Sometimes the better at thinking you are, the less sense working for others makes. The less sense spending time doing bullshit makes. The less sense spending time away from loved ones makes. I dunno, bro just needed a UBI
Difference is that redditors spread racist rhetoric on the internet and Marx wrote the book Americans burned on social media when Russia attacked Ukraine, tho he is German.
Marx wrote the book Americans burned on social media when Russia attacked Ukraine
That’s amazing. I personally heard someone mention that the Ukrainians just hated communism shortly after the invasion. It took me kind of by surprise and it was actually a little while later that I put two and two together and figured out they meant Russia.
And also Putin is arguably post fascist or ultraconservative, total opposite of communism. His favorite ideologue even called Ukraine and its language a “Leninist fabrication, to divide and conquer the Russian nation”.
You haven’t read his letters to Engles huh?
He analyzed capitalism (and religion), and his model predicted regular worsening crises when the market couldn’t expand further, leading to its eventual abolition.
He was employed as a journalist and published books on history and economics.
I swear libs just make stuff up that sounds right and then believe the shit they fantasized
I agree, but these are not liberals. Don’t let the far-right to have the word “liberalism”! They’re conservatives or right-libertarians at best, and outright fascists at worst.
> 4chan user
> libPick one.
I do agree that anon’s take is bullshit.
The funny thing is that communism is technically an evolution of actual liberalism, and tankies look a lot less down on conservatives because of conservatism’s “muh tradishun” lifestyle marketing.
Lemmites just be spouting buzzwords at this point.
Liberalism is the philosophy of capitalism, the guy in OP is definitionly a lib.
No, that’s neoliberalism. Which is a misnomer, because actual liberalism emerged from the humanist tradition and was a political philosophy, not an economic one. It’s where we got ideas like human rights, and rules that restrict governments’ abilities to oppress their citizens.
Neoliberalism misapplies the idea of “freedom” the same way anarcho-capitalists do. But I don’t think anyone here would argue that all anarchists are anarcho-capitalists.
Actually jokes on you, none of the words mean anything and they are all word games used to keep the masses in their places.
https://annas-archive.is/books/289061-289061-liberalism
Heres a book going through all the major liberal philosophers and how they dealt with the conflicts inherent to liberalism.
Tldr, core, overriding freedom of liberalism is and has always been for the dominant class to economically exploit the working class.
One author with a clear spin isn’t exactly a comprehensive literature review. You can probably find a book that says anything about anything.
If you pay attention to historical context you can see how liberalism was an improvement over the systems that had been in place prior, i.e. feudalism and monarchy.
The course of human society doesn’t magically jump from “terrible” to “great.” That never happens. More realistically, society makes incremental progress over generations as ideas develop and grow, catch on and are fought for and ultimately prevail over previous ideas and old systems which start to show cracks and ultimately fail. There are cycles of backsliding of course, and all progress is a battle where victory is never guaranteed, but that’s the gist of it, and it’s always incremental.
Without liberalism, there could never have been a civil rights movement, or suffragettes, or gay marriage. All these things built upon the foundation that was set for them by liberalism so long prior that people had already taken it for granted and forgotten about its origins.
Just because it wasn’t perfect from its outset doesn’t mean it wasn’t an improvement over what existed prior, or that it couldn’t be improved on further. And the course of history throughout the twentieth century is a story of liberalism prevailing. So much was achieved in those grueling years and decades that the world of the 1901 is practically unrecognizable to the world of 2001. That progress wasn’t achieved in a vacuum. It was achieved within a liberal system, in which ideas of human rights had already been formulated and enshrined in constitutional law, albeit imperfectly.
People were able to fight to expand the protections and rights of those laws precisely because they already existed. There were imperfect laws and systems in place that those activists were able to fight to improve and expand. Without liberalism, there wouldn’t have been even that.
More realistically, society makes incremental progress over generations as ideas develop and grow, catch on and are fought for and ultimately prevail over previous ideas and old systems which start to show cracks and ultimately fail.
You’re so close to stepping beyond idealism.
History has never been a struggle of ideas, where everyone gets together and the best idea wins, its always been a class struggle resulting from material reality.
Liberalism didn’t spawn the French revolution because somebody thought up humanism and everyone agreed it was a really good idea, but because the bourgeois were ascendant and liberalism reinforced their power so it was promoted. The same model explains why religion reinforced the power structures of the Roman empire/catholic church, why divine right reigned when the relation with means of production favored feudalism.
Indeed, its why Australia’s main conservative party (middle right) are called The Liberals
Yes, historically that is the case. Semantics drift over time, though. Even though both liberals and conservatives are classical liberals, only one actually still uses the liberal label. When you don’t acknowledge semantic drift, you alienate others because they can’t follow what you’re saying. If you want to destroy capitalism, you need to make the circle of people bigger, not shoulder people out before they begin.
Phrased another way, you want to move the Overton window leftwards, not contribute to it shrinking to the right.
