I’m not gonna be offended trust me. But it drives me equally up a wall when I read anything from .ml that acts this way. A huge tenet of socialist views is the idea of proletariat internationalism, the idea that the working class globally should be working together to fix the entire system everywhere. Instead there is a constant desire to frame east vs west, socialist vs capitalist, Russia vs the US. And that’s disingenuous and really just makes everyone dumb.
The West absolutely has a laundry list of the evil cruel awful terrible shit it has done, I rarely see that denied. What I do see is that same lens not applied the same to socialist/communist countries especially the USSR.
Women were still barred from any position of power through an invisible glass ceiling, they were still completely expected to work a full time job AND handle women’s works, feminist movements were pursued by a state and often crushed, the USSR denied spousal abuse even existed and offered no solution for abused women. Not to mention to overall economic limitations, at least in the west women could own real estate/invest in a stock market/run a business, that wasn’t really the same in the USSR where things were mostly state run or decided by the state which limited everyone’s freedom equally which I guess you could argue is better in some ways but that’s still completely against socialist sentiment.
So yeah I guess women had rights, but it wasn’t paradise and in ways it lacked in contrast to their contemporaries.
You just can’t have actual discussions here because everyone wants to defend the USSR and it is evident in the culture of former soviet countries how they fared and what the government pushed culturally. Spousal abuse is terrible in these parts of the world, racism runs amok, anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment is massive. People in this thread are literally arguing the USSR was better, yet somehow their culture has completely 180’d? Someone said how the west attributed homosexuality to pedophilia, so did the USSR and so does Russia today because no ground has been made in all those decades since. So what are people even talking about?
I have a Russian communist friend, he says that every young Communist he knows in Russia supports LGBT rights, and he worked in the current Russian Communist Party. I can’t help but wonder, if the USSR existed now, would it have better LGBT laws? After all, the youngest cadre is very supportive now.
The two biggest gaps between communists and your views are that communists recognize the imperialist stage of capitalism as the dominant contradiction globally, which pits the imperialist countries like the US against the global south, as well as the insistence that we place our analysis within the specific historical context that it exists in. This latter process is part of Historical Materialism, which is one of the most significant advancements of Karl Marx.
And this all falls away when you accept every country does an imperialism if it has the ability to do so. The Aral Sea didn’t dry itself, people didn’t deport themselves, languages got erased by the state and cultural repression was a tenet of the USSR.
Imperialism is not an action to be committed on a whim, in the eyes of communists, but relevantly is a stage in capitalist development. As bank and industrial capital consolidate and monopolize, they form finance capital, which seeks to expand internationally and thus the economy shifts from focusing on commodity export to capital export. This is a material system, with definite material causes, not something to be engaged upon at a whim.
The idea that countries would simply be evil if they had the opportunity to is an idealist argument, not a materialist one, and thus is anti-scientific. This is closer to a religious look on life than a scientific one.
Further, as we are placing the Soviet Union in its actual, historical context, nationalities were protected, languages that were never written were alphabetized, and the right of secession was protected. Tremendous development happened, and ethnic minorities were culturally protected and celebrated. There were instances of population transfer, and this by modern standards would be considered barbaric. However, this practice was enormously common among capitalist peers like the UK and US, and neither of them had the same level of thought and care placed into respecting and uplifting various ethnicities.
The only conclusion here is that you either are entirely unfamiliar with the true severity of repressions committed by the west, and therefore the shift to the positive direction as compared to their peers, or are entirely unfamiliar with the sheer care and uplifting that did go on when it comes to ethnic minority rights in the USSR, despite failures like population transfer.
This is why we are pointing out that you do not take a scientific approach to history.
Countries routinely prove given the economic and military power, they will do imperialism in some way or another whether warfare or economic or something else entirely. But sure whatever you want. I’m kind of tired of talking to you because as I stated before, you don’t want to discuss or be open, you just want to be right and state the USSR is the best or something. Please find other people to talk to I have no interest in continuing this charade with you defending an objectively terrible place that gave birth to an even worse place.
Evil is a moral idea, not a material process. That’s my point.
