The USSR had free universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, equality under the law for everyone, respect for ethnic minorities and promotion of their languages and their representation in society, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed housing at 3% of the monthly salary on average, heavy subsidization of basics like foodstuffs, affordable and high quality public transit, guaranteed pension plans, abolition of private companies and landlordism, and the highest rates of unionization in the world at the time.
I happen to be a Spaniard, and my ancestors had to endure fascism for 40 years. There was no universal free education, no universal healthcare, no guaranteed jobs, no guaranteed housing, no right to unionization, militarized police defending landlords and private companies, extreme racism and ethno-nationalist-catholic propaganda, colonialism in Morocco, repression of minority languages and ethnicities without a right to an education in them (see Basque and Catalan, compare them to Kazakh or Uzbek), no guaranteed pensions…
The two systems were the polar opposite, it’s the reason why the first thing fascists will do is executing every communist.
Ok so the points coming to mind areas follows: The censorship in the USSR.
This doesn’t seem to align with my understanding of the USSR. Didn’t the USSR fail horribly, leading to its collapse? Bureaucratic corruption, inefficiency, not being able to compete internationally, and the oppression of marginalized populations (such as queer people ) had been my impression of the USSR’s legacy.
As for the last point, that comes off as hypocritical since communist countries do the same thing. North Korea has executions and Cuba throws journalists in jail.
Comrade @Cowbee@lemmy.ml has already responded better than I possibly could, so I’ll just point you to their comment instead. I can only add: I suggest you to look at the population over time (you can find this on the respective Wikipedia “demographics of X” articles) for: Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Belarus and the exceptions of Poland and Estonia, and see what happened to their populations after 1990. Literal tens of millions of demographic losses.
Equally important, is the fact that socialism literally saved Eastern Europe from slavery and extermination at the hands of Nazism. If it weren’t for the socialist industrial revolution kickstarted in 1929 in the USSR, there is absolute certainty that the Nazis would have blitzkrieged their way to the Urals and genocided all non-German peoples in a similar way (but scaled up in speed due to the industrial development of Germany) to what the US did to native Americans.
The USSR had steady and consistent economic growth, and provided free, high quality education and healthcare, full employment, cheap or free housing, and fantastic infrastructure and city planning that still lasts to this day despite capitalism neglecting it. This rapid development resulted in dramatic democratization of society, reduced disparity, doubling of life expectancy, tripling of functional literacy rates to 99.9%, and much more. Living in the 1930s famine would not have been good, but it was the last major famine outside of wartime because the soviets ended famine in their countries.
The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union.
The truth, when judged based on historical evidence and contextualization, is that socialism was the best thing to happen to Russia in the last few centuries, and its absence has been devastating.
Death rates spiked:
And wealth disparity skyrocketed alongside the newly impoverished majority:
When you look at the US Empire and western Europe as having higher quality of life than the USSR, you are looking at the benefits of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism and wishing the USSR also practiced this, instead of helping liberate colonies and the global south. Russia in particular was a semi-feudal backwater in 1917, and made it to space 5 decades later. The USSR was not the picture of wealth, but was for its time the picture of development and rapid progress.
The USSR was stable by the time it dissolved, it was dissolved from the top-down. It did not fail horribly, it was killed by a corrupt wing that had taken hold since Khruschev. It remained socialist until the very end, but by no means was it an inevitable failure, and modern socialist states have learned from it.
Regarding it being “hypocritical” for communists to oppress fascists, no, it isn’t at all. The working classes oppressing their fiercest enemies and preventing them from taking power is for the same reason the bourgeoisie oppresses their fiercest enemies and prevents them from taking power, the communists are the most effective anti-fascists.
You don’t need to convince me that capitalism is bad, I am already convinced of that— though obviously I disagree that socialism is the only path forward for Russia.
Based on what you’ve said, the USSR appears to have done well while it was still up and running.
But:
The repressed groups I was talking about were queer people, not just “capitalists”.
If you’re trying to say that the reason why West Europe (especially Scandinavia) is a much safer place for queer people is “imperialism”, I would consider that a non-sequitur.
So long as communism leads to queer oppression (and historically it has in all of them — except Cuba which is the progressive anomaly in this regard), I will oppose it as I do not see it as “liberation”. We also have very different views on what is acceptable in terms of censorship and hierarchy (which I’m not debating in this thread), so I do not see communism as offering people liberation.
What I don’t understand is why the USSR just flatlined after all the success you’ve mentioned.
Queer rights in the soviet union were more progressive than peer countries, and queer people saw an expansion in rights as compared to Tsarist Russia. In fact, Kollontai was a bisexual woman and one of the first women in a government administrator role. The USSR did re-criminalize homosexuality after decriminalizing this, and this is seen as an error. The reason the USSR became more socially regressive in regards to queer people than in the beginning was due to the constant crisis and siege. Over time, queer rights improved, with the GDR even providing free gender affirming care.
The process of queer liberation goes hand-in-hand with the rise of socialism. In every existing socialist state, queer rights have been improving over time. This is easiest to watch in Cuba and China. In the west, the percentage of queer communists outweighs the standard population, meaning queer people are more common among communists by ratio than the standard population. It isn’t at all that socialism leads to queer repression, it’s much the opposite.
