[HN Gopher] A brief history of the absurdities of the Soviet Union
___________________________________________________________________
A brief history of the absurdities of the Soviet Union
Author : Maro
Score : 118 points
Date : 2025-08-09 15:52 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (laurivahtre.ee)
(TXT) w3m dump (laurivahtre.ee)
| whycome wrote:
| > Recent Russian studies put the count of lost lives and unborn
| children as high as 170 million people.
|
| wait, does this just mean pregnancies that didn't reach full
| term? Or like, a hypothetical number of kids that could have been
| born?
| j4coh wrote:
| Lost lives and lost potential is how I read it.
| mc32 wrote:
| The 170MM figure is referring to all losses of life like the
| purges, man-made famines (Holodomor), inept ww ii strategies,
| as well as "unborn" children. This last one has no reference so
| it's impossible to know what that means or how many people they
| attribute to that.
|
| That said, the problem is a cultural one. The communists poured
| gas on the tendencies of the Tsars and modern Russia suffers
| from that legacy still. The legacy is a peasant (serf) : master
| way of thinking.
|
| Culture is hard to cure and the change has to come from within.
| Japan had a similar problem but most of the sharp edges were
| dulled when they made a deal (surrender) with the Americans.
|
| You also see this tendency to cling to bad cultural habits by
| some enclaves of immigrants. It can take decades of new
| generations to wipe some of those bad tendencies away. Some
| people see that as erasure of culture as a bad thing but it can
| also bring good.
| H8crilA wrote:
| I don't know who is downvoting this comment, but the comment
| is correct. Russia is a state, not a nation. The Kremlin, in
| all incarnations - the Tsars, Stalin, the Communist Party,
| Putin, even the Mongols that used to run it before Moscow,
| have always been perceived more like an alien force that has
| landed onto this land, and now one has to submit to it,
| without questions. This is a lesson that parents pass onto
| their children, implicitly or explicitly. It could become a
| nation-state in a relatively short order, though that's
| certainly going to be bloody. And nukes could be on the table
| as well - this is why the US was actually opposed to the USSR
| collapse, a fact that's not widely known today.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| It's a bold and unsubstantiated claim. In English language
| there's a lot of confusion because the same word Russian is
| used both for citizenship and ethnicity, but in Russian
| they are different and such confusion doesn't exist. If you
| run polls in Russia, ethnic minorities won't say that they
| are Russians using the word for ethnicity, but they will
| certainly confirm that they are Russian citizens belonging
| to the same cultural space (and in that sense some may even
| use the word for ethnicity, e.g. "I'm Tatar, but I'm
| Russian too"). Nation is defined not by the government but
| by shared history and culture and may cross ethnic
| boundaries. Russia is big, but its people have developed
| the shared culture, the pride, the sense of belonging which
| qualify it for a nation. This comes on top of all
| geographical and ethnic identities, which make the picture
| more diverse and complex, but those identities are rarely
| stronger (even in regions like Chechnya).
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You can play with the scope to tell the story you want. If you
| scope in WW2 losses as well, about 30M Soviets died. Some other
| number were injured or disabled. If you look at fertility rates
| at the time, you can project how many children would have been
| born, and I'm sure you could be at that number.
|
| Additionally, the after effects of the war and Stalin persisted
| - the loss of men resulted in higher numbers of childless
| women.
|
| I lack the information to assess whether 170M is a meaningful
| number, but on a relative basis, the United States and even
| China didn't contend with the sheer destruction and oppression
| that Soviet people did, and had higher fertility rates. It's
| not a "pro" or "anti" Soviet/Russian discussion - the nation's
| people suffered in various ways, which had an end result.
| zdragnar wrote:
| The Bolsheviks were the first to get a country to legalize
| elective abortion in 1920. They did so as a temporary measure
| because so many women would have difficulty raising a child in
| the post-war environment.
|
| It got to the point where hospitals were overwhelmed and they
| started setting up dedicated clinics.
|
| They tried making it illegal again in the 30s but brought it
| back in 1955 because there was such demand.
|
| So, presumably this 170 million number is written by someone
| who believes a fetus is a unique human life and the prevalence
| of elective abortion was so high as to be a not insignificant
| number of "lost lives".
| jonah wrote:
| By what actual scientific definition is a fetus, not a unique
| human life? They have their own unique DNA, brain,
| circulatory system, fingerprints, etc, etc.
|
| In my understanding, any definition that discounts there
| individuality is primarily there to depersonalize them and
| thus justify their killing.
| unnamed76ri wrote:
| To justify their killing and assuage the conscience of any
| who have had one/had their wife/girlfriend have one.
| totallynothoney wrote:
| That's a philosophical discussion, not scientific fact.
| (The scientific facts of fetal development are of course
| important for the discussion) I'm sure we would entirely
| disagree when a fetus gets qualia or becomes a human being,
| but that doesn't necessarily mean one of us is ignoring
| science.
|
| Unique DNA is irrelevant (a clone would be a person),
| lacking a viable circulatory system or fingerprints doesn't
| mean lack of personhood. Someone completely braindead a
| person or closer to a cadaver? Not everybody agrees on the
| same.
|
| >In my understanding, any definition that discounts there
| individuality is primarily there to depersonalize them and
| thus justify their killing.
|
| That's bad faith. Let me try one myself, all anti-choice
| people are just useful fools in the ultra-conservative
| campaign to maintain authoritarian control of the
| relationships and bodies of the people. In my country
| divorce was illegal until 2004, the same party that
| maligned it's legalization took condoms out of UN care
| packages after an earthquake. They would absolutely
| prohibit Plan B, limit condoms to married couples and make
| homosexuality illegal if they in had the power.
|
| In the US, the poor will be kept barefoot and pregnant,
| while the Republican senator and the megapastor will get an
| abortion for their mistress.
|
| Well, that's easy. Just think everyone else is evil and
| stupid :^)
| justsomejew wrote:
| The fact that you cannot even see how ridiculuous this piece of
| propaganda is, says also about your ability to reason. The
| great demographic drop in the Soviet Union happened after the
| WWII (you remember that Soviet Union defeated the nazis,
| right?), but even that was not "170 million people" and was due
| to the war started by the nazis (whatever your propaganda
| claims about that).
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| > death toll of communist terror
|
| I don't think this was the fault of that socioeconomic system
| known as "communism". Yet the article tries to push that
| assumption a few times.
|
| > Hitler as the biggest criminal and murderer of the 20th
| century. It is hard to believe that, actually, Stalin murdered
| significantly more. Not only are the crimes of communism not
| condemned, but they are by and large not known.
|
| Right, so it was this particular implementation of communism,
| epitomized by Stalin's policies.
| rwmj wrote:
| Ah ha, didn't have to wait long for _" we've not tried real
| communism yet"_.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| But if we want to be precise, he is right - in theory, it
| wasn't the fault of that socioeconomic system itself, and
| logically you can't exclude the possibility that in the
| future there might be a communist system without causing
| millions of deaths, unfortunately in practice all such
| systems, including the one in Russia and China, had enormous
| toll.
|
| The reason for it, in my opinion, stems from the origin: in
| an ideal world, the whole population would agree the system
| is fantastic and introduce it, based on mutual respect. What
| actually happens is that crowds get furious and start killing
| and introduce a new system by violence, so it's hard to
| expect a nice fruit from a rotten seed.
| nradov wrote:
| Genocide is the inevitable result of communism. There is no
| plausible way to avoid this outcome.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| The theory is a perfectly spherical cow - impossible in
| practice, laughable in imagination. We have a firm
| understanding from historical data of how it fails, even if
| it doesn't match the imagination of its proponents.
| rwmj wrote:
| You _almost_ had it right there at the end. Communism isn
| 't compatible with how humans normally act. You can't
| introduce a system which is incompatible with humans and
| expect it to work.
|
| Anyway next time you experiment with utopias, try not to
| bring along hundreds of millions of unwilling participants.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > Communism isn't compatible with how humans normally
| act.
|
| A correction: _most_ humans. There are a few who like
| communism. Why not them live their lives as they want?
| Communities like the Longo Mai are a living proof this is
| absolutely possible on a tiny scale when a willing subset
| is involved.
| seiferteric wrote:
| I think Communism is a 19th century pseudoscience idea
| like phrenology. There's no evidence these things are
| real but phrenology was easy to discount while many
| people still choose to believe in Communism despite lack
| of evidence of it working long term.
| endoblast wrote:
| I think you've got it the wrong way around. All ideology is
| wrong, incorrect and fails in contact with reality. The
| true purpose of ideology (or 'the system') is to provide
| its adherents with the excuse they need to act badly. It
| could be relatively mild attempts to increase social status
| through hypocrisy and virtue-signalling. Or it could be to
| commit murder, torture and so on.
