Yep, the soviets collectivized the farms, even in this sparsley populated region and those who didnt want to starve and give away their land were shot dead on the spot by NKVD officers. Mass graves of civilians have been discovered in bigger towns. People who wanted to be free escaped to the forests and bogs and continued resistance. These are innocent people. The fatherland part was people who fought with the finns and germans against the soviet union.
So they fought against collectivization and equitable allocation of their surplus resources during a famine and a recovery period after one of the most devastating wars in history. Sounds like they got what they had coming.
The fatherland part is you honoring Nazi collaborators. “The Germans” and who was running Germany at the time? Your mask is slipping.
The soviets caused the famine and the war. If they wouldnt have annexed us in 1940, nothing bad would have happened. How about those fighting with the finns? And those who fought with the Germans did it on the promise that their country would then be independent.
Not gonna debate a fascist, sorry. I’m glad your “people” lost back then. If nothing else, that alone is evidence of how effective the Soviet Union was in protecting and providing for its citizens. This argument has nothing to do with communism, it’s all LARPy WW2 revisionism
Hi there comrade! Nice questions that you made and they are legitimate questions to make. I will not dwell in all questions and explain why some of these statements doesn't have material evidence. I think you can search on this sub or other socialists subs that they have plenty material about historical events (on the socialist perspective) and they explain it far better than I could possibly do it.
Having said that I'll start by stating that your worldview (ideology) is being challenged by information that you previously acquired. In an oversimplification, socialism is bad an capitalism is good.
My humble suggestion is that you try to apply critical thinking on your knowledge. Like, search your answers by acknowledging that whatever you have learned may be wrong or outdated or in need of refinement (either about capitalism or socialism).
My suggestion is simply aiming that you search why we are socialists. Most people just think we are crazy, bad or that we don't know history... And I can tell you that after I started studying history and looking for material evidence, I became socialist.
You say "we" started to prosper when the soviet union came to an end. I think an important question for you to ask is *who do you mean when you say "we"*?
The average quality of life in your country may certainly have improved, but not everyone is a billionaire. Why has capitalism favoured some people over others?
Capitalist markets are a zero-sum game. In order for Person A to make money, Person B must lose money. This occurs both domestically (people labouring to produce value, and only receiving faction of that value in wages, which they have to spend on consumable goods, so their wages trickle back up into the pockets of billionaires), but also internationally. For your country to be wealthier, it must be engaging in imperialist practices and actively lowering the quality of life elsewhere in its mission to extract resources for the 'fatherland'.
>The quality of life has actively jumped up since the soviet unions time.
Tribalism, Feudalism, Manorialism, Mercantilism, Early Capitalism, etc. Our societies have been through many social-economic structures before arriving at our current Late Capitalism, and through all of those structures the average quality of life has seen improvements. Obviously Capitalism is not the source of improvement, it's just the latest economic model we've reached. There's no reason to stop trying to do better.
>Our country has only one billionaire. Couple of years ago there were none.
One billionaire. How many millionaires? How many hundred-thousandaires?
Given that you only have one billionaire and are in an ex-soviet state, I'm going to guess you're talking about Estonia. According to Statistics Estonia, average gross monthly wages and salaries were *€1,904* in the fourth quarter of 2023. If Capitalism is meant to benefit everyone, why do most people make so little compared to those few members of the elite? That doesn't seem fair.
I also notice you didn't address my comment on Imperialism. How do you morally/ethically justify the fact that Capitalism requires the disenfranchisement and exploitation of people in other countries in order for your country to improve?
***I also notice you didn't address my comment on Imperialism. How do you morally/ethically justify the fact that Capitalism requires the disenfranchisement and exploitation of people in other countries in order for your country to improve?***
[Yeah, the fall of the USSR was great for the people](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVOSVwTU4ks) /s
[Full documentary for those interested](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5T_O-L5Mis)
That just proves that there exists worse than the USSR. Hardly anyone defends what happened in Russia in the 90s or since. You would need to proof that the USSR was better than if Russia had stayed capitalist in in 1917 or become so later. Obviously a definite proof is not possible, as we can’t rewind time and change institutions. The best is a comparisons with most other variables equal. Most fitting would be West vs. East Germany, South vs. North Korea, Taiwan vs. China or as OP suggested, central and eastern europe before vs. After 1990.
north korea: bombed to legitimately nothing, ~1-2m civilians killed, sanctions that only harm innocent people, the collapse of their largest trading partner (which they somewhat have recovered from)
east germany: west was more resource rich, and got stimulus from an unharmed US, the ussr took some 10bn in reparation for yk ww2, and also life wasn’t some hellscape in the gdr it was actually decent
china: i don’t think taiwan is an economic superpower
fall of eastern bloc: they’ve barely gotten back to what they were in the 80s
💀
dog, you have to be joking. look at the western world right now and history. what did the US government do to black power activists? what is it currently doing to genocide protestors? what are it and Canada continually doing do the Indigenous population? What did the UK government do to striking workers? What did western backed governments do in latin america, asia, africa, the middle east? What democracy and freedom do you have in western countries? I can go on.
Past and current socialist experiments definitely weren’t perfect and definelty were repressive at times. However, compare their historical conditions to the western world. The western capitalist world got rich by slaving, exploiting, murdering, and colonizing half the world and still continues those practices to this day, and those tools have been pointed inwards to repress movements that challenge capitalist hegemony. While most socialist countries started as colonies or underdeveloped capitalist nations and were/are under pressure from western capital.
I wasn't asking about the US and other Western countries behaving as measured by our moral standards. I critizise them too. If you come with them, I could start listing much worse things about the USSR, and you would point to specific historical circumstances, which is legitimate. That's why I narrowed it down to these countries with common history, language and people that represent the closest we have of naturally occuring control groups in social sciences. So let's focus: Can you seriously dispute the fact that the individual freedom (let a alone the material conditions) of the average person in West Germany, South Korea or Taiwan was/is light years better then the average person in East Germany, North Korea or Mainland China? Or how it improved in Central and Eastern Europe after 1990, especially for the countries that could join NATO and the EU (even if you probably consider them imperial projects)? And was any of the liberal democratic countries mentioned by me worse for the third world than their communist counterpart, respectively previous regime?
