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.
Queer rights in the soviet union were more progressive than peer countries, and queer people saw an expansion in rights as compared to Tsarist Russia. In fact, Kollontai was a bisexual woman and one of the first women in a government administrator role. The USSR did re-criminalize homosexuality after decriminalizing this, and this is seen as an error. The reason the USSR became more socially regressive in regards to queer people than in the beginning was due to the constant crisis and siege. Over time, queer rights improved, with the GDR even providing free gender affirming care.
The process of queer liberation goes hand-in-hand with the rise of socialism. In every existing socialist state, queer rights have been improving over time. This is easiest to watch in Cuba and China. In the west, the percentage of queer communists outweighs the standard population, meaning queer people are more common among communists by ratio than the standard population. It isn’t at all that socialism leads to queer repression, it’s much the opposite.
I never once made the point that queer rights come from imperialism, and I consider that deflection a non-sequitor. When I am talking about the standard of living in imperialist countries, and the social progressivism on the backs of absolute terror of the global south, I am not blaming queer people for this. I am pointing out what is called “Herrenvolk democracy,” or “democracy for the master race alone.” The progressive, good change in social views in the west coincided with increasing plunder and torture abroad, and then the fact that many of these colonized and imperialized countries are lagging the west in queer rights is used as justification for regime change.
So long as communism leads to queer oppression
It has not. Queer rights have improved in socialist countries compared to what they had before. You’re comparing their improving queer rights with the west. I could be just as dishonest and say anarchism leads to queer oppression and antisemitism given the views and actions of Bakunin, Makhno, and other existing anarchist societies, but I don’t because there’s no direct link between the two.
What I don’t understand is why the USSR just flatlined after all the success you’ve mentioned.
Because starting with Khrushchev, reforms that went against the socialist system and enabled the rise of bourgeois power existed alongside a deliberate blindness to these problems. This allowed the Yeltsin faction to take hold and nuke the system from the top, allowing for immense profits. It wasn’t socialism that became exploitative, it was a failure to safeguard it that allowed capitalism to return.
To stress this further: even as corruption built up in the USSR, the system still worked for the majority, the problems came when corruption overtook the system and changed it. Socialism therefore was not the problem, a failure to safeguard it was. Your critique mandates that socialism be exploitative as well, but it wasn’t even as corruption began to take hold.
How come Scandinavian countries are miles ahead of literally all communist countries w.r.t. queer rights (Cuba excluded)?
Simply because progressivism coincided with imperialism, doesn’t mean it’s because of it. Correlation does not equate to causation.
You say queer rights have improved compared to what they had before, but homosexuality is something that remains to this day significantly stigmatized outside of urban centers (Beijing, Shanghai etc which are more accepting)— when it wasn’t stigmatized as much before. Though perhaps that is more owing to Christianity, I’m more privy to Japan’s history than China’s if we’re going beyond the last century.
What’s wrong with comparing them to the west? Is the west a nebulous “evil”? (See above, I don’t believe it’s better there due to imperialism)
How come Scandinavian countries are miles ahead of literally all communist countries w.r.t. queer rights (Cuba excluded)?
I explained this a bit already, but to rephrase and simplify, when your country is under the threat of imperialism, colonialism, settler-colonialism, or neocolonialism, social progress is stunted. Imperialist countries like Scandinavia have had more time benefiting from imperialism, and as such have a form of “Herrenvolk” progressivism. In Scandinavian countries (and imperialist countries in general), social progress itself is allowed as a concession to workers and as a way to justify imperialism, not out of the kindness of the ruling class.
Further, Scandinavian countries are not miles ahead of literally all socialist countries. Queer rights are gradually improving in all socialist countries, which are still under siege but ultimately progressing faster than peer capitalist countries. As the aging populations die off, much of their social conservativism does too, which is why in China for example queer rights have been rapidly improving.
Social progress happens not in a vacuum, simply due to having better and better ideas. Ideas are formed from our material conditions, and alongside economic development comes social progress. The fact that Scandinavian countries have been able to develop earlier due to relying on imperialism is what has allowed their proletariat to struggle for queer rights more effectively, as they aren’t struggling against siege. That’s also why socialist countries have brought positive momentum to queer rights when previously they were more oppressed.
This gradual process of improvement comes from a long struggle towards liberation. Comparing countries with entirely different historical contexts directly is a metaphysical analytical error, which is again an example of why dialectical materialism is so important.
To borrow from Gramsci, who I’ve been reading lately:
To judge the whole philosophical past as madness and folly is not only an anti-historical error, since it contains the anachronistic presumption that in the past they should have thought like today, but it is a truly genuine holdover from metaphysics, since it supposes a dogmatic thought valid at all times and in all countries, by whose standard one should judge all the past.
