To any lurking good faith lemmy users who want to ask questions about socialism, you may do it in this thread, I will protect you

Usually what western people have to be instructed with is current/former socialist countries are legitimate places and not cartoonish dictatorships.

To reinforce your point here, I cannot stress enough how important a step learning actual details about the USSR and China was for me. Because as you say, people don't think of these as real places where countless real people had mundane, normal lives, they just imagine literal cartoon caricatures they passively absorbed from pop culture. Like one that stands out to me is reading a thorough description of the Soviet court system, where even though it took pains to stress how dysfunctional this feature or that feature was all I could think was "I've had family go through the courts in the US, I've seen firsthand what a completely mad and not at all functional system the US has, and by comparison what the Soviets were doing over half a century ago was meaningfully less dysfunctional than what we have now."

And for China, ironically it was something from anti-CPC ultras (Sorghum and Steel) that helped me realize what China had even been doing at all, because even if they stressed this systemic failure or that one they still went into detail about what the policies in question were, what the material situation on the ground was, and why those decisions were being made, leading to a clear picture of China struggling against an impossible material situation and eventually succeeding. Like every western history is just "grr arrg mean devious celestials tricked the peasants and then Mao ate all the sparrows cause they're dumb, grrr" but in the actual context even the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forwards starts to make sense in terms of the model emerging from rural communes that had implemented it successfully (or were claiming to have done so, at least) and the model of highly decentralized rural industry that's far from the coast being extremely appealing given how vulnerable centralized coastal industry would be in the event of a war with the US; the Great Leap Forward didn't work in practice, obviously, but there were clear reasons and pressures behind it instead of just the "lol gommunism dumb no food where iphone" bullshit that makes up the sum total of what liberals believe.

Yeah I agree with this totally, it's why I try to hammer home that people focus on breaking down nationalism first and foremost, it is the primary issue.

I don’t claim to be an authority, but I have spent the last couple years trying to learn about the DPRK as much as I can from more independent sources (like from people from China who go there as tourists).

From a material perspective… very broadly it seems like it’s better to live in the DPRK than to be poor in the United States, but someone in the US who isn’t poor is probably better off than most DPRK citizens. That of course should not be a surprise, given how heavily the DPRK is sanctioned and how restricted their trade is. Interestingly from the time shortly after the Korean War (after the DPRK was able to recover from having every bit of its industrial capacity destroyed and ~20% of its people killed) up through the 80s, the DPRK was seen as the wealthier of the two countries on the Korean Peninsula.

Honestly, the only way to deny that the people of the DPRK are doing ok materially is to use the line about how whenever you see videos of people having fun a water park or whatever, they’re all just actors. For that, idk I think any application of critical thinking would tell you how ridiculous that is.

That said, there’s some truth to the famine thing, but that’s more an artifact of recent history. There really were famine conditions and suffering in the 90s. But that was more a function of some unique weather/climatic conditions plus the collapse of the USSR. The environmental and terrain conditions in the DPRK are not ideal for farming (cold and mountainous), so there’s a lot less margin for when things go bad. The famines could have been alleviated if the DPRK was allowed to have normal relations with other countries, but at the time the US and their allies used that suffering to try and put the screws to the DPRK instead.

I don’t know enough about the political situation to be able to speak to it with confidence.

I've known people who've been there. I've known an Indonesian guy for instance who used to go on vacations to the DPRK to go skiing. Apparently it's a fairly normal vacation destination for Indonesians because they can get into the country easily.

From what's described to me, day to day life is pretty comparable to any other poor country in Asia. Life out in the countryside is probably the hardest. It seems like the worst aspects of living in the DPRK all relate to poverty rather than the cartoonish goofy dictatorship that westerners claim the country is like. They don't have great internet access, but from what I'm told nearly every person in the DPRK buys USB drives full of pirated stuff anyway.

Other than their media, the DPRK is pretty normal, and in fact doing quite well considering their decades of sanctions and international aggression. They haven't had widespread food insecurity in a while. Their healthcare system seems stable. They had energy instability for a while in the 90s they seem to have managed.

This is a fascinating documentary called My Brothers and Sisters in the North by a South Korean woman who had dual citizenship in Germany and then used that German Citizenship to visit the DPRK.

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nSd48emp0lI

She goes to a number of different places in the DPRK and visits people living much different lifestyles.