|
| As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it:
|
| _Ideology--that is what gives evildoing its long-sought
| justification and gives the evildoer the necessary
| steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory
| which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in
| his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches
| and curses but will receive praise and honors._
|
| What obscures matters is that evil tends to operate in
| layers with each layer deceived by the layer above it in
| the hierarchy (or _below_ it, if you prefer a lowerarchy).
| So at the bottom there is a multitude of relatively decent
| people who don 't want to kill and really do believe in the
| system.
| dwb wrote:
| Communism is very widely defined as a classless, moneyless,
| stateless society. So no, it has not existed in any modern
| society. Criticise the Soviet Union all you like - any good
| Marxist should do the same - but this is a very weak put-
| down.
| kkrs wrote:
| That wasn't the only issue with communism. It was so
| inefficient it failed to make enough food. Soviet style central
| planning was popular in India as well, which was a democracy.
| Resulting shortages and low economic growth led to what was
| avoidable deaths and malnutriton. Once you take price out of
| the picture, society stops being self-organizing and has to be
| told what to do. That socioeconomic system failed horribly and
| yet people keep trying to spin fantasies about it.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Don't try this at live human beings _again_. I don 't care
| about your nice theory that could theoretically work.
|
| Just don't. I was born in such a miserable system and I
| certainly don't want to die in one.
|
| One century of hell was enough.
| vectorcrumb wrote:
| Might this be available in some ebook format somewhere?
| jthnme wrote:
| created epub for my personal use, obviously publicly available,
| therefore hoping not an issue to share:
| https://limewire.com/d/r2ZTu#rcSoipCE3E
| Herodotus38 wrote:
| This may be covered but one absurdity that I came across was
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
|
| When I was an undergraduate working in a molecular biology lab my
| two mentors, Andrei and Svetlana were Russian emigrants. Andrei
| taught me, in the 00s, that he couldn't do the level of molecular
| biology in Russia because the downstream effects decades later
| put them far behind in the technical and cultural knowhow.
| Genetics was banned.
| baxtr wrote:
| _> More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or
| imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet
| campaign to suppress scientific opponents._
|
| Scientists were executed... ok wow
| cowcity wrote:
| Almost certainly not true. Stalin's purges were in the 30s
| and scientists were surely executed in various contexts (same
| in the West) but not in the context claimed by this article.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| What? Wow. There's a bot for every crackpot now eh?
| H8crilA wrote:
| Low quality bots are the most jarring.
| piombisallow wrote:
| "Same in the West" lmao, when were scientists executed in
| the West? The 1500s?
| bdamm wrote:
| Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the
| present controls the past.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Of course HN has tankies.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| And lots of them
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _scientists were surely executed in various contexts
| (same in the West)_
|
| Name one.
| cowcity wrote:
| Julius Rosenburg is an obvious one. The Nazis executed
| gobs of scientists. And I'm certain I could find other
| examples if needed, but that is off the top of my head.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _Julius Rosenburg is an obvious one._
|
| Who was executed for being a _spy_ , not for holding
| unorthodox scientific beliefs.
| ponector wrote:
| Giordano Bruno
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| How about one that doesn't predate capitalism?
| LtWorf wrote:
| So... Giordano Bruno?
| ponector wrote:
| Wasn't it a capitalism, the system Roman empire had?
| gambiting wrote:
| It had elements of capitalism, like private ownership and
| focus on trade via monetary means, but its economy was
| largely based on slavery and your position within the
| system was based almost entirely on where you were born
| and to whom. It's a pre-industrial system, capitalism
| isn't really the correct description for it.
| ponector wrote:
| Sounds like USA in the early days. Not a capitalism as
| well?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| As relevant to this discussion as Joan of Arc.
| ponector wrote:
| But it highlights the absurdity of the statement that
| West also purged scientists.
|
| I can think about Turing, he was definitely is a victim
| of the system, but not because he was a scientist.
| Duanemclemore wrote:
| There's a great episode of the podcast The Constant about
| Lysenkoism. Definitely worth a listen.
|
| I can't find the link at the moment, apologies.
| mindslight wrote:
| Awareness of the concept has gained renewed importance in 2025.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Genetics was banned.
|
| During the 1940-s. And yet it undermined the molecular biology
| research in the USSR. It's very easy to destroy the
| institutions of scientific research.
|
| I'm sure, nothing like this can happen in the US. It's not
| possible that people in power will just use theological and
| ideological reasons to just deny sound scientific results.
| croes wrote:
| I guess the post is caused by this article
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843605
| kergonath wrote:
| Entertaining, but not to be taken too seriously. The author
| himself says that it's very subjective and not thoroughly fact-
| checked. Even then, the digs at the Kievan Rus' are... well,
| absurd. Also, I don't know of any European country without its
| share of demented and paranoid rulers. But England is not Henry
| VIII and Germany is not Hitler.
|
| Also, this
|
| > But let us start with the Communist Manifesto which is the
| holiest tome of communist ideology and can be called the red
| gospel.
|
| is a pearl of unintended absurd humour. In this case, when
| someone applies their beliefs and frame of mind to a foreign
| object without actually understanding it.
|
| In the end I agree with the author that all life if absurd, it's
| just a matter of point of view.
| keiferski wrote:
| I look forward to the day when the capitalist and communist eras
| of the 19th-21st century are analyzed coldly, in the way we look
| at mercantilism or medieval market towns today.
|
| Because it _really_ seems like both are increasingly inadequate
| systems for handling modernity, and the obsession with defining
| one as intrinsically evil and the other the obvious superior
| option (I'll let you choose which is which) is such a flattening,
| unhelpful approach.
|
| Personally, having moved from capitalist America to post-
| communist Poland, a few things seem true to me:
|
| ...the communist era in Poland was a disaster and the country
| today is unquestionably better off as a modified capitalist one;
|
| ...contemporary American culture really seems to be struggling
| under an unquestioned capitalist ethic;
|
| ...the conflict seems artificially egged on from think tanks,
| corporations, academics, and maybe even the simple alliteration
| of the letter _c_ (i.e., you don't hear nearly as much about
| Capitalism vs. Socialism, even though historically that's a more
| accurate label of what governments actually were.)
|
| ...and that neither capitalism or communism has ever really been
| implemented in a pure sense.
|
| Which is all a long way of saying that Mark Fisher's quote seems
| more true every day, not as a pessimistic statement but just one
| describing a lack of imagination and the inability to transcend
| the debate:
|
| "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of
| capitalism."
| nradov wrote:
| I can imagine a lot. In every possible scenario, the end of
| capitalism means disaster for the entire human race.
| keiferski wrote:
| This is exactly the kind of low effort, no imagination
| response that I was referring to. No discussion of
| alternatives, no acknowledgement that maybe there are some
| issues with the current capitalist system, etc.
|
| Just apocalyptic language, with no openness to the idea that
| yeah, communism was a terrible system, but maybe that doesn't
| automatically imply that contemporary capitalism is
| inherently the best system.
| nradov wrote:
| Do you have anything constructive to offer or are you going
| to stick with low effort criticism without even proposing
| an alternative? So far all you have are weak complaints,
| totally disconnected from objective reality.
| vintagedave wrote:
| Although I would argue with you that the communist
| governments were socialist -- they were not, at least under
| our current understanding of socialism (says one person
| contradicting another on the internet, this is opinion, I
| know :)) -- you're right about the intellectual blindness
| about other possibilities.
|
| I find Chesteron's distributism an interesting one, and
| personally really admire cooperative societies.
| nilamo wrote:
| That seems awfully defeatist and with a very negative view of
| the human spirit.
|
| I can imagine the end of Capitalism, and it looks like Star
| Trek.
| nradov wrote:
| Nothing in Star Trek even makes any sense. It's a
| completely artificial universe, constructed as a background
| for telling fun stories. From the perspective of
| alternative economic systems it's no different than
| children's fairy tales.
|
| I am an optimist and capitalism looks like success. It's
| the exact opposite of defeatism.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Capitalism looks like exploited third world children in
| sweatshops making your t-shirts and phones.
|
| It's easy to see an exploitative system as success as
| long as one is on the side that does the exploiting.
| ponector wrote:
| Communism looks like exploited people stripped of their
| history and culture in gulag building useless inefficient
| projects.
| saubeidl wrote:
| That's soviet communism. Yugoslav communism looked like
| people with high standards of living and the strongest
| passports in the world, free to travel wherever they
| wanted and celebrating their history.
