Edit for clarity: I’m not asking why the Tankie/Anarchist grudge exist. I’m curious about what information sources - mentors, friends, books, TV, cultural osmosis, conveys that information to people. Where do individuals encounter this information and how does it become important to them. It’s an anthropology question about a contemporary culture rather than a question about the history of leftism.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately. Newly minted Anarchists have to learn to hate Lenin and Stalin and whoever else they have a grudge against. They have to encounter some materials or teacher who teaches them “Yeah these guys, you have to hate these guys and it has to be super-personal like they kicked your dog. You have to be extremely angry about it and treat anyone who doesn’t disavow them as though they’re literally going to kill you.”
Like there’s some process of enculturation there, of being brought in to the culture of anarchism, and there’s a process where anarchists learn this thing that all (most?) anarchists know and agree on.
Idk, just anthropology brain anthropologying. Cause like if someone or something didn’t teach you this why would you care so much?
So was the USSR in 1986 applying Perestroika and Glasnost, and look where that led them. Many more socialists died as a consequence of the dismantling of the Eastern Bloc than as a consequence of USSR actions.
Yes, that’s the US State Department version. Seeing how almost literally all countries that have taken these liberalisation policies have ended in Capitalism as a consequence (except possibly China depending on who you ask, and Cuba possibly might be on the way to that), I find it hard to believe that it would have brought the result of happier socialism for everyone.
Feel free to answer if you really mean that you want me to make a list of USSR L’s, but I think it’s not a stretch to say that Marxist-Leninists usually know as much of the repressions and bad stuffs in the USSR as any other flavour of socialists
I’m saying if you can’t see their fuckups, if you buy all the cope, you aren’t really learning much from their successes either, and this is just masturbating to an idealized past.
There are socialist regimes, even centralized ones close to your ideology, that have not failed, that still exist, that have a better record of being on the right side of history. I dont have a ton of interest arguing the minutiae of a shitty dead empire that could have been really really fucking cool. Why the fuck do any of you never talk about them?
Please excuse me, which socialist country has a better record of being on the right side of history than the Soviet Union?!
I’ll try and make you a list of the bigger ones IMO later or tomorrow. Again, I don’t expect many people to know more about such issues than Marxist-Leninists, who are famously obsessed with the USSR.
I don’t actually care, its just an exercise to see if youre delusional by checking roughly how many. Do it, but for yourself. Remember the people you love might be great, but they also suck. Remembering one without the other is not respecting their memory.
Cuba in particular, as far as nation States, tends to be on the right side of things earlier than most. I’m not interested in discussing it at present.
would not exist as a socialist state without the USSR and (though this may only be historical contingency) Krushchev, doing the only other correct thing he did besides rolling tanks on Hungary
Read what I actually wrote about the USSR though.
I don’t know what makes you think I didn’t. I saw a bunch of vague moral pronouncements and then you refusing to clearly answer questions. For that reason along with the fact that I really want to waste less of my time in internet arguments, I have no interest in the broader discussion here.
I just felt it would be helpful perspective that every existing socialist state (well, idk about Laos) and some of the historical ones owe(d) their existence to the victory of the Bolsheviks. I think that the subsequent progress made by states like Cuba should be understood as part of a historical progression that the USSR was a positive forbear in.
They owe their existence to the victory over the czar, which was a coalition of many many left groups. The Bolsheviks were there, but they were one small group among many during the revolution.
Do you mean the victory over the provisional government? Anyway, whatever. The answer regardless is no, not in a sense more direct than that we should accredit it to the invention of the wheel because that too is an earlier part of the causal chain. The Bolsheviks – yes, because they ran out their opposition – were the ones left standing and it was this political entity as it developed (and devolved) over time that was concretely the one responsible for helping the various other states. We don’t know what the other left factions would have done or if they even would have survived long enough to do something productive. You really can’t escape giving the Bolsheviks credit here.
I’m going to note that you are very reluctant to actually elaborate on many of your points, including which socialist projects have a better record of being on the right side of history. Seriously, how many can you name other than Cuba and East Germany?