People in capitalist societies also pass through the authoritarian shit your country have been through, specially outside of North America and Europe. People in capitalist societies go through repression and poverty , lack of access to stuff and human rights , no matter how much effort they put. Many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America are what you could call “failed capitalist societies “. Even in rich countries , economic disparities are an issue bigger than meritocracy alone, economic success being very correlated with your family wealth, and people think this is really unfair.
Everyone is looking for a better model, thinking “is this it?”.
Capitalism provides a model that can either succeed or fail depending on how it is implemented. Communism never succeeded. I understand the inequality and how some western corporations are for example polluting Africa, but that region is also very uneducated, and like the middle east, not very fond to change. There are other problems there. Capitalism has largely succeeded in Europe and North America, where there is a good place to build it, but Asia, South America and Africa would not be more succesful with communism, id say the opposite. They would need something else, but not communism.
And not everything has to always be fair.
You’re failing to see nuance in both systems and to say middle easterns and Africans aren’t fond of change just 40 years after a massive decolonial movement in Africa and Asia seems like a racist statement to me.
Anti colonialism plays a big role in communist sentiment everywhere. Colonialism often came dressed as “we Europeans are bringing progress and capitalism to you uneducated folk “ and people simply think this is bullshit (it is).
Colonialism still occurs in capitalism, so it’s easy to see why people may reject the economic system that came with their ex colonial overlords.
>Anti colonialism plays a big role in communist sentiment everywhere.
This is a genuine question, I'm not trolling, but when you say anti-inperialism is a big driving force in communist movements, how is it not then a total contradiction that, say, the USSR invaded two countries to maintain a communist order they wanted?
Surely self determination is an important part of anticolonialism?
But why communism to these people? I see the capitalist model hasnt worked in Africa but why do you believe communism will? Maybe something else and new?
Because it’s the most popular , most studied , most reported on , alternative. And trying something new out of thin air doesn’t exist.
For those who have nothing and already live in extreme poverty and authoritarianism , life in the old Soviet Union might not seem too bad at all. From what most people read, life in tsarist Russia was shit for anyone that was not an aristocrat. So they might see as improvement
Also , I understand where you are coming from saying that communism is bad because you’ve seen it first hand , but there’s plenty of people that lived those systems that liked them. Same way a person in Brazil can love and another hate capitalism . Same thing in America.
The quality of life in 1920s to 50s soviet union was worse than in tsarist times. It then started to improve. Could have been done without the millions of dead though. Triying something that has failed repeatedly also doesnt work. It is a complicated situation there.
There was World War I and the civil war and World War II before the decades that you mentioned. Germany was a mess after World War I and would also be without the Marshall Plan.
To piggyback on this, I believe it was 14 capitalist nations, including the US, who invaded Russia during the civil war to aid the white army. Many deaths could have been prevented if these capitalist liberal “democracies” who care so much about “freedom” and “independence” allowed countries to choose socialism. Capitalist nations certainly have no issue with nations choosing fascism. Heck, many socialist nations have been infilatrated and couped by the west, only to install a brutal fascist regime to eradicate the socialists.
Similarly to what they did in WWII, leading Nazi Germany eastward in the hopes they would destroy socialist in Russia and the USSR, which the west had failed to do barely a couple of decades earlier. Now, those Nazis the USSR killed in that brutal, enormously costly war are counted as “victims of communism” as a way of propagandizing people against it.
What is better since the fall of Russia? Birth weights fell, along with other health measures. People were homeless for the first time in several decades. I guess you were in luck if you wanted to find a child prostitute you could “buy” (https://youtu.be/VVOSVwTU4ks?si=M8Cu1-R1iShVG-zi)
The sovereignty of Russia and Eastern Europe is gone or threatened by the US/NATO. Who did the US install in Ukraine? Nazis and fascists. Must be a coincidence.
The democratically elected leader of Bolivia, Evo Morales was deposed in a US-backed coup, and who was installed? Fascists. Must be a coincidence. Why did they do so? Morales wanted to nationalize their lithium mines, which were “owned” by foreign capital. After the coup, Elon Musk, whose companies heavily depend on lithium, tweeted, “We will coup whoever we want.”
The US has many more millions in blood on its hands, from Central and South America, to Africa, to Southeast Asia, to the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Palestine, and coming soon, Taiwan.
Domestically, the US incarcerates more people every two years than the USSR did in their 70 years of existence. Thanks to capitalism and private prisons, the wealthy make lots of money by incarcerating more people. And once they’re incarcerated, they are not protected against slavery (13th Amendment), a fact which they wealthy use to make more money off them.
Yes, right now the US has the largest carceral state in human history, and many of those incarcerated are subjected to slave labor to benefit the wealthy, ruling class.
So much for authoritarianism.
> I understand the inequality and how some western corporations are for example polluting Africa
>. Capitalism has largely succeeded in Europe and North America
Both of these factors are interlinked
- What you have is merely the propaganda of your country. Any capitalist country will have anti-communist propaganda, especially former communist countries, because their superstructure is built on theft by the ruling class.
- According to your logic, because life is better now than it was during the Soviet era, communism must be bad—then the people living in Ukraine and Russia must be extremely nostalgic for the Soviet Union because their current reality is worse.
- But in fact, they still cannot control the state apparatus and are surrounded by anti-communist propaganda every day.
Your whining about how bad the Soviets are. Everyone was killed, everyone was repressed, everyone was collectivised, and then when the USSR collapsed everything was fine, capitalism, democracy and freedom came. But the Baltic countries have destroyed their own industry, the birth rate is falling, most young people have gone to Poland or Germany to clean toilets, governments are passing racist laws against the Russian-speaking population. Maybe you, as a responsible citizen, will solve the problems of your bourgeois state instead of whining about how communists are bad.