| nec4b wrote:
| >> Yugoslav communism looked like people with high
| standards of living
|
| You're just making things up as you go, aren't you? More
| then a million Yugoslavs left the country as
| "Gastarbeiters" to be able to feed themselves and their
| families. Inflation was high and people had to convert
| their salaries into German marks the same day they got
| pay checks, otherwise the money was worthless the next
| day. Basic goods were unattainable. People had to smuggle
| coffee, bananas and jeans across the border. Of course if
| you were a part of the red nobility, your life was easier
| as you got access to special stores and got to enjoy the
| fruits of the labor of your fellow equals.
| bdangubic wrote:
| You should take a look at how capitalism works, I'd start
| with like USA, see how many kids go to bed hungry, have
| no health insurance, etc. then I'd go to like inner City
| Philly or Chicago, then South to like Jackson
| Mississippi, check out how great all that shit is :)
| ponector wrote:
| Or you can go to Zurich, take a look how capitalism looks
| there. And go check how socialism in North Korea works.
|
| People are people, top rich minority always finds ways to
| exploit poor majority under any system.
| bdangubic wrote:
| Switzerland ....
|
| Switzerland has mandatory universal health insurance
| where everyone must purchase basic coverage. The
| government provides premium reduction subsidies for
| lower-income individuals and families to ensure
| affordability.
|
| The unemployment insurance system provides benefits for
| up to 400 days (about 18 months) for those who lose their
| jobs, with the amount based on previous earnings. There
| are also programs for job retraining and placement
| assistance.
|
| Switzerland's public pension system that provides
| retirement benefits starting at age 64 for women and 65
| for men. It also includes survivor benefits for spouses
| and children.
|
| Comprehensive coverage for people with disabilities,
| including rehabilitation services, vocational training,
| and financial support for those unable to work.
|
| Monthly child allowances are provided to families for
| each child until age 16 (or 25 if in education or
| training). Additional birth and adoption allowances are
| also available.
|
| Social Assistance via means-tested program that provides
| financial support for basic living needs when other
| social insurance benefits are insufficient. This serves
| as the ultimate safety net.
|
| Mandatory coverage for all employees that covers medical
| costs and income replacement for work-related and non-
| work-related accidents.
|
| Paid maternity leave for 14 weeks at 80% of salary, along
| with job protection during this period.
|
| Switzerland's system is notable for combining mandatory
| insurance schemes with income-based contributions and
| government subsidies to ensure broad coverage while
| maintaining work incentives.
|
| So maybe not mention Switzerland... Any of the examples
| would be called "far-left" (or worse) in the US of A
| nradov wrote:
| Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it is
| the reverse.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| Star Trek ignores real estate. Who gets the penthouse and
| who gets the first floor apartment next to the noisy space
| port. who gets the house with the beach view and who just
| get views of the wall of the neighboring building.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Who does all the really shit and boring jobs. Say mining
| or construction. And can they just take vacation in
| middle of project and let it hang for a few years? It is
| really distorted universe where either you have
| automation or do not... And timeline as whole really does
| not work...
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| So all its gonna take to end capitalism is matter
| replicators, FTL travel, interstellar colonization, and
| unifying under a one world government after a decade of
| horrifying eugenics wars fought between genetically
| enhanced supermen- And after all that Picard gets to live
| on a nice vineyard in France while thousands of voyager
| doctor clones toil away in the dilithium mines
| nilamo wrote:
| Dang, you're so right, a post-scarcity society is
| obviously not feasible without renacting a fictional
| story.
|
| Y'all took the example, and dove right onto the wackiest
| parts of that example, huh? We also haven't met a
| continuum of godlike sycophants, so I guess space travel
| isn't possible for us at all yet lmao
| krapp wrote:
| If you're going to present Star Trek as a plausible
| example of what a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society
| looks like, it's fair to point out all of the BS behind
| Star Trek's portrayal. In the real world, we can't have
| free energy. In the real world, we can't have warp drives
| or replicators that can instantly and perfectly assemble
| anything from nothing.
|
| And I think it's fair to point out that every vision of
| utopia necessarily comes at a high cost in blood and
| violence because you have to do something about the
| people who don't agree with the vision. Star Trek
| handwaves this away by saying humanity just "evolved"
| beyond their base desires and flaws and fully voluntarist
| socialism just works.
|
| But without the Treknobabble and magitech, what's does
| the end of capitalism actually look like in a world where
| there are no easy solutions, and no benevolent space-
| elves descending from the heavens to save us from
| ourselves?
| nradov wrote:
| It's hilarious how anyone would consider a series of
| cheesy scifi stories by a collection of hack writers as a
| basis for discussion of economic systems. Regardless of
| technology, a post-scarcity is obviously not feasible.
| Sure we can make staple foods and mass manufactured
| products incrementally cheaper through automation. But
| the things that people really want as signaling
| mechanisms for social status will always be scarce. For
| example, prime real estate in geographically favorable
| areas.
| dfedbeef wrote:
| Yeah just let the military run everything
| simlevesque wrote:
| Can you prove that capitalism isn't gonna end the entire
| human race ?
|
| I'm sure you can imagine anything but that's not really
| helpful.
| nradov wrote:
| Can you prove that any other economic system isn't going to
| end the entire human race.
| simlevesque wrote:
| You're the one saying that capitalism is better. I didn't
| claim anything. Never said I knew what's best for the
| world.
|
| You said you do. So, tell us ! Claims require evidences.
| saubeidl wrote:
| This is what ideological indoctrination looks like - it's
| worse than even amongst the CCP cadres.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > Because it really seems like both are increasingly inadequate
| systems for handling modernity, and the obsession with defining
| one as intrinsically evil and the other the obvious superior
| option (I'll let you choose which is which) is such a
| flattening, unhelpful approach
|
| As the post-soviet Russian joke went:
|
| _everything the communists said about communism was false,
| everything they said about capitalism was true_.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| IMO the problem is extremes. The best system is capitalism with
| some "socialist" government regulation, services, and welfare.
| How much and what specific policies are unknown.
| titzer wrote:
| > The best system
|
| The best system _for growth_. It 's important to point out
| that Capitalism won because it grew faster. But nothing can
| grow forever--certainly not exponentially--so we're now
| finding out how poorly late stage Capitalism copes with
| slowing growth and population. Oh, and that little looming
| thing about _environmental consequences_.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| That's where a proactive government comes in.
| chihuahua wrote:
| You should check out how Communism treated the environment.
| general1726 wrote:
| > Capitalism copes with slowing growth and population. Oh,
| and that little looming thing about environmental
| consequences.
|
| During communism Czech Republic lost forests over whole
| mountain range, because they were melted away by acid rains
| because it was cheaper to run brown coal power plants
| without any filtration.
|
| Rivers were used as sewers for big factories. Water being
| brown-red under the paper mill? That's normal comrade.
| Having massive clumps of foam under weirs and rivers
| smelling like swamp and detergent? Don't complain comrade
| if you don't want to have problems.
|
| Oil spills (i.e. from oil pipes) weren't cleaned, they were
| just covered with earth, some found decades after fall of
| communism.
|
| Nobody cared about filtration in general. It was kind of
| normal to have a smoke cloud over an industrial city
| forever, unless winds were blowing strong enough to gift
| this poisonous present to countryside.
|
| Is it snowing in the summer? Yeah it is not, that's just
| ash from factory over there. Try to catch "snowflakes" on
| your tongue if you would like to have cancer in few years.
|
| Agriculture was insane as well. Forced collectivization of
| land and making fields as big as possible so mechanization
| is as effective as possible has caused erosion of soil and
| thus increase of usage of fertilizers which were flushed
| into already polluted rivers during rains.
|
| I could go on and on. Communism has nothing to do with
| environmentalism.
| titzer wrote:
| > Communism has nothing to do with environmentalism.
|
| No one claimed it does. Basically all of what you wrote
| above is because of pursuit of economic growth regardless
| of the -ism. Environmental destruction is the
| _inevitable_ result of growth of industrial society.
| Governments without transparency, with no environmental
| protections, with burgeoning eminent domain, and with
| corruption and backstabbing make it worse.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Correlation does not mean causation. In that historical
| period environmental consequences of industrialization
| were not well known and greener solutions did not exist.
| Communist governments chose the easiest and fastest path
| back then. We do not know what would be their choice or
| how it would complicate establishing communist regimes
| today.
| general1726 wrote:
| The most egregious ones were absolutely known, but fixing
| them would not fulfil 5 years plans, so it was not done.
| We absolutely knew what is a scrubber and that burning
| brown coal will release sulfur which will fall down as
| sulfurous acid. But comrade, can the power plant work
| without a scrubber and filtration system? Yes it can. So
| build it without it.
|
| Chernobyl had exactly same problem - no containment
| around reactor. Why would you build it when power plant
| can work without it?
|
| The main problem of communism vs environmentalism is that
| to get environmentalism working you need to question and
| complain to authorities and demand solutions for obvious
| problems which authorities are causing - there were no
| private enterprises, everything was owned by the state.
