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Both my husband and I are children of expats from former Soviet countries. And while I think I'm fairly open to socialist ideas, I do get caught up on the fact that the people among our relatives who are most nostalgic for the Soviet Union are also VERY racist, homophobic, terrible to animals and just generally mean to everyone around them. And their food, in all its hyper-processed mystery meat and mayonnaise glory, kinda sucks.
Any tips for getting over that bias?
There’s a Chinese communist from the early days of the CPC - and I feel bad that I’ve forgotten his name - who I have read some of his thoughts on this. He said the first generation after the revolution will still have brains full of worms, even among the best and most upstanding comrades. This will get better over time, but you’re talking many generations. Because we are all products of our environment. We cannot escape the social conditions we grew up in. Being a communist doesn’t mean you are now some new person completely cleaved from any connection to the world around us and our personal histories. The Soviet Union did make attempts to fight sexism, racism, nationalism et al within their borders, but thinking you can just propagandize people into right thinking is idealism. The USSR had to start with the social conditions they inherited - and that society, which was part feudalist part capitalist - had a lot of sexism, racism, nationalism, etc (and of course cruelty to animals).
I’ll make a confession: I still sometimes have reactionary thoughts and ideals pop into my head. And it takes active, conscious thought to tell myself “what the fuck dude, cut that shit out”. If I was not actively engaged in checking myself on that, it is possible that the brainworms could come back. It’s something we are all susceptible to in some form, I think.
He said the first generation after the revolution will still have brains full of worms, even among the best and most upstanding comrades. This will get better over time, but you’re talking many generations.
I can't help but compare this to western leftists drawing smaller and smaller circles around who is leftist enough to work with.
What you're talking about was also very much the basis for the idea of the "New Soviet Man" and versions of this can be found even in Lenin's writings. We can at least see that some forms of sexism were systemically combated to the point that even the now-former Soviet states have much higher rates of women in STEM and such.
This is one of the reasons I think we need to repurpose Christian rituals, at least in Christian communities. A symbolic washing away of your old self, confession, the importance of good works informed by study and the faith in the coming rupture, communion and fellowship and sharing of bread across social divisions, etc. We need communist churches
Jonestown
I think reading Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti would be helpful. He doesn't make excuses and acknowledges the racism in the USSR. I think laying bare the actual shortcomings of the project places it in reality instead of the cartoonish evil depicted by mainstream Western history. It allows for a clearer understanding of the good alongside the bad and shows where we can improve in the next iteration of a socialist project
We're all human and need to see where we can do better, and despite the issues of past socialist experiments, it seems to many here that this form of government is the most likely way for humanity to do the most good for all
I think it really is a generational thing, especially with people who grew up during the liberalization era. Plus people wrongly try to make sense of the collapse of their lives, so they may fondly remember Communism, but associate their new shitty conditions with stuff like LGBTQ rights instead of everything else the west brought. This is why a cultural revolution was a necessary idea, even if not executed well. People didn't retain the materialism of the ideology even if they are nostalgic for the world it created.
I always think about this conversation @kristina@hexbear.net and @BeamBrain@hexbear.net about her family and how her grandmother so quickly became pro-LGBTQ, while her more liberal parents are not as quick to change. https://hexbear.net/comment/3310448
Yeah she pretty quickly came over once she read some literature on it. I think the conditions of her time made communists more left thinking, I do really believe that if somehow the communists kept continuity and were able to stay in charge, czechoslovakia would be one of the most LGBT accepting places on the planet, along with Cuba. The biggest things that seem to help LGBT acceptance imo are urbanization and access to information. I really want to do a deeper dive on numbers and historical circumstances for LGBT people in every country so we can see what policies are best to aim for in the long term. Right now, a lot of queer research pretty much is just
governments saying their allies are good for queers and doesnt attempt to predict trendsThis has more to do with the 1990s to 2010s than it does with the Soviet days.
yeah, like FDR sent japanese americans to internment camps but doesn't get very much shit for it in the public consciousness, whereas anything any soviet did ever that was anything less than perfect is an eternal repudiation of the entire ideology of marxism and leftism. Churchill allowed the bengali famine to happen (and was like suuuuuper racist just in general) but he's just a fun cigar smoking wisecracking character to most people instead of the cartoon 1984 joker madman mafia boss dictator Stalin gets portrayed as. compare basically any action of any soviet leader or organization to what their capitalist counterparts were doing at the time, and it becomes a very favorable comparison for the soviets. like no modern socialist thinks the wartime conditions of 1940's russia is anything to strive for, but they did what they had to do at the time to survive and its frankly victim blaming to see them as the badguys when most of the poverty and harsh measures taken in the USSR at the time was due to wartime conditions and the nazi's genociding and slaughtering their way halfway across russia (keep in mind germans and their collaborators did not think slavs were human and did not take prisoners or allow civillians to flee)
I do get caught up on the fact that the people among our relatives who are most nostalgic for the Soviet Union are also VERY racist, homophobic, terrible to animals and just generally mean to everyone around them.
i've noticed this when talking to my cousins abroad but have no answer, because it's kind of true and disturbing, but at the same time in the US, mean american people wander into my life all the time. I think that the US is just slightly ahead of Russia in what you might call the less-economic types of a cultural revolution (specifically, LGBT rights, animal rights, etc.).
Creating a socialist world is the only chance we have at eliminating that kind of bigotry. People are the products of the societies that created them. We can't simply tell people to stop being bigoted. Education only goes so far. We have to completely destroy the conditions that lead to bigotry in the first place.
I used to have that same bias you had and that's how I got through it
Both my husband and I are children of expats from former Soviet countries
you mean "immigrants" right?
It might be pertinent to question how when they left and why factor into it, though that is probably a doxxing risk to share here.
I think one of the most important things to keep in mind is that there are Soviet nostalgics and there are socialists (anarchists and communists).
Most people who are socialist out of politics and not out of a desire to see the old country relive its glory days are going to be very progressive on matters of race, gender and sexuality, animal rights etc.
Not all of them by any stretch of the imagination and, as an example, I'm in discussion with an anarchist outside of this platform who is saying really ableist and borderline eugenicist things so there's absolutely a whole lot more work to be done and I'll be the first to admit it. But generally I expect to see a fairly high standard of being progressive on these sorts of matters and I expect to see big, ugly intraleft slapfights that occur when someone is really backwards on these things (especially if it's an organisation.)
For example, you could ask most socialists what word springs to mind when they hear the phrase Communist Party of Great Britain/CPGB and they'll probably wrinkle their nose and say "TERF" lol.
For someone who is a communist, I'd expect that Soviet nostalgics and I would be 50/50 on finding common ground and on being in such disagreement that we'd butt heads and get into heated arguments over it. But it's also worth mentioning that I feel that would be the case for most people around the grandparent age.
I mean, I live in a racist shithole and when I meet people (especially white people) I kinda just brace for the racism. I present as masculine so I'm also bracing for the misogyny, mostly coming from other men. This tends to intensify the further back you go by birth year. I know that certain politics definitely attracts types of people (you're going to find more homophobes in a conservative party and you're going to find more vegans in a professive party, obviously) but I think a lot of your experiences with Soviet nostalgics could probably be attributed to a generational thing as well as the fact that in some countries Soviet nostalgia is, in a sense, a "conservative" or pseudo-conservative position.