I never once made the point that queer rights come from imperialism, and I consider that deflection a non-sequitor. When I am talking about the standard of living in imperialist countries, and the social progressivism on the backs of absolute terror of the global south, I am not blaming queer people for this. I am pointing out what is called “Herrenvolk democracy,” or “democracy for the master race alone.” The progressive, good change in social views in the west coincided with increasing plunder and torture abroad, and then the fact that many of these colonized and imperialized countries are lagging the west in queer rights is used as justification for regime change.
So long as communism leads to queer oppression
It has not. Queer rights have improved in socialist countries compared to what they had before. You’re comparing their improving queer rights with the west. I could be just as dishonest and say anarchism leads to queer oppression and antisemitism given the views and actions of Bakunin, Makhno, and other existing anarchist societies, but I don’t because there’s no direct link between the two.
What I don’t understand is why the USSR just flatlined after all the success you’ve mentioned.
Because starting with Khrushchev, reforms that went against the socialist system and enabled the rise of bourgeois power existed alongside a deliberate blindness to these problems. This allowed the Yeltsin faction to take hold and nuke the system from the top, allowing for immense profits. It wasn’t socialism that became exploitative, it was a failure to safeguard it that allowed capitalism to return.
To stress this further: even as corruption built up in the USSR, the system still worked for the majority, the problems came when corruption overtook the system and changed it. Socialism therefore was not the problem, a failure to safeguard it was. Your critique mandates that socialism be exploitative as well, but it wasn’t even as corruption began to take hold.
How come Scandinavian countries are miles ahead of literally all communist countries w.r.t. queer rights (Cuba excluded)?
Simply because progressivism coincided with imperialism, doesn’t mean it’s because of it. Correlation does not equate to causation.
You say queer rights have improved compared to what they had before, but homosexuality is something that remains to this day significantly stigmatized outside of urban centers (Beijing, Shanghai etc which are more accepting)— when it wasn’t stigmatized as much before. Though perhaps that is more owing to Christianity, I’m more privy to Japan’s history than China’s if we’re going beyond the last century.
What’s wrong with comparing them to the west? Is the west a nebulous “evil”? (See above, I don’t believe it’s better there due to imperialism)
Didn’t they ban factions (perhaps this was Stalin’s time)?
We can move the conversation there if you want, but I don’t see how that’s related to worker-owned press
It’s related to the subject of fascism and censorship
Censorship, we can argue about it. Fascism, no.
The USSR had free universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, equality under the law for everyone, respect for ethnic minorities and promotion of their languages and their representation in society, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed housing at 3% of the monthly salary on average, heavy subsidization of basics like foodstuffs, affordable and high quality public transit, guaranteed pension plans, abolition of private companies and landlordism, and the highest rates of unionization in the world at the time.
I happen to be a Spaniard, and my ancestors had to endure fascism for 40 years. There was no universal free education, no universal healthcare, no guaranteed jobs, no guaranteed housing, no right to unionization, militarized police defending landlords and private companies, extreme racism and ethno-nationalist-catholic propaganda, colonialism in Morocco, repression of minority languages and ethnicities without a right to an education in them (see Basque and Catalan, compare them to Kazakh or Uzbek), no guaranteed pensions…
The two systems were the polar opposite, it’s the reason why the first thing fascists will do is executing every communist.
Ok so the points coming to mind areas follows: The censorship in the USSR.
This doesn’t seem to align with my understanding of the USSR. Didn’t the USSR fail horribly, leading to its collapse? Bureaucratic corruption, inefficiency, not being able to compete internationally, and the oppression of marginalized populations (such as queer people ) had been my impression of the USSR’s legacy.
As for the last point, that comes off as hypocritical since communist countries do the same thing. North Korea has executions and Cuba throws journalists in jail.
Comrade @Cowbee@lemmy.ml has already responded better than I possibly could, so I’ll just point you to their comment instead. I can only add: I suggest you to look at the population over time (you can find this on the respective Wikipedia “demographics of X” articles) for: Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Belarus and the exceptions of Poland and Estonia, and see what happened to their populations after 1990. Literal tens of millions of demographic losses.
Equally important, is the fact that socialism literally saved Eastern Europe from slavery and extermination at the hands of Nazism. If it weren’t for the socialist industrial revolution kickstarted in 1929 in the USSR, there is absolute certainty that the Nazis would have blitzkrieged their way to the Urals and genocided all non-German peoples in a similar way (but scaled up in speed due to the industrial development of Germany) to what the US did to native Americans.
Killing and repressing fascists and other reactionary forces is good actually. Progressive forces being killed and the masses oppressed is bad.
The USSR had steady and consistent economic growth, and provided free, high quality education and healthcare, full employment, cheap or free housing, and fantastic infrastructure and city planning that still lasts to this day despite capitalism neglecting it. This rapid development resulted in dramatic democratization of society, reduced disparity, doubling of life expectancy, tripling of functional literacy rates to 99.9%, and much more. Living in the 1930s famine would not have been good, but it was the last major famine outside of wartime because the soviets ended famine in their countries.