| But if secret police will just threaten the complainer
| with punishment, then you have solved the problem. No
| complain = no problem. Welcome to everyday realities of
| communism comrade.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| I will point out that in capitalist systems, the money
| saved by the efficiencies can be put towards more
| environmentally positive products and technologies.
| Electric cars for example were very expensive, and it was
| the wealthy that were able to demand them, drive the
| market, push prices down so more middle class families can
| afford them. This is happening again with compostable
| plastics, B-corps that are more circular,
| efficient/recyclable packaging solutions, and other parts
| of our industry.
| jack_h wrote:
| I tend to be in the camp that believes capitalism will
| generally produce better results than socialism but it will not
| produce anything close to a utopia. However, I don't believe
| capitalism is a stable economic system within a democratic
| society. It will inevitably lead to some results that are
| repugnant to the electorate who will advocate for political
| action to prevent such outcomes from occurring in the future.
| This will lead to stronger government authority and increasing
| market manipulation which will (potentially) prevent those
| outcomes but simultaneously it can produce different negative
| outcomes[1]. In the end it seems as though despite good
| intentions we end up with a system that nobody understands,
| nobody is satisfied with, and nobody can fix. I suppose it's
| like software engineering in a way, we want perfection but
| instead we are constrained by trade-offs and we never reach a
| state that everyone is happy with.
|
| [1] A classic example is rent control which tends to lead to
| shortages.
| shakow wrote:
| > having moved from capitalist America to post-communist Poland
|
| Poland is definitely a very nice place to live right now, and
| improvements since the fall of the communist government is
| undeniable.
|
| However, please note that not all Polish growth is just due to
| capitalism knocking to the door - the country is the recipient
| of a huge amount of EU funds[0]. To illustrate it, France, the
| 2nd largest net contributor to the EU budget, gives barely more
| than Poland receives, even though the population is a bit half
| as big.
|
| Is it a bad thing? Not necessarily. But it is definitely not an
| illustration of a post-communist country standing by its own
| self.
|
| [0] https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-
| eu-...
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II
| _[...]_ this has not happened with communism.
|
| This resonates quite deeply. In my country nazis go straight to
| jail but communists walk our soil _completely unpunished_. They
| have half a dozen political parties, are well coordinated, are
| popular and are constantly elected by the population when they
| promise them heaven on earth. This is especially ironic since
| nazism is short for national _socialism_.
|
| Communism is alive and well in Latin America. Brazilian president
| Lula declared to CNN his intention to install communism in my
| country not even a week ago. It has been his intention for over
| 40 years. He and his party has been in power for over 20 years.
| Yet people act as though it was fake news.
| simlevesque wrote:
| It's not fake news it's good news.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| A specific, racist form of fascism can't really be compared to
| an economic ideology.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It absolutely can. Nazis, like socialists, centralized
| control of the economy in the state. It's just that they did
| it in order to further the goals of the so called Aryan
| nation as a whole. That's why it's called national socialism.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| "Naziism had economic principles therefore it is a peer of
| any general economic system." Nah. Capitalism and communism
| don't have all those racist tenets. Nor the expansionism.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Principles have nothing to do with it. The key feature is
| totalitarian government control over the economy and the
| means of production. Nazi Germany certainly had it.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Does communism require totalitarianism?
| nec4b wrote:
| Of course, how else can you achieve classless society. Do
| you expect people to freely give everything they have to
| the state, so it can redistribute their wealth around?
| Don't you know the concept of a class enemy and why so
| much of mass murdering was going on in communist
| countries?
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Accelerated transition to it likely does. Gradual
| transition probably doesn't. In social market economies
| redistribution is relatively strong but it can become
| even stronger, to the point where it's indistinguishable
| from socialism. If done carefully while rewarding
| entrepreneurial initiative and penalizing rent seeking,
| it may be even not that bad.
| justsomejew wrote:
| Nazis had racial laws. As you did, by the way, just not
| towards jews, remember? Something which the communists have
| not done. And I think it ruins your theory, as well as the
| communusm equals nazism equation, so beloved by your
| propaganda
| throwaway3060 wrote:
| That's because the communists found a workaround; they
| were the first to invent the idea that they could just
| officially target discrimination against "Zionists" and
| "cosmopolitans" and just lob that accusation against any
| Jew, effectively legalizing state antisemitism under a
| different name.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| It amuses me that the libertarians are bearing this torch
| now.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| > Something which the communists have not done.
|
| Except when they effectively enslaved people on the basis
| of their ethnicity (the reality of being Soviet German,
| Crimean Tatar or Chechen in 1940-early 1950s). My German
| grandfather was taken into Labor Army (forced labor
| institution) as soon as he turned 16 (in 1952). He
| obviously wasn't a Nazi collaborator. He was fully
| rehabilitated only in 1990.
|
| Soviet communist policies towards ethnic minorities often
| did involve oppression and almost genocidal treatment.
| That fact of course should not be used to paint an all-
| black picture. Late USSR wasn't bad at all for our
| family, creating a lot of opportunities.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _On the other hand, life was secure. There were no bank loans,
| therefore there were no bank fees or percents. There was no real
| worry over one's job or workplace; one was available for
| everyone. Wages were low, but fear of losing one's job was almost
| nonexistent. A person pretended to work; the state pretended to
| pay him. Living accommodations were crowded and faint hope
| existed to find a better apartment, but all had a roof over their
| heads.There had to be, since homelessness was forbidden by law._
|
| > _Nowadays, there exist people who yearn for that mollusk-like
| life._
|
| This isn't an inaccurate description, and yes, it's not exactly a
| utopian state to find yourself in.
|
| But I'm not going to chuckle at the hypothetical people we're
| supposed to pity for wanting this; I bet there are quite a few
| people in the United States alone who would _love_ to have this
| life, who would love to have a guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof
| over their heads, and the heads of their children.
| username332211 wrote:
| The really funny part is that this is probably fairly easy to
| achieve in the United States. The only part of the Soviet
| system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency
| control regime.
|
| Currently people all over the world are free to move to New
| York, which makes the city unaffordable. If you forbade anyone
| not born within it from moving there, Manhattan would be fairly
| affordable and homelessness would be much reduced.
|
| All you need to do is to free yourself from that bourgeois
| delusion that a man from Mexico (or worse, West Virginia) has
| any right to live in that city.
| vintagedave wrote:
| > The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement
| is the migration and residency control regime.
|
| Ouch: straight to being against others.
|
| No, the part you'd need to implement to get socialised
| housing is socialised housing. Similarly, there are modern
| equivalents to guaranteed jobs. Communism believed everyone
| had to work: today we have different ideas of purpose than
| Marx had, plus are more aware of those who cannot work, or
| the value of non-work social contributions, and tech folks
| like us might believe in or hope for an upcoming post-
| scarcity society, with a transition period of UBI.
|
| I expect you want to control migration and residency in order
| to avoid freeloaders. Freeloaders are remarkably rare, most
| people have self-respect and enjoy being productive, and
| interestingly systems that exterminate freeloaders entirely
| tend to be less efficient.[1] Plus, if you have a wonderful
| system, the best way to handle other people wanting it is to
| help it grow, not limit it to yourself. A better policy would
| be one encouraging its growth elsewhere in other countries
| where all those folk who are coming to your shores are coming
| from. The US has a long (mixed) history of that approach re
| democracy.
|
| [1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-
| fra...
| username332211 wrote:
| What freeloaders are you talking about? This is complete
| nonsense.
|
| Residency controls exist to solve the Economic Problem. The
| amount of people that want to live in global cities is
| endless. Even if you socialize all the housing in New York,
| there will be people that want to live in the city but
| won't be able to. It is the job of the economic system to
| determine who gets in and who doesn't.
|
| That's why socialized housing requires residency controls,
| but if those were implemented in the United States, the
| country could reap the specified benefits of of the Soviet
| system.
|
| Finally, you speak of encouraging growth elsewhere, but
| what can be more productive for the growth of West
| Virginia, than to tell every man born in that state that he
| shall also die in that state. What can be better for
| industrial development, but a labor force that can't move
| away?
|
| It's so sad to see communists cling to capitalist concepts
| like that. Communism has no future so long as it's
| supporters refuse to understand that Marx's magnificent
| philosophical and political system rejects borgeous human
| rights.
| saubeidl wrote:
| That's not true and the City of Vienna proved that thesis
| wrong a century ago. [0].
|
| Even today, two-thirds of Viennese residents live in
| public housing, the city is Europe's largest landlord and
| as a result, housing is extremely affordable for a world-
| class city. It's not without reason that Vienna tends to
| top worldwide quality of life rankings - it's the
| achievements of Red Vienna.