Either way, I have an interest in defending points that were actually made, not the horrendous fantasy you made up, nor the idealism you are spouting. Nobody is making you do this, you have every opportunity to approach the conversation from a point of good-faith, but instead you have shifted goalposts and made quasi-fascist points surrounding culture.
So murder is fine, most of the world doesn’t agree murder is morally wrong. Correct?
They are opinions, they aren’t weightless, and they aren’t ambiguous there are a few almost no one disagrees with because their obviousness is so outrageously apparent.
Your slavery example doesn’t work because slavery was and is always immoral, simply overlooking that fact for profit only reinforces my point.
Morals are not the same as material processes. Simply saying “evil” as a reason for something is not a scientific answer for the behavior of societies.
I’m kind of tired of talking to you because as I stated before, you don’t want to discuss or be open, you just want to be right and state the USSR is the best or something.
Whatever, Cowbee has been very open and responsive and all you do is talk in circles, misinterpret Cowbee’s posts in bad faith and then be insulting.
He literally just argued work camps were more progressive than western prison practices. Which were also work camps in many places, and also not work camps in other places. I am not being insulting, I am being insulted. And now dogpiled in an attempt to overwhelm. I have nothing to prove, history stands. Many people here will realize how fucking silly it is to argue the USSR was a progressive place.
He literally just argued work camps were more progressive than western prison practices.
Those “western prison practices” include private prisons, i.e. slavery.
Many people here will realize how fucking silly it is to argue the USSR was a progressive place.
It very unambiguously was. It tremendously improved the lives of people, both directly within its own territory, by helping liberatory anti-colonial movements, and by pushing the Imperial Core to improve workers’ rights domestically.
Not every Soviet prison was a labor camp, and many of them were open-air prisons, with weekend visitation, etc. The cartoonist idea of the gulag is a fantasy that did not exist. Meanwhile, the west had concentration camps in the Congo, India, etc.
I’m not gonna be offended trust me. But it drives me equally up a wall when I read anything from .ml that acts this way. A huge tenet of socialist views is the idea of proletariat internationalism, the idea that the working class globally should be working together to fix the entire system everywhere. Instead there is a constant desire to frame east vs west, socialist vs capitalist, Russia vs the US. And that’s disingenuous and really just makes everyone dumb.
The West absolutely has a laundry list of the evil cruel awful terrible shit it has done, I rarely see that denied. What I do see is that same lens not applied the same to socialist/communist countries especially the USSR.
Women were still barred from any position of power through an invisible glass ceiling, they were still completely expected to work a full time job AND handle women’s works, feminist movements were pursued by a state and often crushed, the USSR denied spousal abuse even existed and offered no solution for abused women. Not to mention to overall economic limitations, at least in the west women could own real estate/invest in a stock market/run a business, that wasn’t really the same in the USSR where things were mostly state run or decided by the state which limited everyone’s freedom equally which I guess you could argue is better in some ways but that’s still completely against socialist sentiment.
So yeah I guess women had rights, but it wasn’t paradise and in ways it lacked in contrast to their contemporaries.
You just can’t have actual discussions here because everyone wants to defend the USSR and it is evident in the culture of former soviet countries how they fared and what the government pushed culturally. Spousal abuse is terrible in these parts of the world, racism runs amok, anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment is massive. People in this thread are literally arguing the USSR was better, yet somehow their culture has completely 180’d? Someone said how the west attributed homosexuality to pedophilia, so did the USSR and so does Russia today because no ground has been made in all those decades since. So what are people even talking about?
I have a Russian communist friend, he says that every young Communist he knows in Russia supports LGBT rights, and he worked in the current Russian Communist Party. I can’t help but wonder, if the USSR existed now, would it have better LGBT laws? After all, the youngest cadre is very supportive now.
The two biggest gaps between communists and your views are that communists recognize the imperialist stage of capitalism as the dominant contradiction globally, which pits the imperialist countries like the US against the global south, as well as the insistence that we place our analysis within the specific historical context that it exists in. This latter process is part of Historical Materialism, which is one of the most significant advancements of Karl Marx.
