Socialism_Everyday
@Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
And what did Hungary do to the USSR? Hungary was a fascist Axis state that contributed to Holocaust and to the invasion of the USSR.
Regarding the rapes, it’s unfortunate, but an army of starved and mostly uneducated peasants who suffered millions of deaths for the prior two years is bound to commit excesses.
600 thousand people were also kidnapped (from a country of less than 10 million) and forced into labour camps
Yes. Hungary was a Nazi nation. Sending the people responsible to prison is a good thing. Not technically labor camps, the GULAG system is just prison, and reeducating the people out of Nazism was a good thing. The USSR literally rid Hungary of Nazism.
There were also examples of brutal torture, keeping people in cells small enough they couldn’t even sit down, and so on
Sure, excesses in repression during a struggle against Nazism happened. I wonder why youre you’re more concerned with that than thankful that Hungary stopped being Nazi and such tortures and means ended forever after the 50s.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
My claim isn’t that the word Holodomor was coined to make it sound scary, it’s that the word becoming the one to refer to the event in the western world is no coincidence. The etymological origin can be whichever it is.
Now, why oh why does the Skull Famine not have relevancy on the political climate? That’s exactly my point. Other famines are depoliticized (the article on Wikipedia for example chalks most of it down to climate) but “Holodomor” is made out to be by western anticommunist propaganda an attempt of genocide against Ukrainians. The motivations, followup or precedents are left to guess, though, but that’s fine, nobody will question it because first, questioning genocide is a risky thing to do, and secondly, it’s le evil Russian commies doing it, so ofc we will all believe it in the west.
Just a small remark: the two search results I referred to after searching “skull famine” came from not just searching those words on lemmy.world, but also from doing a Ctrl+F search for the words to be together. After ignoring our conversation, only two results meet that condition.
Rosefielde’s (great name) paper is excellent, and breaks down his calculations in an extremely easily digested manner.
Ok. Funny to me that you hadn’t seen any of this before. Given the proximity to our modern times of this excess mortality numbering the millions in Russia alone, it should be a political hotbed shouldn’t it? Especially now that sensibilities with Ukraine are high, I wonder, why is it that similar studies but regarding the impact of capitalism in Ukraine aren’t constantly discussed? Be honest, were you aware of the scale of death and suffering caused by capitalist restoration in the eastern block? Given your original dismiss when I talked of drug abuse, organized crime, suicide rates, malnutrition and preventable disease, I doubt it. You seem to know so much about Holodomor though, so ask yourself: why is that? Why do you only seem to know about the millions of Ukrainians who died under socialism 90 years ago but you didn’t quite know what happened in the region in terms of life metrics for the past 35?
However: Both of those papers show examples of addressing death rates, and make no attempt at the problem of calculating lives saved
Cool, but I addressed that already. I already gave you the Brazil example. Tell me any other underdeveloped country that, between 1930 and 1960, had a doubling of life expectancy from 28 to 60. Comparative economics is a valid method, and there is no country that had this growth at the time, which is even more relevant in the case of the USSR because for equally developed countries, socialist ones consistently give better life metrics. You don’t believe in comparative economics, or in the idea that economic development correlates (especially in socialist societies) with increased life expectancy and reduced mortality?
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
I remember there was an end-goal of a communist state to ultimately disband bureaus
To my understanding, the way communists understand “the state” that they want dismantled, is the structures of power of class repression. Communists (myself included) define the state in capitalism as the set of institutions that maintain the repression on workers that enables the domination by capitalists. When we talk of the dictatorship of the proletariat, we simply mean that the state, instead of maintaining the repression against workers, is turned around and instead represses the capitalists to maintain the workers in power (which we see as desirable since workers are the majority and our goal is the elimination of the capitalist class and hence all class relations). The elimination of the state in end-goal communism, the way I see it, is about not needing anymore those structures to repress capitalists because capitalism has been thoroughly eliminated and history has progressed beyond it, in the same way that Europe hasn’t fallen back to feudalism because it was made obsolete by capitalism. This doesn’t mean, however, that all institutions are dismantled. Representative bodies, associations of technicians and specialists in one way or the other (research insitutes, healthcare, meteorology… you name it), and other types of institutions that we associate with modern states would still exist. Many of these imply political power: a higher-up of a research institution in nuclear power will obviously have some higher degree of decision-making over energy policy than your average citizen.
