Newspapers in the USSR had the legal obligation of responding to letters from readers in the span of 2 weeks. Every workplace had its own announcement board and journal/newspaper written by workers in the worker’s union. Imagine being able to publish an article to all your coworkers criticising the administration of the company and not getting fired for it.
There was freedom of press to a larger degree than in any western society because people literally made and consumed their own press.
The USSR had free universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, equality under the law for everyone, respect for ethnic minorities and promotion of their languages and their representation in society, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed housing at 3% of the monthly salary on average, heavy subsidization of basics like foodstuffs, affordable and high quality public transit, guaranteed pension plans, abolition of private companies and landlordism, and the highest rates of unionization in the world at the time.
I happen to be a Spaniard, and my ancestors had to endure fascism for 40 years. There was no universal free education, no universal healthcare, no guaranteed jobs, no guaranteed housing, no right to unionization, militarized police defending landlords and private companies, extreme racism and ethno-nationalist-catholic propaganda, colonialism in Morocco, repression of minority languages and ethnicities without a right to an education in them (see Basque and Catalan, compare them to Kazakh or Uzbek), no guaranteed pensions…
The two systems were the polar opposite, it’s the reason why the first thing fascists will do is executing every communist.
Ok so the points coming to mind areas follows: The censorship in the USSR.
This doesn’t seem to align with my understanding of the USSR. Didn’t the USSR fail horribly, leading to its collapse? Bureaucratic corruption, inefficiency, not being able to compete internationally, and the oppression of marginalized populations (such as queer people ) had been my impression of the USSR’s legacy.
As for the last point, that comes off as hypocritical since communist countries do the same thing. North Korea has executions and Cuba throws journalists in jail.
Comrade @Cowbee@lemmy.ml has already responded better than I possibly could, so I’ll just point you to their comment instead. I can only add: I suggest you to look at the population over time (you can find this on the respective Wikipedia “demographics of X” articles) for: Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Belarus and the exceptions of Poland and Estonia, and see what happened to their populations after 1990. Literal tens of millions of demographic losses.
Equally important, is the fact that socialism literally saved Eastern Europe from slavery and extermination at the hands of Nazism. If it weren’t for the socialist industrial revolution kickstarted in 1929 in the USSR, there is absolute certainty that the Nazis would have blitzkrieged their way to the Urals and genocided all non-German peoples in a similar way (but scaled up in speed due to the industrial development of Germany) to what the US did to native Americans.
The USSR had steady and consistent economic growth, and provided free, high quality education and healthcare, full employment, cheap or free housing, and fantastic infrastructure and city planning that still lasts to this day despite capitalism neglecting it. This rapid development resulted in dramatic democratization of society, reduced disparity, doubling of life expectancy, tripling of functional literacy rates to 99.9%, and much more. Living in the 1930s famine would not have been good, but it was the last major famine outside of wartime because the soviets ended famine in their countries.
The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union.
The truth, when judged based on historical evidence and contextualization, is that socialism was the best thing to happen to Russia in the last few centuries, and its absence has been devastating.
Death rates spiked:
And wealth disparity skyrocketed alongside the newly impoverished majority:
When you look at the US Empire and western Europe as having higher quality of life than the USSR, you are looking at the benefits of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism and wishing the USSR also practiced this, instead of helping liberate colonies and the global south. Russia in particular was a semi-feudal backwater in 1917, and made it to space 5 decades later. The USSR was not the picture of wealth, but was for its time the picture of development and rapid progress.
The USSR was stable by the time it dissolved, it was dissolved from the top-down. It did not fail horribly, it was killed by a corrupt wing that had taken hold since Khruschev. It remained socialist until the very end, but by no means was it an inevitable failure, and modern socialist states have learned from it.
Regarding it being “hypocritical” for communists to oppress fascists, no, it isn’t at all. The working classes oppressing their fiercest enemies and preventing them from taking power is for the same reason the bourgeoisie oppresses their fiercest enemies and prevents them from taking power, the communists are the most effective anti-fascists.
You don’t need to convince me that capitalism is bad, I am already convinced of that— though obviously I disagree that socialism is the only path forward for Russia.
