactly morally equivalent. If you would like to provide any evidence for a single one of your “irrefutable claims” I would love to see it.
And US republicans say they believe in freedom above all.
Just the most recent one of many examples
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That is in fact very obviously true. If they hadn’t developed their economy far faster than any other society in history, they couldn’t possibly have produced enough food and war materiel to defeat the Nazis, which I hope we can agree was an extremely important thing for the Soviets to be able to do.
The revolution which was betrayed by the bolsheviks in its infancy would have achieved the same results and not devolved into an authoritarian dystopia in the process.
“A type of economic success achieved multiple times under “the tankies” and under literally nobody else would definitely have been achieved under the liberal government that the October revolution overthrew” is too farfetched and historically unfounded to even make a good historical fiction what if novel.
Funny how you still sound like the liberals who talk about the economic success of liberal capitalist revolutions based on cherry-picked metrics. Much like they ignore the imperialism and exploitation which powered those results, so do you ignore the exploitation and oppression that powered yours. Both are insufficient by anarchist standards and therefore we criticize them instead of having a naive deterministic view that this is the only way it could have happened.
But I’m sure you don’t get it again, so I doubt I’ll try to explain it once again after you reply with some delusions about the grandeur of the USSR.
Delusions of grandeur about the people who ended the Holocaust is wild coming from the petty tyrant of a reddit knockoff that they named after themselves.
Lol if you think I’m a tyrant, you’d do great under an ML regime based on a literal cult of personality.
Thank you for that amazing statement though. We might just make it into a tagline.
lol just take up a hobby or go do some productive labour, why do you do this to yourself
I’m autistic. I know I should just disengage but sometimes I can’t help it.
plenty of better ways to spend your time, is all i want to say. like, is this really fulfilling for you or does it just feel empty afterwards?
Again, I’m autistic. I can’t always help myself from replying to goading and disinfo. It’s a waste of time for everyone involved.
your commitment to maintaining a pure idealistic ignorance about 20th century history, in the face of many people much more informed than you doing their best to educate you, does imply a certain tenacity. however, i can’t go as far to say that it’s commendable in any way. you should read some books.
I know I’m impervious to campist propaganda, no need to remind me. It’s because I’ve read enough that I’m like this. Thank you for noticing though.
You, apparently: fuck those kids
What a stupifyingly disingenuous statement, but then again about right for a campist.
You looked at a chart that outlined improvements in quality of life that included a boom in agricultural output, aka, literally feeding the children and called it
Clearly the tankie brain cannot comprehend criticism from the left…
It’s alright, don’t worry about it.
Being so ideologically rigid that you’d let children starve to avoid “state authoritarian bureaucracy” is not actually something to be proud of, lib
Disengage
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what is your opinion on left coms (i.e. like, bordiga fans/council communists that like lenin but hate the USSR from like 1922 or whatever onwards)