You insult the average person, people are far smarter than you give them credit for. Moreover, you can’t avoid discussing the “baggage” that comes from Marxism anyways, so acting scared and secretive is more damaging than anything else. Maintaining a correct line is more important than trying to be sneaky and having it backfire by having them either not read theory, which would be disastrous, or having them retain anti-socialist views because you were sneaky.

Less “first,” more “alongside” imo. Class division is the primary contradiction, but you can’t untangle it without making progress on the secondary contradictions.

It’s still very important to recognize the impacts of racism, sexism, homophobia, and more. White supremacy, cishet supremacy, and patriarchy are additional axes by which the overall contradiction of bourgeois vs proletarian is waged. You can’t erase that. You have to acknowledge it within the broader class war. Historically, class war has been waged the fiercest by those most marginalized by it, uniting and making significant social progress is necessary for Socialism.

I disagree, actually. Labelling them by their Marxian terms ties them to Marxism. This continues to tie Marxism to modern day analysis. Using general terms erases Marxism, and therefore erases critical theory.

The three works I listed were history books, 2 written during the early Soviet Period and the third written shortly after the fall of the USSR. Theory is important, but so are history books, and in this case history books take priority because these are accounts of the ground. I am not sure where you get off believing them to be theory. You have your anecdotes, which can help guide your experiences, and I provided historical texts and analysis.

Then, again, why do you think it is out of madness?

So you reject the stated logical, mechanical, economic reasons, and ascribe it to madness and absurdity? Occam’s razor needs to be applied here, you need to justify your claims that absurdity is the reason in spite of evidence otherwise.

What you describe in your first paragraph isn’t what Marxists advocate for nor is it what AES states look like. You can read historical texts like Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan, or This Soviet World by Anna Louise Strong if you want to dig deeper, but overall government officials are an extension of class and not a separate class, and officials absolutely are accountable with mechanisms like Recall Elections.

More than the prior texts, though, contextualization is important, and Blackshirts and Reds does a great job of that.

The Soviets did end famine, just not with a wave of a magic wand. Outside of WWII, the 1930s famine was the last famine in Russia, because collectivization and industrialization at the hands of the Communists improved farming methods. The 1930s famine in particular was a mixture of natural causes and mismanagement, but the long term effects were it being the final major famine outside of when Nazi Germany took Ukraine, the USSR’s breadbasket.

This wish-washy anticommunism ignores the fact that famines were regular and common under the Tsars for centuries until the Communists stopped it. It isn’t “shifting the narrative,” you were wrong when you said everyone was paid the same and were wrong when you said this led to famine. You were wrong on your understanding of history and theory at several points each, why speak when you haven’t investigated.

Equating all bad as simply “bad” regardless of context, intensity, direction, and more is a privledged western position that seeks to undermine liberatory movements and entrenches the status quo. The status quo may be “bad,” but by your analysis so it overturning the status quo. This is the kind of moralism that was used against the Civil Rights Movement, Palestinian Liberation, anti-slavery movements, and more.

The Soviet Union was disbanded in 1991. No, the Soviet system was not magical and thus immediately fixed everything overnight, but took decades of work and industrialization.

Again, your moral equivalence results in standing back and watching Palestine be erased from the map. Equal condemnation for unequal evils minimizes the worse and raises the lesser evil.

Rather than breaking up monopolies that will only ever reform themselves eventually, it makes more sense to fold them into the Public Sector, whereby their existing planning infrastructure can be better put to use in a more efficient manner. We need to move the clock forwards, not keep setting it back.

I just showed you the consequence of your framing, correct? The goal isn’t to excuse anything, but to come to correct conclusions. Your line of thinking supports the genocide of Palestinians, because it becomes a toothless “both sides bad,” resulting in “continue the course.” It’s the equivalent of coming out and saying “cancer is bad,” it doesn’t change anything.

Bad actions have different intensities and scales. Such equal condemnation for unequal evil leads to people who refuse to take a Pro-Palestinian stance, which implicitly sides with Israel as the stronger force.

My point is that that is bad, it obscures reality and leads to incorrect conclusions.

Boring comment. It’s doing its job, which is garnering response and sparking discussion.

Can’t say I agree with your analysis, but time will tell.

It’s best to correctly contextualize all bad. Simply saying X is bad if one country does .5X and another does 2X equalizes each into merely “X.”

This is nonsense, and ascribes a supernatural element to whatever it is you declare a “state” without analyzing its structures or mechanisms. As a consequence, you incorrectly pretend that Communism somehow would not have a government, when the point of Marxism is working towards full Public Ownership and Central Planning through developing the Public Forces. Government officials are an extension of the dominant class, with a fully public economy there no longer exists classes.