Things to remember when watching vids regarding inside DPRK is that they are basically under siege by Western Powers for almost a century now. So when they're being interviewed, they're basically talking to extensions of their oppressors and they're very aware of that.

There's also The Haircut by BoyBoy. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=2BO83Ig-E8E

You'll probably recognize some of the locations they went to from the documentary as there's a basic tour every tourist goes on and then people who visit as part of the DPRK's cultural exchange program get to visit more relevant locations to their project in addition.

Speaking of. If you can find a torrent of Aim High in Creation you'll get to see a much more behind the scenes look of people in DPRK just doing their job and living their life. The facade of stiffness falls to the wayside and you get to see Filmmakers who aren't typically dealing with tourists just being themselves and shooting the shit. See if you can tell when the Australian director is being inadvertently rude to them.

Trailer https://yewtu.be/watch?v=CvrWdj79aT4

Keep in mind that the DPRK had 20% of its people killed off in a matter of 3 years and much of its land destroyed.

So, while there have been a famine in recent memory (during the 1990s), this has been a result of the economic embargo and sanctions on the country.

I'm trying to be as honest as I can with you here.

Oh, also regarding defectors. Most that you hear about are monetizing their story through USA backed Libertarian think tanks. Atlas Network being the big one. Freedom Factory is another if I remember correctly.

Yeah, NK's state media has always had a very off and somewhat idealist view of the DPRK. Most information you find on the nation doesn't pass the sniff test. They also seem to be the oddball of the socialist countries.

This is one that made me question the western narrative on NK. An article about a stoner getting some North Korean weed and smoking in a restaurant like it was no big deal.. Very good read

I don't think anyone here really knows. The only people who know are defectors, and not only are defectors themselves not always reliable (Yeonmi Park being the obvious example), documentaries and interviews where defectors tell their experiences will often be edited to fit certain narratives. Not even necessarily for nefarious purposes, but for the same reason that spooky, ominous music plays when a documentary shows a lion sneak up to a gazelle. Telling scary stories about how kim jong-un will execute your family for wearing a tie he finds ugly will keep audiences more interested than "it really isn't all that special over there, you guys" and since there's 0 consequences for making up outrageous lies (since nobody is able or willing to fact check you), that's what we get.

I'm more inclined to believe what I hear from the DPRK itself, but I don't think anyone here can truly tell you what life over there is like.

I'm by no means an expert but some factors to consider are that there's a very extensive economic sanctions regime in place against the DPRK.

What that looks like on the ground is that there's very little oil because it's hard to import, meaning that there are few cars and a heavy reliance upon mass transit and electricity instead (e.g. trolleybuses).

It also means that they don't have as much access to things like cutting edge medical technology.

For farming, as manufacturing modern agrochemicals is often very energy intensive and reliant upon oil (do we even use the term petrochemicals? Lol. It feels like all of our chemicals are derived from oil these days...), they tend to be much more low-input chemical-wise and this affects yield as well as the environment (e.g. less chemical runoff in the waterways, all things being equal.)

There's the focus on militarisation of the DPRK in the western media and this is a response to the Korean war and the very obvious attempts to destabilise and destroy their political system. Their recent advances in nuclear arms and ICBM technology has given them a degree of breathing room as it's a pretty well established fact that this creates military deterrence that was otherwise being maintained through a very strong focus on a conventional military with a large financial investment in that. These days it's not as high a priority to have such a strong army, for example, and they don't need as much artillery aimed at Seoul to feel some degree of security knowing that nuclear missiles are going to fulfil the same purpose. (Am I cribbing my notes from Stephen Gowans here? You bet I am!) I would expect to see the DPRK gradually scaling down their investment in conventional military and reorienting their economic priorities towards infrastructure and other civilian purposes but I'd expect to see just as much military pageantry because they won't want to expose their flank to the rest of the world unnecessarily. This means we should see better outcomes for the average citizen of the DPRK.

The west is preoccupied with the notion of Potemkin village narratives in the media. Everyone and their dog will point out how some building with no lights on is proof that an entire residential block is just for show or how the passengers on trains in the DPRK all appear to be actors or whatever. This is largely nonsense and a product of westerner tourists coming down with diagnosable cases of Main Character Syndrome and I wouldn't give much credence to these stories. I mean, I've been hearing that China is on the cusp of collapsing for about 25 years now and that it's going to happen within this year for real this time so I'm a bit reticent towards sensationalism in the media. When the media focus on the DPRK, one of the biggest names is Yeonmi Park who talks absolute rubbish. Plenty of what she says is either absurd, contrary to basic science, or easily fact-checked and disproven. Often her stories are not even internally-consistent.