Nah. We don’t need to surrender the overton window to liberals and let them dictate that the alternative to capitalism is capitalism, except the workers get more crumbs and minorities get conditional protections. Moving the Overton window left of the current rightwing framing requires people to realize how rightwing the current framing is.
Yes… by teaching people. Meaning you need to reach them. If the way you talk is a barrier to being understood, you’re going to reach way less people, my man.
I’m gonna quote scripture, not cause I’m Christian or anything (catholic apostate atheist), but because my sister fell into a Christian cult so this is an example that quickly comes to mind (her “church” had a real goofy interpretation of this that a lot of new American Christian Cults regularly have). 1 Corinthians 14:3-8, where Paul tells the Corinthians, who were holding mass at the time in Hebrew, that they need to speak to be understood. If they hold mass speaking a language that no one outside their church understands, they only lift themselves up. But if they speak to be understood, then they can lift up everyone.
Sorry to say, while using liberal in the way you do is definitely a nice shorthand to be able to identify people who are safe for you to express your views with, it also alienates those who don’t know what the historical term means. Speak Latin, dammit (that was how the catholic church misinterpreted Paul’s teaching in this letter. And the new Christians use it to promote speaking tongues. Aren’t religions great? /s)
I’d also chime in that definition change and can mean very different things in different places. It’s a bit silly how frequently I see other left leaning people, purely online, demonize anyone using liberal as a label.
To me it comes off as a bit manufactured division. It’s far too abundant to see on spaces like Reddit and certain Lemmy instances, yet near complete absent from offline discourse.
Americans sure love making everything miserably fucking stupid for their own convenience and ignorance.
No, liberals are not leftist ANYWHERE outside the US. And we don’t want that. That’s because that doesn’t make any fucking sense.
No one calls fascist chuds “liberal” anywhere outside of the US, either. And this is literally the first time that I’ve seen anyone call extreme rightwingers “liberal”.
Who’s calling them that? No, that would be libertarians.
It really depends on how you define things; a black and white definition doesn’t account for scenarios where one could logically be both leftist and liberal. So it’s not exactly nonsense.
Okay then, surprise me, what beliefs would a man posses that would lead him to calling himself a liberal leftist?
Yes, and as I already said elsewhere, speak to be understood. In the US, I have to account for semantic drift. You don’t, which is great, but 4chan is an American institution.
So, when the comment we’re all replying under drew the comparison between liberal and 4chan, the underlying context was that this was from an American perspective. So I talked about that, instead of talking about all possible contexts. Isn’t language neat?
Yes, Americans are ignorant, but it’s because of our incredibly loud propaganda. I would ask for kindness, but I’m certainly not gonna force it. I get being frustrated by the American-centric-ness that we all sort of drag around with us. I try to be humble, but it’s really hard to know the shit you don’t know, ya know?
Edit: oops responded to the wrong person
Why when both are accurate
nobody cares about facts or details. they only care about marx = communism.
he was a better economist than he was a political theorist. but his economic works are long, boring, and technical, and his political works are far shorter and dramatic, so that’s all the average undergraduate cares about.
Why would you say he’s a bad political theorist? If we measure the success of a political theory by its ability to take, hold and exercise power Marxism is one of the most successful political ideologies in the world. Sure it never “beat” liberal capitalism but it came the closest of any other theory to challenging it.
Or are you doubting it’s accuracy more then its success?
If we measure the success of a political theory by its ability to take, hold and exercise power
The success of a political theory should be measured by its ability to improve quality of life. Taking power may be a prerequisite, but that alone is not success. Seeing the seizure of state power as an end in itself is a mistake that leads to an authoritarian dead end.
By your definition the billionaires and the politicians they back would be unsuccessful political actors as they’re making the quality of life worse for most people. I’d say they are very successful political actors, and that is the problem.
In my opinion politics is “war without bloodshed”. It is a means by which a group can accomplish certain goals that another group opposes.
One side could have a goal of improving the quality of life for the poor while the other could have a goal of improving it for the rich. Politics is what both sides do to try and accomplish there goals.
Political theory is like military theory in the sense that it lays out strategies to defeat the opposition and accomplish those goals. While a military theory is proven correct by winning a battle, a political theory can be proven correct by winning an election.
Politics is a means, not an end. The end/goal is determined by ideology , class position, self interest, racism etc.
You don’t have to adopt the ruling elites’ definition of success. You talk about politics being a means and not an end, but you still insist on calling winning an election success. If the end/goal is determined by ideology then so is the criteria for success, and my personal criteria for success is improving quality of life for as many people as possible. Winning an election can be a means to that end, but just seizing power does not by itself merit the political theory that enabled it. Fascism has proven quite capable of seizing power in liberal democracies with capitalist economies, but I would certainly not call that success.
A political theory being popular doesn’t mean it’s a good or inherently sound theory. For example, fascists have made the “immigrants are ruining our country” theory very common in the mainstream and people have latched on to it to explain their lived experience. Fascism is “challenging” classical liberalism pretty successfully. That doesn’t make it logically sound or a viable strategy.
