752
you can't make the system better by voting. our rights were taken by force, not given to us willingly.
(anarchist.nexus)
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
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Lefty Memes
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Not to be pedantic or anything, but wasn't the etymology of the word "tankie" vindicated recently when it was released by Trump that the leader of the Hungarian Freedom Fighters ended up being funded by CIA?
Regarding your point of Stalin controlling the Soviet Union and dictating whatever happened with the means of production, I actually have stuff to add: union membership was highest in the USSR than it's ever been anywhere to that point of history, with unions taking care of a lot of stuff such as guaranteeing workers access to housing and healthcare, organizing vacation, ensuring workplace safety, and obviously representing the will of workers: in every factory there was a factory newspaper where workers could submit their complaints or comments on the work organizing, and unions had the power to change the workplace director. As for sources of this, you can have a look at Pat Sloan's "Soviet Democracy", a book written by an Englishman who left the UK to go to the USSR in the Stalin era and lived there for about a decade; also Mick Costello's "Worker Participation in the Soviet Union", a book written after a series of interviews to workers all over the USSR by the author, published 1977 so a very different era, tells a lot about this. I think most of the misconception that "workers had no say in production" comes mostly from western anticommunist propaganda and isn't substantiated by any serious evidence. If you have any works contradicting what I've said above, I'd be glad to look into it.
Lastly, regarding your point of "Soviet Union being the end state of Capitalism and the enslavement of the working class to the owner class": who was said owner class?
Source for the graph above, hopefully you know Meduza well enough to know that it's not very much aligned with socialism. Wealth inequality has never been lower in any Soviet Union territories as it was during the Soviet Union, not before, not after. In fact, wealth inequality was remarkably low compared to most capitalist countries (again as you see in the graph), and the highest salaries belonged actually not to politicians as you could expect, but to highly trained intellectuals such as University professors or military researchers (my sources for this are Albert Szymanski's "Is the Red Flag Flying" and Robert C. Allen's "Farm to Factory: a Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution). If there were an "owning class vs. working class" dynamic, wouldn't we expect high wealth disparity between workers and "owners", whoever they were? Why, if workers had no say over 70 years in industrial and economic production, was wealth inequality consistently at historic minima and not growing as is the case in proven class-societies such as capitalism (Russia post-1990 per the graph) or feudalism (Russia pre-1929ish per the graph)?
That declassified document you posted doesn't say a whole lot. Basically boils down to "we gave them a phone call". If that's all the proof there is for collaboration, then your evidence is pathetic.
Secondly, you notice that blue line going up almost vertically? I've already lined out my definition of ownership, there's also a second one, namely that you own something if the sovereign legally recognizes you as the owner. What happened was that the Communist party went from controlling the means of production without accountability (de facto owning them), to being the recognized owner of the means of production (de jure owning them). The graph you posted just tracks the latter, that's why it looks like the Soviet Union had low wealth inequality.
If you took care to actually read the graph, you would see it says "income inequality". How income (i.e. regular earnings, NOT amount of property owned) relates to formal ownership of something is beyond me. Additionally:
I don't even know what to say. Are you not aware that in 1991 the USSR was dissolved? How exactly would the communist party achieve formal ownership of means of production in 1991 if the system was discarded in favour of capitalism? What happened is kinda exactly the opposite: means of production went from formal ownership by the state, to formal and de-facto ownership by private owners over the following 5-10 years (the "vertical" line you talk about).
I'm under the impression that you have done 0 reading on the topic of actual worker representation, which you haven't rebuked and haven't given any sources too, and you're pulling stuff out of your ass from hearsay, because your comment literally makes no sense whatsoever
The people who took over the government of Russia were the same people who ran the communist party of the USSR. For example the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin. That's how they were able to steal all the stuff.
Ok, so why if they already de-facto controlled everything, did they have comparably much lower INCOME. What stopped them from having higher INCOME? Why do you refuse to answer to that?
Nothing, they could probably have written down any number and that would have been their salary.
Because money isn't real. If you control everything, you don't need to buy stuff, hence money is literally meaningless.
Ohhh, so now we bounce from your misunderstanding and conflation of wealth and income which now you conveniently forget about, and jump to "actually, money didn't mean anything, so it doesn't matter that income inequality was low". Good to see you keep making up stuff on the spot.
If you had bothered to read my first comment, you'd have seen that highest wages were given not to party members but to highly trained professionals of the intelligentsia such as university professors or researchers (many of the latter in military projects). If wages were used as an incentive for these people, then how come money wasn't real and didn't mean anything? Then they would have paid those professionals the same!
Your point of "access to goods and services in the USSR through non-monetary means" has a bit of merit though, but it actually backfires to your agenda. Food basics, energy, heating, housing, basic clothing items, public transit and even housing were astonishingly low-priced, with housing costing about 3% of monthly family unit income, and with metro tickets in Moscow not changing price between 1940s and 1980. Healthcare was free to everyone, education was completely free to the highest level for everyone, and there was universal access to such important services. Those things actually work in the opposite direction that you mean: the poorer people were heavily subsidized in comparison to capitalist states. It's especially relevant to rural areas, with tens of millions of formerly rural people being forced to abandon their hometowns after the deterioration or outright closure of formerly state-subsidized services (e.g. Moscow metropolitan area has grown by 6mn people over the past 30 years whereas the total population of Russia has shrunk by a few million).
Every single measurement of inequality has grown since the dismantling of the soviet state: reduction in life expectancy over the 90s and 2000s leading to above ten million premature deaths, lower childbirth rates, destruction of the public pension system, dismantling of public healthcare and education, removal of basic services in rural areas that have forced migrations of millions to cities, crime rates skyrocketed... What argument will you make up on-the-spot now?
I suppose I didn't explain it well enough.
You explained it perfectly well: you have as an axiom based on no sources provided yet (I.e. hearsay) that the "owning class" of the USSR owned the state property de facto, and so inequalily was perpetuated. Not through income, conveniently, as I already provided data contradicting that, so you shift to saying money was worthless.
I have explained and given you numbers and evidence on how access to many goods and services was subsidized to the working class and stopped being so after the transition to capitalism, which again contradicts your initial assertion that it was also capitalism and a class society with an owning class and a working class. Now, answer my proposition: given how universal access was I such things and how it stopped being the case, why did the "owning class" previously grant the working class access to such healthcare, education, housing, foodstuffs, energy, public transit, infrastructure, sports facilities, and even holiday resorts?
@Saledovil@sh.itjust.works no response here?
They gave a response which you can check out. It boils down to "I don't understand the difference between income and wealth, and I'm choosing to make up an on-the-spot interpretation based on my preconceived views".
You see where the blue line goes up vertically? That's when they go from de facto ownership to de jure ownership.
Anything's possible when you make shit up, but you should try making up something more believable once in a while
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin
You're bad at this
Oh come on, you only had to read that little box on the right.
You could show a little dignity and just admit you're wrong
All you had to do was to read Boris Yeltsin's CV, CJ!