this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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That message with that pfp is really something. I hope you can forgive me for forgetting the very obvious fact that other instances can see my post, since I intended it to just be directed at hexbears (not that your presence is unwelcome).
As you can probably tell from the post and the instance, I'm a communist. My agenda is arguing for the infeasibility of liberal capitalism to address the problems that we face, and that the solution to this is to replace that system with one that is a) radically democratic, empowering the popular will to the most thorough extent possible and b) uncompromisingly represses the political power of capitalists, who are the current masters of society and the principal force we need to struggle against.
Good so far?
As a heads up, I'm not the person that wrote the previous message.
No. Switzerland is a liberal state and by capitalists. In Switzerland, one's relationship to work is part of a petty dictatorship in each company. There is a social democratic system in place that mediates this relationship to an extent, but at the end of the day your ability to provide for yourself is decided by private company hierarchies and forces largely outside of your control. Even with a referendum system, such a country is constrained by having provided so much power to the capitalist class. Want guaranteed housing for everyone? I dunno, profits are low right now and taxation might crash the economy. Want to end unemployment? No can do, this makes the workers too powerful and their wages increase. You will have an army of Very Serious Economists from the Child Labor is Good School of Economics getting breathlessly cited by the state and the privately-owned media to propsgandize the full population against the idea of full employment and more or less threatening a capital strike should the population try to vote for it anyways.
In addition, Switzerland depends on imperialism, of an unequal trade system enforced by force by the US, NATO, etc, in order to do this. Effectively, the violence inherent to the capitalist system is split in two parts between Switzerland and global south countries, with the Swiss getting cheaper goods with better working standards while the Imperialized are forced into worse and worse conditions.
The term communism is thrown around in different ways. The Soviet Union was communist in the sense that it was created and run by communists, though liberal (revisionist) reformists eventually gained enough power to dismantle it. Communists are socialists that understand that capitalists - really, the capitalist system - will never allow us to liberate ourselves from their control and control our destinies, they will always use violence and coercion to prevent this, and so we must educate each other and organize so that we may overcome them when they inevitably attack.
This is an uncommon view for people that were adults in the USSR. It is primarily those who were children and politically unaware who feel this way, having primarily lived under capitalism, the associated dramatic drop in quality of life during capitalist restoration (shock therapy), and subsequently been bathed in propaganda. Millions were killed by capitalist restoration.
Under capitalism, corporations control the state. Even in countries where corporate bribery is illegal. Capital permeates the public consciousness through education, journalism, entertainment media, think tanks, lobbying groups, and most subtly (and as mentioned before) placing hard constraints in what is possible. The facade of liberal democracy is just a way to more stably maintain capital's position. You will discover this when you attempt to do anything against the interests of capital, especially imperialism.
I think our friend will be perfectly capable of providing their own citations, but since I happen to have some familiarity with this topic: Here's an article discussing the data on nostalgia for the USSR and here's a study that shows the spike in mortality caused by capitalist restoration.
If you have any follow-up questions for GarbageShoot's links I would be happy to discuss them + add more. You may be interested to review the shock therapy doctrine as applied to the former USSR during capitalist restoration. People usually talk about it as being directed at Russia, but Ukraine also bore the brunt and had its social safety net dismantled, its industries sold to foreign interests for pennies, etc. It suffered just as much as Russia from this process and this treatment is a big part of the reason that those who were adults before and after, say, adults in the 1970s, believe times were better before. Ukraine has never fully recovered.
This is nonsense. Everyone had personal property. People worked jobs, participated in clubs, did sports, etc.
The two were confluent. The party ran the state and having influence over the state meant joining the party and working through it. They were not divorced, separate things.
Bullshit.
"Able to build a better life" is not very concrete. Perhaps you could share what your source is and examples of what this means.
If you were a child in the 80s (the only way you would have grown up just before capitalist restoration) then this would make your great grandfather someone born around 60-90 years prior, i.e. 1890-1920. Anti-Kulak sentiments were only made relevant in the late 1920s/early 1930s and meant basically nothing after 1960.