The problem I have with Marx discussions are people cherry picking across his work. Some of it is philosophical, some is economic analysis and some is aspirational politics. Usually along the lines of “his theoretical economic framework is mostly sound in X case, therefore his political prognosis is correct”.
Marx was living in a certain time with certain quantifiable constraints and a specific lived perspective, writing on contemporary economic conditions. When I point that out I’m always met with “Well he didn’t need to know about [modern human cognitive research / studies on the specific limitations of earth’s resources / the scalability of technical surveillance & media distribution] to project its effects”.
I vehemently assert that our modern perspective fundamentally outmodes some of his base arguments.
As an example, Marx’s theory has important pieces built around his concept of Gattungswesen and it’s role in alienation of labor. The friction of that alienation can be traced to forces used to pacify labor. His work views it as something that, while malleable with biological aspects, is fundamental to the human experience.
That makes sense from a perspective of the mid 19th century, where phrenology was still a cutting edge science and opium was a crude panecea for most behavioral illness. But in the 21st century we’ve mapped the human genome & are delving into gene editing, are gaining an ever deeper biochemical understanding of the human brain, refining models of addiction, and incrementally advancing pharmaceutical treatment of neuroses. Humans are looking more and more like a solvable biological problem.
Marx assumes that one clear reason we cannot reach a stable society under capitalism is the sheer weight of labor discontent. But as of 2026, I’m of the opinion that we’re far closer to total pacification than liberation of the working class. If you can prescribe serenity to the ruling class while the masses clamor for biological contentment, your political prognosis wildly changes.
Theorists in Marx’s lineage will try to account for this (or similar arguments) by refining his theory to fit reality. But they do so with the prior bias of intending the inevitable victory of the proletariat. That’s not a sound foundation for constructing a theoretical framework and it makes these debates pointless and frustrating.
Precisely. He’s genius at certain things, but just because of that, doesn’t mean the other things he does are good or legitimate.
Communist manifesto was highly accessible, so are many popular texts that espouse simplistic and idealistic theories about the world, politics or not. That doesn’t mean they are accurate, useful, or pragmatic today, or even at the time of their conception.
Agreed that the issue with Marxists generally is their limited understanding of Marx and their vast over use and generalization of his theories, but that’s not exclusive to Marxists. Lots of followers of theories are complete morons and turn critique and insight into blind belief and rhetoric around which they then justify violence in the name of.
Marx ‘positive’ theory makes many social and psychological assumptions that are just… obviously untrue esp in regard to modern theorizing. At it’s heart he replies on a modification of the ‘noble savage’ myth, that there is some ‘true’ or ‘natural’ state of individual human living that is being ‘oppressed’ by ‘society’ and his political system will ‘liberate’ us from it… which when you start to think about that you see how ridiculous that is. But that conception was deeply popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, because everyone was still queuing off of Hobbes. Modern (post WW2) political theories don’t really by so much into any ‘state of nature’. Their idealizing is more of a calculus assuming society already must and will forever exist.
I am not too familiar with modern marxists re-workings of his theories to try and fit ‘reality’ but from what I’ve seen they still heavily borrow a lot of his assumptions about human nature being one way and ‘society/capitalism’ ‘corrupting’ it. They treat his work and their theories more like as if it were religious revelation, rather than taking a more pragmatic approach or one based in the more modern economic and social science understandings we have, maybe of which are only a generation or two old.
because his political theory is basically an outline. it’s not substantial. the communist manifesto is an 80 page pamphlet. it’s not a 1000 page detailed discourse.
how many people do you know who read Das Kapital? which is primarily an economic critique. you ever notice how communist manifesto doesn’t touch much on economic details and sort of hand waves about them idealistically?
He analyzed capitalism (and religion), and his model predicted regular worsening crises when the market couldn’t expand further, leading to its eventual abolition.
How ironic that China/Russia/North Korea etc instead decided to leap on it and realise that it sucks instead
Oligarchical capture of communist states, especially authoritarian ones, is going to recreate capitalism as it concentrates more wealth without more accountability. Plus, capitalist countries don’t play with states with markets they can’t expand into.
Oligarchical capture of communist states, especially authoritarian ones, is going to recreate capitalism as it concentrates more wealth without more accountability
How can it recreate capitalism without a free market? That’s communist not capitalist
China has billionaires and private property. Is that not capitalist enough?
sadly capitalism is more than a left wing progressive 5 word meme
There are volumes of books used to describe and explain and understand the intricacies of modern economies, and people who understand it aren’t coming to this shithole that’s for sure
Whatever the fuck is happening in China is definitely further from communism than it is from capitalism, by any measure
No shit, they tried it, apparently it didn’t go very well:
The Great Leap Forward was an industrialization campaign within China from 1958 to 1962, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). CCP Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to transform the country from an agrarian society into an industrialized society through the formation of people’s communes. The Great Leap Forward led to between 15 and 55 million deaths in mainland China during the 1959–1961 Great Chinese Famine it caused, making it the largest or second-largest famine[1] in human history.[2][3][4][5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
So they decided to switch to a mixed market economy with capitalist elements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_and_opening_up
and apparently things are going pretty well
The reforms led to significant economic growth for China within the successive decades; this phenomenon has since been seen as an “economic miracle”.[1][2][4][5]
Juuuuust kidding, they actually stayed true to their communism roots and shunned the free market, international trade, every worker worked to his or her own ability, owned the means of production, never had any issues or disagreements and they lived happily, ever, after. The end 😇
The market isn’t free so much as it is anarchistic, according to Marx. That is, production isn’t directed by human need, which is, i think, what you refer to as communism, but by profitability. Stuff doesn’t get made based on whether people need it, it isnt made available to buy so that its available for people who need it, its all based on whether companies can make money.
