glockenspiel , 11 months ago

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.