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Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse. Memes are welcome!
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History of eastern Europe is the Achilles heel for the Tankies.
It literally destroys their entire narrative.
The best counter argument they have is some vague 1990s polls that the proles regretted the fall of USSR.
I am sure there is a poll of some boomer whining about it. They sure love that 50 kopek salami...
Tankies will ignore the actual referendum and current opinions and the current behaviour of the Russian Federation who ain't even a commie no more
A lot of people did end up regretting the fall of the USSR. The way that it fell, with things formerly owned by the state being snapped up by the oligarchs, meant that life got significantly worse for a lot of people, especially people that were older. If they had gotten a western-style liberal democracy--which, to be clear, ain't great--they probably would have felt differently. But the corruption fucked the people over far, far faster than it has in the west.
Also, the West assisted in the corruption. The IMF and the State Department were absolutely pivotal in handing over all of the USSR's state assets to like 10 murderous billionaires, and then they peaced out, leaving the people to starve.
Capitalism, like democracy or nuclear energy, is a troublesome servant at the best of times, and all too readily becomes a demon that seeks only to destroy. It must be carefully managed and contained, and the US during the mid-1990s was basically a pretty accurate rendition of the nightmare caricature that tankies like to present of what happens when it is not. Basically just wandering the world fucking things up for people and taking all the money, with all of the voters totally propagandized into thinking it was all a good thing outside of a cranky and disregarded 1% that were reading Noam Chomsky.
Sure. And capitalists in the west are still doing it, only much, much more openly.
I don't think that either capitalism or communism is the answer, assuming that there's only one, and that it has to be 'pure', but I also don't know what is. I can see large, gaping pitfalls with almost every system that's been proposed and tried so far when you talk about a society of 200M+ people.
Replace communism in your statement with leninism / maoism. And I am 100% on board. Actual communism, classless stateless communism. Which is not what any of these countries are were or ever will be. Isn't the problem. Even if it's likely unobtainable. I'd still say we'd be better off trying.
I have such mixed feelings. Anarchism and stateless communism can, and does, work pretty well in relatively small communities. But it's hard to scale effectively. Leninism/Stalinism/Maoism/etc. is a form of communism (-ish) that solves the scaling issue, but at the cost of a deep repression of individual rights. Without some form of a state, it's incredibly hard to get a society moving in the same direction.
Both a state, and statelessness, have pitfalls.
The downsides of a state tend to outweigh its benefits though. The loss of consent etc. Many of the benefits of the state could be gained through minimal and temporary measures. Without establishing a full-on permanent growing state. But as you said there are definitely pros and cons to both
I don't think that's really correct. I think that a huge risk you take with an anarchist country is that other countries will take the lack of a standing military as an invitation to invade and take your land. Then instead of losing a degree of consent to a state, you lose all consent. (Could militias play a role in defense? Sure! But mobilizing and funding a military on an ad hoc basis would be very, very challenging, particularly when you're in a crisis.) Individuals certainly would not have power to e.g. negotiate on equal terms with a corporate entity that was organized in a different country, particularly if you didn't have some form of a state enforcing fair labor standards. But yeah, balancing the individual's autonomy versus the needs of all of the people is a tough thing. I don't have simple answers, because I don't think that there are any. A lot of theory is just that: theory. And taht goes for both capitalism and communism/socialism. The real world gets messy, politics interferes with economics, and people are rarely rational actors.
It's possible. But still better than the alternative. The thing with standing armies is they are no ultimate determinator themselves. Both Russia and the United States ended up getting their ass handed to them in the end. By rural Warlords in afghanistan. Even England and Spain lost control of their colonies because of this simple fact. At the end of the day the people who live here will always be here. Those who invading only generally want to be there as long as they have to be.
Heck it doesn't always hold up locally either. The Czar lost to the Bolsheviks. The Chinese emperor to the peasants. You won't find more committed fighters than those defending their lives and livelihoods.
The thing with balancing autonomy and consent is that it gets exponentially harder for every person you add to a group. At city levels it starts becoming outright impossible. Hamlets, villages and Commonwealth's can still cooperate and band together where it makes sense. The point is to keep the structures small and answerable to those they represent.
Yeah. It is fiendishly difficult to get right, even good situations (rare as they are) don't last and fall apart into corruption. My only gripe is with people who hold out complaints about the US (generally extremely valid, you don't really need to exaggerate although sometimes they do), and then turn around and say "See it's actually super simple you just do communism" even though any big countries that have ever tried communism have seen it collapse into nightmares and suffering that makes the US's dystopian bullshit look like paradise on earth.
China is slowly getting better. By that I mean that the average living situation in China now is better than is was 50 years ago. Poverty and illiteracy used to be an enormous problem in China, and that's been getting significantly better (although the changes that have decreased poverty have also cause some significant social upheaval). But the first few years, with the Great Leap Forward, that was pretty rough.
On the other hand, China is only nominally communist now. I'd say that it's a single-party capitalist country at this point.
Yeah. China as I understand it is actually really sincerely investing in economic development for the rural areas in a way that's really genuine and admirable. I'm not saying they are always and uniformly bad, almost no one is that.
Basically, both the USSR and China experimented with some variety of actual communism, realized that it didn't work on a big scale, and abandoned it in favor of command-economy capitalism. The USSR didn't do it in time, but China did, and now China works while the USSR exploded and fell down. Why people try to argue that they were better even economically during the time that they were communist is just totally bizarre to me.
How many of those attempts weren't sabotaged by the US? Are you familiar with Greg Palast's work?
Most of them?
The US didn't sabotage Communist China or the USSR that I know of. They've sabotaged some more vulnerable countries for pursuing basically any variety of self-determination, including communism, socialism, nationalism, democracy, or basically anything other than getting held upside down and shaken by the US. Some they're still doing it to that still despite the sabotage manage to have better educational and medical systems than the US does (Cuba). But mostly what I was thinking of was China, the USSR, and all the little nightmare republics all over Eastern Europe where the pattern "communists take power" "people start dying by the millions and happiness ends" was consistent and universal enough that I think it is safe to say it is a pattern.
I have given Greg Palast's books to family members for Christmas. I'm also familiar with John Perkins and Smedley Butler. Like I say, nothing I am attempting to say is in any way undone by pointing out any of the many extremely accurate criticisms of the United States.
Perestroika immediately comes to mind. I'm sure there are things I'm not thinking of just now, but my belly is full and I'm sleepy. Thanks for your reply.
Yeah, all good. Did we have anything to do with Perestroika? I thought that was communism failing, and then Gorbachev trying to change communism, and the new thing being even worse. Not a ringing endorsement for communism unless I am missing something.
Of course, just wait, it's easily possible that in about 6 months we will have USSR-scale shortages and tyranny in the United States, and people can point to that as an example of capitalism fucking up, in turn. Like I say and like I think HelixDab was saying, I don't think there is a system that will protect you.
Very much more complicated and nuanced than mentioned here, but as I said, I'm sleepy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perestroika
I'll look more later.
All good, I am happy to read whenever you want to send.
Which GEOS are talking about specifically?
I don't know what that acronym means, I'm sorry.