The USA government does direct production somewhat, but directs it in a way that resources and the means of production (which means “the stuff that is used to make other stuff”) goes to the capitalists, individual and corporate, rather than belonging to the people. For example, in the State of Michigan, Nestle pays about $200 per year to extract millions of gallons of water from lake Michigan, meanwhile many people in surrounding areas dont have access to clean fresh water at all. While Flint is, a decade later, replacing lead lines, and government regulation now requires reporting maps of lead lines in municipalities, Chicago conspicuously is exempt, and around 400,000 households are being supplied leads contaminated water.
Another is railroads. Back in the day the government gave land to build them to the rail companies, and used the military to clear and protect the lands so that the rail companies could run them profitably. By the 70’s, passenger and commercial railroads were no longer profitable, and rail companies started going bankrupt, starting with Penn Central, and then cascading to other industries. but they were critical national infrastructure, so the US government first injected subsidies into the businesses (very similar to the “too big to fail” attitude of the 2008 great recession) and then the US Government took over the failed railroads, which created Amtrak for passenger and Conrail for commercial. In 1987, Conrail was sold off to Norfolk Southern and CSX, once the government had fixed up the failing, disintegrating infrastructure, for 1.8 B. A decent return to the taxpayers, but last year CSX generated 3.25 B in profit. Norfolk Southern reported 4.4 billion in income, but paid out a lot in “derailment stabilization” which, despite its mention in financial reports, people are still sick and reporting bad water in East Palestine OH. Also talk to someone who works for a major railroad and you’ll hear about worsening safety conditions due to deregulation. So the company is free to make money, but the people are not free to live in peace, and to raise our children in good health.
Depending on how you look at it, and this is how I look at it, the market isn’t free because it is controlled by the capitalists. We are allowed to use it in limited ways, like we can sell our labor on it, but when it comes to producing and selling commodities, there are often fees, restrictions, monopolizing factors that prevent people from converting our own work into a good living. In the USA, the government ensures high returns on capital investments for the capitalists. In China the system is at least somewhat blended and contradictory. Imo its very difficult to pin down exactly what the Chinese system actually is. State Capitalist doesn’t really fit, social democracy doesn’t really fit, full communist doesn’t really fit. But in the USA, the “free market” invokes Marx in “On the Question of Free Trade”:
Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.
Oh, Russia and North Korea did really made some leaps - look at them now, such great places to leave!
Russian living standards were comparable to the west under the USSR despite not having the plundered wealth of the global south to prop them up. Modern Russia’s conditions are entirely due to its embrace of capitalism.
despite not having the plundered wealth of the global south
yeah, they plundered all the lands they were supposed to liberate from the russian empire instead
Plundered them by building schools and homes.
Russian chauvanism was an issue with the USSR, but you can’t just pretend they were the same as their western counterparts who had entirely different social and economic pressures determining their actions.
I’m sure all those school and homes were really helpful in 1930s Ukraine. Oh, and can’t forget Poland. And all the indigenous peoples in North Asia were really grateful at still being part of the empire.
The same as their western counterparts? Well, if we go by Nazi collaboration and ethnic cleansing levels, it was pretty damn close. If we go by history rewriting levels, Soviets did so much of it there are even people today that insist they were a net positive. Such as yourself.
He’s delusional, take him to the infirmary! 😂
by the way, I know this will be sad for you to hear but the soviet union collapsed! I know I know, it’s sad, only 30 years ago, too soon 🥲
You really need to work on your reading comprehension. The collapse of the USSR was a bad thing for every country involved. Have you seen modern Russia?
Have you seen the USSR?
The Holodomor,[a] also known as the Ukrainian famine,[8][9][b] was a massive man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
But during his visit, Yeltsin insisted on an impromptu visit to a mid-sized Texan supermarket called Randall’s before heading to the airport. He wanted to see what the average American shopping experience looked like, without tour guides and diplomats to airbrush the experience for him — and what he found shocked him to his core.
“When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people.” — Yeltsin’s autobiography
On the flight home, he apparently said with his head buried in his hands, raging at the lies of Soviet propaganda and how his country was betraying the working class. An aid who was with him on that flight home reckoned it was when the last traces of Bolshevism left him.
https://readmedium.com/how-a-texas-supermarket-helped-defeat-communism-953543403aa9
Sounds fuckin amazing m8
They should show this to you kids still in school, this is a miracle of production, the humble supermarket, you don’t think twice about it, but in the USSR this was considered incredible
Have you seen modern Russia?