And this all falls away when you accept every country does an imperialism if it has the ability to do so. The Aral Sea didn’t dry itself, people didn’t deport themselves, languages got erased by the state and cultural repression was a tenet of the USSR.
Imperialism is not an action to be committed on a whim, in the eyes of communists, but relevantly is a stage in capitalist development. As bank and industrial capital consolidate and monopolize, they form finance capital, which seeks to expand internationally and thus the economy shifts from focusing on commodity export to capital export. This is a material system, with definite material causes, not something to be engaged upon at a whim.
The idea that countries would simply be evil if they had the opportunity to is an idealist argument, not a materialist one, and thus is anti-scientific. This is closer to a religious look on life than a scientific one.
Further, as we are placing the Soviet Union in its actual, historical context, nationalities were protected, languages that were never written were alphabetized, and the right of secession was protected. Tremendous development happened, and ethnic minorities were culturally protected and celebrated. There were instances of population transfer, and this by modern standards would be considered barbaric. However, this practice was enormously common among capitalist peers like the UK and US, and neither of them had the same level of thought and care placed into respecting and uplifting various ethnicities.
The only conclusion here is that you either are entirely unfamiliar with the true severity of repressions committed by the west, and therefore the shift to the positive direction as compared to their peers, or are entirely unfamiliar with the sheer care and uplifting that did go on when it comes to ethnic minority rights in the USSR, despite failures like population transfer.
This is why we are pointing out that you do not take a scientific approach to history.
Evil is an opinion we can’t actually weigh.
Countries routinely prove given the economic and military power, they will do imperialism in some way or another whether warfare or economic or something else entirely. But sure whatever you want. I’m kind of tired of talking to you because as I stated before, you don’t want to discuss or be open, you just want to be right and state the USSR is the best or something. Please find other people to talk to I have no interest in continuing this charade with you defending an objectively terrible place that gave birth to an even worse place.
Evil is a moral idea, not a material process. That’s my point.
Either way, I have an interest in defending points that were actually made, not the horrendous fantasy you made up, nor the idealism you are spouting. Nobody is making you do this, you have every opportunity to approach the conversation from a point of good-faith, but instead you have shifted goalposts and made quasi-fascist points surrounding culture.
Morals have weight homie, hand waving away immoral acts by saying they’re just opinions is obtuse at best.
Morals are weightless and made up homie, for half of American history it was “wrong” to free a slave
So murder is fine, most of the world doesn’t agree murder is morally wrong. Correct?
They are opinions, they aren’t weightless, and they aren’t ambiguous there are a few almost no one disagrees with because their obviousness is so outrageously apparent.
Your slavery example doesn’t work because slavery was and is always immoral, simply overlooking that fact for profit only reinforces my point.
Morals are not the same as material processes. Simply saying “evil” as a reason for something is not a scientific answer for the behavior of societies.
It’s also not an excuse, it doesn’t need to be scientific since societal issues aren’t scientific and there is no legitimate social sciences.
Whatever, Cowbee has been very open and responsive and all you do is talk in circles, misinterpret Cowbee’s posts in bad faith and then be insulting.
He literally just argued work camps were more progressive than western prison practices. Which were also work camps in many places, and also not work camps in other places. I am not being insulting, I am being insulted. And now dogpiled in an attempt to overwhelm. I have nothing to prove, history stands. Many people here will realize how fucking silly it is to argue the USSR was a progressive place.
Those “western prison practices” include private prisons, i.e. slavery.
It very unambiguously was. It tremendously improved the lives of people, both directly within its own territory, by helping liberatory anti-colonial movements, and by pushing the Imperial Core to improve workers’ rights domestically.
Not every Soviet prison was a labor camp, and many of them were open-air prisons, with weekend visitation, etc. The cartoonist idea of the gulag is a fantasy that did not exist. Meanwhile, the west had concentration camps in the Congo, India, etc.
I never said a gulag, I laughed at how silly it is to propose the concept of a progressive prison.
Mate you are a bloodthirsty shitlib, you are clouded in your racism
“You’re insulting him you fucking racist bloodthirsty shitlib!!!”
-continues to defend colonialism and oppression because it is the brand you like I guess?