I don’t think communism and democracy aim at the same outcome. Democracy as a concept doesn’t explicitly aim to the elimination of class in society, and communism does, for example.
Do you have any comment on my insights on guaranteeing of human rights by historic socialist nations?
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
Or did you perhaps mean the Doji bara / Skull Famine
Hmmm. Fair enough. Now let’s do an exercise: let’s go to lemmy.world search, and look for the words “skull famine”, see how many results we get. Oh, we get exactly 2 results containing the words “skull famine”, two copypastas from 2 years ago which are simply a list of western atrocities. I wonder why a famine in India with 10+ million deaths has only 2 results in lemmy.world… Compare that to the search of the word “holodomor”. My point stands, doesn’t it?
That’s why meaningless phrases like “Demographic extrapolations and comparative economics” are such an easy thing to parrot - you’re just saying “and then we do statistics, QED” without having to engage with the actual difficult part (the math)
Good that you’re a data scientist specializing in public health data modeling! Will be interesting. The thing is, you can easily do these studies for the particular case of the transition to capitalism, because you can use many metrics: alcohol consumption, violent crime statistics, drug use, deaths from certain diseases, expenditure in healthcare, number of suicides… etc. You can take all of those metrics and see how they all vastly increase in the transition to capitalism. Sure, if it were just one of those metrics, then you maybe would be able to say it’s because of another reason, but when all of these metrics consistently rise sharply during a horrifying economic crisis byproduct of capitalism in several post-soviet republics at the same time, you can quite confidently both calculate numbers, and blame them on capitalism. As a matter of fact, this has been done widely for modern capitalist Russia, with this study talking of 3.5 million probable deaths between 1990 and 1998 alone, and this other study by Paul Cockshott reaching the figure of 12 million excess deaths between 1986 and 2008, though this latter one using much simpler methodology. Similar studies can be carried out for Ukraine, which suffered even harder since the crisis took longer to recover, and either way the numbers point towards the millions. And this is only excess deaths, not including lack of childbirth and economic migrations, both also counting in the millions.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
Because that’s the name it was given by the Ukranian peoples that survived it?
Then why don’t we use any Indian names for the very many famines in India due to British occupation? Why do we call them neutral names like “Bengal famine” and not “exterminatron 3000”?
millions of “lives saved” (pop quiz: how do you measure that?)
Demographic extrapolations and comparative economics.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
Regarding Molotov-Ribbentrop and the invasion of “Poland”: I’m gonna please ask you to actually read my comment and to be open to the historical evidence I bring (using Wikipedia as a source, hopefully not suspect of being tankie-biased), because I believe there is a great mistake in the way contemporary western nations interpret history of WW2 and the interwar period. Thank you for actually making the effort, I know it’s a long comment, but please engage with the points I’m making:
The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.” Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn’t want to. By the logic of “invading Poland” being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.
As a Spaniard leftist it’s so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren’t dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn’t agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won’t find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.
The invasion of “Poland” is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:
“Polish” territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:
The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?
Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.
All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn’t allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that’s a given), and offered to send a million troops to France’s border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren’t allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:
“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)
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
Holodomor
Yeah, a bad famine happened in the USSR between 1930 and 1933, no need for a scary special word to refer to it. Famines were commonplace in the region up to that point, and this one was the result of unforeseen difficulties in the first successful collectivization of land in human history. It was not intended or targeted, unlike the repeated famines in India under British rule. As I’ve explained in other comments, it was a tragedy that took place during the necessary rapid collectivization of agriculture that enabled the industrial revolution which saved Eastern Europe from extermination by Nazis.
Katyn
Katyn and similar incidents in Poland number in the tens of thousands of victims, most of them military and law enforcement. It’s not like Poland didn’t have expansionist ambitions that needed to be fought against.