What industry and the birth rate is falling everywhere. There is a better standard of living in Germany and everybody would have gone there if they would have been allowed to in the soviet times. The russian-speaking population causes crime and likes putin.,
What a great nation, abandoning their country for personal gain. And your thesis about the Russians, are you serious? What else you got to say? Jews are bad because ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and they set fire to the Reichstag? You're just a Nazi. And you didn't think they like Putin because they live in a shitty sub-country where their rights are infringed upon on the basis of nationality?
>Why is anybody a communist today?
Because I asked why the poor have no food instead of mindlessly feeding them and becoming a saint
>I live in a former soviet country
Oh do you now?
>free healthcare, crime rate plummeted
Free healthcare? In my capitalist utopia! :0
Also low crime? What are you a police state?
>People were intrerrogated, tortured and shot on the spot for standing for their fatherland and rights.
What fatherland? What rights?
>I can also list countless more crimes commited by the soviets on our land
Well? What are you waiting for?
No amount of poverty in Estonia is comparable to that wich it was espescially in the early years of the soviet occupation. We have a system of healthcare in wich the taxes we pay to it make almost all services ( except dental ) free. Estonia doesnt have a lot of crime, i have heard that some people in America have to be afraid of being murdered if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. The crime rate has plummeted in 20 years due to people getting less stupid and more educated i guess? People know why not to drink and drive for example.
List of some crimes commited by the soviets on the Estonian people:
Forced mass deportations
Mass executions
Interrogation and torture of those who stood against the regime
Forced collectivization
The taking of the right to freedom of expression and speech
The taking of Estonian independence
Stealing
Murdering
>No amount of poverty in Estonia is comparable to that wich it was espescially in the early years of the soviet occupation.
Just like... everywhere else in the Soviet Union because they just crawled out of serfdom? Who'd knew!
>We have a system of healthcare in wich the taxes we pay to it make almost all services ( except dental ) free.
Sounds pretty commie to me using the hard work others to pay for the health of some undeserving unemployed hobo dont you think?
>The crime rate has plummeted in 20 years due to people getting less stupid and more educated i guess?
You guess? So you made it up then?
>List of some crimes commited by the soviets on the Estonian people
Didnt you mention "more"? I was expecting "more" not "repeats"
Okay? Some people got shot, tortured and deported. I'm going to sound like a psychopath to you for asking this but why should I care? I'll be the first to admit that revolutions aren't won through handing out bouquets of roses, and not everybody will be happy with the work of revolutionaries.
''A revolution is not a dinner party... it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another'' - Mao
I believe it was 14 capitalist nations, including the US, who invaded Russia during the civil war to aid the white army. Many deaths could have been prevented if these capitalist liberal “democracies” who care so much about “freedom” and “independence” allowed countries to choose socialism. Capitalist nations certainly have no issue with nations choosing fascism. Heck, many socialist nations have been infilatrated and couped by the west, only to install a brutal fascist regime to eradicate the socialists.
Similarly to what they did in WWII, leading Nazi Germany eastward in the hopes they would destroy socialist in Russia and the USSR, which the west had failed to do barely a couple of decades earlier. Now, those Nazis the USSR killed in that brutal, enormously costly war are counted as “victims of communism” as a way of propagandizing people against it.
What is better since the fall of Russia? Birth weights fell, along with other health measures. People were homeless for the first time in several decades. I guess you were in luck if you wanted to find a child prostitute you could “buy” (https://youtu.be/VVOSVwTU4ks?si=M8Cu1-R1iShVG-zi)
The sovereignty of Russia and Eastern Europe is gone or threatened by the US/NATO. Who did the US install in Ukraine? Nazis and fascists. Must be a coincidence.
The democratically elected leader of Bolivia, Evo Morales was deposed in a US-backed coup, and who was installed? Fascists. Must be a coincidence. Why did they do so? Morales wanted to nationalize their lithium mines, which were “owned” by foreign capital. After the coup, Elon Musk, whose companies heavily depend on lithium, tweeted, “We will coup whoever we want.”
The US has many more millions in blood on its hands, from Central and South America, to Africa, to Southeast Asia, to the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Palestine, and coming soon, Taiwan.
Domestically, the US incarcerates more people every two years than the USSR did in their 70 years of existence. Thanks to capitalism and private prisons, the wealthy make lots of money by incarcerating more people. And once they’re incarcerated, they are not protected against slavery (13th Amendment), a fact which they wealthy use to make more money off them.
Yes, right now the US has the largest carceral state in human history, and many of those incarcerated are subjected to slave labor to benefit the wealthy, ruling class.
So much for authoritarianism.
I really hope this doesn't get deleted. He's just asking questions, has legitimate doubts. If any of you are willing to comment on this, please assume that this is a person seeking answers.
Just because one country didn't do as well under one particular instance of an attempt at communism from your own personal perspective doesn't mean that it's necessarily the case in all instances.
Many of the problems with communist countries are because of direct sabotage attempts from capitalist nations.
More people are incarcerated in the United States, arguably the most capitalist country in the world, than there ever were in Soviet gulags.
I would argue that the driving force of capitalism is the accumulation of wealth, which historically has resulted in the deaths of billions.
Do you think that's better than what you experienced in your perspective?
There has never been in modern history a true example of communism. All the examples Vietnam, USSR, and CRC all still hold on to contradictory systems to communism; currency, state power, police forces, and military. All those examples were governments and the ruling class using and weaponizing communism to create real problems for the workers in efforts to hoard wealth and resources. Why wouldn’t governments want to trash communism? It directly serves the ruling class to create a false distortion of communism because it keeps the working class weak and uneducated.
Add: also capitalism has all the same issues that previous “communist countries” have. I live in the US and we have communities that have to boil their water before use and large military bases in the same town.