The method of anti-historicism is nothing but metaphysics. That past philosophical systems have been superseded does not negate the fact that they were historically valid and served a necessary function: their obsolescence should be considered from the point of view of the entire development of history and the real dialectic; that they deserved to perish is neither a moral judgment nor sound thinking issued from an “objective” point of view, but a dialectical-historical judgment. One can compare this with Engels’ presentation of the Hegelian proposition that “all that is rational is real and all that is real is rational,” a proposition which holds true for the past as well.
This doesn’t just apply to past philosophy, but also to past ways we view social rights, gender, sexuality, and more, and this development is not flat and even across all of humanity but often restricted by dialect, language, and level of development.
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.
Queer rights in the soviet union were more progressive than peer countries, and queer people saw an expansion in rights as compared to Tsarist Russia. In fact, Kollontai was a bisexual woman and one of the first women in a government administrator role. The USSR did re-criminalize homosexuality after decriminalizing this, and this is seen as an error. The reason the USSR became more socially regressive in regards to queer people than in the beginning was due to the constant crisis and siege. Over time, queer rights improved, with the GDR even providing free gender affirming care.
The process of queer liberation goes hand-in-hand with the rise of socialism. In every existing socialist state, queer rights have been improving over time. This is easiest to watch in Cuba and China. In the west, the percentage of queer communists outweighs the standard population, meaning queer people are more common among communists by ratio than the standard population. It isn’t at all that socialism leads to queer repression, it’s much the opposite.
I never once made the point that queer rights come from imperialism, and I consider that deflection a non-sequitor. When I am talking about the standard of living in imperialist countries, and the social progressivism on the backs of absolute terror of the global south, I am not blaming queer people for this. I am pointing out what is called “Herrenvolk democracy,” or “democracy for the master race alone.” The progressive, good change in social views in the west coincided with increasing plunder and torture abroad, and then the fact that many of these colonized and imperialized countries are lagging the west in queer rights is used as justification for regime change.
It has not. Queer rights have improved in socialist countries compared to what they had before. You’re comparing their improving queer rights with the west. I could be just as dishonest and say anarchism leads to queer oppression and antisemitism given the views and actions of Bakunin, Makhno, and other existing anarchist societies, but I don’t because there’s no direct link between the two.
Because starting with Khrushchev, reforms that went against the socialist system and enabled the rise of bourgeois power existed alongside a deliberate blindness to these problems. This allowed the Yeltsin faction to take hold and nuke the system from the top, allowing for immense profits. It wasn’t socialism that became exploitative, it was a failure to safeguard it that allowed capitalism to return.
To stress this further: even as corruption built up in the USSR, the system still worked for the majority, the problems came when corruption overtook the system and changed it. Socialism therefore was not the problem, a failure to safeguard it was. Your critique mandates that socialism be exploitative as well, but it wasn’t even as corruption began to take hold.
How come Scandinavian countries are miles ahead of literally all communist countries w.r.t. queer rights (Cuba excluded)?
Simply because progressivism coincided with imperialism, doesn’t mean it’s because of it. Correlation does not equate to causation.
You say queer rights have improved compared to what they had before, but homosexuality is something that remains to this day significantly stigmatized outside of urban centers (Beijing, Shanghai etc which are more accepting)— when it wasn’t stigmatized as much before. Though perhaps that is more owing to Christianity, I’m more privy to Japan’s history than China’s if we’re going beyond the last century.
What’s wrong with comparing them to the west? Is the west a nebulous “evil”? (See above, I don’t believe it’s better there due to imperialism)
I explained this a bit already, but to rephrase and simplify, when your country is under the threat of imperialism, colonialism, settler-colonialism, or neocolonialism, social progress is stunted. Imperialist countries like Scandinavia have had more time benefiting from imperialism, and as such have a form of “Herrenvolk” progressivism. In Scandinavian countries (and imperialist countries in general), social progress itself is allowed as a concession to workers and as a way to justify imperialism, not out of the kindness of the ruling class.
Further, Scandinavian countries are not miles ahead of literally all socialist countries. Queer rights are gradually improving in all socialist countries, which are still under siege but ultimately progressing faster than peer capitalist countries. As the aging populations die off, much of their social conservativism does too, which is why in China for example queer rights have been rapidly improving.
Social progress happens not in a vacuum, simply due to having better and better ideas. Ideas are formed from our material conditions, and alongside economic development comes social progress. The fact that Scandinavian countries have been able to develop earlier due to relying on imperialism is what has allowed their proletariat to struggle for queer rights more effectively, as they aren’t struggling against siege. That’s also why socialist countries have brought positive momentum to queer rights when previously they were more oppressed.
This gradual process of improvement comes from a long struggle towards liberation. Comparing countries with entirely different historical contexts directly is a metaphysical analytical error, which is again an example of why dialectical materialism is so important.
To borrow from Gramsci, who I’ve been reading lately:
This doesn’t just apply to past philosophy, but also to past ways we view social rights, gender, sexuality, and more, and this development is not flat and even across all of humanity but often restricted by dialect, language, and level of development.
You have a not in the first sentence, I think shouldn’t be there.
Thanks! I goofed that one up, sorry!