Gulags
Gulag is just the name of the prison system of the USSR. The fact that many people died in the Gulags during WW2 is consequence of the food shortages that Nazis themselves caused in the USSR during their invasion:
Literal alliance with the Nazis
This is simply ahistorical and true. In 1936 already, the Soviet Union was the only country to send weapons, munitions, tanks and aviation to Republican Spain in the Spanish Civil War against fascism, fighting the Nazis in proxy war. Regarding Molotov-Ribbentrop, this deserves its own comment, so I’ll post it below this one
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
The word was used in print in the 1930s in Ukrainian diaspora publications in Czechoslovakia as Haladamor
And why exactly did that term stick in the west, only transliterated as Holodomor instead? And why is it overwhelmingly discussed since the 2000s? Maybe because the usage of the word is political in nature as I explained?
As for the name of the famine broadly, in Wikipedia it appears as Soviet famine of 1930-1933.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
I’m not interested in anticommunist propaganda that doesn’t even portray the class differences between Kulaks and non-landowning peasants. Being born in the west I’ve been exposed to my fair share of anticommunism throughout my life, and I continue to be exposed to it whenever I bring historical facts to lemmitors.
If you were truly concerned about the lives of Ukrainians, you’d be condemning the capitalist restoration and the end of the USSR, which brought untold suffering and death on the Ukrainian people:
Do you also have a scary word like “Holodomor” to refer to the immense post-1990 suffering in Ukraine? Or do you reserve your propagandistic catchy words to anticommunist propaganda exclusively?
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
So, as I had predicted, the only sources for intentionality against Ukrainians are a few personal remarks by Stalin in some obscure letter to a writer. I literally called this out before you brought up your comment because if there were any further evidence, it would be plastered all over, since there are BIG reasons for western propaganda to promote Russophobia and anticommunist sentiment now that Ukraine is an ideological hotbed.
Also, your source doesn’t discriminate between Kulaks and non-landowning peasants, again as I called you out for in another comment. Funnily enough the only numerical evidence in your source supports my thesis: that the regions most affected by the grain requisitions were the main grain-producing regions, including Ukraine and the Caucasus but also Southern Russia (not mentioned because you don’t care about Russians dying).
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
Answer, o defender of Ukrainians. Or maybe your concern was only performative and you don’t give one flying fuck about Ukrainians if you can’t weaponize them against communism?
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
So, grain requisitions? I never denied that those happened, I denied that it was used as a tool to oppress farmers. You also keep conflating Kulaks and non-landowning peasants, which is bad analysis.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
What a load of unsourced bullshit full of lies. This is an opinion article written by a western anticommunist, full of tropes, lies. From claiming that in 1917-1921 Ukraine fought for “liberation from Bolsheviks” (when the Bolsheviks saved most of Ukraine from Polish invasion in the Polish-Ukrainian war), to completely ignoring the role of rapid industrialization in the Soviet Union and the saving of Ukraine from Nazi extermination. It implies that countrywide policies were taken only in Ukraine such as grain requisitions or grain exports, it implies no famine relief was taken (it was taken), and provides no evidence whatsoever that the famine striking especially hard in Ukraine has anything to do with political motivations, especially when, as stated in the article, there was an indigenization policy in the early 1920s in Ukraine (as in the rest of the USSR).
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
By it being systemic policy, what do you mean it? What policy, specifically, and in what timeframe?
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
Stalin disliking Kulaks or his personal beliefs towards peasants are not evidence of policy, and it’s the only source you will be able to provide. In contrast, I can bring you quotes by Anna Louise Strong, an American journalist (first woman to get a doctorate in Chicago university) who traveled and documented the USSR, proving that peasants generally supported the Bolshevik movement and government during the collectivization, and how most trials against Kulaks were carried out by peasants themselves.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
The USSR in the early years had targeted food shortages in Ukraine and the Caucuses to starve the population into submission
This is a false anticommunist narrative created by western imperialists to boost anticommunism and Russophobia. Plenty of people in Southern Russia died during the 1930s famine, and there is no document proving anything remotely close to your claim of “starving people into submission”.