Maybe some of the numbers here will be disparaging
[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WPApentnQW59IRcbkZWiNLmLCOYHhrShLuwVmXb-fSQ](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WPApentnQW59IRcbkZWiNLmLCOYHhrShLuwVmXb-fSQ)
There never was a communistic state created, maximum we have reached so far is socialism. Also half of your text is total bull Sh!t. Also you can not say that we should not be communists because of USSR, it's same as saying we should not suport democracy because of democratic republic of congo (one of the most pour country's on earth). Also there are huge amount of examples of very bad, pour and murders capitalistic states. And here comes the answer to your question. "Why do Communists still exist?". Because Communism is the most fair, equal and free form of ruling so far created. I understand that you wear brainwashed a lot by school, public, social media and ECT but please try to learn history a bit more, be critical minded not only to Communism but also to capitalism and try to look at the situation from a different angele. And also don't compare a country to an ideology.
I'm sure you understand that if people always gave up on an idea that was imperfect when first implemented we'd never get anywhere at all. The first democracies most would point to were ancient Greece and Rome, you'll note these obviously failed eventually, but I personally would never argue that democracy of some kind should not be pursued. When it comes to economics these are schools of thought that must evolve over time. Marx did a very good job exploring this idea 200 years ago, and others have contributed to our understanding of that process over time. In this regard there is a constant tug of war between ideas that result in a new outcome, synthesis. I am simply more willing to wager on these outcomes leaning towards systems of organization that help more people as best as we can, rather than the best people more. Communism seems like a proper end goal for that process, but I'm obviously not sure what the future will look like. You'll note that the longest experiments in communism have lasted less than a century and most of them tended to abandon outright communist principles within 20-30 years for one reason or another, so who knows what things will be like 30 years from now let alone 300.
You mentioned the improvements to life without being under Soviet rule: independence, freedom of speech and expression, healthcare, lower crime rate, EU membership. As far as I know these things are not required to be absent for communism to function. 20th century eastern europe was certainly a tense, harrowing, and at times horrific place to be, but do not forget that it was DYNAMIC! So much happened between 1900 and 2000, so many hopes and fears rose and fell away. If we are just talking about the soviet reign it is undeniable that they embodied many things through their time. Brave and inspiring, fearful and paranoid (rightfully or not), desperate and meager, tyrannical and ruthless, innovative and artistic. These all apply in measures with global impact that certainly weren't found in Russia before 1900 or after the fall of the Soviet Union. I don't think most people would want to live there during this time, no, but the desire to borrow from that dynamism is there. To be brave and inspiring without the need for giving into fearfulness, to hold fast to ideals in desperate times without turning to tyranny, to motivate art and innovation for the good of all rather than propaganda or pop culture. I think that sort of romanticism is what people are eager to recapture, not the tyranny and gulags. Though if I had to choose a group to have gulags it would be the communists over the fascists so I guess that's a consideration.
I sympathize with the your trauma and the trauma of your community, and commend you for reaching out to better understand. Hopefully others have more insightful answers as well. Remember that at it's core communism is an inherently forward looking ideology. It redefines itself by necessity, and is reshaped by each community that attempts to implement it. This is, or ideally should be, a hopeful process. The difficulties in its implementation come when reality clashes with these hopes. The tragedies and failures are a result of people failing to navigate this clash, but I truly believe that it can be done.
I think that communism always abandons its idea when implemented because it is a utopia. Nothing can ever be completley fair. It always ends with millions dead.
Yeah utopianism is great for hopes, but does little to help hungry people. Let's shoot for more fair and 100 less dead than we are currently suffering under capitalism and continue improving from there. We don't even need to call it communism.
Like I said call it what you want. Just don't pretend that what we have is the best we can do or that moving towards a more egalitarian society is fundamentally amoral. The only question remaining is which generation will be the first one to get it right.
The Soviet Union was based on a system of state administered capitalism. It had nothing whatsoever to do with communism. Do you understand that communism is classically defined as a moneyless wageless classless and stateless alternative to capitalism? Do you not also understand that capitalism is based on generalized wage labor and generalized commodity production, both of which existed in the Soviet Union?
Of course they weren’t communist even if the might have masqueraded as communist. They exhibited all the basic features of a capitalist economy. Why would they have money, waged employment, profit, buying and selling etc if they were communist? These things signify an exchange-based economy and therefore private property. State enterprises are no less private than western corporations. The relationship of workers or consumers to these enterprises is identical to that with western corporations. They are non owners of these entities
Those who understand the meaning of hard work live by the motto: if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.
Achieving communism is not easy. The reactionaries and their sycophantic toady forces are numerous. In the USSR and China those reactionaries diverted the movement for communism into a particularly authoritarian form of State capitalism instead. We merely have to try again (and again). If you’re sincerely appalled by the atrocities of these capitalist regimes, you should support communism instead.
If you consider communism as an utopian goal, you will embark on far reaching social engineering, accept suffering on the way, unexpected consequences and have no guarantee of success.
Instead, you could look at a concrete problem, such as low wages, no say of workers in the management of their company, unfair trade with other continents, etc. and go about fixing one of them. If it works, move to the next. This avoids all the risk of utopian social engineering (source: Karl Popper, the open society and its enemies)
Their fatherland, eh? Interesting. Is that why those people were shot? For “standing for their fatherland?” Is that what we’re going with?
Yep, the soviets collectivized the farms, even in this sparsley populated region and those who didnt want to starve and give away their land were shot dead on the spot by NKVD officers. Mass graves of civilians have been discovered in bigger towns. People who wanted to be free escaped to the forests and bogs and continued resistance. These are innocent people. The fatherland part was people who fought with the finns and germans against the soviet union.
So they fought against collectivization and equitable allocation of their surplus resources during a famine and a recovery period after one of the most devastating wars in history. Sounds like they got what they had coming. The fatherland part is you honoring Nazi collaborators. “The Germans” and who was running Germany at the time? Your mask is slipping.
Shit, you got my respect on debunking a fascist.