Based on what you’ve said, the USSR appears to have done well while it was still up and running.
But:
The repressed groups I was talking about were queer people, not just “capitalists”.
If you’re trying to say that the reason why West Europe (especially Scandinavia) is a much safer place for queer people is “imperialism”, I would consider that a non-sequitur.
So long as communism leads to queer oppression (and historically it has in all of them — except Cuba which is the progressive anomaly in this regard), I will oppose it as I do not see it as “liberation”. We also have very different views on what is acceptable in terms of censorship and hierarchy (which I’m not debating in this thread), so I do not see communism as offering people liberation.
What I don’t understand is why the USSR just flatlined after all the success you’ve mentioned.
Freedom of press only applies to the wealthy, how do I benefit from it as a worker when all media in my country perpetuates comprador propaganda and I’m too poor to make my own press?
For sure— I’m not saying freedom of press actually exists under capitalism.
My point is that socialism doesn’t have freedom of press either. Censorship and surveillance by the vanguard state (see China, Cuba, historical USSR) is routine.
“Dictatorship of the proletariat”.
Unfortunately, dictatorships do not have a tendency to allow for freedom of press.
The proletariat is the majority in most if not all societies, arguing the dictatorship of the proletariat is undemocratic merely because the word “dictatorship” doesn’t make sense. Democracy is [ideally, not what it is in practice] is a dictatorship of the majority, and the proletariat are the majority, surely you see how saying democracy is undemocratic makes no sense.
States are instruments of oppression weilded by classes, they are all “dictatorships” in the sense that a class oppresses the other; the question in state is, is it the capitalists oppressing the working class, or the other way around
Except in practice it’s not proletarians doing these things, it’s bureaucrats who end up forming their own class and class interests in the name of the proletariat. The average proletariat isn’t actually the one who makes these rules or checks or applies censorships. See China, USSR, Cuba.
There shouldn’t be classes to begin with. Eliminating hierarchies in lieu of anarchism deals with the issue without it being “another dictatorship”
forming their own class and class interests in the name of the proletariat.
That’s not how class works, it’s not like starting a new club. Class is defined by your relationship to production, not some nebulous title like “beauraucrats”
There shouldn’t be classes to begin with.
Genuinely, what is your suggested approach to rectifying this and what real world data is it based on? How do you expect to abolish class without a clear understanding of what creates it? How would a scientist expect to cure a disease without understanding what it is?
That’s the socialist definition of class, that is not how I understand class.
I can decide to understand gravity as a color if I want to, but it doesn’t make me right.
Calling bureaucracy “nebulous” doesn’t invalidate any of the reasoning I provided
I’m calling the term you’re using (beauraucrats) nebulous, because it is, because you haven’t defined it. You haven’t provided any “reasoning”, you’ve just said “I think this happens” with nothing at all to back it up.
Suggested approach: anarchism.
That’s cool, but some of us feel like living in a society that doesn’t get rolled over by a capitalist military whenever they feel like it. Some of us enjoy functional supply chains, too.
I didn’t disregard the importance of understanding class, merely that I disagreed with the reductive socialist definition of class.
Yeah I’m not saying you don’t think it’s important, I’m just saying you don’t understand it. Please tell me what you think is reductive about the definition of class used by the people who have radically transformed multiple feudal societies into world powers, because your own track record does not make a compelling case for abandoning it.
Those words don’t mean anything when they are used to censor. The introduction of censorship allows censors to censor anything, regardless of whether or not it is “capitalist” or not.
There is no way of knowing whether only “capitalist” content is censored or if criticisms that are staunchly and directly against the state (which absolutely deserves its place in any state that doesn’t want to be an echo chamber) are also being censored under the veneer of “capitalism”.
Every government and even every culture practices some degree of control over how we speak and how we exist. Language itself has an impact on this. Despite this fact, it’s possible to recognize proletarian control vs capitalist control.
“Everyone does it!” is literally a logical fallacy.
It’s not even just “some”, you’re minimizing the extent of control here. You cannot have a state held accountable if it systematically suppresses criticism against it.