|
| [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/magazine/vienna-
| social-ho...
| username332211 wrote:
| The city of Vienna has a fairly unique history. It used
| to be the capital of a massive empire that's now gone,
| and thus suffered a period of fairly prolonged decline.
|
| It's population declined from 2.4 million in 1914[1] to
| 1.5 million in the 1980s[2]. The only reason why it's
| currently considered even close to a world-class city is
| that after the fall of the Berlin wall it was the natural
| financial hub for oligarchic capital.
|
| I think we can all agree not many great and global cities
| have tons of free housing emptied by a prolonged period
| of decline. And that we can't really evaluate if the city
| is solving the economic problem well or badly, as right
| now it's simply less acute for historical reasons that
| have nothing to do with it's housing policy.
|
| [1] https://ww1.habsburger.net/en/chapters/growing-city-
| vienna-e... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-
| metrics/cities/20107/vien...
| saubeidl wrote:
| > I think we can all agree not many great and global
| cities have tons of free housing emptied by a prolonged
| period of decline
|
| That is not the case in Vienna, either. The government
| built enough units to supply ten percent of the total
| market and used that leverage to drive down prices.
| Before that, a large portion lived in squalor.
|
| > But from 1923 to 1934, in a period known as Red Vienna,
| the ruling Social Democratic Party built 64,000 new units
| in 400 housing blocks, increasing the city's housing
| supply by about 10 percent. Some 200,000 people, one-
| tenth of the population, were rehoused in these
| buildings, with rents set at 3.5 percent of the average
| semiskilled worker's income, enough to cover the cost of
| maintenance and operation
| Reasoning wrote:
| > _Communism has no future so long as it 's supporters
| refuse to understand that Marx's magnificent
| philosophical and political system rejects borgeous human
| rights._
|
| Stalin couldn't have put it better himself.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Residency controls exist to solve the Economic Problem.
| The amount of people that want to live in global cities
| is endless.
|
| That isn't true. There are a finite number of living
| people and if you just kept building housing in every
| major city, there would be enough for everyone who wants
| to live there.
|
| It might not be practical to build enough housing in
| _one_ city to house the entire _global_ population, but
| who is proposing that anyway? Build more housing
| everywhere.
|
| > Finally, you speak of encouraging growth elsewhere, but
| what can be more productive for the growth of West
| Virginia, than to tell every man born in that state that
| he shall also die in that state. What can be better for
| industrial development, but a labor force that can't move
| away?
|
| By implication you would also have an inability to
| _import_ labor. And then if you don 't e.g. have a local
| medical school, you don't have local doctors. If you have
| the local environment to sustain a major industry and a
| local population that could do 90% of the jobs, but the
| other 10% are specialists who would have to be paid to
| relocate then it can't open up there at all and you lose
| the other 90% of the jobs too.
|
| Suppose you have a mining town somewhere until the mine
| is exhausted. What are the people who used to live there
| supposed to do other than move away? There is nothing
| there for them anymore.
| username332211 wrote:
| > That isn't true. There are a finite number of living
| people and if you just kept building housing in every
| major city, there would be enough for everyone who wants
| to live there.
|
| That's sort of of neither here nor there. Sure, it's
| probably true, but try explaining that to anyone who
| hates bourgeois democracy. "If only we let the greedy
| property developers have it their way."
|
| But the point that I'm trying to get across here with no
| small amount of irony (that I hope is fairly obvious), is
| that all the benefits of living in a communist
| dictatorship come from the dictatorship, not from the
| communism. Collectivized agriculture, state industries,
| socialized housings - all those things are worse than
| useless. What provided safety, stability and a guaranteed
| standard of life was the semi-serfdom imposed by the
| state.
|
| > By implication you would also have an inability to
| import labor. And then if you don't e.g. have a local
| medical school, you don't have local doctors. If you have
| the local environment to sustain a major industry and a
| local population that could do 90% of the jobs, but the
| other 10% are specialists who would have to be paid to
| relocate then it can't open up there at all and you lose
| the other 90% of the jobs too.
|
| The Soviet system did allow for movement. When a factory
| was opened and had to be staffed, permits were issued for
| the necessary people. In fact that was the only
| significant way for people from rural areas to be allowed
| the privilege to move to a city. Similarly, the problem
| with doctors was dealt with rather elegantly - every
| graduate of a medical school was assigned a specific town
| or village and was forced to live and practice there for
| decades.
|
| The Soviet Union didn't abolish the movement of people.
| In fact, in the 1940s it was probably something of a
| champion in terms of internal migration. It's the
| _freedom_ of movement that was abolished.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _It is the job of the economic system to determine who
| gets in and who doesn 't._
|
| Isn't that the point of capitalism? If you can afford to
| live in New York, you do. If you can't, you don't.
| sedawkgrep wrote:
| > I bet there are quite a few people in the United States alone
| who would love to have this life, who would love to have a
| guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof over their heads, and the
| heads of their children.
|
| I'd almost venture to say the majority of people, and
| definitely those who suffer from a disability of some sort;
| especially mental health, where one may not mentally function
| well enough from one day to the next to be able to reliably
| hold a job.
| spwa4 wrote:
| At the cost that the Soviet union imposed? I doubt there's
| even 100.
|
| There is nothing stopping people from living like communists
| in the US. There have been many communist communes here and
| in other countries, like famously Israel and Columbia. All
| but single digits have been abandoned or sold by their
| inhabitants.
|
| So we've got plenty of historical evidence whether people
| would choose to have this life. All but a few dozen, out of
| hundreds of million, choose against it. Including all
| socialists, everyone in those demonstrations, ...
| demonstrating extremely clearly:
|
| without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > There is nothing stopping people from living like
| communists in the US.
|
| Capitalism stops them. The state has expectations of
| everyone. They will have to deal with things from outside
| that will force them into some level of capitalistic
| thinking which will ultimately eat the project from within.
|
| > All but single digits have been abandoned or sold by
| their inhabitants.
|
| The fact that the death of these experiments comes with a
| sale is illustrative of the point above
|
| > without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
|
| Is that so? It sounds like red scare propaganda honestly,
| and I don't think you could reasonably make an argument for
| this without conceding that the same is true of capitalism.
| spwa4 wrote:
| > Capitalism stops them. The state has expectations of
| everyone. They will have to deal with things from outside
| that will force them into some level of capitalistic
| thinking which will ultimately eat the project from
| within.
|
| This is not a difference between capitalism and
| communism, and so not a valid complaint. You will pay
| taxes in a communist system. You will have to deal with
| all sorts of external influences in a communist system.
|
| > The fact that the death of these experiments comes with
| a sale is illustrative of the point above
|
| No it isn't. These were voluntary sales (especially since
| most were abandoned, not sold. There was no profit in
| leaving, except in some cases). It is illustrative of the
| simple fact that given the choice, all but a rare
| exception chooses against communism.
|
| Or to put it another way: people REALLY don't want
| communism, and after trying it, that becomes worse. In
| many cases abandoning these communes required a large-ish
| group of people taking the decision together. In other
| words: they organized themselves to destroy their little
| patch of communism. Which illustrates the next point:
|
| > > without constant terror, socialism cannot exist.
|
| > Is that so? It sounds like red scare propaganda
| honestly, and I don't think you could reasonably make an
| argument for this without conceding that the same is true
| of capitalism.
|
| You just made an argument in favor of this. Your argument
| is that people cannot be allowed to have access to the
| external world, or they will abandon communism. That must
| be prevented, in your argument.
|
| HOW will you prevent it? State terror.
| H8crilA wrote:
| The problem is you'll probably live on something like
| $300/month, and the $ won't even be exchangeable
| internationally - think like food stamps but for everything.
| Or less. Unless you have connections in the nomenklatura,
| i.e. those who decide who gets which positions. University
| admission is handled by a similar circle.
|
| Let me quote the text:
|
| > _An anecdote on this very topic became popular in the later
| Soviet Union. A young communist proclaimed victoriously: "We
| have founded a society where there are no rich people!" To
| which an old social democrat shook his head and muttered,
| "Actually our intention was to found a society were there
| were no poor people."_
| Mars008 wrote:
| > We have founded a society where there are no rich
| people!"
|
| Many in the west would like this idea. Try goggle
| "communism support young americans".
| dlachausse wrote:
| That is terrifying. Do they just not teach in schools how
| devastating every Marxist/Communist regime has been? Do
| people really think somehow that next time will magically
| be different despite all historical evidence pointing to
| the fact that this ideology is flawed at its very core?
| Mars008 wrote:
| I think this is the result of woke shit pushed in
| education.
