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volodya_ilich

@ volodya_ilich @lemm.ee

Posts
4
Comments
622
Joined
2 yr. ago

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  • Regarding corruption, I made a little writeup a while ago about why corruption is systematically overestimated in the USSR which, if you're arguing from good faith, you won't have a problem checking out. There was active fight against corruption in the Soviet Union (as you can see by the sign on the picture), the so-called "chistka", i.e. purges of party members, were part of said campaigns, and citizens could legally organise committees to review the functioning and accounting of local public services and institutions.

    Regarding "lowering wages", you're simply wrong. That's just from the 60s, but material wealth of people rose at unparalleled speed in the USSR, faster than any country before that. And when the USSR economy stagnated in the 70s, real median wages kept rising at around 3.5% yearly

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  • Literally the first phrase is a condemnation of the criminalisation of homosexuality

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  • "I will overfixate on a debate on the academic definition of capitalism in order to be able to call X communist leader a capitalist instead of looking at the actual policy implemented" isn't an honest framework to deal with this. In a worker state without bourgeoisie, such as the soviet union, there is no such thing as surplus value because there's no capitalist class appropriating the wealth for itself. Instead, salaries are decided centrally, goods are provided at centrally-planned prices and NOT through the market principles. This is enough for me to claim that the USSR was socialist and not capitalist, and I refuse to engage in semantics rather than talking about policy: the USSR was materially and significantly different from any classical capitalist state, and much better by ANY actual metric than any capitalist state, and you're just trying to bend definitions to call your Marxist-Leninist of choice a capitalist

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  • “ It is clear that Stalin had two courses open to him. He could seek a general coalition against Hitler, or he could come to an understanding with Hitler at the expense of the Western democracies. Stalin’s policy was guided by a profound conviction of the ultimate hostility of Nazi Germany, as well as by the hope that if the capitalist Powers became locked in mortal conflict, the Soviet Union might remain aloof, gaining strength while they tore one another to pieces. Certainly the principle of self-preservation lay at the heart of Moscow’s calculations ” Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm, Chapter 20, The Soviet Enigma pub 1948.

    “ In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be ” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)

    “ It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door ” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.

    “ One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course ” Neville Chamberlain, House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact's signing)

    “ We could not doubt that the Soviet Government, disillusioned by the hesitant negotiations with Britain and France, feared a lone struggle against Hitler’s mighty war machine. It seemed they had concluded, in the interests of survival, that an accord with Germany would at least postpone their day of reckoning ” Cordell Hull (U.S. Secretary of State), The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (Published 1948)

    “ *It must be said that the Soviet Government, having little confidence in swift military aid from the Western Powers, chose to protect its borders, however odious such a pact might seem. One perceives in their choice the determination to secure time—time they evidently believed we were not prepared to give them.” Édouard Daladier (French Prime Minister), Address to the French Chamber of Deputies, Late August 1939

    “ It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door ” Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938), Mission to Moscow (1941)

    “ British officials, for all their outrage, concede that Stalin, with no firm pledge of Allied assistance, and regarding Poland as a foregone victim, decided that if the Red Army must eventually face Hitler, it should not be without first gaining some strategic space—and time ” Joseph P. Kennedy (U.S. Ambassador to the UK, 1938–1940),Private Correspondence, September 1939

    Hopefully, you won't accuse such sources, i.e. western diplomats and politicians who actually experienced WW2, of being tankies

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  • “ It is clear that Stalin had two courses open to him. He could seek a general coalition against Hitler, or he could come to an understanding with Hitler at the expense of the Western democracies. Stalin’s policy was guided by a profound conviction of the ultimate hostility of Nazi Germany, as well as by the hope that if the capitalist Powers became locked in mortal conflict, the Soviet Union might remain aloof, gaining strength while they tore one another to pieces. Certainly the principle of self-preservation lay at the heart of Moscow’s calculations ” Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm, Chapter 20, The Soviet Enigma pub 1948.

    “ In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be ” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)

    “ It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door ” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.