I’m recognizing the class nature of the state and society. I’m not trying to morally justify anything, but instead point out why it exists, both necessarily and temporarily.
China, Cuba, Historical USSR. No such thing what you described. It’s state-controlled. In china, it’s bureaucratic class that controls the media, not average workers by any means.
The state is governed by the working classes in China, Cuba, USSR, etc. Administration is not a class, it’s a subset of a broader class, ie the proletariat. Classes are relations to ownership of production and distribution, not simply job categories.
Teachers and doctors don’t get to make laws to further their own interests, make it easier for others they know to do the same, amongst the countless other power moves bureaucrats are able to pull off. This power concentrates and develops them into their own class with their own interests because they are so largely cut off and distinguished from the rest of the working population.
Teachers and doctors are nothing like bureaucrats, that’s a fallacious analogy.
Teachers and doctors do get to manipulate their own positions to their own advantage. You’re treating sub-categories of larger categories as distinct from said category, and not a part of it. The class interests of administrators are aligned with the rest of the working classes, towards collectivization of production and distribution and helping everyone. Corruption exists, sure, but this doesn’t mean this is an impossible hurdle, just like the fact that we can get sick doesn’t mean we can’t exist publicly.
Valid criticism, but let’s not pretend socialism leads to better outcomes for freedom of speech or press either.
Newspapers in the USSR had the legal obligation of responding to letters from readers in the span of 2 weeks. Every workplace had its own announcement board and journal/newspaper written by workers in the worker’s union. Imagine being able to publish an article to all your coworkers criticising the administration of the company and not getting fired for it.
There was freedom of press to a larger degree than in any western society because people literally made and consumed their own press.
Didn’t they ban factions (perhaps this was Stalin’s time)?
We can move the conversation there if you want, but I don’t see how that’s related to worker-owned press
It’s related to the subject of fascism and censorship
Censorship, we can argue about it. Fascism, no.
The USSR had free universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, equality under the law for everyone, respect for ethnic minorities and promotion of their languages and their representation in society, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed housing at 3% of the monthly salary on average, heavy subsidization of basics like foodstuffs, affordable and high quality public transit, guaranteed pension plans, abolition of private companies and landlordism, and the highest rates of unionization in the world at the time.
I happen to be a Spaniard, and my ancestors had to endure fascism for 40 years. There was no universal free education, no universal healthcare, no guaranteed jobs, no guaranteed housing, no right to unionization, militarized police defending landlords and private companies, extreme racism and ethno-nationalist-catholic propaganda, colonialism in Morocco, repression of minority languages and ethnicities without a right to an education in them (see Basque and Catalan, compare them to Kazakh or Uzbek), no guaranteed pensions…
The two systems were the polar opposite, it’s the reason why the first thing fascists will do is executing every communist.
Ok so the points coming to mind areas follows: The censorship in the USSR.
This doesn’t seem to align with my understanding of the USSR. Didn’t the USSR fail horribly, leading to its collapse? Bureaucratic corruption, inefficiency, not being able to compete internationally, and the oppression of marginalized populations (such as queer people ) had been my impression of the USSR’s legacy.
As for the last point, that comes off as hypocritical since communist countries do the same thing. North Korea has executions and Cuba throws journalists in jail.
Comrade @Cowbee@lemmy.ml has already responded better than I possibly could, so I’ll just point you to their comment instead. I can only add: I suggest you to look at the population over time (you can find this on the respective Wikipedia “demographics of X” articles) for: Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Belarus and the exceptions of Poland and Estonia, and see what happened to their populations after 1990. Literal tens of millions of demographic losses.
Equally important, is the fact that socialism literally saved Eastern Europe from slavery and extermination at the hands of Nazism. If it weren’t for the socialist industrial revolution kickstarted in 1929 in the USSR, there is absolute certainty that the Nazis would have blitzkrieged their way to the Urals and genocided all non-German peoples in a similar way (but scaled up in speed due to the industrial development of Germany) to what the US did to native Americans.
Killing and repressing fascists and other reactionary forces is good actually. Progressive forces being killed and the masses oppressed is bad.