| rcakebread wrote:
| More like MAGA rewriting US Soviet relations history.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| I mean, yes, in Texas for instance that kind of
| propaganda is state mandated.
| dlachausse wrote:
| I guess maybe the blue cities push the Marxism/Communism
| propaganda, but I don't think the rest of the state does.
| throwaway3060 wrote:
| Not in any detail. In my experience, Americans actually
| know very little about the Soviet Union, beyond that they
| were the "adversary" in the Cold War.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Do they just not teach in schools how devastating every
| Marxist/Communist regime has been?
|
| Even if they do, when you're living somewhere that's free
| to fail you before you're even born, the second-worst
| case can still look good. And also the absolute worse
| case is Pol Pot, and there's many examples equally awful
| showing that a lot of people just flat out refuse to
| accept humans can be that evil.
|
| But also, basically all types of governments can
| demonstrate the sorts of failure mode that Communism is
| famous for. Holodomor and Great Leap Forward's famines
| were Communist failures, the Irish Potato Famine and
| several in India under the British were Capitalist
| failures.
|
| > the fact that this ideology is flawed at its very core?
|
| You may be surprised if you read a copy of The Communist
| Manifesto. Several parts of it have been considered
| "common sense" in capitalist nations for over a century.
|
| Me, I think Karl Marx made the same error as Adam Smith,
| that both think humans free from rules are naturally
| amazing and they largely ignore power seeking behaviours
| and the consequences of that. Hence Smith is associated
| with laissez-faire, and "socialist" and "anarchist" were
| seen by the authorities of the 19th c. as being much the
| same*.
|
| (I over simplify a bit, this is just a comment and not a
| script for a replacement idiology).
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_anarchism_a
| nd_li...
| dlachausse wrote:
| I've read The Communist Manifesto. There are indeed parts
| of it that are sensible in isolation. The problem is that
| taken as a whole, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, etc. are
| deeply flawed ideologies doomed to catastrophic failure
| and devastating results. History has shown us this
| repeatedly.
|
| To Quote Ronald Reagan...
|
| "How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who
| reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-
| Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."
| ben_w wrote:
| What history has shown us is somewhat weaker than you say
| -- for all the stuff they did badly, for all that they
| wildly missed their own raison d'etre and became just
| another power structure for just another bunch of
| essentially aristocrats, it did also get Russia from the
| Tzars to orbit in 40 years.
|
| But that aside, when you're already getting failed and
| the people failing you specifically hate one thing, it's
| very easy to reach for that thing.
|
| To your quote: Well, I'm not a communist (unlike a
| previous partner)... but I'm also not a capitalist,
| because I see that capitalism also is a deeply flawed
| ideology doomed to catastrophic failure and devastating
| results, and that history has shown us this, too,
| repeatedly.
|
| I'm also not "anti-" either of them, because I'd rather
| see someone take the best of both and find some new
| mechanism to deal with the other repeatedly observed
| historical fact: that a non-trivial fraction of the
| population are power-hungry sadistic arses. To quote,
| albeit from fiction: "To summarize: it is a well-known
| fact that those people who must want to rule people are,
| ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the
| summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made
| President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
| - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416-the-major-
| problem-mdas...
|
| (Both capitalism and communism have failure modes
| separate from the problem of dark triad personalities,
| but both sets are much easier to deal with if your
| society has also solved the problem of dark triad
| personalities, and a society does also need to solve the
| problem of dark triad personalities irregardless of what
| else it does).
| graemep wrote:
| Adam Smith did nit think that. He warned about the danger
| of business "conspiracy against the public" and thought
| ethics more important afield than economics. The idea the
| invisible hand was perfectible is a amplification of his
| idea
| inglor_cz wrote:
| People in general love utopias when they weren't exposed
| to their real incarnations.
|
| Same with the RETVRN types who dream of an ancient-like
| societal structure without realizing that they would
| likely be slaves.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>University admission is handled by a similar circle.
|
| So obviously I welcome any anecdotes to the contrary, but I
| was always told that in my formely communist
| country(Poland) university admissions were extremely fair.
| Everyone had equal chance if they passed exams well enough
| - in fact messing around with this system was guaranteed to
| get you in prison for corruption. And in there were many
| examples of poor families from very disadvantaged
| backgrounds sending kids to top universities because they
| studied hard enough to pass the entrance exams - there was
| no bribe you could give anyone to get you in, because the
| principles of fair admissions were upheld as the greatest
| value. I'm sure there are examples of it happening that we
| could find, but my understanding is that it was incredibly
| rare.
|
| Now, top posts at universities - that's a different
| situation. To be the dean you had to be in the party and
| know the right people to be considered for the position.
| But students? Anyone could get anywhere and study
| completely for free.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| You underestimate the inability of the Soviet regime to
| provide its own people with basic consumer goods.
|
| You would have a job and some money, but your money would buy
| nothing, because goods were scarce. Even finding good shoes
| would be a challenge and you would need to cultivate
| relationships with warehouse clerks etc. to get some access
| to stuff before it was stealthily distributed by underground
| channels to relatives, friends etc.
|
| Modern Americans would go absolutely ballistic if they came
| to a shop with empty shelves and a bored arrogant assistant
| who would jeer at their very question "I want to buy X".
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _Modern Americans would go absolutely ballistic if they
| came to a shop with empty shelves and a bored arrogant
| assistant who would jeer at their very question "I want to
| buy X"._
|
| Reminds me of an old Russian joke. In stores, you'd
| typically go to one counter to get some produce weighed,
| then to a cashier to pay for it.
|
| So, someone goes up to the meat counter, and asks, "Can you
| weigh me out half a kilo of sausage?" And the guy behind
| the counter replies: "Sure, bring some in, and I'll weigh
| it out for you."
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Yeah, the old jokes are first class.
|
| "Capitalism is based on exploitation of a man by another
| man. In Communism, it is the other way round!"
| kachurovskiy wrote:
| Just so that you understand, what that inevitably brings is
| alcoholism, domestic violence and other depressive deformities.
| My grandpa died from daily drinking with his factory pals and
| my grand-grandma has axe damage on her wooden furniture and it
| was normal.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| We have more options for hobbies these days.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I'm sorry about your family history, but I have American
| friends who've grown up here for generations with identical
| family histories - alcoholism, domestic violence, depressive
| deformities and all.
| LtWorf wrote:
| And farmers under the tzar had it better in your opinion?
| saubeidl wrote:
| The descriptor "mollusk-like" for people that have different
| political or social preferences from the author is really
| dehumanizing and not okay.
| logical_proof wrote:
| I think you missed the metaphors target. He was describing
| the lifestyle of just subsisting. Like a mollusk. This was
| objectively the majority of experiences under the Soviet
| system, not a comment on anyone's political views.
| justsomejew wrote:
| And I think you missed something as well
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _really dehumanizing_
|
| Yes. That was the author's point.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Not if that guarantee came with some miserable factory job that
| was mandatory.
| cosmicgadget wrote:
| Most parents would.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Yeah. I've had friends who went unemployed for a long time
| because they considered themselves to be above certain
| jobs. Me? If my kid needs food, the burger at the local
| McDonald's is gonna look _very_ flippable real quick.
| gambiting wrote:
| My understanding is that most of these jobs you could just
| slack off at and nothing would happen. They couldn't really
| fire you anyway.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > But I'm not going to chuckle at the hypothetical people we're
| supposed to pity for wanting this
|
| We should.
|
| What communists _really_ want is to have their every need and
| desire magically provided for, as if they were fundamental
| rights. In other words, what they _truly_ want is called post-
| scarcity: the absence of an economy.
|
| Communism and socialism are economic models. There exists
| scarcity of goods and resources and therefore they must be
| economized. There's a system that chooses who gets access to
| said scarce resources.
|
| Socialism is sold to people as though it was post-scarcity.
| People think they'd be living comfortable "secure" lives where
| everything is guaranteed and provided for. Ah yes, the fabled
| memetic fully automated luxury space communism.
|
| People who buy into this will probably end up doing forced hard
| labor in a field somewhere should communists actually come to
| power. They will not get to do what they want, they will work
| wherever the state puts them to work under penalty of death by
| firing squad. The state has no choice, anything else means mass
| starvation and millions of deaths.
|
| Pity is far too lenient a reaction towards such reality
| distorting naivete. If left unchecked, they will win elections
| and actually install socialism in your country.
|
| We have a better chance of achieving post scarcity by
| collapsing capitalism with relentless automation.
| only-one1701 wrote:
| Idk the Nordics seem to be doing ok
| dismalaf wrote:
| They're not socialist by the classical definition. They're
| capitalist countries with social benefits.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| And then, these strong social safety nets seem to only
| work well in countries that have highly homogenous
| populations.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Nordic countries are not socialist regimes. They are free
| economies with welfare states. Socialism implies state
| control of the economy, industry and the means of
| production.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| In the Nordics, the governments don't really try to run the
| economy. They provide stable environment to their local
| capitalists, let them do business at their leisure, and
| then tax their profits.