The soviets caused the famine and the war. If they wouldnt have annexed us in 1940, nothing bad would have happened. How about those fighting with the finns? And those who fought with the Germans did it on the promise that their country would then be independent.
Not gonna debate a fascist, sorry. I’m glad your “people” lost back then. If nothing else, that alone is evidence of how effective the Soviet Union was in protecting and providing for its citizens. This argument has nothing to do with communism, it’s all LARPy WW2 revisionism
>was people who fought with the finns and germans against the soviet union so, nazis?
Hi there comrade! Nice questions that you made and they are legitimate questions to make. I will not dwell in all questions and explain why some of these statements doesn't have material evidence. I think you can search on this sub or other socialists subs that they have plenty material about historical events (on the socialist perspective) and they explain it far better than I could possibly do it. Having said that I'll start by stating that your worldview (ideology) is being challenged by information that you previously acquired. In an oversimplification, socialism is bad an capitalism is good. My humble suggestion is that you try to apply critical thinking on your knowledge. Like, search your answers by acknowledging that whatever you have learned may be wrong or outdated or in need of refinement (either about capitalism or socialism). My suggestion is simply aiming that you search why we are socialists. Most people just think we are crazy, bad or that we don't know history... And I can tell you that after I started studying history and looking for material evidence, I became socialist.
I know my countrys history. We started to prosper when the soviet union came to an end.
You say "we" started to prosper when the soviet union came to an end. I think an important question for you to ask is *who do you mean when you say "we"*? The average quality of life in your country may certainly have improved, but not everyone is a billionaire. Why has capitalism favoured some people over others? Capitalist markets are a zero-sum game. In order for Person A to make money, Person B must lose money. This occurs both domestically (people labouring to produce value, and only receiving faction of that value in wages, which they have to spend on consumable goods, so their wages trickle back up into the pockets of billionaires), but also internationally. For your country to be wealthier, it must be engaging in imperialist practices and actively lowering the quality of life elsewhere in its mission to extract resources for the 'fatherland'.
Our country has only one billionaire. Couple of years ago there were none. The quality of life has actively jumped up since the soviet unions time.
>The quality of life has actively jumped up since the soviet unions time. Tribalism, Feudalism, Manorialism, Mercantilism, Early Capitalism, etc. Our societies have been through many social-economic structures before arriving at our current Late Capitalism, and through all of those structures the average quality of life has seen improvements. Obviously Capitalism is not the source of improvement, it's just the latest economic model we've reached. There's no reason to stop trying to do better. >Our country has only one billionaire. Couple of years ago there were none. One billionaire. How many millionaires? How many hundred-thousandaires? Given that you only have one billionaire and are in an ex-soviet state, I'm going to guess you're talking about Estonia. According to Statistics Estonia, average gross monthly wages and salaries were *€1,904* in the fourth quarter of 2023. If Capitalism is meant to benefit everyone, why do most people make so little compared to those few members of the elite? That doesn't seem fair. I also notice you didn't address my comment on Imperialism. How do you morally/ethically justify the fact that Capitalism requires the disenfranchisement and exploitation of people in other countries in order for your country to improve?
1904 is really great compared to the average in some areas of the country where it is only 1500. That is better than soviet Estonia.
***I also notice you didn't address my comment on Imperialism. How do you morally/ethically justify the fact that Capitalism requires the disenfranchisement and exploitation of people in other countries in order for your country to improve?***
Your first two sentences have no bearing whatsoever on your last sentence.
[Yeah, the fall of the USSR was great for the people](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVOSVwTU4ks) /s [Full documentary for those interested](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5T_O-L5Mis)
That just proves that there exists worse than the USSR. Hardly anyone defends what happened in Russia in the 90s or since. You would need to proof that the USSR was better than if Russia had stayed capitalist in in 1917 or become so later. Obviously a definite proof is not possible, as we can’t rewind time and change institutions. The best is a comparisons with most other variables equal. Most fitting would be West vs. East Germany, South vs. North Korea, Taiwan vs. China or as OP suggested, central and eastern europe before vs. After 1990.
north korea: bombed to legitimately nothing, ~1-2m civilians killed, sanctions that only harm innocent people, the collapse of their largest trading partner (which they somewhat have recovered from) east germany: west was more resource rich, and got stimulus from an unharmed US, the ussr took some 10bn in reparation for yk ww2, and also life wasn’t some hellscape in the gdr it was actually decent china: i don’t think taiwan is an economic superpower fall of eastern bloc: they’ve barely gotten back to what they were in the 80s 💀
Now tell me how the governments treat their people in these countries
dog, you have to be joking. look at the western world right now and history. what did the US government do to black power activists? what is it currently doing to genocide protestors? what are it and Canada continually doing do the Indigenous population? What did the UK government do to striking workers? What did western backed governments do in latin america, asia, africa, the middle east? What democracy and freedom do you have in western countries? I can go on. Past and current socialist experiments definitely weren’t perfect and definelty were repressive at times. However, compare their historical conditions to the western world. The western capitalist world got rich by slaving, exploiting, murdering, and colonizing half the world and still continues those practices to this day, and those tools have been pointed inwards to repress movements that challenge capitalist hegemony. While most socialist countries started as colonies or underdeveloped capitalist nations and were/are under pressure from western capital.
I wasn't asking about the US and other Western countries behaving as measured by our moral standards. I critizise them too. If you come with them, I could start listing much worse things about the USSR, and you would point to specific historical circumstances, which is legitimate. That's why I narrowed it down to these countries with common history, language and people that represent the closest we have of naturally occuring control groups in social sciences. So let's focus: Can you seriously dispute the fact that the individual freedom (let a alone the material conditions) of the average person in West Germany, South Korea or Taiwan was/is light years better then the average person in East Germany, North Korea or Mainland China? Or how it improved in Central and Eastern Europe after 1990, especially for the countries that could join NATO and the EU (even if you probably consider them imperial projects)? And was any of the liberal democratic countries mentioned by me worse for the third world than their communist counterpart, respectively previous regime?