Assuming any of this is true, it sounds like you may be describing actual Kulak actions re: private landlordism (which would explain using euphemisms rather than saying what actually happened). Please elaborate on what your great granddather did, particularly if it was during a famine.
I don't understand how this is a response to millions getting killed by capitalist restoration.
The Soviet Union developed from a semi-feudal regional monarchy to an industrialized global superpower in about 20-30 years, raising millions from serfdom, ending famine, and dramatically increasing quality of life. It did this without the Imperialism used by Western Europe and the US, without slavery. This experience is not what happens to those excluded from the imperial pie, or often, even those who are in imperialist countries but are of the (larger) lower classes. Were it not for the Soviet Union your ancestors would likely have starved, died of treatable disease, or died young. See Sub-Saharan Africa. See how it is intentionally prevented from development and how kt s economies are structured around material exports for which the people never see the profits. They don't get the healthcare. They don't get the industry. They don't get the housing.
You do not have a choice to simply be a capitalist country enjoying the fruits of being on top (achieved at the dear coat to others). That is not how the system works. Your option is to overthrow that system or be dictated to by it and more likely than not when dictated to you will not only be voiceless, you will be dispossed, just like Ukraine was in the 90s, just how most of the world that has not directly confronted capitalism has suffered. Compare the stories and state of India to those of the USSR and China. Ukraine got the India treatment and has now been used as a pawn to fight another capitalist power in Russia.
To be clear I am not saying all of this just to get the point across that capitalism is bad or simply worse than the Soviet System (which I am saying was a fantastic achievement, for all its faults). My real point is that it has never been in the cards for Ukraine to be both capitalist and well-to-do. The prospect for prosperity from the 1900s to the foreseeable future came and went with the USSR. Now, the real, actual situation is a capitalist autocracy pretending to be liberal democracy laden with huge foreign debts due to the capitalist powers using Ukraine as a pawn to poke Russia. This will mean very, very bad things for the common Ukrainians not forced into disability or death through conscription. If Russia doesn't end up bombing away electricity and clean water and food, the incoming capitalist disposession to "pay the debts" will do something horribly similar, only rather than the infrastructure being gone, it will simply be so expensive compared to the work a person is lucky enough to find that most things a person would want to do will be unachievable. If you spend all your money on electricity and food and renting an apartment you will have none for children or a health emergency. The current trajectory will have Ukraine will experience a continued diaspora, one that actually accelerates, as it becomes all but impossible to have a desirable life without leaving. Excluded from the EU due to poverty, Ukrainians may also find immigration difficult in many places as the rest of Europe experiences a contraction due to the US siphoning off its industries bit by bit via the imposed energy crisis.
I should say that there is room for experimentation in socialist state projects, in how to organize and defend revolutions, but the revolution and control of the state are both absolutely essential to leave the current global political economic system. The USSR was the first project to do so and look at what they accomplished being virtually alone outside of the global anti-colonial movements they supported.
a) Referendums and recall elections (to pick two examples) are both cool and good
What year were you born, just to be clear? In any case, the Soviet Union was a revisionist government really from the late 40s on (though much more openly so after the Secret Speech), we (the people on this instance) have severe criticisms of it, but the misappropriation of Marxism, etc. by Khrushchev does not mean they own the term, and I guess that leads me to the better response to your question: Marxism is the best way to analyze politics and form a worker's movement to oppose the capitalists, with the goal of ending class antagonisms by ending class itself. That's what communism is, and it would be silly (and obscurantist) to try to say "Oh, we're not communists, we just have this belief system that people referred to as communism for almost 200 years, but that we call, uh, workerism" or whatever. Not that our beliefs are 1) identical to Marx's or 2) monolithic, but there's a clear genealogy here.
b) Being a capitalist inherently means having power. Removing all power from a capitalist means making them not a capitalist. As an ultimate goal, yes, we'd like to do that, but each country's level of development is different, and it could be necessary to keep capitalists around for some time in many of them, albeit suppressed by the proletariat. This is not the case in America, where the level of development means the intermediary period, the dictatorship of the proletariat as it is conventionally called, would need only be very short. In India, it would need to be somewhat longer and in other states, longer still.