Yeah I seen it, I seen it trying to take back Ukraine real hard and Ukraine telling the USSR to fuck right off we don’t want your shitty little union, it sucked enough the first time around (see Holodomor)
I’d like to thank Communism for making me realise how good I have it :)
There’s no Communism in either of the places
Then there’s no capitalism here, so no worries
There’s no communism in North Korea?
You think the workers own the means of production in North Korea? Cause I’m pretty sure that’s glorious leader who does
You mean this one?
The Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK)[a] is the ruling party of North Korea. Founded in 1949 from a merger between the Workers’ Party of North Korea and the Workers’ Party of South Korea, the WPK is the oldest active party in Korea. It also controls the Korean People’s Army, North Korea’s armed forces. The WPK is the largest party represented in the Supreme People’s Assembly and coexists with two other legal parties that are completely subservient to the WPK and must accept the WPK’s “leading role” as a condition of their existence. Kim Jong Un is the current party leader, serving as General Secretary of the WPK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers'_Party_of_Korea
😅
But like I said, here’s a bit of AI for you, feel free to fact check it:
Marx and Engels described communism as the final stage of human society, emerging after:
Capitalism collapses due to its internal contradictions (e.g., class struggle, overproduction).
Marx assumed this would happen naturally in advanced capitalist societies (e.g., Germany, UK) with strong worker movements.
Instead, communism was imposed by force in pre-industrial, agrarian societies (e.g., Russia, China, Cuba) where the conditions Marx described didn’t exist.
And as I said in my first reply: https://aussie.zone/comment/23631616
How ironic that China/Russia/North Korea etc instead decided to leap on it and realise that it sucks instead
or tldr: I’m sure capitalism will collapse any day now 🤣
You think what China is doing is capitalism?
Cool, lets get the kind of capitalism where we plan for how much of each resource and what price industry needs every 5 years, build enough housing rent is <300USD and food like 2 bucks in major cities, I can get an xray, ultrasound, and consult for 12 bucks (this is still too much), and occasionally we take a capitalist out back and shoot them if they get too political or end up responsible for the death of workers.
Working a job is not neccessarily making a contribution to society, not a good contribution oftentimes to be sure.
He was also wealthy to begin with, as was Engels. But his books and writings are a contribution in any case even if he didn’t get rich off them as OP suggests here.
Russia did though, before the revolution Russia was still mostly agrarian and way less developed then western europe. Under communism they developed faster then any other country up to that point and nearly caught up to the west.
People often compare the soviets to western europe and say they’re poor, but Russia was half a century behind the west before the revolution, and the revolution/ civil war caused even more destruction. A better comparison would be a country like Mexico which also was mostly agrarian and just finished a revolution in 1920. Compared to that the Soviet union did pretty well living standards wise.
Just look at there war performance , WWI Russia lost to Germany whose main focus was on the western front, WWII Russia was able to halt Germanies full force after they had conquered France and drive them back.
A better comparison would be a country like Mexico
A better comparison would be Finland, which was literally a part of Russia.
We kept market economy. Russia didn’t.
Capitalism sucks, but so do planned economies. Socialist market economies are the thing.
Also WWII Russia won by having tons of disposable troops to toss at any enemy position. Not because their economy was magnificent.
Russia also was unable to take Finland, despite us having way worse military equipment and way less people.
Finland was much more industrialized, urbanized and developed then the rest of Russia prior to 1917. It was barely even part of Russia as it was mostly autonomous with its own parliament. So it’s not as good of a comparison.
Russia didn’t win the war solely through manpower. They had just as much of a man power advantage in WWI and still lost because they’re industry was shit. Without Stalin’s obsession with increasing steel and war production, heavily mechanized battles like the battle of kursk would’ve been lost. A 10 to 1 advantage in manpower won’t matter if that 1 guy is in a tank and the 10 guys don’t even have a gun.
IDK if that meme is outdated or fabricated but the current wiki page shows way less casualties on the Soviet side and more even strength in man power. Even then it shows the lopsided Soviet industrial capacity with how many tanks and planes they had. They were wasted on a war in terrain that would’ve been difficult without snow, and even more so with.
Yeah the soviets weren’t able to fully conquer finland but they did get a lot of there demands and a good chunk of territory. If the war had dragged out longer and the snow thawed then finland probably wouldn’t have been able to hold them off for much longer in conventional war, though a guerilla campaign would probably be effective.
A 10 to 1 advantage in manpower won’t matter if that 1 guy is in a tank and the 10 guys don’t even have a gun.
You’ve never heard of the Winter War, I see.
Russia had a massive war industry in comparison to Finland, where it was literally non-existent.
Even then it shows the lopsided Soviet industrial capacity with how many tanks and planes they had.