There was later a union wide food shortage because Stalin increased the export of wheat without adequately increasing production
Production was attempted to increase, and achieved subsequently, it simply lagged behind for a few years because, you know, it was the first ever successful experiment of land collectivization in human history, and there were unexpected difficulties that weren’t properly addressed with policy at the time. It’s easy to judge in hindsight, but the authorities really did everything they could to minimize the famine.
As for grain exports, these weren’t a capricious ideological decision, they were forced by the threat of external invasion. The USSR in 1929 was a preindustrial feudal shithole, conditions inherited from the Tsarist Empire. 80% of people were peasants, and life expectancy was of 28 years of age. The collectivization was carried out in a very rapid fashion in order to pursue rapid industrialization, again not out of ideological reasons. There was big debate in the CPSU against rapid collectivization, but the threat of external invasion (evidenced by the invasion by USA, Britain, France and many more countries during the Russian Civil War for the unforgivable sin of being communists) eventually triumphed and rapid industrialization was pursued.
Rapid industrialization, which necessitated rapid collectivization in order to relieve labour from the fields and move it to industry, was the key measure that allowed for the defense of the USSR 10 years later against Nazism. After yearly growths of 15% in GDP, the USSR industrialized just enough to defeat Nazism, at the horrendous cost of 25 million Soviet lives at fascist hands. Had the USSR not pursued rapid industrialization (only enabled by export of grains, the only product the USSR could offer at the time to international markets given its low level of development), Eastern Europe would have been genocided on an unimaginable scale, and Nazism wouldn’t have been defeated in Europe. Tens of millions of lives would have been lost to Nazi extermination.
Furthermore, the rapid industrialization boosted the economic capabilities of the country massively, allowing for universal healthcare, the elimination of hunger forever in the region, and therefore the more than doubling of life expectancy between 1929, when industrialization was kickstarted, to 1955 when Stalin died. People went from having a life expectancy of 28 years to above 60 in this timeframe. This, again, saved tens of millions of lives by any demographic measure you use. For comparison, Brazil went from 40 years of life expectancy to slightly above 50 in that timeframe.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
With a centrally controlled food supply, a misstep can lead to there literally not being enough food
Agreed, let’s abolish Walmart then and advocate for collectively owned, decentrally planned agriculture. Love to see fellow comrades!
More people die from obesity than starvation. There are tons of options for free food. Nobody is going to starve to death
Ignoring the reality of the literal millions of people receiving food assistance with food stamp programs and charity kitchens isn’t as intelligent as you think it is. Some people can be obese while others in the same country experience food insecurity.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
But they’re not by any metric you want to use. Study after study show that, at similar levels of development, socialism creates better outcomes in quality of life than capitalism.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
A greedy sociopathic leader with lack of empathy will always cause starvation, be it capitalism or communism or any other system anywhere
Empirically false. At equal levels of development, communism provides better life metrics such as life expectancy, infant mortality or nutritional values, and socialism also has been the only way for previously colonized nations to develop. China and India were similarly developed 100 years ago, yet now China has a higher life expectancy than the USA whereas India still sees tremendous amounts of death from treatable disease and malnutrition. This example alone accounts for hundreds of millions of lives saved. Similarly, in the Tsarist empire, life expectancy was 28 years of age. By the death of “le evil dictator Stalin”, it was 60 years of age.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
USSR leadership absolutely used forced requisition
True
as a tool of power and control and to punish the farmers
Bullshit.