She claimed that she was so propagandised that she didn't recognise that Kim Jong-Un was fat. Like, she couldn't conceptually grasp that he was fat. Not that she wasn't allowed to talk about it or that there was propaganda explaining why but that she would look at a picture of him and she would be unable to see it.

I mean, come on...

Obviously there's the famous Joe Rogan interview where she said that there was one train that ran in the DPRK (completely false), that it would only come once a month (again, completely false), and that people would often have to get off the train and push it (I'm sorry, what??). This is directly after saying that people would hang around the train station starving to death and there would be children who were so starved that all their organs fell out (???) and that rats would eat the corpses of victims of starvation and that people starving at the train station would hunt the rats for food.

If that were true we would have satellite images of it. If that were true people wouldn't stand around starving to death at a train station, they'd be hunting and foraging elsewhere. If everyone was starving so badly then nobody would have the strength to walk, let alone to push a train (which is an absurd amount of weight to try and push regardless of how well nourished you and your fellow passengers are).

I have to admit that I don't follow Yeonmi Park's appearances in the media closely but if she's the leading voice in the western media for what things are like in the DPRK and, at least to my knowledge, no journalist has confronted her about her inconsistencies, her outright fabrications, and her ridiculous claims let alone challenged her on any of them then I'd say that it's a safe bet that the standard for journalism on the DPRK is abysmally low and it should be regarded with deep skepticism.

There are other things like how there's an effective blockade on people from the DPRK leaving to go to other countries. This is something which was passed by the UN Security Council as a part of sanctions on the country, although the received wisdom is usually that it's the DPRK government who imposes this on its citizens.

Same goes for starvation or lack of food. If you look at Security Council resolutions (not that I expect people to do this but...) you'll find the US pushing for outrageous sanctions on things like oil and food imports and you'll have China threatening to veto the resolution because this would cause destabilisation of the DPRK due to the measures being so extremely punitive, meaning that often before the final resolution passes it gets watered down enough that the average citizen of the DPRK isn't facing abject starvation conditions but only because China is curtailing the US' designs. I'd need to dig back into old resolutions to get a clear picture of this but there was the Deng Xiaoping era onwards where China pivoted and began playing ball with the west, in a dramatic departure from the Mao era, and they were not nearly as strong militarily, politically, or economically so I would venture a guess that China being firmer in its negotiations at the Security Council with regards to stuff like the DPRK is a relatively recent shift. But basically any country which is cut off from the rest of the world's agriculture is only one environmental disaster away from starvation. Modern agricultural practices ameliorate this to a certain extent but if your country is cut off from them as well then you're in a precarious position.

But yeah, it's extremely hard to distinguish fact from fiction when it comes to the DPRK and you're not alone in feeling that way. My default position for anything about the DPRK is false until proven true and to be wary of the interpretation of the facts, for example what I mentioned above where it's a function of the UN Security Council resolution that prevents DPRK citizens from travelling abroad rather than some cynical plot by the DPRK government to control the movement of its citizens.

imgur album with almost 400 pictures of life outside of pyongyang: https://imgur.com/a/BybJ7DQ

jaka parker has videos of this on youtube https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=e6STm0seel8

indonesian diplomat, has no real commentary, no handlers. just shows daily life in the country. its not a rich place, it is severely lacking in industry due to western sanctions, but there are some interesting things going on, particularly in regards to housing and food distribution. a lot of places in asia look a lot like north korea, there is new development that is very good, and there is dilapidated rural areas. its important to understand that this region used to be worse off than africa. china has many similar issues, but have been able to rapidly advance due to deng's reforms.

on Netflix there is a Series "Crash landing on you" , watch it ! Its great and this way you will understand "how south Korea " sees it.. and this way you will then get to a more hollistic view.

on Netflix there is a Series "Crash landing on you" , watch it ! Its great and this way you will understand "how south Korea " sees it.. and this way you will then get to a more hollistic view.

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.

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

This has more to do with the 1990s to 2010s than it does with the Soviet days.

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

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.

Both my husband and I are children of expats from former Soviet countries

you mean "immigrants" right?

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.

it's more of a waiting list/lottery situation than a "schedule"

The most efficient toothbrush use will be optimized with linear programming.

