Socialism_Everyday
@Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com
- Comment on Wikipeter was the founder of the site in 1993 when he wanted to know more about model trains without having to visit the library 4 hours ago:
I only get my information from Hexbear comrades who share links ;)
- Comment on Wikipeter was the founder of the site in 1993 when he wanted to know more about model trains without having to visit the library 6 hours ago:
Wikipedia is wonderful… for most things.
The main demographic contributing to and editing English Wikipedia are young, highly educated white men from western countries. It will portray on average the bias that most of these people espouse. So it will have racist bias, misogynistic bias and pro-western bias.
That said, it’s still probably less misogynistic and less racist and less pro-western than your average outlet, because it filters out some of the most blatant false narratives and propaganda from conservative sources such as FOX.
- Comment on wisdom 1 day ago:
That’s your definition. To me, it means essentially “Marxist-Leninist who supports actually existing socialist projects”. I still fail to see what my views on some countries have to do with adventurism.
- Comment on wisdom 1 day ago:
They only condone violence against capitalists if leadership ordered them to
No. We just believe that adventurism isn’t a good tactic in bourgeois dictatorship, and we distinguish it from repression of capitalists by the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. by the state democratically representing the workers in power.
- Comment on wisdom 1 day ago:
What do Russia, China or the DPRK have to do with stochastic acts of violence against capitalists?
- Comment on wisdom 1 day ago:
Tankie here. Marxists-Leninist don’t condone stochastic violent acts during capitalism against Capitalists, the word we use to refer to such tactics is “adventurism”, and it’s criticized heavily.
- Comment on China Is Banning Tesla-Style Retractable Door Handles Over Safety Concerns 3 days ago:
Why wouldn’t you enter a Chinese car?
- Comment on China Is Banning Tesla-Style Retractable Door Handles Over Safety Concerns 3 days ago:
China has massively boosted the living conditions of workers since the 1980s-1990s. The accusations of sweatshops 40 years ago made sense, but in 2025 they’re absurd, especially seeing the vast improvement in life quality in China compared to other countries which 100 years ago were in an identical condition, such as India or Bangladesh.
- Comment on Finally, Common Ground... 2 weeks ago:
When you can get a fucking delicious and nutritious bowl of noodles and vegetables for 5 yuan or a metro/bus ride for 3 yuan in the USA let me know.
- Comment on Denmark wants to ban VPNs to unlock foreign, illegal streams – and experts are worried 2 weeks ago:
From the article:
Ma [the one ordered to pay] said the police seized his phone, laptop and several computer hard drives upon learning that he worked for an overseas company, holding them for a month. He was later asked to provide details about his work, his bank details, his employment contract and other information, before being issued with the penalty in August
This person was not “using a VPN”, he was lying to the government about his working status and working for an overseas firm illegally.
- Comment on Finally, Common Ground... 2 weeks ago:
This post is misinformation.
[Statistical Communiqué for 2024 on national economics by the National Bureau of Statistics of China] (www.stats.gov.cn/…/t20250228_1958822.html):
“In 2024, the per capita disposable income nationwide was 41,314 yuan, an increase of 5.3 percent over that of the previous year or a real increase of 5.1 percent after deducting price factors”
Tell me how growing your disposable income by 5% a year is “not being able to afford anything”
- Comment on Denmark wants to ban VPNs to unlock foreign, illegal streams – and experts are worried 2 weeks ago:
You are being absolutely ridiculous. VPNs may be de jure forbidden in China (idk about this even), but de-facto they’re absolutely allowed, nobody is prosecuted for using them, and every young Chinese person can tell you this. You haven’t talked with a Chinese living in China in your entire life.
- Comment on YSK that in most countries, traffic fatalities have been falling. But in the U.S., the opposite happened. Americans die in rising numbers 3 weeks ago:
Is it not possible to portray anti-China or anti-Russian bias? Or is it that you don’t care about astroturfing when it’s done for such purpose?
- Comment on YSK that in most countries, traffic fatalities have been falling. But in the U.S., the opposite happened. Americans die in rising numbers 3 weeks ago:
You say all of those things as if it were specific to anti-USA posting. Lemmy is ripe and full of anti-China and anti-Russia AstroTurf-seeming accounts:
A post a week ago made a brief list of some accounts (not complete by any means)
- Comment on Manufacturer issues remote kill command to disable smart vacuum after engineer blocks it from collecting data — user revives it with custom hardware and Python scripts to run offline 3 weeks ago:
If it were illegal, that would be a huge infraction to FREEDOM®🦅🦅
- Comment on I work long hour and make little money 5 weeks ago:
You Americans are experts at outsourcing any homegrown problem, aren’t you? Drug problems? Venezuela. Radical right wing in the core of the imperial west winning the elections? Russia’s fault.
Mother of God, your international propaganda apparatus is so pervasive that I needed to exchange euros to dollars the other day and I could recognize the faces of your fucking 200 year old founding fathers on the bills by name and surname, and you STILL believe that propaganda problems in the USA are due to Russia?!
- Comment on Radon 5 weeks ago:
Yes, our society makes lots of bullshit jobs. That’s because capitalism can only keep people employed by creating bullshit jobs, and unemployed people are six missed meals away from revolution
Couldn’t be further from reality. Capitalist firms actively hire the least amount of people possible, because if they can get away with equal production and lower number of employees, that means higher profit.
Capitalism is actually the only system in human history with unemployment: it wasn’t a thing in hunter-gatherer society, it wasn’t a thing in early agricultural societies, it wasn’t a thing during the times of slavery, it wasn’t a thing during feudalism, and it hasn’t been a thing in any communist nation such as Cuba or the USSR (both guaranteeing jobs to every citizen as a right, and the latter having 10% of all positions vacant from 1970 onward).
Capitalism maintains an unemployed sector of the population because:
-
Employing more workers costs more money to firms
-
Having high unemployment decreases wages, improving profits of firms
-
Having a pool of unemployed people allows firms to spawn, grow and mutate without difficulty of finding workers to do so.
-
- Comment on Hrmmmmm 1 month 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 month 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 month 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 month 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 month 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 month 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 month 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 month 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 month 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 month 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 month 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 month 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 month 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).