The rapid collectivization of 1929-1934 was a very difficult endeavour, and is the FIRST IN HISTORY successful collectivization of agriculture. There have been many attempts since before the Roman Empire, but never had it been carried our successfully before. Grain requisitions were carried out because the effort of rapid collectivization was kickstarted in order to rapidly industrialize the nation. By introducing tractors into farms and collectivizing them in larger plots, fewer peasants were needed, and people could move to cities to build up an industrial sector. Moving people to cities meant feeding people in cities, and grain requisitions were carried out initially in order to force wealthy exploiter peasants (kulaks) to sell their grain at state mandated prices. Had it not been for the rapid collectivization and industrialization of the 1930s, the Soviets would have been crushed by Nazism, and tens of millions of people more would have been exterminated as it happened in Poland, Belarus or Ukraine. Rapid collectivization wasn’t an ideological decision, it was a pragmatic decision that averted the extermination of Eastern Europe at the hands of Nazism.
agrarian population and treated them like shit at least until later in the Union’s life
This is again bullshit. The region has never before or after seen the level of expenditure in infrastructure, education or healthcare that took place in rural USSR. Since the disappearing of the USSR, many massive rural exodus have taken place all over the eastern block.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
The “near abroad” is/was a colonial empire
The USSR was definitely imperialistic, see Hungary
You’re spitting in the graves of the tens of millions of murdered by colonialism by comparing it to intervention in Hungary. Colonialism isn’t “maintaining an aligned bloc”, colonialism is the plunder, enslavement and murder of millions in the name of wealth and resource extraction. Go tell the tens of millions of enslaved Africans, of murdered Congolese and Native Americans and Palestinians how what happened in Hungary was colonialism. Disturbing the definitions of western colonialism in order to dunk on communism is honestly a disgusting attitude that trivializes the suffering of the millions upon millions of wretched of the Earth.
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
The Soviet Famine of the collectivization, which you inappropriately label “Holodomor” (scary word for a specific famine to make it sound like holocaust, I wonder if you have any other special scary words for other famines) is indeed an unfortunate event of Soviet History. Yet, you fail to see it in the bigger picture.
First of all, even during the famine, life expectancy remained higher than in Tsarist times, because of increasing access to healthcare and nutrition on average to peasants.
Secondly, the famine is an unfortunate consequence of the necessity of rapid collectivization and industrialization because of threat of external invasion. There was intense debate in the CPSU at the time regarding rapid collectivization and industrialization vs. progressive one, and ultimately rapid industrialization won because of the perceived threat of invasion by industrialized western powers with 100 years of industrialization behind their backs. Famously, in 1931, Stalin said in a speech that the USSR was 100 years behind and would have to make up for that difference in 10 years or they would be eliminated. Almost exactly 10 years later, Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
By industrializing rapidly (15% yearly growth of GDP) thanks to rapid collectivization of agriculture, not only did the Soviet Union defeat Nazism and save every European nationality between Germany and the Urals from Nazi genocide (hence saving tens of millions of lives), but this rapid development managed to raise life expectancy from below 30 years old in 1929 to above 60 bu 1960, effectively saving tens of millions of lives more. By any demographic metric you use, compared to what came before (Tsarism) and what came after (capitalism), the USSR saved tens of millions of lives. Capitalism is the one that brought unemployment, hunger, drug abuse, violent crime, and a reduction of life expectancy after decades of progress.
Don’t believe me? Go check the data:
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
Imagine a society in which every person has exactly the same sociopolitical power as every other person; representatives and officials do not have additional power; that’s a property of a truly communist society.
Aren’t you sort of describing democracy, and not socialism? I’m a Communist myself and I’ve never heard anyone claim that every person will have the exact same sociopolitical power, reading Marx or Lenin I’ve never encountered anything as such. Obviously people more engaged with politics should have more political power, in the sense that contributing to politics is both a privilege and a responsibility. Organizers of a local worker council will obviously have more political power than people who choose not to participate on that.
Imagine a society in which everyone’s needs are met for an extreme body of needs (say as defined by the UN Universal Declaration of Human RIghts). The only transients that exist either are in a short line to be issued a dwelling, or don’t want one. Everyone is fed. Everyone has their own stuff. This isn’t impossible, but is difficult as heck to reach.