|
| That is a huge difference from the mass experiment with
| central-command economy that was run in the countries of
| the Soviet Bloc. Unsurprisingly, ideologues and bureaucrats
| cannot really create and sustain a competitive economy.
| That requires a different sort of mentality.
| LtWorf wrote:
| They aren't. They're becoming fascist like the rest of EU.
| ponector wrote:
| >> This isn't an inaccurate description,
|
| That is quite inaccurate. Or partially accurate. Accurate for
| white russian people.
|
| For others it was quite easy to loose a job and get a forced
| psychiatric treatment or gulag trip (depends on the year).
| riehwvfbk wrote:
| The matters of race occupy a much smaller percentage of the
| brains of people outside of the USA. I say this completely
| without malice. It simply means that the trauma of
| segregation is still too raw in American society.
|
| The rest of your statement doesn't make any sense. One went
| to a gulag for opposing the Soviet government, not for having
| a particular ethnicity. Stalin was ethnically Georgian. Many
| prominent members of the politburo were Poles, Lithuanians,
| Ukrainians, or Jews. In the later Soviet Union there were
| many politicians from the "ethnic" republics who had high-
| powered careers.
|
| In fact, look at the list of Russian politicians who are
| currently under international sanctions and tell me with a
| straight face that they are all white and Russian. Well, they
| are Russian of course, but not in the way you meant.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > It simply means that the trauma of segregation is still
| too raw in American society.
|
| It feels more calculated than that -- there are people
| trying to keep it alive for use as a partisan wedge issue.
|
| Replace first past the post voting (and therefore the two-
| party system) with score voting and see what happens to the
| issue.
| esseph wrote:
| There have been a ton of states passing laws, starting in
| 2022 but really hitting stride in 2024/2025, where the
| Republican party has pushed laws or changes to state
| constitutions to prevent Ranked Choice Voting.
|
| Example, in Missouri there was a ballot initiative called
| Amendment 7. The first part of the Amendment was to
| enshrine banning non-citizens from voting. I want to be
| clear, this was already against state law. This didn't
| change anything.
|
| The second part of Amendment 7 was to ban ranked choice
| voting and require a plurality. That was the REAL intent
| of the Amendment.
|
| People got duped, badly.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-
| choice_voting_in_the_Un...
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _The matters of race occupy a much smaller percentage of
| the brains of people outside of the USA. I say this
| completely without malice._
|
| But do you say it with first-hand experience?
|
| Having gone back to Russia to meet with relatives, it was
| very clear that they considered "Tajiks" to be somewhere
| below them on a social ladder, and one relative directly
| inquired whether I felt safe living in America with all the
| "Africans" living in New York. (Granted, that last
| statement could back up your point that it only matters in
| America - but it didn't feel that way at the time.)
| ponector wrote:
| And don't forget Jews. Jews have always been the number
| one to be hated by common tovarish, as well as modern
| russians.
| ponector wrote:
| Right, no etnic cleansing, no mass starvation of etnic non-
| russian regions. No forced deportations to the Syberia.
|
| No one of mentioned high ranks could freely use native
| language.
|
| You probably know how they called USSR the prison of
| nations.
| throwaway3060 wrote:
| I assume by "white Russian" you really mean someone of
| Russian ethnicity and not Belarus - which is what that phrase
| means to a Russian speaker - but you might want to clarify.
| shakow wrote:
| I have _never_ seen an english speaker use "white Russians"
| for Belarusians - the only uses I know of this idiom are
| (i) for the non-red /non-green participants to the Russian
| civil war, and, by extensions, their diaspora, and (ii) the
| cocktail, which of course, is by far the most common
| occurence nowadays.
| throwaway3060 wrote:
| Many of the Russian speakers I know do this when speaking
| English - I'm guessing that's how they think of the
| phrase in Russian and want to translate it literally.
| ponector wrote:
| Yes. White male with Slavic face who speaks russian
| language without an accent because he knows no other
| language.
|
| A friend of mine had a grandfather, who was born in central
| Asia (Samarkand) had Ukrainian parents, but also had
| written in his passport that he was a russian. Soviets
| erased his roots, history, ethnicity. He never spoke
| Ukrainian in his life.
|
| Btw, that is what current russian government is doing. They
| have stolen thousands of Ukrainian kids and erased their
| identity. Few more years and some of them are ready to be
| sent to the frontline.
| gambiting wrote:
| Plenty of stories of people being forced to "voluntarily"
| accept Russian passports on the territories occupied by
| Russia in Ukraine too.
| justsomejew wrote:
| I dont know how your life is, but my own impression is that
| life of many americans is worse than the life which was in the
| Soviet Union at least until the 80s (after Stalin). Maybe not
| in the sense of the capacity to buy junkfood and other junk,
| but as to sense of living and human relations. "Mollusk" sounds
| as the usual american antirussian propaganda.
| throwaway3060 wrote:
| Unless you are limiting your comparison to just the homeless
| in America, this is just not true. Most people don't know
| much about life in the Soviet Union in the first place, but
| even what people do know is typically limited only to life in
| Moscow and Leningrad. Dismissing the conditions as "capacity
| to buy junkfood" is uncalled for.
| search_facility wrote:
| They definitely does not aware of soviet reality that "roof
| over head" usually is not in the place where human want to
| live, same with job. if student after university decided (not
| by student, by state distributing workforce) to go work at city
| on polar circle - that means that student will go live and work
| here, without sunlight for the rest of his life! not joking,
| personal story with soviet collapse as happy ending (moved to
| normal place after that)
| nikanj wrote:
| Nazi Germany never put up fences to stop their people from
| leaving. The Soviet Union did. That's my metric for the standard
| of living in them
| seiferteric wrote:
| Except for the ones around the concentration camps.
| chihuahua wrote:
| I'm virulently opposed to communism and the Soviet Union, as
| well as Nazism, and it is tempting to say that the Soviet Union
| was worse than Nazi Germany.
|
| In some ways that's true if you look at the number of their own
| citizens that were killed by Stalin vs Hitler. On the other
| hand, Stalin had a longer period of time for his mass murder
| than Hitler did. But Hitler caused the almost complete
| destruction of Germany with the war he started.
|
| In terms of living conditions, you are probably correct;
| although again, Hitler's starting point in terms of economy,
| civilization, and living conditions was much better than
| Stalin's, and we didn't see Nazism play out over decades.
|
| Nazi Germany's soldiers on the advance engaged in systematic
| killing and regarded most of the population of the conquered
| territories as vermin; Soviet soldiers merely raped most of the
| women and did not engage in systematic killing campaigns, with
| some exceptions (e.g. Katyn massacre)
|
| I'd say it's difficult to say which is more deplorable: Hitler
| killing millions just because of their ancestry, or Stalin
| killing millions in the Gulag because of paranoia and because
| it was a convenient source of labor.
|
| If we're just looking at the success of the economic systems,
| leaving aside the mass murder and the devastating war, then
| what you're saying is correct.
| throwaway3060 wrote:
| IMO, when thinking about this question it's useful to look at
| the full scope of their objectives. We don't know much about
| what else Stalin planned, but given the time he had it
| probably would not fundamentally change the order of
| magnitude. On the other hand, we do know some of what the
| Nazis planned to do if they had won, and it was on a scale
| far beyond even the millions they did murder.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II,
| making the return of this form of totalitarianism impossible_
|
| Even written in 2021 rather than today, it's difficult to take
| the OP seriously after this. Both Hitler's nazism and Stalin's
| communism are manifestations of the deeper authoritarian
| sympathies that infect the human psyche and to which the modern
| world is quickly succumbing.
| sublimefire wrote:
| > deeper authoritarian sympathies
|
| It is not that but systematic destruction of any institution
| standing in the way. Once that is done it is easier to wield
| power and suppress people to do stuff. Just look at Russia
| today, where dissent is extremely risky to you and people
| around you, where shitnews television is pumping people with
| weird narratives, etc. Similarly T.Snyder argues that a
| precursor to the atrocities (not the war per se) in WWII were
| the destruction of the institutions.
| justsomejew wrote:
| Communism was quite different from nazism, whatever they tell
| and told you in the west. You just did not live there, and some
| people rewrote the history for you. Equating communism and
| nazism is one of the most abominable aspects of western
| propaganda
| nec4b wrote:
| They are both the same. One wants one true race society and
| the the other one true class society. The only way tho
| achieve one or the other state is by eliminating those who
| don't conform (Holocaust and Holodomor). It's despicable some
| pretend one is better then the other.