Literacy rates, societal guarantees in the 1936 constitution, reports on the healthcare system over time, and more are good sources for these claims.
The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union.
The truth, when judged based on historical evidence and contextualization, is that socialism was the best thing to happen to Russia in the last few centuries, and its absence has been devastating.
Death rates spiked:
And wealth disparity skyrocketed alongside the newly impoverished majority:
Capitalism brought with it skyrocketing poverty rates, drug abuse, prostitution, homelessness, crime rates, and lowered life expectancy. An estimated 7 million people died due to the dissolution of socialism and reintroduction of capitalism, and the large majority of post-soviet citizens regret its fall. A return to socialism is the only path forward for the post-soviet countries.
When you look at the US Empire and western Europe as having higher quality of life than the USSR, you are looking at the benefits of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism and wishing the USSR also practiced this, instead of helping liberate colonies and the global south. Russia in particular was a semi-feudal backwater in 1917, and made it to space 5 decades later. The USSR was not the picture of wealth, but was for its time the picture of development and rapid progress.
The USSR was stable by the time it dissolved, it was dissolved from the top-down. It did not fail horribly, it was killed by a corrupt wing that had taken hold since Khruschev. It remained socialist until the very end, but by no means was it an inevitable failure, and modern socialist states have learned from it.
Regarding it being “hypocritical” for communists to oppress fascists, no, it isn’t at all. The working classes oppressing their fiercest enemies and preventing them from taking power is for the same reason the bourgeoisie oppresses their fiercest enemies and prevents them from taking power, the communists are the most effective anti-fascists.
You don’t need to convince me that capitalism is bad, I am already convinced of that— though obviously I disagree that socialism is the only path forward for Russia.
Based on what you’ve said, the USSR appears to have done well while it was still up and running.
But:
So long as communism leads to queer oppression (and historically it has in all of them — except Cuba which is the progressive anomaly in this regard), I will oppose it as I do not see it as “liberation”. We also have very different views on what is acceptable in terms of censorship and hierarchy (which I’m not debating in this thread), so I do not see communism as offering people liberation.
What I don’t understand is why the USSR just flatlined after all the success you’ve mentioned.
I see it as hypocritical but I digress on that.
Queer rights in the soviet union were more progressive than peer countries, and queer people saw an expansion in rights as compared to Tsarist Russia. In fact, Kollontai was a bisexual woman and one of the first women in a government administrator role. The USSR did re-criminalize homosexuality after decriminalizing this, and this is seen as an error. The reason the USSR became more socially regressive in regards to queer people than in the beginning was due to the constant crisis and siege. Over time, queer rights improved, with the GDR even providing free gender affirming care.
The process of queer liberation goes hand-in-hand with the rise of socialism. In every existing socialist state, queer rights have been improving over time. This is easiest to watch in Cuba and China. In the west, the percentage of queer communists outweighs the standard population, meaning queer people are more common among communists by ratio than the standard population. It isn’t at all that socialism leads to queer repression, it’s much the opposite.
I never once made the point that queer rights come from imperialism, and I consider that deflection a non-sequitor. When I am talking about the standard of living in imperialist countries, and the social progressivism on the backs of absolute terror of the global south, I am not blaming queer people for this. I am pointing out what is called “Herrenvolk democracy,” or “democracy for the master race alone.” The progressive, good change in social views in the west coincided with increasing plunder and torture abroad, and then the fact that many of these colonized and imperialized countries are lagging the west in queer rights is used as justification for regime change.
It has not. Queer rights have improved in socialist countries compared to what they had before. You’re comparing their improving queer rights with the west. I could be just as dishonest and say anarchism leads to queer oppression and antisemitism given the views and actions of Bakunin, Makhno, and other existing anarchist societies, but I don’t because there’s no direct link between the two.
Because starting with Khrushchev, reforms that went against the socialist system and enabled the rise of bourgeois power existed alongside a deliberate blindness to these problems. This allowed the Yeltsin faction to take hold and nuke the system from the top, allowing for immense profits. It wasn’t socialism that became exploitative, it was a failure to safeguard it that allowed capitalism to return.
To stress this further: even as corruption built up in the USSR, the system still worked for the majority, the problems came when corruption overtook the system and changed it. Socialism therefore was not the problem, a failure to safeguard it was. Your critique mandates that socialism be exploitative as well, but it wasn’t even as corruption began to take hold.
How come Scandinavian countries are miles ahead of literally all communist countries w.r.t. queer rights (Cuba excluded)?
Simply because progressivism coincided with imperialism, doesn’t mean it’s because of it. Correlation does not equate to causation.
You say queer rights have improved compared to what they had before, but homosexuality is something that remains to this day significantly stigmatized outside of urban centers (Beijing, Shanghai etc which are more accepting)— when it wasn’t stigmatized as much before. Though perhaps that is more owing to Christianity, I’m more privy to Japan’s history than China’s if we’re going beyond the last century.
What’s wrong with comparing them to the west? Is the west a nebulous “evil”? (See above, I don’t believe it’s better there due to imperialism)