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[+] -7 points 2 days ago* (30 children)

The USSR was run by politicians. They concentrated wealth and privilege into their hands and those of their supporters in the police and military.

Capitalists, party elites, or hereditary nobility; it makes little difference to the starving.

Putting the words in your country name and paying lip service is not enough.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (8 children)

    Comments like this make it painfully obvious that someone has not engaged with the actual history, because guess who agreed with you that lip service is not enough? The communists. Life expectancy, infant mortality, nutrition, medical outcomes, literacy, addiction rates, poverty, all of this shit immediately improves drastically in every time and place communists have ever seized power. Often these improvements have come despite nightmarish wartime conditions, such as during the Chinese Revolution when life expectancy shot up despite being in active combat with Imperial Japan after 20 years of civil war. The people of Cuba have created one of the most advanced medical systems on earth despite sixty years of strangulation. The people of the USSR risked their safety to send weapons to uprisings across the world despite needing every bullet themselves for the near century of fascist invasion and expansion that ultimately took thirty million of their lives.

    The idea that communists are secretly only pretending to care about other people is the single biggest piece of capitalist projection, and the one most foundational to holding up other myths about communists. Every abuser in history has said all the same things the white empire drills into our heads: this is just how the world is, everyone else is just like me or worse, so there's no point in looking for better. But in reality, Cuba has no Gates Foundation. Laos has no Mr Beast. Our economic system is the one set up to reward and incentivize exploiting people you pretend to care about, not theirs. To look around at the very specific, grotesque circumstances created by capitalism and attribute it to some universal axiom of human society is what having an imagination trapped by capitalist "realism" looks like.

    This attitude of "well everyone is shit" is one of the last layers of refuge before you get to the truth: that we, westerners raised in a culture of advanced imperialism, are specifically and deeply sick, that we have forcibly exported this sickness across our planet and we desperately need drastic mass change and healing before it kills us all.

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  • [–] -2 points 2 days ago (7 children)

    Exploiting people is inherently rewarding. Blaming capitalism for that is baffling.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

    See what I mean? Brain trapped by capitalist game theory at all times, never more than a fiscal quarter ahead. Is exploitation more rewarding than cooperation? Not at scale. Not in the long run. Look at the diseased, collapsing western empire, this parasitic thing falling to pieces, and look at China, whose relationships with other countries (and it's own people) are mutually beneficial. They're the new world power for a reason.

    Exploiting people is actually a slow and deadly poison, and our entire society is currently reaping the consequences.

    "Oh but don't blame the entire system of exploitation that punishes you for not being an exploiter, that's just weird" Brother you are fully lost in the sauce. If this was 1325 you'd be telling me not to blame the king because this is just how things are, this is how God made the world.

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  • [+] 1 point 15 hours ago (4 children)
  • [–] 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 child)

    Believing that a system that encourages and requires that exploitation is the best we can do is absolutely a capitalist idea, it's the ultimate ideological expression of capitalism: Liberalism. The belief that this is just how things are and there is no real alternative, and anything purporting to be one is just liberalism in a different hat.

    You are subsumed in ideology. The function of liberal ideology is not to convince you of the virtues of capitalism, but to ensure you make no serious investigations into any alternative by pretending that everything else is just secretly also capitalism.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 days ago (17 children)

    "Politician" is not a class. The state, in Marxist theory, is not outside of class struggle, but is within it. The CPSU did not concentrate wealth in their hands, in fact they were paid wages akin to highly skilled labor at the highest level. As such, wealth inequality went dramatically down:

    This is why the Soviet administrators cared so much about the working claases, they were working class themselves. Starvation was eliminated in the Soviet Union, life expectancy doubled in the first few decades, literacy rates skyrocketed to 99.9%, unemployment and homelessness were both nearly eliminated.

    Yes, it's enormously easy to simply paint the USSR as an exact replica of capitalism and aristocracy in outcome, only different in form. It's also enormously incorrect, and bears no resemblance to reality. As socialists, we need to actually seek truth from facts, and not coast by on vibes alone.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 days ago (13 children)
  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (12 children)

    The Soviet Union indeed had a famine in the 1930s. Is your point that it was deliberate? That's a popular theory among fascists and used to be popular among liberal historians, but opening the Soviet archives proved the socialists correct, that it was largely caused by weather disaster and some degree of mismanagement. It was also the last famine outside of World War II in the Soviet Union, because by the time of the famine's end agriculture had been successfully collectivized.

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  • [+] 0 points 15 hours ago (11 children)
  • [–] 2 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

    Famines were extremely common in both Tsarist Russia and feudal China. Their respective famines in the beginning were ended because they developed out of that underdeveloped form of agriculture. This is not difficult to understand. Why compare the Soviet Union and PRC to capitalist countries, when we should be comparing them to their former selves?

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  • [+] 0 points 8 hours ago (2 children)
  • [–] 2 points 8 hours ago (1 child)

    No, what's toxic is comparing countries with wildly different circumstances and prior levels of development without properly contextualizing. The famines were not caused by communism, nor mismanagement. The famines were caused by a combination of weather disaster and dramatic underdevelopment of agriculture, which is why both regions commonly had famine before, and why both countries had these as their last famines outside wartime, as they industrialized.

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  • [–] 1 point 12 hours ago (6 children)

    Jeez, you had me until "NGO."

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  • [+] 0 points 8 hours ago (5 children)
  • [–] 2 points 8 hours ago (4 children)

    You do know bigger NGOs receiver government funding, beholding them to said government?

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  • [+] 0 points 8 hours ago (3 children)