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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)