Everyone talks big game about the file names but forget how important standardizing on log time stamps is too. When I’m able to pipe a bunch of logs into sort, I get so happy.
I’m a systems guy. ISO8601 or die. Whomever decided to put the most significant digits at the end of MMDDYYYY can get fired. From a cannon. Into the sun.
Meant it to be more of an all out brawl of the different groups, but realized it looks like people are cheering on the libertarian after it was too late. Oh well, at the very least I think it also shows Lemmy’s general disdain for tankies.
They were economically socialists, politically authoritarians - and, for better or worse, communism and the Leninist concept of the vanguard party are inextricably linked. At the end of the day, the question is: can a state democratically become socialist? The answer is clearly no, hence the vanguard party, hence Lenin, hence Ho Chi Minh, hence Mao. I’m not talking about a mixed economy, I’m talking about socualism.
Uhh… I might be wrong, and do correct me because I’m not good at politics or geography or stuff, but isn’t The Republic of Ireland a democratic socialist country?
The ROI is I think a social democracy rather democratic socialist. It is economically capitalist though with state intervention.
When we are talking political science ‘state’ is political entity that exerts legal power over a territory. They may be federalised like in the USA or they may be independant (or a few other things.) It can also refer to the systems of this power, like government, legal system, and civil service including entities like police and military forces.
By their own admission, the economy of the Soviet Union was “state capitalism”. Means of production were not owned by private individuals and companies (as in capitalism) but also not by the people or workers (as in socialism). They were owned by the state, and since the state was not democratic, this does not count as shared or public ownership. This may have been meant or justified as temporary at the start, but it did not change.
How do you define “democratic?” Because the “soviet” of “soviet union” is a type of council which was directly elected by citizens. The USSR was a democratic republic in that each soviet usually voted for a higher level soviet. Not that unusual, especially back then.
Now, I’m not suggesting that the books were never cooked. We know that Stalin rigged at least some higher level elections at the very least.
But “democratic” does not mean multi-party. It can also be “no party” or “three parties” or anything. In the USSR you could run for your local soviet or petition them to vote for you. Yes, you’d have to be a party member. But that doesn’t mean blind allegiance and no differing thought. I’ve brought it up before, but you had severe infighting in the party because of the diversity of opinions and thought, not lack of it. Sure, they were all communists or some flavor thereof at least superficially. But there’s a hell of a difference between Stalin and Kruschev and Gorbachev as examples.
And, Stalin aside given his prominence in the early years of the nation, the other prominent leaders were very dependant on entities like the Supreme Soviet which was elected by your elected representatives.
Yea, no, elections were a joke in the soviet union. Pretty much everyone knew your vote counted for nothing and they started offering people food so they would show up to vote to give it some legitimacy. Unlike current Russia the soviet propaganda was mostly a laughing stock at the time.
Also the party members were basically picked by nepotism alone. Sure, you could have internal elections but the winner was always the one with most friends in the party. That’s kinda like saying north Korea is democratic because there are some internal elections while in practise it’s pretty much a monarchy.
Wether or not the SU handed the means of production to the workers or just transferred them to a different previleged class is debatable. But it surely did not abolish the commodity form.
From a theory standpoint, Russia didnt really fullfill the prerequisites for a transition to communism. The social structures were still too aligned with serfdom. In such an environment it is difficult to actually transition from state capitalism to socialism in a functional way, and most critiques of the Soviet Union seem to stem from this problem.
SU wasn’t fascist per se. It was a militaristic authoritarian dictatorship that overlapped with fascism on a lot of issues, but technically fascism means a different thing, yes.
Militaristic might be not technically correct, it was more of a police state than a military state, after the WWII Stalin put a lot of effort to make sure that military will remain a tool and not have agency on itself. All the police-adjacent organisations though were so powerful that they didn’t have to be militaristic to exert all the power.
Everything else is absolutely correct though, complete, absolute power was in the hand of an unelected individual and the people he empowererd, as much as power was concentrated. So as much as authocracy and dictatorship could overlap, USSR was an embodiment of that.