Finland had a couple of WWI tanks. And I mean just a couple. When the USSR attacked, we had already placed an order for new tanks from the Brits (Vickers 6 ton tanks) but the first ones were delivered in 1938 and the deliveries weren’t complete when the Ruskis attacked.
So they literally had more manpower and more war industry, especially armored vehicles. Tanks.
They were wasted on a war in terrain that would’ve been difficult without snow, and even more so with.
We found the Russian tanks actually really useful and they helped us keep Vanja at bay. So it wasn’t the terrain, it was user error.
Yeah the soviets weren’t able to fully conquer finland but they did get a lot of there demands
Please do elaborate. Yeah we lost Karjala and the NE arm. But that’s like saying the US won the Vietnam War. They most certainly didn’t. Perhaps people won’t say Vietnam or Finland straight up won, but both show just how much determination matters.
Because in both cases the invading force had a lot of people from thousands of kilometres away who had never even seen the land they were invading.
So what do you base this “Finland was much more industrialised” bit? Because we really weren’t much of a country until Nokia. Really the only thing Finland made was what you wiped your arse on. As in we had a well growing forest industry, and still do. But other than that, we weren’t highly industrialised in the 20th century. That only came in like the 70’s.
You know people were on rations right? Like my grandma went on and on about rationing. And my dad still had a booze card, although that wasn’t just for rationing because of lack of resources (the Bratt system is what I advocate in unison with legalising drugs).
and the snow thawed then finland probably wouldn’t have been able to hold them off for much longer in conventional war
As if motitus in the woods would be any different with snow or not. We’re good at using the forests, no matter the time of the year. You know there was another war, right? The Continuation War which lasted from 1941 to 1944. Where we actually advanced into Russia. As in, we invaded Russia.
That wasn’t a guerrilla campaign. It was an open invasion. And a successful one.
It started in June and by September we’d gained all the previously lost ground. It doesn’t snow in September.
Seems like you’re a bit sore about Ruskis sucking so hard?
In the Winter War Finns lost 20-30 tanks. Russia lost SEVERAL THOUSAND.
But yeah, Ruskis would’ve deffo had Finland if the snow had only thawed ;>>>>>
Please do elaborate. Yeah we lost Karjala and the NE arm.
Yeah those were the soviets demands prior to the war. They got even more territory then they were demanding in fact. This is more like the Korean war, the US went in with the goal of protecting the south, then they got cocky and thought they could take the whole peninsula and got pushed back by China until they got to the modern border. They achieved there initial war aims but didn’t get there maximalist aims.
So what do you base this “Finland was much more industrialised” bit?
At the time of the revolution finland was more urbanized then the rest of Russia, the population was more concentrated in Helsinki, like you said involved in paper milling. In order to industrialize you need to get the peasants into the cities to work in factories. To do that you need an efficient agricultural system that can produce the same amount of food with less man power.
Prior to the revolution finlands agricultural production was on similar levels to other Nordic countries with land being consolidated under more efficient middling farmers, which freed up agricultural laborers to go work in the cities.
The rest of Russia was still operating mostly on pseudo-serfdom with a bunch of rich landlords ,who didn’t have the knowledge to increase efficiency, driving dirt poor peasants, who didn’t have the incentive to increase efficiency as it would all go to the landlord anyway. Because of this Russia had the most backward, inefficient agricultural sector in all of Europe. This meant they needed more peasents working the land instead of moving to the city and working in factories
This changed when Stalin forced the collectivization of the land and the adoption of modern agricultural practices and forced peasents to move to the cities. While this did increase agricultural efficiency, it didn’t do so by enough to compensate for all the new people in the cities eating food instead of out in the country making food and caused a massive famine.
This had a huge cost in lives but it did give results as russias industrial capacity increased massively, as shown by there ability to churn out tanks so easily during the war.
This wouldn’t have happened under capitalism or market socialism as it took the very heavy hand of the state to do all of this. If it were capitalism the peasents wouldn’t have been pushed to the cities as quickly, and there probably also wouldn’t have been a famine.
At the time of the revolution finland was more urbanized then the rest of Russia, the population was more concentrated in Helsinki, like you said involved in paper milling
Are you fucking high?
Do you know where paper comes from? What Finland is covered by? What stopped the Ruskis? Forest.
By what inane and/or insane logic do you think that forestry is an urban activity? :DDD
In 1939, Leningrad had 3.1 million people. The entirety of Finland had 3.7 million people. Helsinki had ~250k people.
Most of Finland was just rural. You’re spouting complete fantasy.
Hell, I’m from one of the largest cities in Finland and a vast majority of it is still considered very much rural, there’s only like a square kilometer or so in the centre that’s actually city city.
Zero facts, utter nonsense. The only thing we have is large docks, because we needed large docks for the export for the forest industry. That’s why we build the largest cruise ships in the world (fact).
But you’d be very silly indeed to think that only logging was done on-site, instead of actually making the paper mills and cellulose factories where the logging happens to save driving through half the country.