The USSR had steady and consistent economic growth, and provided free, high quality education and healthcare, full employment, cheap or free housing, and fantastic infrastructure and city planning that still lasts to this day despite capitalism neglecting it. This rapid development resulted in dramatic democratization of society, reduced disparity, doubling of life expectancy, tripling of functional literacy rates to 99.9%, and much more. Living in the 1930s famine would not have been good, but it was the last major famine outside of wartime because the soviets ended famine in their countries.
Literacy rates, societal guarantees in the 1936 constitution, reports on the healthcare system over time, and more are good sources for these claims.
The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union.
The truth, when judged based on historical evidence and contextualization, is that socialism was the best thing to happen to Russia in the last few centuries, and its absence has been devastating.
Death rates spiked:
And wealth disparity skyrocketed alongside the newly impoverished majority:
Capitalism brought with it skyrocketing poverty rates, drug abuse, prostitution, homelessness, crime rates, and lowered life expectancy. An estimated 7 million people died due to the dissolution of socialism and reintroduction of capitalism, and the large majority of post-soviet citizens regret its fall. A return to socialism is the only path forward for the post-soviet countries.
When you look at the US Empire and western Europe as having higher quality of life than the USSR, you are looking at the benefits of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism and wishing the USSR also practiced this, instead of helping liberate colonies and the global south. Russia in particular was a semi-feudal backwater in 1917, and made it to space 5 decades later. The USSR was not the picture of wealth, but was for its time the picture of development and rapid progress.
The USSR was stable by the time it dissolved, it was dissolved from the top-down. It did not fail horribly, it was killed by a corrupt wing that had taken hold since Khruschev. It remained socialist until the very end, but by no means was it an inevitable failure, and modern socialist states have learned from it.
Regarding it being “hypocritical” for communists to oppress fascists, no, it isn’t at all. The working classes oppressing their fiercest enemies and preventing them from taking power is for the same reason the bourgeoisie oppresses their fiercest enemies and prevents them from taking power, the communists are the most effective anti-fascists.
You don’t need to convince me that capitalism is bad, I am already convinced of that— though obviously I disagree that socialism is the only path forward for Russia.
Based on what you’ve said, the USSR appears to have done well while it was still up and running.
But:
So long as communism leads to queer oppression (and historically it has in all of them — except Cuba which is the progressive anomaly in this regard), I will oppose it as I do not see it as “liberation”. We also have very different views on what is acceptable in terms of censorship and hierarchy (which I’m not debating in this thread), so I do not see communism as offering people liberation.
What I don’t understand is why the USSR just flatlined after all the success you’ve mentioned.
I see it as hypocritical but I digress on that.
Freedom of press only applies to the wealthy, how do I benefit from it as a worker when all media in my country perpetuates comprador propaganda and I’m too poor to make my own press?
For sure— I’m not saying freedom of press actually exists under capitalism.
My point is that socialism doesn’t have freedom of press either. Censorship and surveillance by the vanguard state (see China, Cuba, historical USSR) is routine.
“Dictatorship of the proletariat”. Unfortunately, dictatorships do not have a tendency to allow for freedom of press.
The proletariat is the majority in most if not all societies, arguing the dictatorship of the proletariat is undemocratic merely because the word “dictatorship” doesn’t make sense. Democracy is [ideally, not what it is in practice] is a dictatorship of the majority, and the proletariat are the majority, surely you see how saying democracy is undemocratic makes no sense.
States are instruments of oppression weilded by classes, they are all “dictatorships” in the sense that a class oppresses the other; the question in state is, is it the capitalists oppressing the working class, or the other way around
Except in practice it’s not proletarians doing these things, it’s bureaucrats who end up forming their own class and class interests in the name of the proletariat. The average proletariat isn’t actually the one who makes these rules or checks or applies censorships. See China, USSR, Cuba.
There shouldn’t be classes to begin with. Eliminating hierarchies in lieu of anarchism deals with the issue without it being “another dictatorship”
That’s not how class works, it’s not like starting a new club. Class is defined by your relationship to production, not some nebulous title like “beauraucrats”
Genuinely, what is your suggested approach to rectifying this and what real world data is it based on? How do you expect to abolish class without a clear understanding of what creates it? How would a scientist expect to cure a disease without understanding what it is?