That’s the main issue. But their approach to the economy was awful as well. Unions just collected money and did nothing, plants and factories produced either copies of goods created in the capitalist world, or things that looked bad. People who wanted to wear good-looking clothes were waiting for the end of the month because shops to gain the desired number of purchases were selling western goods for a day or two. Jeans weren’t officially imported and sold. People were buying jeans for two monthly salaries, and it was ok because anyway it was hard to spend the earned money. For a worker, it wasn’t beneficial to improve something in the factory, and nobody wanted to suggest such improvements. There was no market and because of this, nobody wanted to make better goods or make the production process more effective. There was no need in economy of resources, and because of this, production was ineffective. The Soviets admitted it, but weren’t able to change it. Goods made in the USSR and briefly in the ex-USSR countries after the USSR collapsed, were ugly, outdated and expensive. They just couldn’t compete in the market. And there are many people telling capitalism is bad. Capitalism is more effective in providing cheaper good-looking goods because companies have to make profit and compete for customers.
I’ve been thinking if we could just make all companies employee owned by law. You’d still get the benefits of capitalism but instead of vampiric investors getting all the benefits it would be the employees that reap the rewards of their own hard work. There are already employee owned businesses that compete just fine against investor owned businesses so I feel like it’s already proven out.
Investors are not bad. They cover early-stage expanses, and of course, they want to return that money and get profit. Having investors is better than having nothing. As an alternative, workers can work for free until the company becomes profitable, or even invest some money in it. But I don’t think most workers will agree with such a scheme.
There are other ways of securing early capital that don’t require you to give a percent of your company to investors. I don’t think anything needs to be black and white, but the situation where the only people profiting off the success of a company is outside share holders creates a very anti worker incentive.
Lot of folks from Eastern Europe will agree on that.
I believe current social issues need fixing - maybe even adopting some radical changes. E.g. I still can’t get over the fact that capitalism allows for existence of something as ridiculous as billionaires - real life wealth ‘black holes’. And that’s just the start. On the other hand, there are some things that capitalism does extremely well, e.g. competitive markets are very good at producing cheap goods and can drive innovation (when disallowing monopolies). So maybe the right path for us is somewhere between the two extremes?
Anyways, while I understand the distaste for capitalism for some folks and the feeling that it failed them and working people below CEO level in general, I still can’t get over the fact that lots of neo-communists use USSR as a role model. The only people in that country who benefited from that system were the people at the top and those with connections to them (sounds somewhat familiar, doesn’t it?). IMO anybody trying to base their political views on communist ideology should cut off entirely from the USSR and simply deem it as a failed state (that was only communist by name) with too much blood on their hands. Definitely not something that we want to go back to.
I still can’t get over the fact that lots of neo-communists use USSR as a role model. The only people in that country who benefited from that system were the people at the top and those with connections to them
Demonstrably false. For example, are you suggesting that the 23 million serfs–dirt farmers–of the imperial Russian empire were better off not knowing how to read, having no education, no healthcare, no subsidized food supplies, no industry tools, and no ability to break free from being born into a rigid inherited socioeconomic class from which there was no escape?
Capitalists need to remember that last point. They have a shared and reoccuring thread throughout their history of thinking they can treat people in a similar way and that a break will never come. Except they know it does, which is why they were literally murdering communists, socialists, and union folk in both the Americas and Europe (and likely elsewhere, but I’m not well versed enough to speak on other regions of the world).
The USSR, as a model, worked. Capitalists don’t want to accept it publicly because it threatens their monopoly on state and enterprise power. A young government, forged through raw power, is going to be a bit different than what we expect. But the USSR was trending toward what we understand as liberalization which is why it dissolved the moment some ethno-nationalist capitalists were allowed to seize control of newly free media outlets and get people on their side with talking points. People like Yeltsin. I’d like to remind you that Gorbachev, leader of the USSR, didn’t react when people like (but not exclusively) Yeltsin used ethnonationalism to whip up mass riots and protests. He didn’t roll out the tanks,something tankies really hate. He didn’t refuse to recognize the results of elections and votes.
We know the USSR worked because the entire region went from nothing to world superpower in a single generation. It spooked the Americans and a lot of Europeans such that they adopted a practice of containment after WW2 in order to prevent a rival system from spreading. They dirtied the word for a couple generations such that people wouldn’t and still won’t consider what the ideology means. And that, just maybe, a period of time under an autocrat doesn’t define the entire nation.