I put tokthburhs in my buthol

This depends on just how efficient the Toothbrush Snatching Squads will be, a raging debate in leftism is whether we'll get 30% or 90% of all toothbrushes, but nobody knows for sure

sometimes i wonder if we would even need toothbrushes if our food wasn't full of processed sugar because corpos want to get us addicted to their slop (they put more sugar in than you can even consciously taste in some foods, to make your body crave more of it instinctually)

GRAB YOUR GEAR AND GET IN THE TEACHING TRENCHES!

real

Shitposting is praxis.

Subsistence farming is very different from owning means of production and exploiting workers. Unless your two cows are a metaphor for owning land and cattle that are worked by peasants while you keep the surplus value literally nothing happens.

I hire a furry to draw them as smokin hot babes

They will die, as will we all.

As pets?

they are cut into cubes and portioned out to everyone throughout the country

YOU have 2 cows? No no, WE have 2 cows.

They become best friends

Uhhh, I guess there's a CW on that article for having a homophobic term/a term that could be interpreted as homophobia.

The editor really dropped the ball by not adding an editor's note to explain that clanger.

they'll probably moo once or twice

EDIT: Serious Answer -

Its Part of the Psyop is that they dont tell you about "Personal Property" , they only give you Private Property a word that includes Multinational Corporations and your Toothhbrush. To the cows will happen what you choose for them ...

Uh, the people that milk them, slaughter them, cut them up, etc. now own them if they go to market. If you're doing subsistence farming + a little bit to market that you yourself do, you own them. If it's decided during wartime that cow production is a strategic necessity that has additional considerations for the purposes of defence, the state now owns them until it is no longer a strategic necessity (this largely applies to weapons production, and certain resource sectors. Cows are unlikely, but wheat and oil are very likely. Basically, you don't want the entire socialist system to be held hostage by a tiny minority who happen to be providing a very broad necessary good. For instance, the amount of wheat a single wheat farmer provides is absolutely massive, meaning that a consortium of wheat farmers have a chain to yank to extort everyone else. In the case of wheat during non-wartime periods, I'd probably want a rotating cast of wheat farmers, maybe as a vocational "this is where our food comes from" school thing with a small core of permanent wheat farmers for institutional knowledge? Depends on the circumstances)

(this may also depend on the vegan-ness of your revolution, but I think generally meat should be seen as a luxury or limited good. It's unlikely that American meat consumption would continue for particularly long regardless of the revolution though)

(this was a semi-serious meandering answer. Sorry.)

(tldr: it depends on the interaction of the cows with the rest of society)

🥰

counterpoint, why not marxism?

It is!

This is probably not an answer, and certainly not a defense of atrocities, but I’d like to provoke you a little by putting you in the shoes of the 1930s USSR:

It hasn’t even been a decade since the end of a brutal Civil War, during which the world’s first newly formed socialist state was invaded by a dozen of Western imperialist powers, and ended with a heavy toll on human lives and the destruction of huge parts of the economy.

A new form of reactionary force - fascism, embodying the most brutal form of reactionary violence, had just crushed the revolutionary movement in Italy, and is spreading across Europe. Hitler had just been made the leader of Germany, and is heavily militarizing and preparing to execute an expansionist doctrine.

War is coming. An imperialist war that threatens to be far bloodier than the Great War itself not even two decades ago, is now painting the world’s first socialist state as its target. You pleaded with the European powers to take this fascist threat seriously, but was turned down by every single one of them, who then proceeded to form military and economic alliance with Nazi Germany. It became clear to you that the anti-communist imperialist powers are dead set on destroying the Soviet Union. It should have been obvious.

A war is coming, and your country is still 50-100 years behind the Western capitalist powers. It was barely industrialized, and there simply isn’t enough productive capacity to match the output of the Western powers. The fate of the world’s first socialist state is in peril - if the Soviet Union is crushed, then all hopes would be lost. Reactionary forces would have won. This has gone beyond the survival of the nation - this is the ultimate clash between ideologies, and the survival of socialist ideas hinges upon the survival of the Soviet Union itself.

You don’t know when the war would come. Would it be in 5 years? 10 years? There is no time to waste. There is only one way out: brutal industrialization. “We are 50-100 years behind the capitalist powers, and we must make do of that in 10 years” - Stalin in 1930. This proved to be prophetic, because in exactly 10 years, Nazi Germany would launch its invasion against the Soviet Union that would end with the perishing of 27 million lives of the Soviet people.