Most of the country is still empty. Not as empty as Russia, because we just don’t have the space, but it’s not far. Russia is the largest country in the world with vaaaast empty spaces. Finland is quite small. Yet we still only have double the population density. (For comparison the US has almost 10x that, Germany 25x, UK ~29x).
We also had double the population density in 1939.
According to this site
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/rus/russia/urban-population
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/fin/finland/urban-population
The urbanisation for both countries in 1960 was very similar at ~55%. However Russia urbanised quicker and then baselined, whereas Finland grew slowly. Ofc that doesn’t tell us much of the 40s but they didn’t have the data and I was loathe to waste time
So yeah, what goals did Russia achieve, if we put away the land claims. Which by the way wasn’t in any way comparable to the splitting of the Koreas. Finland didn’t split in half.
By the end of WWII, Finland lost roughly 12% of our pre-war territory. Korea literally split in half, 48% to 52%. Not comparable. There isn’t an active Finnic population on the Russian side claiming to be the “real Finland”. We lost 0% of our national unity.
My grandma was a refugee thanks to Russkis. She’s still my grandma, spoke Finnish, lived in Finland and I’m Finnish as well. I don’t think the same thing happened in Korea.
So what “initial aims” did the USSR achieve? Their initial aim at invading Finland was to take a tenth of it?
Russia was operating on planned economies, which just don’t function yet. Perhaps in the 24th century, but not yet. For instance they didn’t want to label products like screws, so that people and factories are equal. But that also meant no culpability for the factories or workers for shoddy quality. Which very soon led to them having to actually label the products, ie sort of branding them. Ofc “factory 141 of the worker’s paradise” or smth isn’t exactly unique branding, but to anyone who’s been in the military, numbers can be as much branded as the Coke Santa. For instance a lot of people will know the 101st Airborne Division. That’s just a number.
So despite their ideals with the planed economy, the USSR actually ended up doing a lot of market economy things, because they’re not in market economies “just because” but because they have functionality. Capitalism might take those things too far and pervert them, but Soviet communism didn’t see any value in any of them and failed.
Anyway, eagerly waiting your response on how forestry is an urban activity lololol
I never said forestry was an urban industry, I said milling was, just like mining coal and iron aren’t urban but they’re indictive of the urban industry of steel production.
I’m also not saying that Finland is a dense country, just that its population was more concentrated then Russia at 1917.
The point I’m trying to make is that Russia on the eve of the revolution was less urbanized and industrialized then Finland. By the 1960s they had caught up, as you have shown, and I am saying that it was communism that allowed them to catch up.
On the eve of the revolution / independence 66% of Finns were working in agriculture/forestry while 12% were working in industry while in 1914 Russia was 80% agriculture and 2% industrial
Then, as you’ve shown, by the war Russia had caught up to Finland. I am saying this is because of communism and Stalin’s five year plans.
As for the goals, prior to the war the soviets demanded:
- A border shift on the Karelian Isthmus, pushing it back from Leningrad (the USSR wanted roughly 25-30 km more buffer)
- A lease on Hanko (a peninsula) for a naval base
- Several islands in the Gulf of Finland
- Parts of the Rybachi Peninsula in the Arctic north
- In exchange, the USSR offered Finland a larger but less valuable swath of territory in Karelia further north
Finland refused, the Soviets invaded and in the peace treaty the soviets got:
- The entire Karelian Isthmus, including Viipuri (Finland’s second-largest city)
- Significant additional territory around Lake Ladoga
- Parts of the Salla region and Rybachi Peninsula
- A lease on Hanko (not just the original ask, but now as a full military base)
So they achieved there original goals and then some. They didn’t conquer finland, but it’s debatable whether that was a goal in the first place.
My comparison to korea wasn’t about scale or dividing the country, it was about setting an initial goal, getting ambitious and trying to go for it all, then pulling back and still achieving the initial goal.
Not saying a planned economy is always the right path to development, by the 1960s the soviets had stalled out due to lack of innovation. I’m saying that it can lead to rapid development when catching up, as innovation isn’t required so much as organizing to copy existing systems. In the 1930s the Soviet union did that and developed the country faster then even capitalism could’ve done.
The point I’m trying to make is that Russia on the eve of the revolution was less urbanized and industrialized then Finland.
Yeah and you have zero sources for that. Everything points the other way.
The article also says that Finland was (and is) an agrarian society. You’re just trying to defend USSR losses, clearly.
“Noo noo USSR had it worse and less industry and Finns were all in cities, doing forestry.”
Fucking insane man stop the brain rot propaganda
Lots of countries have done that. Has nothing to do with communism, so much as a leadership of the nation that was desperate to modernize due to fear of being invaded or falling into international irrelevancy.
Dead wrong as usual lol
My comment was in reply to another one saying something along the lines of “Russia poor because communism”. So it was more about how communism can lead to development.
Either way though I would say its development was largely because of communism. The czarist regime faced similar pressures and didn’t develop like Russia did in the 30s
An even better comparison would be Poland which faced an even greater existential threat from its neighbors and didn’t industrialize as quickly. For example Poland built about 150 of there tp7 tanks in the interwar period while the Soviet union had around 25,000 tanks built before the war. Even accounting for the Soviet unions 5-6x population that’s still a lot more production capacity per capita.
