this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Define communism.
It's true that this should not be about communism, but about soviet state, which was an authoritharian state dominated by russian nationalism, but under banner of communism. Their kind of messed up the banner of communism for everybody. If used, it should be discussed with care.
no one can, not even those who advocate for it. (aside from "not that thing that was repeatedly tried and failed")
from Principles of Communism by Friedrich Engels.
And what would be those conditions?
common ownership and control of the means of production in a classless moneyless stateless society governed via collective mutual determination or similar horizontal system of power.
oh, i see, makes sense then why it was never tried. how are we going to have a society without a state to govern it? (i mean not to concern troll here, if a solution can be created for this that would be genuinely interesting, but for example that council the soviets created a century ago was clearly a state)
how? abolish the standing beaurocratic heirarchy which perpetuates and expends its own power and the interest of the ruling class by inflicting violence on the working class. what that looks like depends on how the people who make up a community choose to govern themselves.
realistically I don't expect a revolution of the proletariat to take place, so I promote the institution of robust mutual aid networks, radical solidarity (organized labor, intersectional liberatory philosophy), and resilient autonomous communities, to compete with the prevailing system of power.
attempts at anarchist-adjacent organizing have existed, and continue to in some communities, though of course execution varies, as does identity.
the USSR was not an attempt towards a stateless society, being a state-capitalist imperialist kleptocracy.
I love how you just keep flaunting your ignorance here. Communists aren't imbeciles who think that you can simply snap your fingers and abolish the state, they recognize the need for a transitional socialist period from the current system to a communist one.
and how do you wish to avoid that the leaders of said transitional socialist period just cling to power?
as someone who has to live in the aftermath of one of those "transitional socialist periods" that predictably went nowhere and just broke the country's spirit completely, i'm really damn curious. we are not talking about hypotheticals here.
I grew up in USSR and I certainly preferred it to what followed after the collapse. Claiming that it went nowhere is just brain dead. The fact is that USSR had to compete with the US empire after the war, and US being across the ocean was completely unscathed while USSR had to rebuild under duress. Of course, if you just ignore all that then you can make intellectually dishonest statements of the sort you do.
nice copium, but over here in hungary, one of the countries your glorious ussr managed to colonize that's not really the picture we got. the ten years following the collapse of the soviet system were by far the best ten years of this country in living memory, until the dust settled and an amalgamation of the old elite and the supposed revolutionaries took back control and re-instituted the same oligopoly, albeit with somewhat less oppression this time.
the whole point of having a transitional period between market capitalism and true communism is to reach that communism. that never happened. instead, the people were robbed of everything of value by an elite who claimed to represent the proletariat but was anything but that, and then it was re-privatized at the end of this period into the hands of a new elite. to give credit where it's due, this is in fact a redistribution of wealth, it just goes the other way than what's often heralded, and only made the rich richer and the average person more powerless.
Enjoy your fascism, clearly that's your preferred political system in Hungary.
If you lived in Russia then sure. If you lived in any of the annexed countries and preferred the priviledge of not being able to travel, secret police checking your every fart and people dying while trying to, for some inexplicable reason, escape to the evil west, then you're a traitor to your own people.
meanwhile in the real world
Yes, in the real world, some people have a very short and selective memories.
Fortunately statistics are quite clear in proving otherwise.
www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/26/this-is-the-golden-age-eastern-europes-extraordinary-30-year-revival
In reality, the "revival" wasn't evenly distributed. Lots of people became destitute and exploited in the process, while a small minority of parasites started to enjoy lavish lifestyles built on their backs.
Yes, that is true and those obscenely rich people shouldn't exist.
But, for me, anything is better than being at the mercy of a tyrannical regime hell bent on controlling all aspect of your life, turning people against each other and removing them for their opinions.
The USSR era was the worst thing in the modern history of Europe (yet) and anyone who idealizes it is, at best, scum.
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