I still can’t get over the fact that lots of neo-communists use USSR as a role model. The only people in that country who benefited from that system were the people at the top and those with connections to them
Demonstrably false. For example, are you suggesting that the 23 million serfs–dirt farmers–of the imperial Russian empire were better off not knowing how to read, having no education, no healthcare, no subsidized food supplies, no industry tools, and no ability to break free from being born into a rigid inherited socioeconomic class from which there was no escape?
You’re indeed right that Imperial Russia wasn’t better for average lower-class folk. And certainly Bolshevik revolution didn’t came from nothing. For those people it was indeed an improvement. Maybe even substantial. Won’t argue, don’t know that much about that time. The thing that I know, being born in USSR satellite state is how much it sent us back into the middle ages after WWII. Huge lines for food, shit currency, no free speech, not being able to leave the country, political cleansing, gulags, exiles to Syberia, man-made famine. The list goes on and on. It definitely wasn’t as good here as it was in Western Europe for the ordinary people. And we are still seen as ‘worse’ compared to the West. You make it sound like it was some utopian state destroyed by filthy capitalists, while for some of us it was a living hell. And any attempt to change that was bloodily thwarted (e.g. Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia)
The USSR, as a model, worked.
Yes, especially in creating genocides (e.g. Katyn massacre), artificial famines (e.g. Holodomor) and causing large shortages of basic necessities even though their 5 year plans were so perfect. While most people in the West see Hitler as the personification of evil, I often hear that Stalin was much much worse.
Even not counting those issues, if it worked so well then we are not living in a glorious World SSR? USSR had almost twice natural resources the US has and they still didn’t make it work.
But the USSR was trending toward what we understand as liberalization which is why it dissolved the moment some ethno-nationalist capitalists were allowed to seize control of newly free media outlets and get people on their side with talking points.
Yep, it definitely didn’t have anything to do with people living in poverty, working for money worth shit, being prosecuted (or even executed) for just mentioning something bad about the ruling party. Those people were just corrupted by the free media to fight the state which gave them everything they needed. Also it didn’t collapse economically at all. (Hope at this point I don’t need to add /s)
It spooked the Americans and a lot of Europeans such that they adopted a practice of containment after WW2 in order to prevent a rival system from spreading.
I’ll just say that Berlin wall wasn’t created to keep Germans from the West from running away to East Germany.
I’d like to remind you that Gorbachev, leader of the USSR, didn’t react when people like (but not exclusively) Yeltsin used ethnonationalism to whip up mass riots and protests. He didn’t roll out the tanks,something tankies really hate. He didn’t refuse to recognize the results of elections and votes.
This system was simply not sustainable in the long run. With world’s second military they could prolong the inevitable. The fact that they didn’t roll out those tanks says that even people ruling that country knew it wasn’t working. They simply couldn’t keep up the race with the West. You can even see it in terms of GDP:
Sorry, got a bit angry. Idk, as much as I like to keep an open mind, USSR and it’s proxies created so much pain and suffering for me, my parents and grandparents, that it makes my blood boiling when I see somebody defending that monster of a country. Hope I wasn’t offensive much.
Yeah, fascism includes authoritarianism but not the other way around. You can be authoritarian and not a fascist. Which doesn’t make you good, just different flavour of bad
All governments and all societies as of today are authoritarian by nature, no matter how small or big. Even those “direct democracy” villages have hierarchy, and are thus authoritarian. Stop claiming authoritarian = bad.
Your issue with the soviets is that you’re utterly illiterate on the subject of the soviets and should educate yourself instead of posting nonsensical comments in a public forum.
Go ask some Polish people how well the Russians treated them. You can have two bad parties, just because one is worse doesn’t make the other not bad. I mean it’s such a simple concept.
join south africa and (sorta) japan, use YYYY-MM-DD as a default - sorts well, zero ambiguity… at least until some joker starts popularising YYYY-DD-MM, anyway
Using Jerboa still. Nice to have it from F-Droids official repo. Did use Infinity for Reddit before I deleted my account around aweek before the protest. But only the Reddit version is there currently
Go to settings. Then pick ‘username’ settings (for you it will say snowraven settings). Then scroll down to default listing type and you can choose between all, local or subscribed.
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