758
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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Read it yet?
I must say that I haven't read your sources. So I don't even have a way of telling what they say.
My thesis mostly hinges on the Soviet Union not being democratic, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_Soviet_Union. People could only vote in favor or against the Bloc of Communists and Non-Partisans, which always won >99% of the votes. This is impossible to achieve in a functioning democracy, especially not over decades
You also need to consider that the Soviet Union kept the information classified until the 1980s, when it was declassified as part of Glasnost. So, why did they keep it hidden for literal decades?
Looking at those graphs you posted, it seems like Russia didn't break 70 until 2015, which Brazil reached around the year 2000. And why does Russia's life expectancy spike upwards right around the time the Soviet Union collapsed? And why does did it mostly decline between 1975 and 2005? But yeah, other than that, it's a quite impressive growth. Still leaves the question as to why the Soviet Union just collapsed?
Exactly, your material and historical analysis of the Soviet Union is based off of NATOpedia.
In short: Wikipedia is primarily edited by white young males of english-speaking countries, so it features the bias or young males of English a speaking countries. This is well-known and even has Wikipedia articles dedicated to it. In particular, source selection on English Wikipedia is mostly taken from western news sources, so it reflects the bias of western news sources. Western news sources present systematic pro-western bias in geopolitically sensitive issues, you may recall the behaviour of western news sources regarding Palestine up to a few years ago, with no media talking of genocide and presenting the occupation of Palestine as a "both sides issue". Other, possibly more egregious cases you may or not remember are Nayirah's Testimony or the media flip on coverage of Russia in European countries, where up to 2022 Putin was said to be a "great governor and Russian patriot" (e.g. Francisco Marhuenda), which is now unthinkable. If you're interested in this issue with Wikipedia, I wrote this detailed post about it some time ago.
I hope you, a self-declared socialist from what I've seen on your post history, will reflect on using mainstream western sources to analyze topics that are sensitive to western geopolitics as is the case for communism, we're well aware of what the red scare in the US entailed and the lies that have been spread about socialism in general (not just the Soviet project) by the US state propaganda apparatus over the past century.
I encourage you to do some reading of my sources, especially Albert Szymanski's "Human Rights in the Soviet Union", which dispells a ton of western-manufactured myths about the USSR using mostly western academic sources.
On the graph you can see Russia's life expectancy peaked in 1990, then fell for one and a half decades coinciding with the dismantling of the USSR, and then in 2005 it starts to rise back, but doesnt reach pre-1990 levels until about 2015, so life expectancy didnt recover from capitalism until 25 years of technological advances passed. Regarding Brazil, yes, Brazil surpassed life expectancy in Russia during the crisis of the dismantling, I do think this supports my thesis that the dismantling murdered millions (by Paul Cockshott's calculations, about 5-10 million in Russia alone).
If there were a class of owners strongly gripping to power in order to keep exploiting the majority of workers, you would expect very violent revolutions being needed to dismantle the system and remove them from power, but the transition to capitalism in the Eastern Block was overwhelmingly peaceful, which again supports my thesis that there wasn't an owning class enjoying the fruits of others' labour. As to why the USSR was dismantled this is a long topic, and if you're interested in some materialist historical analysis, I recommend "Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union" by Robert Keeran and Thomas Kenny. It gives a good historical outlook on how it's possible that the USSR survived something as impossibly difficult as WW2 and the murder of 25 million Soviet citizens (13% of the population) by Nazis, but it was dismantled in half a decade since the start of the perestroika in 1985.
Please, you're patently showing that the reading you've done of the topic of the USSR is superficial and based off primarily western anticommunist sources. I encourage you to keep an open mind and read more about the project that uplifted 150 million peasants in the Russian Empire from extreme poverty to being the second most powerful nation on Earth, guaranteeing healthcare, education, housing, work, not performing unequal exchange or economic imperialism with any sort of colony unlike US and Europe with Africa and Latin America, and helping emancipatory movements such as that of Vietnam or Cuba.
Stop looking for excuses with on-the-spot reading of graphs or moving the goalposts (first wealth and de-jure ownership, then income not mattering, then radio silence about widespread access to social services and essential goods).
So, got the real numbers for the election results somewhere?
Again, way to ignore 90% of my comment.
Democracy isn't when there's three parties, it's when people generally get what they want. People in the entirety of Europe have been consistently overwhelmingly against Austerity Policy since 2008 and that's all we've gotten, regardless of party in government or country in question, and when one country (Greece) decided to ignore austerity, it was literally threatened with a default by the European Central Bank and wasn't allowed to do so. Plenty of parties and free vote in Europe, it all means nothing at the end of the day. If you're USian instead, you're probably aware that the overwhelming majority of USians want universal healthcare for decades and that's systematically ignored by either party in government. What's democracy then?
Again: why would an antidemocratic dictatorship of an owning class create free universal healthcare, free education to the highest degree, guaranteed housing and work, public services, thoughtful urban planning and walkable neighborhoods, quality public transit for the period, subsidies of basic foodstuffs, sports centres aplenty, paid holidays for everyone, high workplace safety, etc? Maybe, possibly, because it was more democratic than you've made out to think? Again, I've given you plenty of sources mate, and you're just ignoring 90% of the comments I'm writing. Are you even a leftist at all? I wouldn't have this patience with a rightoid
Do you have the real numbers of the election results somewhere?
If you're unwilling to as much as listen, be honest to me and to yourself and stop wasting our time
You're being purposefully obtuse. Did Bush obey the popular will when he invaded Iraq?
The only and best measure of democracy is the existence of multiple parties?
I'm trying to have an actual conversation with you, dont be a dick
No, its when state is ruled by the people.
As somebody living in Europe, no they haven't.
A default is when you fail to make a payment on your obligations. Saying Greece was threatened by a default is like saying that you were threatened with cancer. Greece wasn't being economical with their resources, which led to them to them being on the verge of ruin. If they had managed their resources sustainably (that's sustainable in the economic sense, not in the environmental sense), nobody would have complained.
It's really easy to find people who don't want it. Too easy for the support to be overwhelming.
Because they wanted to? And then along came Gorbachev, decided that they didn't want to give the people those things anymore, and now they don't have them anymore.
Dictatorships aren't bad because dictators are cruel and incompetent, they're bad because there's no defense against a cruel and incompetent dictator.
And let me restate my earlier question: Do you have the real numbers somewhere?
Ok I thought I was talking to someone with basic political literacy. Yes, the overwhelming majority of EU citizens were/are against rise of retirement age and against defunding of public healthcare and education.
Greece was threatened with a default because EU states with Euro as their currency gave up their monetary sovereignty to the European Central Bank. England, the US or Japan have their own currencies so the state cannot default by definition, because the state can literally create an unlimited amount of the money it borrows through debt. Greece had a DEMOCRATIC REFERENDUM to revise its sovereign debt and the idea won by a long shot, and then the country was not allowed to exercise its democratic will under threat of cutting Euro supply by the ECB, i.e. default.
Every poll in the USA comes to some result close to 70% of USians supporting the idea of implementing universal healthcare because essentially every Democrat wants this and many Republicans want it too. It's not done because the US isn't a democracy, it's a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
I'm actually done talking with you. You pretend to be a leftist but you have literally 0 support to offer to the working class, you have the narrowest understanding of politics as defined by whatever western outlets you consume, and you're a smug debatelord who doesn't care to inform themselves in the slightest, you haven't picked up a single book about politics in your entire life and it shows. You constantly replicate lies and don't care to admit it, you constantly miss information and you don't care to admit it, and you think you're the smartest person in the universe. Go waste someone else's time.