Oh and your alt tex is missing, please add according to rule 0.5, thanks!
Trotsky. The guy who argued the Soviet Union was too authoritarian and bureaucratic. And was serving an unaccountable elite instead of the workers. Arguably much closer to the spirit of Marx than Stalin. Is the one everyone hates?
This meme is kinda tankie brained.
A little, yeah. I grew up hating Stalin and favored Trotsky, but the more I learned about the eastern front the more I have to wonder if the USSR would have survived the Nazi invasion if Stalin hadn't forced them to industrialize so aggressively. Without Stalin, it is possible that the Nazis took Moscow in 1942 and without most of the Wehrmacht stuck on the eastern front, I doubt that the US would have sacrificed a million men to force open a western front. It is possible without Stalin that the Nazis would have ruled Europe for decades.
Yeah... no. Stalin's purges is literally the reason the Soviet army was such a walkover in the early days of Operation Barbarossa. It's thanks to Stalin that the Wehrmacht even managed to get that far.
I don’t think that’s a good reason to like Stalin.
You could say something similar about Churchill vis à vis Nazis. Doesn’t change the fact he was a cunt.
Plus Stalin literally cooperated with Hitler to invade Poland, commiting atrocities in the process. So while I appreciate that the USSR is one of the, if not the, major reasons the Nazis fell, I don’t see it as out of good faith.
Please stop spreading false information about the non-aggression pact between the USSR and fascist Germany. There is infinetly more nuance in that situation than your take here:
Plus Stalin literally cooperated with Hitler to invade Poland, commiting atrocities in the process. So while I appreciate that the USSR is one of the, if not the, major reasons the Nazis fell, I don’t see it as out of good faith.
I have neither the energy nor the will for a discussion with you about that, but I am gonna link some quality effortposting by @[email protected] on this topic:
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/50641556/20569861
It's the whole thread, really. Highly recommended writeup.
Thanks for the shoutout, comrade! 🫡
🫡
I'm sorry tho, I did not intend it as a demand for you to come and have to write here, but more of an additional attribution ajzjsjenf
No worries! I know I'm not very popular over here, and I know you aren't trying to spark anything, I just wanted to give my side of what I felt was misrepresentation of my views. I don't intend on starting a struggle session here, I deliberately try to leave dbzer0 communities to dbzer0 users.
I never mentioned the Non agression pact. Simply that Stalin and Hitler cooperated in an invasion of Poland. I don’t think that’s deniable.
Also, I’m not sure I’m going to take Cowbee’s take seriously when they frame Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as self defence. And who calls modern CCP controlled China “Democratic”.
Well, since I was called here, and now you're directly calling my views into question, I'll give my side of things.
The Nazis and the USSR did not cooperate to invade Poland. The Nazis invaded Poland as a part of Lebensraum, and the Soviets went in weeks later to prevent the Nazis from taking all of Poland. Because the Soviets went into Poland, the areas they took (largely areas Poland had annexed from Ukraine and Lithuania) were spared from the Holocaust.
I do not frame the Russo-Ukrainian War as Russian "self-defense." I frame it as western-provoked, and maintain that Russia's goals are NATO neutrality and to annex the 4 oblasts as a buffer zone to protect from a hypothetical land invasion. The 4 oblasts are culturally and ethnically Russian, and seceded following the coup against Yanukovych in 2014, and have been at war with Kiev for a decade. Russia's goals are purely self-interested, wishing to annex the seperatists and ensure Ukraine cannot join NATO. It isn't in the war for plunder, the 4 oblasts aren't exactly economic powerhouses or resource rich. My stances on the Russo-Ukrainian War are very consistent with other communist orgs like PSL and FRSO.
The PRC is democratic, although certainly not a multiparty form of liberal democracy. Regardless if the PRC's form of socialism is something you agree with or not, we need to take an accurate view of the situation. Ultimately, polling in support of the PRC is extremely consistent, even when taken from western orgs.
According to the most recent report (2024), people in China have overwhelmingly positive views of their political system. 92% of people say that democracy is important to them, 79% say that their country is democratic, 91% say that the government serves the interests of most people (rather than a small group), and 85% say all people have equal rights before the law. Furthermore, China outperforms the US and most European countries on these indicators – in fact, it has some of the strongest results in the world. The figure below compares China’s results to those from the US, France and Britain. These results may help explain the high levels of satisfaction with government reported by the Ash Center.
Just wanted to clarify my stances here, as the way you framed them were clearly meant to smear my legitimacy. I understand why some may disagree with my analysis, but the underlying evidence is reliable and widespread.
This is so utterly fucked up that anyone of db0 is defending allying with the fucking Nazis.
This instance is going really tankie these days.
Learning how to properly read is one of the first steps towards losing your political/historical illiteracy 😁
Also sorry for not wishing for the destruction of the whole of Eastern Europe, the extermination of all Slavs and even more dead Soviet citizens (because 27 million apparently isn't enough for the shitlibs)
Without Stalin's purges, every branch and level of USSR would have been better prepared for the Nazi invasion and the early part of the war would be very different.
I think it's more a jab at his personality, which was quite annoying.
He was very intelligent and an excellent orator, but he often seemed arrogant.
I mean Trotsky predicted what would happen and then went through with it anyway, so yeah, fuck him
Also tag yourself: am a mix of Rosa "the gremlin" Luxembourg and Nadezhda "Um... what's her name again?" Krupskaya in terms of vibes LOL
Trotsky's personality might have been quite annoying but I do think he had a lot of correct observations and predictions, including but not limited to:
His crucial and monumental role in the civil war, accurately calling out the growing bureaucracy which later evolved into the corrupt nomenklatura with all their privileges and special status.
Him being able to see past his disdain for Stalinism and vocally supporting the USSR in WW2 etc.
There is a lot of slander about him, as with most old Bolsheviks (most of which were murdered in the 1930s....)
And yes, he was a Bolshevik through and through. He corrected his position way before 1917 and usually tried to stay away from dogmatic ones as well. Why else would he have helped so much in the civil war and played one of the key positions?
Koba was only relevant as for his bank robberies (which were based) and IIRC failing a military offensive in Poland/Ukraine.
(Only much later becoming more relevant by abusing his position as gensec.)
While Trotsky had so many feathers in his cap, from the early pravda board, to the Petersburg/Petrograd Soviet, obviously the Red Army, his later positions of the economy (meaning after his armies of labour blunder) which were adopted almost verbatim by Stalin after he opportunistically disposed of the right wing with e.g. Bukharin (whose position he implemented before).
Good thing it is not, since there are better political theories now.
🤨
Could you provide some examples? I'm curious.
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
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1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such
That means condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
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That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
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The only dangerous minority is the rich.
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Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