The Soviet industrialization during the interwar period was unprecedented and relied on a command economy to force the peasants off the land and into the cities, at the cost of a famine that killed millions.
Of course, those 25000 tanks were probably built by Gulag slaves and children, and had shit welds and no QC. Also y’know being willing to kill millions with a famine. Had Poland just done that they’d have bigger numbers too I’d bet.
Anything’s possible when you make shit up
Millions of people starved to death under the Soviet Union. it sucked.
Also do you think Korea was some developed country at the beginning of the 20th century. They had it hard in WWII and the Korean war. How did SK become a developed country and North Korea remains a horrible place to live.
Perhaps central planning can be beneficial for a developing country, if you don’t get ideology brained and do stupid mistakes like the Soviet Union and China did which resulted in famines. But even then once you get past basic needs, socialism stagnates. Who determines what people “need”? What if the powers that be decide “the people need more tanks?”
Once a society reaches a certain level of prosperity and people have some disposable income, it’s better to have a system that allows people to choose to do what they want with that income. Socialism fails at that point.
Once a society reaches a certain level of prosperity and people have some disposable income, it’s better to have a system that allows people to choose to do what they want with that income. Socialism fails at that point.
Just to be clear capitalism and markets aren’t equivocal. Market socialism is a thing.
Socialism is a really big umbrella term… similar to “democracy” there are a bunch of different ways to actually apply it. State socialism is only one scheme for it.
There were famines before the Soviet Union. That’s kind of how things worked before modern industrial agriculture.
As for Korea… just think about it for 30 seconds… I’ll give you time…
…ok: South Korea was allied with the US, which helped rebuild it and became a trading partner. North Korea is an enemy of the US and has spent it’s entire existence being blockaded and provoked by the world’s largest superpower. Gee, why might they have had different economic outcomes?
As for the central planning point: idk. That’s something to figure out. It’s not even really the important part of socialism/communism. The important part is making sure the state can’t be taken over by a ruling class. Capitalism absolutely can’t keep capitalists from taking over the state. Whatever we should do, we don’t get to choose until we get the government in the hands of the people.
A lot of modern-day critique of communist regimes like Stalin’s are critiqued in a way that the problems they had are not only unique to communism, but were due to it. My great-grandfather was jailed into a gulag due to arrest quotas and being at the wrong place in 1956 in Hungary. By 2013, he was instructed to stop mentioning the arrest quotas by the NGO he used to volunteer to (due to “future US presidents might want to use them”), and that he’d get money if he made up a lie that would make it seem like he was arrested for being a conservative christian or something like that.
Never made any financial contributions, I assume OP means, completely missing the mark about Marx being anticapitalist. Ignoring the obvious: We still talk about Karl Marx, even make unprompted greentexts about him, proving a social contribution
We still talk about Karl Marx, even make unprompted greentexts about him, proving a social contribution
Furthermore, you actually have the time to do something other than slave away to the bourgeoisie. Sure, you might not have a lot of it in your own experience, but child labour and 16 hour days were completely normal before Marx.
Marx had the idea the surplus value the capitalists are actually profiting off of is the commodity of the worker’s putting in time. I mean, he didn’t really consider it a commodity, just pointed out how capitalism commodifies human labour.
But yeah pretty much all trade unions and socialist parties owe their existence to Marx.
“Didn’t make any contributions” such ragebait
His books and writings are a contribution anyway. Plus he was already wealthy so idk if mooching off his family is accurate at all.
He didn’t oppose religion that much, definitely not in “a reddit atheist” way, opium has been commonly used in medicine as a painkiller those days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people
Tldr, he is saying religion is a human response to inhuman conditions.
He was saying that people need someone to tell them on Sunday that working until you die for nothing is fine because it’ll all be great after you die. He made a strong argument for religion just being another capitalist tool that keeps the people in line, doped up just enough to work another week. Sure, if opiate addiction in response to abuse is human, then that’s pretty damn human.
He even argued that religion mirrors the hierarchical structures of the government it exists under, which is pretty spot on.
I never took his writing to be pro-religion.
life has always been inhuman. religion has been around forever, so has oppression, violence, and hate.
and we are still inventing new ways to hate, oppress, and do violence to each other over perceived differences. yay social media!
If religion is the opiate of the people, then communism is the heroin of the people.
:3 Communism is the heroine of the people? :3
You’d be able to insult communism better if you spent even a little bit of time actually reading about it. Have a crack mate, it’s not too hard.
Lol gottem
Bold words from a 4chan chud
if there is to be talk about philosophy, there should be less trifling with the label “atheism” (which reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man), and that instead the content of philosophy should be brought to the people.
–Karl Marx, Letter to Arnold Ruge, 1842
Anon is right on the Marx.
Yes, and I think me arguing “meet people where they are” or “speak to be understood” better fits what you’re saying than the guy digging his heels in over the definition of liberal