A brutal industrialization must take place before the worst comes for us! It must not be derailed! Anyone who threatens to derail the industrialization process also threatens the survival of the nation itself. It is a time of confusion and uncertainty. You cannot know for sure who might be the saboteurs, the naysayers, the delinquents who will drag us down and set us back. There is no time for that. Would you risk having millions of lives killed in a war because you’re not sure if a few managers are innocent? There is no time to tell, and no way to know for certain.

You have to make the choice. Now. And your choice will determine whether fascism destroys an entire nation and leads to the final victory of the reactionary forces.

What would you do?

There is certainly survivorship bias because all the socialist states that had perished have merely become a footnote, that leftists lament over: “how unfortunate”. Allende in Chile tried to be democratic with his socialism, and what he invited instead was the most brutal form of fascist violence that murdered hundreds of thousands of people, and the most brutal form of economic exploitation known as neoliberalism, the effects of which had destroyed millions of families and its devastation still lingers to this day in Latin America.

It is easy to say, “if I had been in charge, I would certainly have done it better.” But that’s with the power of hindsight. But let’s say you have just achieved a socialist revolution in your country, how would you act and prepare for the coming onslaught of the counter-revolutionaries? How far are you willing to go to defend the survival of the revolution?

In a time of confusion, uncertainty, social upheaval, radical transformation of the society, the emotions, with all the flux of information that may or may not be trustworthy, if you were to make decisions which will determine the survival or the demise of an entire nation, could you really have done better?

I'd recommend "Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend" by Domenico Losurdo.

In it, Losudro brings up the 'thornier' parts of Stalin's history and contextualizes those moments in history. To me, he does a convincing job of explaining all of the 'Great Man' myths we hear about Stalin, and that so much of these unexamined anecdotes just lived on as myths/legends about the man.

I believe he has a few chapters about work camps and explains and contextualizes them in a nuanced way. Really enlightening book and I think it would answer some of the questions you might have about Stalin.

I think Blackshirts and Reds was a very accessible USSR book.

Most leftist books, I've found, are very well sourced.

I will say this, I get frustrated by most any anti-Stalin slander, but I also get really depressed when i look into a figure in soviet history and see "died 1938-9" because so so often it is needless. So many comrades lives wasted and in many cases indefensibly, however what is worth considering is these are the exception not the rule. Most people who got tried didn't get executed, most purged just got reassigned or kicked from the party, and the vast majority of citizens faced none of this. That doesn't make a great deal of it any less of a mistake, but it becomes a mistake among triumphs.

There is a reason so many people who got purged and executed have wiki articles, and it is not just western propaganda, it is because people in prominent and noteworthy positions were more likely to be killed or become relevant in hindsight, whereas random worker who got his pension and retired happily and voted in his soviet is not "worth" making an entry for, and for understandable reasons.

So many dissidents or executed people who get attention are artists, creatives, and this seems to imply that the purges went so deep into harmless things, but really it shows us that a great deal of the purges are part of an almost culture war or battle within an agency, a disproportionate number of those purged are public individuals. So you naturally will see more info on them.

Another part of it is that there are for sure bad actors and people operating out of malice, plenty involved in the ethnic expulsions did so with cruelty and while there are reasons for why at the highest levels say Stalin would approve of deporting so many Chinese and Korean communists from the Far East out of concerns that Japan would claim that made it legitimate territory for Manchuria to claim (as they had elsewhere), another case like that of the Ingush is far less reasonable even compared to the incorrect logic of the prior example, and carried out even more harshly often in an openly racist manner by officials. Sometimes this was ignored or approved of by higher officials, but often local powerbases protected themselves until dismantled.

We see this with Ukraine and Stalin bringing the hammer down on officials who did discriminate and mistreat people intentionally

reddit tier comment

This explains everything, I would argue. Just go to the two videos explaining SwCC and Deng Xiaoping.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsCaI-gsA29xVYzFI-kYWLcx2QhowNBCL

We'll plant seeds in fertile fields comrade......and yes I could've worded that better, but I just got off work and have a light buzz going

Chaucer's Mead, the drink of gods

If I recall correctly, East Germany had a sort of time share system where people didn't own the property, but they had access to it at certain times. So everyone basically had a vacation home to visit at some point.

I may be misremembering, and they might have built large resorts that could facilitate large amounts of people. Either way, people universally got to visit these things and had the time to do it.