It’s not impossible, or even difficult to reach. 1970s USSR literally had all of this. Access to a job, to housing, to universal healthcare, to free education to the highest level, to quality urban planning and public transit, to affordable basic foodstuffs and clothes, and very cheap energy, were all available. Again, I’m talking about 1970s technology and progress in a self-sufficient country isolated from world markets, without engaging in colonialism and extraction of resources from the global south, in a country that 40 years prior had been a feudal backwater in which 80% of the population were peasants, most of them not owning any land and being essentially serfs to landlords. Cuba, today, manages to get most of this, despite being in the most comprehensive economic embargo in history. It’s not remotely hard to achieve this, the main obstacle to this is western imperialism doing everything in its hand to destroy any attempt, from regime destabilization, to outright threat of nuclear war, including bombing of your country to the ground (Vietnam, Korea) or support of fascists (Chile).
As for people having their own stuff:
I wonder if there’s anything in common in those countries…
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 week ago:
The Russian Revolution was communist but the USSR was never communist
Hard disagree. Universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, lowest wealth and income inequality in the history of the region, guaranteed housing and abolition of homelessness and unemployment, life expectancy skyrocketing from a meager 28 years to 70 in the span of 40 years, abolition of private business, redistribution of land to peasants, and saving Europe from Fascism really seem like communist traits to me. There were defects and policy failures during some of the hardest times in history, don’t get me wrong, but simply by achieving all of those wonderful goals without ever having colonies or engaging in imperialism, that’s very communist to me.
What you are experiencing in the US is totalitarianism and while it hasn’t gotten to USSR levels, it is going on that direction
The US has had, for decades, the highest prison population in the world, both in absolute and relative terms. In absolute terms, the US has nearly as many prisoners as the USSR did during WW2, the historic highest for obvious reasons (25 million Soviet citizens were killed by Nazism). You have literal fascist police disappearing people based on the colour of the skin, and the US has literally bombed black people for their ideology in US soil.
You’re damn high in American exceptionalism and anticommunist propaganda.
- Comment on Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race 1 week ago:
Wow, you solved geopolitics! Now that you bravely exposed your point of view, both US and China will stop the AI race!
- Comment on Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race 1 week ago:
Sure, buddy, everyone who reinforces your worldview from your limited sample is a true Chinese testimony, but the 99% of Chinese who choose to stay In China are the brainwashed hivemind.
- Comment on Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race 1 week ago:
The original comment is specifically about comparing China to the west, hence discussing “who should win the AI race”. I’m responding to that comparison
- Comment on Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race 1 week ago:
China has an industrial base that can no longer be competed with. This is the winning recipe, so they will likely control the world.
I fundamentally agree. I don’t think it will be direct control, but I think China will have a lot more political power in the coming decades.
So how well all of humanity fares, depends on how the leadership in China decides to treat u
Seeing how China has no recent history of violence and hasn’t participated in wars for the past 40ish years, I’d say it’s much better than the warmongering USA empire self-declaring itself “the world police”. We’ve seen how well that worked for Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Libya, Vietnam, Korea, Laos, Cambodia…
If we end up with say, a chinese Trump, we are done for
Thankfully China has a communist party in government, and no fascist parties like the Republicans or the slightly less fascist Democrats.
We should invest everything we can into ensuring the later
Surely the warmongering and genocidal western countries, responsible for the almost total extermination of native Americans, the enslavement of Africa and Asia, and invaders during WW2 (biggest armed conflict in history) aren’t the ones most indicated to make decisions in this regard.
- Comment on Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race 1 week ago:
You’re not quoting my leader, I’m a Spaniard.
So now “violence bad”? I thought y’all are advocating for Americans to overthow the US regime
Violence in itself isn’t great, but it can be justified depending on the degree and the goals. Seeing how China saved 800 million people from poverty over 30 years, I think some violence consequence of disturbances isn’t unjustifiable, although can be criticized. The US on the other hand murders 500.000 people abroad yearly since 1970 through economic sanctions and blockades, so I think violence to remove this regime could be justified.
- Comment on Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race 1 week ago:
The original comment I responded to was comparing the west to China and saying that the reason why China shouldn’t win is because it’s more repressive. I explained how that’s not the case, so me comparing to the west is relevant in this instance