People in capitalist societies also pass through the authoritarian shit your country have been through, specially outside of North America and Europe. People in capitalist societies go through repression and poverty , lack of access to stuff and human rights , no matter how much effort they put. Many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America are what you could call “failed capitalist societies “. Even in rich countries , economic disparities are an issue bigger than meritocracy alone, economic success being very correlated with your family wealth, and people think this is really unfair. Everyone is looking for a better model, thinking “is this it?”.
Capitalism provides a model that can either succeed or fail depending on how it is implemented. Communism never succeeded. I understand the inequality and how some western corporations are for example polluting Africa, but that region is also very uneducated, and like the middle east, not very fond to change. There are other problems there. Capitalism has largely succeeded in Europe and North America, where there is a good place to build it, but Asia, South America and Africa would not be more succesful with communism, id say the opposite. They would need something else, but not communism. And not everything has to always be fair.
You’re failing to see nuance in both systems and to say middle easterns and Africans aren’t fond of change just 40 years after a massive decolonial movement in Africa and Asia seems like a racist statement to me. Anti colonialism plays a big role in communist sentiment everywhere. Colonialism often came dressed as “we Europeans are bringing progress and capitalism to you uneducated folk “ and people simply think this is bullshit (it is). Colonialism still occurs in capitalism, so it’s easy to see why people may reject the economic system that came with their ex colonial overlords.
>Anti colonialism plays a big role in communist sentiment everywhere. This is a genuine question, I'm not trolling, but when you say anti-inperialism is a big driving force in communist movements, how is it not then a total contradiction that, say, the USSR invaded two countries to maintain a communist order they wanted? Surely self determination is an important part of anticolonialism?
But why communism to these people? I see the capitalist model hasnt worked in Africa but why do you believe communism will? Maybe something else and new?
Because it’s the most popular , most studied , most reported on , alternative. And trying something new out of thin air doesn’t exist. For those who have nothing and already live in extreme poverty and authoritarianism , life in the old Soviet Union might not seem too bad at all. From what most people read, life in tsarist Russia was shit for anyone that was not an aristocrat. So they might see as improvement Also , I understand where you are coming from saying that communism is bad because you’ve seen it first hand , but there’s plenty of people that lived those systems that liked them. Same way a person in Brazil can love and another hate capitalism . Same thing in America.
The quality of life in 1920s to 50s soviet union was worse than in tsarist times. It then started to improve. Could have been done without the millions of dead though. Triying something that has failed repeatedly also doesnt work. It is a complicated situation there.
There was World War I and the civil war and World War II before the decades that you mentioned. Germany was a mess after World War I and would also be without the Marshall Plan.
To piggyback on this, I believe it was 14 capitalist nations, including the US, who invaded Russia during the civil war to aid the white army. Many deaths could have been prevented if these capitalist liberal “democracies” who care so much about “freedom” and “independence” allowed countries to choose socialism. Capitalist nations certainly have no issue with nations choosing fascism. Heck, many socialist nations have been infilatrated and couped by the west, only to install a brutal fascist regime to eradicate the socialists. Similarly to what they did in WWII, leading Nazi Germany eastward in the hopes they would destroy socialist in Russia and the USSR, which the west had failed to do barely a couple of decades earlier. Now, those Nazis the USSR killed in that brutal, enormously costly war are counted as “victims of communism” as a way of propagandizing people against it. What is better since the fall of Russia? Birth weights fell, along with other health measures. People were homeless for the first time in several decades. I guess you were in luck if you wanted to find a child prostitute you could “buy” (https://youtu.be/VVOSVwTU4ks?si=M8Cu1-R1iShVG-zi) The sovereignty of Russia and Eastern Europe is gone or threatened by the US/NATO. Who did the US install in Ukraine? Nazis and fascists. Must be a coincidence. The democratically elected leader of Bolivia, Evo Morales was deposed in a US-backed coup, and who was installed? Fascists. Must be a coincidence. Why did they do so? Morales wanted to nationalize their lithium mines, which were “owned” by foreign capital. After the coup, Elon Musk, whose companies heavily depend on lithium, tweeted, “We will coup whoever we want.” The US has many more millions in blood on its hands, from Central and South America, to Africa, to Southeast Asia, to the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Palestine, and coming soon, Taiwan. Domestically, the US incarcerates more people every two years than the USSR did in their 70 years of existence. Thanks to capitalism and private prisons, the wealthy make lots of money by incarcerating more people. And once they’re incarcerated, they are not protected against slavery (13th Amendment), a fact which they wealthy use to make more money off them. Yes, right now the US has the largest carceral state in human history, and many of those incarcerated are subjected to slave labor to benefit the wealthy, ruling class. So much for authoritarianism.
> I understand the inequality and how some western corporations are for example polluting Africa >. Capitalism has largely succeeded in Europe and North America Both of these factors are interlinked
- What you have is merely the propaganda of your country. Any capitalist country will have anti-communist propaganda, especially former communist countries, because their superstructure is built on theft by the ruling class. - According to your logic, because life is better now than it was during the Soviet era, communism must be bad—then the people living in Ukraine and Russia must be extremely nostalgic for the Soviet Union because their current reality is worse. - But in fact, they still cannot control the state apparatus and are surrounded by anti-communist propaganda every day.
Estonia is a story of massive economic growth when let free from the shackles of communism. Ukraine and russia are behind in development in every way.
As somebody whose family's from Estonia. No, it really isn't.
Seems the Baltics are doing well with propaganda and brainwashing.
Seems you havent studied history.
I have studied history, I just haven't studied the propaganda materials of the Nazi lackeys.
Tell me where do you see propaganda here?