Someone else says lottery, but realistically it is probably going to be money. Socialist systems (transitory as they are) generally still use money to some extent, and people that have specialised necessary skills often do get paid more (e.g. in the USSR, professors and engineers got paid more than janitors and politicians, Blackshirts and Reds somewhere). They can use this extra money to buy beachside property or exotic imported goods or services. What they can't do with it is appropriate ownership of productive tools from the people actually using those tools (e.g. factories, phone banks etc).

I think beachside property is a good case study because it is desirable but will always be at least somewhat limited, especially as our view of the socialism we want becomes more green. People that hypothetically work near beaches would also have some priority (dockworkers, fishermen etc) depending on the region.

Obviously, there are socialist societies (real and imagined) that do away with money at the outset, but I think overall this answer has wound up being the best.

Lottery

In a socialist system? Money. People with more demanding or specialized jobs would have more purchasing power. That's it. That's how it currently works in most socialist countries. People with more money purchase nicer housing.

In a completely moneyless society without any notion of property ownership? A completely post-revolutionary society with altered concepts of commodities? Who knows, those people in the future would have a completely different conception for what the meaning of life is. I certainly have no idea how they'd distribute stuff. People by then might not care about living in lakefront housing, or people might have a different concept of housing entirely. People might rotate out when they stay at a lakehouse. There's no pre-designed system for this because the people in this hypothetical scenario would have different material conditions and desires than we do now. Ask an aristocrat in the year 1034 about how people in 2024 would acquire and use desirable farmland. That's how far off our perspective is here.

My only prediction is that people in the future simply wouldn't care as much. I'd hope a communist future would have much more chill people overall who might view the entire world as their home.

The socialist version of airb&b presumably

I think the shores os lakes and beaches should be protected and no bulling should happen near them. But I guess we're a little too late for that.

Speaking as a ex-long term anarchist, anarchism is much more heterogeneous in its ideologies or political orientations. You have anarcho-communists who are, especially from the outside looking in, very similar to communists to the point of seeming identical.

Then you have tendencies like individualists, post-leftists, and egoists that are wildly different and in a lot of ways their politics can be so different that it's hard to find a common thread linking them to other anarchist tendencies.

Speaking in broad terms from here on:

Anarchists tend to give much more emphasis to hierarchies and their concept of the state whereas communists tend to emphasize class and class conflict (i.e. where you get the workers vs the bourgeoisie framing of issues and the whole "workers of the world unite - you have nothing to lose but your chains!" sort of thing).

This might come off as uncharitable and it's a statement of personal opinion more than a statement of absolute fact but in my experience but, when pressed to define their position, anarchists tend to agree in the necessity of a transitional state between what we have right now and their ideal end-point (anarchism or communism, generally this is seen as interchangeable in a sort of platonic sense) however the real distinction is in their timeframes for the necessity of a transitional state; most anarchists do not believe that you can have the revolution overthrowing capitalism on Monday and achieve an anarchist society on Tuesday but they object to how long a transitional state exists under a communist party.

If I were to be more charitable here I would have said "transitional steps" but, even going by a commonly agreed-upon anarchist definition of the state, they will generally describe a transitional state.

Regardless, the overwhelming majority of Marxists see the revolution as being the first step, then the hard task of setting a course from what we have today (or what we have overthrown today) towards achieving communism begins as we transition to socialism and build up the necessary social and material preconditions (think things like how goods are produced and how the whole political economy functions) to advance towards the end goal of a stateless, classless, moneyless society (i.e. communism).

To illustrate the idea of preconditions and material conditions, we can use the example of slavery. Slavery has been abolished (I think?) everywhere in the world. Yet there are more slaves in the world today than there were at the height of institutionalised slavery.

Why is that? Well, a Marxist would start from a place of analysis that the conditions that give rise to slavery have not yet been eliminated and as such all the laws in the world aren't going to be sufficient to eliminate slavery alone.

To extend this idea a little more, the program for creating a stateless, classless, moneyless society is hard to fathom. Rightly so. As is eliminating the conditions that give rise to slavery. But we can understand the "etiology" of slavery and make educated guesses about what sorts of policies and, ultimately, what kinds of societies would mitigate these conditions. We can enact changes and measure their impacts and then, using this information of whether or not it was successful (or if it had a Cobra Effect), we can then take another step forward or we can take a step backwards with the knowledge that the next step we take will actually advance towards the desired outcome. And onwards it continues until we reach that end goal eventually through a process of doing a lot of research, careful consideration, measuring outcomes, and the correcting of errors.

