this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2025
40 points (97.6% liked)
chat
8556 readers
169 users here now
Chat is a text only community for casual conversation, please keep shitposting to the absolute minimum. This is intended to be a separate space from c/chapotraphouse or the daily megathread. Chat does this by being a long-form community where topics will remain from day to day unlike the megathread, and it is distinct from c/chapotraphouse in that we ask you to engage in this community in a genuine way. Please keep shitposting, bits, and irony to a minimum.
As with all communities posts need to abide by the code of conduct, additionally moderators will remove any posts or comments deemed to be inappropriate.
Thank you and happy chatting!
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yes, and to know if a person is a Stalinist you just have to ask. If he spends the next 6 hours telling you he’s actually a Marxist-Leninist and not a Stalinist, he’s a Stalinist.
No [I'm saying a closeted Stalinist will feel attacked by the question, hence will feel the need to defend himself], but yes.
community is on fediverse's public feed, so it's basically talking to anyone from any instance.
accusations of anti-communism when people don't like Stalin's USSR sound awfully like people calling critics of Israel anti-semites.
why I'm from a ml instance? It promotes itself as being about FOSS, and not a single place on its About mentions what the ml stands for. So I was basically conned :P (although I don't really have anything against Marx, pretty cool guy)
And the anarchists around here are cool with Stalin? Crazy times...
This comment reminds me of some old "left unity" spaces I used to go to in my teenage anarchist days. That quickly turned into ML spaces. It was surreal to watch happen. Yeah, that's the thing. There's stuff both sides can learn from each other, despite being an ML now I definitely still have a soft spot for the more rational libertarian socialist types because I don't think my teenage self was entirely wrong, and if you want a strong leftist anything, we gotta be cool with each other.
Cooler with Stalin than with liberals and fascists, generally.
I've definitely dealt with some idiot "ancoms" more cool with liberals than "Stalinists"... but even at 13 in the height of my own anarchist phase I knew those guys were idiots.
Comm is on Hexbear, and follows Hexbear's rules. It's kind of like you crossing an open border to another country and expecting the laws to be the same, we don't ask for your passport or credentials but we ask that you abide our rules.
The USSR, both during Stalin's tenure and not, was the largest and most significant socialist state in history (until the rise of the PRC). Slandering the USSR is pretty basic anti-communism, and is in no way comparable to Israel conflating anti-Zionism with anti-semitism.
Fair, it happens.
Again, "slandering the USSR," "anti-communism" when I talk about Stalin sounds awfully like people accusing antisemitism when people talk about Israel... just like then, it's like you believe they are the same entity, like socialism in one country and the further centralization of power after Lenin's vanguardism = Marxism... I don't believe the first comment violated any rule, the other user asked a personal opinion and I just said yes, but if this falls into sectarianism or whatever, don't worry, I'm blocking the instance right now so I won't see it on my feed and accidentally comment on it again - so don't bother replying here, I won't see it.
You'll still see this comment, you just won't see these comms show up.
The thing is, we can't separate Stalin from the USSR's successes. We can either look at the USSR (and Stalin by extension) honestly, for the good and the bad, or we can just say Stalin and the USSR were bad. Looking at Stalin's achievements, he was actually right a broad majority of the time despite existing in the most chaotic and dangerous period of soviet history. He was often socially reactionary, but at the same time he played a large (but not all-encompassing) role in the dramatic improvements the working class saw in the soviet union.
To quote Nia Frome:
I don't spend 6 hours saying it. But I'm not a Stalinist. I often think it's funny when someone insists I am, though.
You can also put like this... do you prefer Lenin's Constitution that decriminalized homosexuality, legalized abortion and let women initiate divorces unilaterally, or do you prefer Stalin's Constitution that reversed all of that?
Lenin wasn't a king, it's the 1918 Constitution, which did not have the features you describe. For example, the decriminalization of homosexuality was a characteristic of the 1922 Criminal Code, not the Constitution. The other two were decrees, not the Constitution (then the divorce policy was put in the 1918 Family Code, so again law, a year after its decree).
Though they happened around the same time, they are not features of the 1936 Constitution, they are all laws.
You can just say "Under Lenin" and "Under Stalin" and be both more concise and more accurate. Hell, even the "Lenin Regime" and the "Stalin Regime." Yes, I am being pedantic, but this talk about the respective "Constitutions" is a senseless affectation.
But what you are talking about, besides eliding the entire content of the Constitutions, is simply not useful on a fundamental level because no one here is going to argue that we should be implementing either Constitution wholesale and will obviously disagree with those actions under Stalin. But again, this isn't from either Constitution, so how am I supposed to answer? The Constitutions with these laws tacked on? Why these laws specifically, and why bring the Constitutions into it? I disagree with the laws you tacked on, but the 1936 Constitution has many good provisions in it that the previous did not have regarding economic rights and the like, not that I'm even blaming Lenin (mostly*), since I think all of these Constitutions were written in response to current conditions and there's only so much you can do to declare a better society by fiat (though I grant you the mentioned laws under Lenin are a good example of it, though you're missing of course that abortion was also free, and that cannot be merely declared but requires infrastructure, and so was only guaranteed because they could provide it).
*I said "mostly" because I broadly believe in universal suffrage and there were people the 1918 Constitution banned from voting who I don't think it was very helpful to ban, not that I'm kept up at night by the injustice of it. I just think it's minimally a mild detriment without a real benefit, at least in some cases.
True communism is when gay people.
I can't wait to see the good faith interpretation they have of this comment