    “ One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course ” Neville Chamberlain, House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact's signing)

    “ We could not doubt that the Soviet Government, disillusioned by the hesitant negotiations with Britain and France, feared a lone struggle against Hitler’s mighty war machine. It seemed they had concluded, in the interests of survival, that an accord with Germany would at least postpone their day of reckoning ” Cordell Hull (U.S. Secretary of State), The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (Published 1948)

    “ *It must be said that the Soviet Government, having little confidence in swift military aid from the Western Powers, chose to protect its borders, however odious such a pact might seem. One perceives in their choice the determination to secure time—time they evidently believed we were not prepared to give them.” Édouard Daladier (French Prime Minister), Address to the French Chamber of Deputies, Late August 1939

    “ It seemed to me that the Soviet leaders believed conflict with Nazi Germany was inescapable. But, lacking clear assurances of military partnership from England and France, they resolved that a ‘breathing spell’ was urgently needed. In that sense, the pact with Germany was a temporary expedient to keep the wolf from the door ” Joseph E. Davies (U.S. Ambassador to the USSR, 1937–1938), Mission to Moscow (1941)

    “ British officials, for all their outrage, concede that Stalin, with no firm pledge of Allied assistance, and regarding Poland as a foregone victim, decided that if the Red Army must eventually face Hitler, it should not be without first gaining some strategic space—and time ” Joseph P. Kennedy (U.S. Ambassador to the UK, 1938–1940),Private Correspondence, September 1939

    Hopefully, you won't accuse such sources, i.e. western diplomats and politicians who actually experienced WW2, of being tankies

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  • No, because that's revisionist propaganda. The USSR had proposed mutual-defense agreements with Poland, France and England, which all of them rejected. The USSR offered to enter a war against nazism as a response to the Munich agreements and the annexation of Czechoslovakia by nazis and Poland, but France and England (and obviously Poland) didn't want that. The Soviets went as far as to offer sending ONE MILLION soldiers to France, together with artillery, aviation and tanks, on exchange for a mutual-defense agreement with France and England. As was later discovered through released embassy wires, the French and English ambassadors were instructed not to make a peace agreement with the Soviets under any condition, but to pretend to be interested and to prolong the negotiations for as long as possible... presumably expecting Nazis to invade the Soviet Union, given that communists were their self-declared enemy and they held racial motivations to eliminate "the Slavic Untermenschen". It was convenient, letting the Nazis deal with the communists (since England and France had failed to eliminate Bolshevism during their invasion of Russia in the Russian Civil War), two birds with one stone.

    The Soviet Union, which had only begun industrializing in 1928 with its first 5-year plan, compared to the century-long history of industrialization of Germany, simply didn't have the material means to single-handedly fight nazism in 1939. This is further proven by the fact that, after the invasion of the USSR by the Nazis, 27 million Soviet lives were lost in the struggle against fascism. They DESPERATELY needed every single year they could buy, and they DESPERATELY needed to avoid facing the Nazis in a one-on-one struggle. Without the lend-lease program, and without the western front, who's to say if the Soviet Union would have simply succumbed to Nazi Germany, and the horrifying additional extent of genocide that Nazis would have been able to perpetrate.

    In case you don't believe me personally, I'll leave you another comment below this one with quotes of western politicians and diplomats of the period, showing the revisionism that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact has been subjected to.

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  • You're taking things out of context. In the first example, Lenin specifically says "bourgeois reformist assertion", he's talking of monopoly in the context of a bourgeois state, not in a worker's state. He understands that for as long as a strong bourgeoisie exists, not even a state monopoly can be considered socialist, because the state is in fact controlled by the bourgeoisie.

    That was until after the October revolution

    Wow, so you're telling me that, when confronted with real situations and material conditions, the opinions of someone can change? Baffling.

    This is around the time he stripped the soviets of their power and disenfranchised the workers in favour of a central state that alienated them from control over the means of production

    Good luck fighting a civil war in which you get invaded by 14 other world powers for the sin of being a communist, while your industry is disorganized and not centralized towards the war-effort. Give as an answer as to how to fight and win such a war, maybe the entire communist part just didn't think hard enough? Or will you say that the people who spent most of their adult life in jail or exile for organizing workers and distributing communist newspapers during Tsarism were ackchually just power-hungry tyrants?

    And now tankies are distancing themselves

    Wait, so tankies are actually against centralized economic planning? Strawman

    an analysis of what happened shows that the USSR liberalised quickly

    "liberalism is when centrally-planned economy". Seriously, do you know what "liberalism" means?