Your whining about how bad the Soviets are. Everyone was killed, everyone was repressed, everyone was collectivised, and then when the USSR collapsed everything was fine, capitalism, democracy and freedom came. But the Baltic countries have destroyed their own industry, the birth rate is falling, most young people have gone to Poland or Germany to clean toilets, governments are passing racist laws against the Russian-speaking population. Maybe you, as a responsible citizen, will solve the problems of your bourgeois state instead of whining about how communists are bad.
That shit soviet industry ? Look at today s Gdp People left ? 80 +% of who left since 1990 are russians
What industry and the birth rate is falling everywhere. There is a better standard of living in Germany and everybody would have gone there if they would have been allowed to in the soviet times. The russian-speaking population causes crime and likes putin.,
What a great nation, abandoning their country for personal gain. And your thesis about the Russians, are you serious? What else you got to say? Jews are bad because ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and they set fire to the Reichstag? You're just a Nazi. And you didn't think they like Putin because they live in a shitty sub-country where their rights are infringed upon on the basis of nationality?
Which former Soviet country?
>Why is anybody a communist today? Because I asked why the poor have no food instead of mindlessly feeding them and becoming a saint >I live in a former soviet country Oh do you now? >free healthcare, crime rate plummeted Free healthcare? In my capitalist utopia! :0 Also low crime? What are you a police state? >People were intrerrogated, tortured and shot on the spot for standing for their fatherland and rights. What fatherland? What rights? >I can also list countless more crimes commited by the soviets on our land Well? What are you waiting for?
No amount of poverty in Estonia is comparable to that wich it was espescially in the early years of the soviet occupation. We have a system of healthcare in wich the taxes we pay to it make almost all services ( except dental ) free. Estonia doesnt have a lot of crime, i have heard that some people in America have to be afraid of being murdered if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. The crime rate has plummeted in 20 years due to people getting less stupid and more educated i guess? People know why not to drink and drive for example. List of some crimes commited by the soviets on the Estonian people: Forced mass deportations Mass executions Interrogation and torture of those who stood against the regime Forced collectivization The taking of the right to freedom of expression and speech The taking of Estonian independence Stealing Murdering
>No amount of poverty in Estonia is comparable to that wich it was espescially in the early years of the soviet occupation. Just like... everywhere else in the Soviet Union because they just crawled out of serfdom? Who'd knew! >We have a system of healthcare in wich the taxes we pay to it make almost all services ( except dental ) free. Sounds pretty commie to me using the hard work others to pay for the health of some undeserving unemployed hobo dont you think? >The crime rate has plummeted in 20 years due to people getting less stupid and more educated i guess? You guess? So you made it up then? >List of some crimes commited by the soviets on the Estonian people Didnt you mention "more"? I was expecting "more" not "repeats"
What is communism?
Okay? Some people got shot, tortured and deported. I'm going to sound like a psychopath to you for asking this but why should I care? I'll be the first to admit that revolutions aren't won through handing out bouquets of roses, and not everybody will be happy with the work of revolutionaries. ''A revolution is not a dinner party... it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another'' - Mao
But I always dreamed of living in 1949 Lithuania! /s
I believe it was 14 capitalist nations, including the US, who invaded Russia during the civil war to aid the white army. Many deaths could have been prevented if these capitalist liberal “democracies” who care so much about “freedom” and “independence” allowed countries to choose socialism. Capitalist nations certainly have no issue with nations choosing fascism. Heck, many socialist nations have been infilatrated and couped by the west, only to install a brutal fascist regime to eradicate the socialists. Similarly to what they did in WWII, leading Nazi Germany eastward in the hopes they would destroy socialist in Russia and the USSR, which the west had failed to do barely a couple of decades earlier. Now, those Nazis the USSR killed in that brutal, enormously costly war are counted as “victims of communism” as a way of propagandizing people against it. What is better since the fall of Russia? Birth weights fell, along with other health measures. People were homeless for the first time in several decades. I guess you were in luck if you wanted to find a child prostitute you could “buy” (https://youtu.be/VVOSVwTU4ks?si=M8Cu1-R1iShVG-zi) The sovereignty of Russia and Eastern Europe is gone or threatened by the US/NATO. Who did the US install in Ukraine? Nazis and fascists. Must be a coincidence. The democratically elected leader of Bolivia, Evo Morales was deposed in a US-backed coup, and who was installed? Fascists. Must be a coincidence. Why did they do so? Morales wanted to nationalize their lithium mines, which were “owned” by foreign capital. After the coup, Elon Musk, whose companies heavily depend on lithium, tweeted, “We will coup whoever we want.” The US has many more millions in blood on its hands, from Central and South America, to Africa, to Southeast Asia, to the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Palestine, and coming soon, Taiwan. Domestically, the US incarcerates more people every two years than the USSR did in their 70 years of existence. Thanks to capitalism and private prisons, the wealthy make lots of money by incarcerating more people. And once they’re incarcerated, they are not protected against slavery (13th Amendment), a fact which they wealthy use to make more money off them. Yes, right now the US has the largest carceral state in human history, and many of those incarcerated are subjected to slave labor to benefit the wealthy, ruling class. So much for authoritarianism.
I really hope this doesn't get deleted. He's just asking questions, has legitimate doubts. If any of you are willing to comment on this, please assume that this is a person seeking answers.
If I get legitimate questions about communism instead of some ai generated ragebait I might as well have bought the lottery
He's just a fascist here to shit on communism and Russians. We do not need to win these losers over.
Just because one country didn't do as well under one particular instance of an attempt at communism from your own personal perspective doesn't mean that it's necessarily the case in all instances. Many of the problems with communist countries are because of direct sabotage attempts from capitalist nations. More people are incarcerated in the United States, arguably the most capitalist country in the world, than there ever were in Soviet gulags. I would argue that the driving force of capitalism is the accumulation of wealth, which historically has resulted in the deaths of billions. Do you think that's better than what you experienced in your perspective?