That’s the socialist definition of class, that is not how I understand class.
I didn’t say it’s like “starting a new club”.
Calling bureaucracy “nebulous” doesn’t invalidate any of the reasoning I provided.
Suggested approach: anarchism.
I didn’t disregard the importance of understanding class, merely that I disagreed with the reductive socialist definition of class.
I can decide to understand gravity as a color if I want to, but it doesn’t make me right.
I’m calling the term you’re using (beauraucrats) nebulous, because it is, because you haven’t defined it. You haven’t provided any “reasoning”, you’ve just said “I think this happens” with nothing at all to back it up.
That’s cool, but some of us feel like living in a society that doesn’t get rolled over by a capitalist military whenever they feel like it. Some of us enjoy functional supply chains, too.
Yeah I’m not saying you don’t think it’s important, I’m just saying you don’t understand it. Please tell me what you think is reductive about the definition of class used by the people who have radically transformed multiple feudal societies into world powers, because your own track record does not make a compelling case for abandoning it.
Dictatorship of the proletariat means democracy for the proletariat, dictatorship against capitalists.
Those words don’t mean anything when they are used to censor. The introduction of censorship allows censors to censor anything, regardless of whether or not it is “capitalist” or not.
There is no way of knowing whether only “capitalist” content is censored or if criticisms that are staunchly and directly against the state (which absolutely deserves its place in any state that doesn’t want to be an echo chamber) are also being censored under the veneer of “capitalism”.
Every government and even every culture practices some degree of control over how we speak and how we exist. Language itself has an impact on this. Despite this fact, it’s possible to recognize proletarian control vs capitalist control.
“Everyone does it!” is literally a logical fallacy.
It’s not even just “some”, you’re minimizing the extent of control here. You cannot have a state held accountable if it systematically suppresses criticism against it.
No it’s an accurate representation of class society and what it necessitates
I’m recognizing the class nature of the state and society. I’m not trying to morally justify anything, but instead point out why it exists, both necessarily and temporarily.
It does come off as you defending it when you don’t consider it bad or criticize the idea, and instead assert for it.
We can do better. Just because everyone does it, doesn’t mean we can’t do better.
Classes can be destroyed and we can build class-less societies without hierarchy in lieu of anarchism.
Socialism changes which class controls the speech from the capitalist class to the working classes.
This is not the case in any of the AES countries.
China, Cuba, Historical USSR. No such thing what you described. It’s state-controlled. In china, it’s bureaucratic class that controls the media, not average workers by any means.
The state is governed by the working classes in China, Cuba, USSR, etc. Administration is not a class, it’s a subset of a broader class, ie the proletariat. Classes are relations to ownership of production and distribution, not simply job categories.
The bureaucracy is still a class category that is distinct from workers in general with its own class interests.
States such as China aren’t really governed by the working classes.
No, this is not how class or the state works. Administration is a subset of a class, just like teachers and doctors are not classes.
Teachers and doctors don’t get to make laws to further their own interests, make it easier for others they know to do the same, amongst the countless other power moves bureaucrats are able to pull off. This power concentrates and develops them into their own class with their own interests because they are so largely cut off and distinguished from the rest of the working population.
Teachers and doctors are nothing like bureaucrats, that’s a fallacious analogy.
Teachers and doctors do get to manipulate their own positions to their own advantage. You’re treating sub-categories of larger categories as distinct from said category, and not a part of it. The class interests of administrators are aligned with the rest of the working classes, towards collectivization of production and distribution and helping everyone. Corruption exists, sure, but this doesn’t mean this is an impossible hurdle, just like the fact that we can get sick doesn’t mean we can’t exist publicly.
Teachers and doctors do not make their own laws.
I gave you reasons, you’re reverting to vague responses to make generalized truisms that aren’t true when analyzed specifically.
You’re not engaging with my reasoning about why bureaucracy is entirely different at all.