Anarchists don't have the same emphasis on material conditions and so they tend to expect that anarchism should be achieved in relatively short timeframes. Communists, on the other hand, see the timeframes as being far longer and, venturing a guess here, you could ask most communists if they saw a revolution today whether they'd expect to see communism achieved within their lifetime and they'd tell you no.

Most anarchists are communist. Communism is an end goal, anarchism and marxism/MLism/maoism/whatever are differences in strategy to reach that goal.

Anarchism is idealist, starting with an abstract principle of anti-hierarchicalism and individualism. It can be, but is not necessarily communist. Anarchists typically desire communism (a stateless and classless society) as an end state, but don't have a clear plan to get there, sense most are against all states for some reason. Scientific socialism or Marxism doesn't start from abstract ideals, it studies the material world using a dialectical understanding to come to its conclusions. It recognizes that states are not abstract oppressive entities. States are monopolies on violence legitimizing and protecting class rule. Historically the ruling class has been the exploiting class. Socialists aim to smash the current state, and make the working class the ruling class, in order to lift up the oppressed and subjugate the oppressors. When class distinctions cease the state will "wither away." Anarchists may use the Marxist method of analysis. Let me know if you have any more questions.

The shared end goal is one of the only sources of leftist unity, other than anti-fascism. Anarchists imagine a revolution that immediately jumps to a stateless society, and Marxists have concluded that it is necessary to seize state power to defeat the forces of reaction, and that the state can be dismantled only once imperialism and capitalism have been defeated on a global scale.

Confusingly, both groups are technically "communists"

Communism is when you play the bass boosted national anthrm in the middle of your 8th grade math class and nobody laugh

Anarchism is when you listen to weezer repeatedly and swear its ironic even after you purchase 2 copies of the blue album

america

them

who is them tho

The Plastic People of the Universe

never heard of them before, browsing wikipedia it sounds like the Czechoslovakian government was freaking out over nothing and should have left be, but that wiki wasn't much to go on :shrug-outta-hecks:

Kinda reminds me of the USSR clamping down on christian cultural expression; unnecessary and tactically just gives reactionary movements an inroad they wouldn't otherwise have.

There is no democracy. If there was, we would agitate for people to vote.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

[...]

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

What are you referring to? If you're talking about Biden, you're just plain wrong about it being a movement towards the left.

Because without the threat of revolution you'll never get those rights in the first place and as soon as the threat is removed the rights you have or won will be rolled back at the earliest convenience

Without revolution the capitalist class will call your bluff each time, and if you get mad at them what're you going to do? You already took revolution off the table

As a result Liberal radicalism can best be described as a snake eating it own ass

you'll have to be more specific. Are you talking about how people here dismiss Democrats or western liberals in general? Because we don't trust them. It's true that communists have a history of making coalitions with their liberals. Like the current dominant party in Mexico, MORENA, is a coalition between communists, liberals, social democrats, etc. Lenin's party would also make concessions with their liberals when it came to making electoral advancements.

But that's not our situation at all and we're distrustful of liberals. Most of us are from western countries where liberal parties exist to betray us or do nothing, that's really it. We haven't experienced much solidarity at all with the liberals in our countries/areas, we've only experienced betrayal and failure. We have no built up trust. I've personally worked with some liberals in my area, namely the Sierra Club and AFL-CIO. But it was just that. Work, stay on task, because I know once the task drifts from our common goals, they'll go back to being useless liberals. I'm still really salty about how the 2020 anti-cop protests fizzled out.

I am reminded of this line from Billy Bragg's version of the internationale

Freedom is merely privilege extended, unless enjoyed by one and all

But even that is simplistic, because even if everyone has a right, that does not mean freedom. Economy power being in the hands of the producing class is the only way that class can actually be free. How free are black people if they can still be enslaved in prison? That is not separate from general african-american civil liberties, it is inseparable.

Also most of us here love LatAm demsocs like Evo or Allende, we have emotes of them for a reason. Those are not revolutionaries

Because we want real structural shifts in the distribution of power, not just treats from our ruling class overlords.

Look at things in the context of slavery, as an analogy for the ultimate unequal society.

If a slave owner gives his slaves more comfortable beds, or reduces their working hours, or gives them better food, we can agree that these changes are good for the slaves without praising the slaveowner. And if someone in 1820 or whatever went to an abolitionist protest with a sign that said "Comfier beds for slaves", they would (rightfully) get punched in the face.