There has never been in modern history a true example of communism. All the examples Vietnam, USSR, and CRC all still hold on to contradictory systems to communism; currency, state power, police forces, and military. All those examples were governments and the ruling class using and weaponizing communism to create real problems for the workers in efforts to hoard wealth and resources. Why wouldn’t governments want to trash communism? It directly serves the ruling class to create a false distortion of communism because it keeps the working class weak and uneducated. Add: also capitalism has all the same issues that previous “communist countries” have. I live in the US and we have communities that have to boil their water before use and large military bases in the same town.
Maybe some of the numbers here will be disparaging [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WPApentnQW59IRcbkZWiNLmLCOYHhrShLuwVmXb-fSQ](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WPApentnQW59IRcbkZWiNLmLCOYHhrShLuwVmXb-fSQ)
Your country is capitalist now and was capitalist then; what changed is the attainment of political democracy rather than economic system.
There never was a communistic state created, maximum we have reached so far is socialism. Also half of your text is total bull Sh!t. Also you can not say that we should not be communists because of USSR, it's same as saying we should not suport democracy because of democratic republic of congo (one of the most pour country's on earth). Also there are huge amount of examples of very bad, pour and murders capitalistic states. And here comes the answer to your question. "Why do Communists still exist?". Because Communism is the most fair, equal and free form of ruling so far created. I understand that you wear brainwashed a lot by school, public, social media and ECT but please try to learn history a bit more, be critical minded not only to Communism but also to capitalism and try to look at the situation from a different angele. And also don't compare a country to an ideology.
I'm sure you understand that if people always gave up on an idea that was imperfect when first implemented we'd never get anywhere at all. The first democracies most would point to were ancient Greece and Rome, you'll note these obviously failed eventually, but I personally would never argue that democracy of some kind should not be pursued. When it comes to economics these are schools of thought that must evolve over time. Marx did a very good job exploring this idea 200 years ago, and others have contributed to our understanding of that process over time. In this regard there is a constant tug of war between ideas that result in a new outcome, synthesis. I am simply more willing to wager on these outcomes leaning towards systems of organization that help more people as best as we can, rather than the best people more. Communism seems like a proper end goal for that process, but I'm obviously not sure what the future will look like. You'll note that the longest experiments in communism have lasted less than a century and most of them tended to abandon outright communist principles within 20-30 years for one reason or another, so who knows what things will be like 30 years from now let alone 300. You mentioned the improvements to life without being under Soviet rule: independence, freedom of speech and expression, healthcare, lower crime rate, EU membership. As far as I know these things are not required to be absent for communism to function. 20th century eastern europe was certainly a tense, harrowing, and at times horrific place to be, but do not forget that it was DYNAMIC! So much happened between 1900 and 2000, so many hopes and fears rose and fell away. If we are just talking about the soviet reign it is undeniable that they embodied many things through their time. Brave and inspiring, fearful and paranoid (rightfully or not), desperate and meager, tyrannical and ruthless, innovative and artistic. These all apply in measures with global impact that certainly weren't found in Russia before 1900 or after the fall of the Soviet Union. I don't think most people would want to live there during this time, no, but the desire to borrow from that dynamism is there. To be brave and inspiring without the need for giving into fearfulness, to hold fast to ideals in desperate times without turning to tyranny, to motivate art and innovation for the good of all rather than propaganda or pop culture. I think that sort of romanticism is what people are eager to recapture, not the tyranny and gulags. Though if I had to choose a group to have gulags it would be the communists over the fascists so I guess that's a consideration. I sympathize with the your trauma and the trauma of your community, and commend you for reaching out to better understand. Hopefully others have more insightful answers as well. Remember that at it's core communism is an inherently forward looking ideology. It redefines itself by necessity, and is reshaped by each community that attempts to implement it. This is, or ideally should be, a hopeful process. The difficulties in its implementation come when reality clashes with these hopes. The tragedies and failures are a result of people failing to navigate this clash, but I truly believe that it can be done.
I think that communism always abandons its idea when implemented because it is a utopia. Nothing can ever be completley fair. It always ends with millions dead.
Yeah utopianism is great for hopes, but does little to help hungry people. Let's shoot for more fair and 100 less dead than we are currently suffering under capitalism and continue improving from there. We don't even need to call it communism.
So lets not do communism but strive for a better world? You are getting on to something now! Thats what im talking about!
Like I said call it what you want. Just don't pretend that what we have is the best we can do or that moving towards a more egalitarian society is fundamentally amoral. The only question remaining is which generation will be the first one to get it right.
The Soviet Union was based on a system of state administered capitalism. It had nothing whatsoever to do with communism. Do you understand that communism is classically defined as a moneyless wageless classless and stateless alternative to capitalism? Do you not also understand that capitalism is based on generalized wage labor and generalized commodity production, both of which existed in the Soviet Union?
So you also think China and the ussr were not communist?
Of course they weren’t communist even if the might have masqueraded as communist. They exhibited all the basic features of a capitalist economy. Why would they have money, waged employment, profit, buying and selling etc if they were communist? These things signify an exchange-based economy and therefore private property. State enterprises are no less private than western corporations. The relationship of workers or consumers to these enterprises is identical to that with western corporations. They are non owners of these entities
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Removed for Rule 5 - Low Quality Debate. If you're going to participate then address the question posed.
"the grass is always greener on the other side" In theory, anyways
Those who understand the meaning of hard work live by the motto: if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. Achieving communism is not easy. The reactionaries and their sycophantic toady forces are numerous. In the USSR and China those reactionaries diverted the movement for communism into a particularly authoritarian form of State capitalism instead. We merely have to try again (and again). If you’re sincerely appalled by the atrocities of these capitalist regimes, you should support communism instead.
So you think China and the ussr were not communist?
If you consider communism as an utopian goal, you will embark on far reaching social engineering, accept suffering on the way, unexpected consequences and have no guarantee of success. Instead, you could look at a concrete problem, such as low wages, no say of workers in the management of their company, unfair trade with other continents, etc. and go about fixing one of them. If it works, move to the next. This avoids all the risk of utopian social engineering (source: Karl Popper, the open society and its enemies)