    You know your REAL problem with the Bolsheviks? That they won. The problem YOU have with Bolsheviks, is that they had to face real historical and material problems, and big ones, and therefore had to make tough decisions. You claim to know better than the people of the time that spent their literal lives in jail or exile prior to the revolution, studying and theorizing and discussing about communism in real life, risking their lives in organizing the workers and in fighting against Tsarism, and you know why? Because the ONLY socialists that supposed "leftists" like you will support, are the leftists who failed. You'll support Salvador Allende because he didn't face the real conditions of his time and didn't apply the necessary policy to fight the advance of fascism. You'll support the anarchists in the Spanish Second Republic because they failed to fight against fascism and, because of rejecting taking power, they didn't have to apply harsh policy to fight reactionarism. But you won't ever support actual socialists who DID understand the dangers of fascism and of capitalist counter-revolution, and actually did something about it, because as soon as they apply their ideology to real-world conditions, they're not perfect anymore. Because they ACTUALLY were a threat to the system, and so the propaganda will paint them as intolerable autocrats, and you'll swallow that propaganda whole and share the same views of socialists than fucking Zbigniew Brzezinsky.

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  • Please tell us your radically right policy lmao

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  • "TaNkIeS hAvE rIgHtWiNg IdEaLs"

    The ideals: collectivisation of the means of production and of agricultural land, guaranteed employment, guaranteed housing, free universal healthcare and education to the highest level, guaranteed public pensions, equalization of wages between jobs, push towards unionisation, defence of LGTBQ and women's rights, defence of indigenous movements and racial minorities, anti-racism, anti-imperialism...

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  • Criminalising homosexuality was a mistake, and a consequence of a process of rolling back on some of the cultural progress achieved during the 1920s in the USSR due to fear of a situation like the pushback against early collectivisation efforts after the end of the New Economic Policy era. Nobody on hexbear will excuse this. What they will tell you is the massive boost in literacy during Stalin's rule, especially among women; the guarantee of employment by the state, the immense equalisation of wages, the total elimination of private property through the collectivisation of agriculture and industry, the guarantee of free healthcare and education de jura and de facto, the world-unprecedented industrial growth and improvement of the economic situation of citizens of the Soviet Union, the massive push towards unionisation of workers and participation in policy through party membership, and the most intense struggle against fascism that costed 27 million Soviet lives.

    Now, you named one right wing policy, I named a list of communist policy, please explain me how the overall is "right wing"

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  • You can't say the same things about Churchill, there was no massive equalisation of wages in England during his rule, nor a planned economy guaranteeing a job to anyone who wanted a job, nor a collectivisation of agriculture and of the means of production, nor a state-backing of unions, nor an immense push towards literacy and women's rights and education...

  • President Biden warns of 'oligarchy' as he bids farewell to five decades in politics

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  • For fuck's sake, the US threatened military invasion of Greenland and best EU ca do is say "oh, trump, stop it uwu".

  • President Biden warns of 'oligarchy' as he bids farewell to five decades in politics

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  • The genocide couldn't happen without the military, diplomatic and economic support of the USA (and its vassal European states) to Israel.

  • President Biden warns of 'oligarchy' as he bids farewell to five decades in politics

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  • Dude. The genocide has been ongoing during Biden administration, stop finding excuses, and "orange man worse", we know that Trump sucks, that's not a defense of a genocide supporter

  • President Biden warns of 'oligarchy' as he bids farewell to five decades in politics

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  • My man here pulling out every trick to minimise the support with billions of dollars to a genocide. "Poor wittle Joe, the president of the most powerful country in the world, had no alternative but to send millions to genocide. But he cursed while doing so, so it's OK actually". Fuck that shit

  • President Biden warns of 'oligarchy' as he bids farewell to five decades in politics

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  • My man here pulling out every trick to minimise the support with billions of dollars to a genocide. "Poor wittle Joe, the president of the most powerful country in the world, had no alternative but to send millions to genocide. But he cursed while doing so, so it's OK actually". Fuck that shit

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  • Damn, everything he could for you like checks notes funding a genocide while the number of homeless rises at double digits percent each year. If that's the best a president can do, you need a change of system NOW

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  • Again, never had such thing as "accountable politicians" in the west, we're founded on colonialism, slavery and genocide. We've never had these "balances and regulations" that you talk about, otherwise the people in charge for the invasion of Vietnam, Iraq, the bombing of Libya and of Yugoslavia, and an honestly endless list of atrocities carried out by the west, would have suffered consequences

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  • Fascism is unconditionally bad, but the term "red fash" is ahistorical, illogical and made up right wing bullshit to push people away from communism