Why? Because these things are not truly progress. They haven't changed the power dynamic. The slaveowner can still take away the new beds and increase the working hours and start giving them worse food again. The only things that really matter are structural shifts of power.

but it just bugs me that at the end of the day, whoever is in power gets to define "intolerance" and their definition might not match the majority's. And the majority might not be right either...

This is to me one of the most primal liberal problems with thinking about politics. No, communists do not support some benevolent autocrat delineating acceptable speech, it must be democratically decided with a mind to Marxist analysis. "But what if people vote wrong?" Campaign against it! Educate them! "But what if people vote so overwhelmingly wrong that such a campaign is hopeless?" Then you are talking about a state that is so overwhelmingly compromised that it doesn't fucking matter if your hypothetical Republicanist alternative tries to reign them in, because in liberal society there is already a massive extent to which popular consensus decides if you live in squalor or not based on what you say. That's what "a reputation" is in liberal society.

The only thing to do is to educate people on what their own interests are. If there is some hypothetical world where people are just determined to vote themselves into hell, then that represents a failed project and a state that must be overthrown.

Some people would consider me intolerant for being against circumcision and piercing of infants' ears, because those are deeply-held cultural traditions for some people.

There is a difference between speaking against something and banning it. This is ultimately just a question about the nature of reactionary religious practices, not "free speech" itself.

Reactionary and hate speech makes me fuckin sick. Yet I'm terrified that attempts to officially ban it just fuel persecution fetishes in people who practice it, and cause them to go further down their rabbit holes and drag more uncertain people with them.

While not as fundamental, this is another common trope among liberals, though I am glad that even radlibs have started to understand that deplatforming is good and works. Yes, the new circumstances fascists are put in give them new tools with which to recruit, but that's the dialectical nature of reality. What matters is not that they have new tools but that those new tools are predicated on them being deprived of old tools that are much, much more powerful, and being able to call yourself a fascist in open society is much more powerful to recruit new fascists than some precious little song and dance about "look at who you aren't allowed to criticize".

I would like to further point out that your likely frames of reference -- either America or states just to its left -- overwhelmingly don't prosecute what you and I would call hate speech, it is the social consensus around some of that hate speech being bad that pushes it to the fringes. It is the banning of it -- which is something that should follow from that social consensus in a democratic government -- that would for most intents and purposes stamp it out.

There's also the matter of social programs and such for the alienated and dispossessed people who it might pick up or who have even already been caught up in it. The law does not need to be punitive, and many fascists are ultimately also a type of victim who the state can help out of their fascism if the state actually wanted to do so.

In some ways yes, but it already happens. The way reactionaries frame the debate (e.g. freedom of expression is the freedom to harass minorities with slurs on campus) is actually a fairly recent project starting in the 90s (perhaps to discredit freedom of expression as a goal). The leftist approach to freedom of expression (e.g. advocating for the people our state is actively bombing, private/personal property, whistleblower attacks, intellectual property etc.) tends to be a lot more nuanced.

I think the idea of the slippery slope is a bit banal. It's not really swaying people one way or another, it's just people will find it as a convenient excuse to "both sides". e.g. Australia banning both Nazi salutes and Hamas flags. This didn't need prior justification to do so, inasmuch as Australia has free speech laws to begin with. If supposedly "free" capitalist states can do such things, why not a socialist state? It makes them only just as bad on that one issue, not worse, which kinda means that if you feel such worry about a future socialist state, you should feel the same worry about current capitalist ones.

To say nothing of how any restriction would be punished. Imprisonment is worse than a fine is worse than rejection from a campus is worse than rejection from a social group. But all societies practice a grading scale of all of those (wrt. speech).

I don't think you're crazy for worrying or even thinking about it. I think it will come down to the circumstances of whatever revolution happens and what groups are involved in negotiating the future. Personally, I'd want to promote active debate both inside and outside the party, but your right to speech is limited from recruiting foreign actors to help overthrow the government and conspiracy to commit crime (depends on the crime). Maybe something about active military movements (should such a thing exist) during a conflict? Even if you're a one party state, you want to have a lot of ears on the ground to address particular grievances, however mundane, and safe discussion is a good place to explore ideas. (this is something that I disagree with right wingers on, if a lot of minorities feel unsafe even if the state isn't coming down on you, you won't get productive discussion, you'll get a circle jerk of the dominant ideology)