| xyzelement wrote:
| I was about 10 when the USSR has collapsed and have lived in the
| use for over 30 years yet I still see in my parents and even
| myself the remnants of dehumanizing ridiculousness that existed
| there. Eg my dad is instinctively terrified of dealing with
| anyone from the government even like the mailman because that
| person can wield their position against you even though that's
| not the case here at all.
|
| Or for example I had to point out to my dad that his neighbor
| open carries. Like my dad is intellectually aware of the 2nd
| amendment but it didn't fit in his brain that people could
| actually exercise a freedom so his eyes were literally blind to
| it (obviously I drove him to the gun shop that evening)
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _(obviously I drove him to the gun shop that evening)_
|
| Why would that be obvious?
| Mars008 wrote:
| > intellectually aware of the 2nd amendment but it didn't fit
| in his brain that people could actually exercise a freedom
|
| You know what the reality is in US? Even close friends don't
| talk on sensitive topics. At work only woke propaganda is
| allowed, woke training (brainwashing) is mandatory.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Yeah but the USA wokeness is only about words, not about
| solving anyone's problems for real.
| divan wrote:
| Important to understand that these are "absurdities" only when
| viewed from the angle of market economy and democratic society.
| For people living in Soviet Union this was just a "state of the
| world".
|
| Communist values (or lack of values) shaped the political and
| social systems in which people were born and raised.
|
| First we shape systems, then systems shape us.
| bevr1337 wrote:
| This was written and edited by folks who lived in the USSR, so
| we know that these people held complexity. More than "just..."
|
| Just is a great word. It alerts the author and reader that
| there's little substance in the claim. Just trust me!
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| People were shaped by the rules they lived under. That doesn't
| make the rules any less insane.
| divan wrote:
| Yes. What I was trying to say that people who live within
| those rules (and keep propagating/making them!) can't just
| live in the constant congitive dissonance state. They
| rationalize this state of the world, they tell stories (to
| themselves and to each other) to make sense of these rules,
| so it doesn't feel insane.
| justsomejew wrote:
| Well, the very real absurdities and nightmare of your "way of
| life", you don't see them as well. What happens now in Gaza? Do
| you "see" it?
| throwaway3060 wrote:
| Many were aware of the absurdities. The issue is that when one
| is inundated with absurdities around them, identifying what is
| true is impossible.
| hagendaasalpine wrote:
| historians have described the USSR as an 'affirmitive action
| empire', a contradictory one
| jostylr wrote:
| This might be a good article for such a perspective:
| https://reason.com/2021/11/01/yes-it-was-an-evil-empire/
| csours wrote:
| I feel like some people are trying for the sequel right now.
|
| Moral relativism is like digging a latrine. Almost nobody wants
| to do it for somebody else, it's a chore to do it for one's self,
| but pretty much everyone appreciates when it's already done for
| them.
|
| Anyway, I feel like 'liberalism' is under broad attack by both
| conservatives and progressives, largely because it is very
| unsatisfying right now.
|
| Speaking for myself, liberalism is a way to understand the world.
| Liberalism in this sense does not especially imply progressivism
| or conservatism, and can be practiced by anyone. To re-phrase the
| Robustness Principle: "be opinionated in what you do, be open
| minded in what you accept from others".
|
| I feel like the stronger you push your opinions into your
| understanding of the world, the harder it gets to actually
| understand what is going on in the world. As Colbert said:
| "reality has a well-known liberal bias". This statement makes
| more sense if run in reverse: "An open-minded understanding of
| the world is more likely to be durably and broadly true than a
| strongly opinionated understanding".
|
| Unfortunately, it has become VERY difficult to talk about what is
| going on in the world right now, largely because a lot of
| disparate groups are pushing their opinions into their
| understanding very very hard. There are many people who currently
| disagree with their own in-group, but are restricted in what they
| can say because of social loyalty constraints. If you can't be
| the first person to speak up, consider being the second.
|
| The absolute strongest superpower that humans have is the the
| ability to tell another story. Don't get stuck in the first
| satisfying story you hear.
|
| ----
|
| If you are satisfied with blame, try examining the situation
| closer. If you are satisfied that a whole political party is
| evil, try examining the situation closer.
|
| Here are some questions:
|
| What is the person or organization doing
| socially economically emotionally
| political as in policy objectives political as in
| electoral strategy political as in internal power
| structure - is the internal power structure sound or fragmented?
|
| When a person or organization says something, is it
| complete accurate satisfying (to anyone? to
| someone? to me?)
|
| Sometimes, it is a trap to fight the obvious fight. Perhaps the
| other side is fine with losing the obvious fight for some reason.
|
| People don't believe crazy things because of correct facts, they
| believe them because of satisfying stories.
|
| ---
|
| May I humbly ask 2 things of you:
|
| 1. Please don't assume I'm saying or implying something beyond
| what I've said here. You may feel free to go beyond what I've
| said, just don't put it on me.
|
| 2. Please don't join a death cult. You can look up the
| characteristics of a high control group; a death cult is all that
| plus their definition of morality narrows over time, excluding
| more and more people. Death cults ramp up anger over time. It's
| very easy to fall into one right now, and they are not exclusive
| to either side of the political spectrum. It's better to endure a
| little moral dissatisfaction than to join a high control group.
| binary132 wrote:
| I'm the farthest thing imaginable from a Bolshevik sympathizer
| but I often wonder whether big-C Communism could have survived
| and how it would have fared if the United States hadn't engaged
| in sustained economic warfare against it. I imagine it might look
| something a bit like Chinese Communism does today, although
| perhaps those days came and went in the later eras of the Party
| system.
| nradov wrote:
| What economic warfare? Even after WWII the USA literally sold
| food to the USSR. Without that their food shortages would have
| been even worse.
| unnamed76ri wrote:
| Chinese communism survives because the US spends an insane
| amount of money on their goods each year. It would have
| collapsed by now if not for the US demand for stuff.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| People who got too serious about communism tended to get
| eliminated by Stalin, and then the people in charge of the
| elimination (Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria) were in turn eliminated in
| later purges.
| sublimefire wrote:
| The premise of its "success" was based on half the population
| working for free in the camps for the other half. Many major
| projects were executed with little thought for the
| slaves/workers that perished, all for the goals of socialism.
| Then oligarchy followed, without the way to increase worker
| productivity. The only well funded programmes were in the
| defence sector which bankrupted the country eventually
| gampleman wrote:
| Reminds me a bit of the "Power of the Powerless" by Vaclav Havel.
| wormius wrote:
| 1. Black Book of Communism
|
| 2. "Unborn"
|
| Yeah, no.
|
| I'm not saying USSR was a panacea or that Stalin did nothing
| wrong (Tankies are the fucking worst. I hung out on /r/communism
| for a while, and, as the kids used to say "gross").
|
| I take writing like the OP with a HUGE grain of salt.
|
| There are plenty of crimes and problems with what happened in the
| Soviet Union. Some of these were intentional by the leadership
| both before, during, and after Stalin. Some of these were self-
| owns (War Communism much?) some of these were forced errors (when
| doing battle one makes tough choices, and this includes in
| ideological/economic/actual war). Some of these were straight up
| evil policies (gulags, great purges, Katyn, etc...)
|
| If someone can do real analysis I'm down, but once you start
| quoting Black Book of Communism, I know you're coming with an
| agenda and it's hard for me to take you in good faith. Especially
| if you're counting "The Unborn" - go on, just call the US a "Nazi
| Nation with the unborn holocaust" (I grew up in that shit, so saw
| the propaganda first hand).
| nec4b wrote:
| >>1. Black Book of Communism
|
| Are you contending existence of mass murders under almost any
| communist regime? What agenda are you talking about? You are
| making it sound communism is a noble idea, which someone is
| trying to discredit undeservingly.
|
| >>2. "Unborn" It was about an estimation of how much more
| people would Soviet Union have in time if it hadn't murdered so
| many of its citizens. Imagine children of children of missing
| 20 million people.
| davejagoda wrote:
| > In their subconscious hopes that a societal formula is as
| simple and as universal as the famous E=mc2, people are prepared
| to believe nonsense if it only sounds good.
|
| This is an interesting insight on human nature.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Somewhat related, one of my favorite 'absurdities' to come from
| the USSR was the hydraulic computer
| https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/12/vladimir-lukyanovs-wat...
| inglor_cz wrote:
| One thing that only the "survivors" realize is just how
| materialistic the Soviet Bloc societies were.
|
| And I don't mean philosophically materialistic, like "there is no
| soul". That too, but I mainly mean that in the shortage of
| everything (and there usually was a shortage of everything)
| people would become fixated on owning relatively banal objects.
|
| Girls would prostitute themselves for a nice pair of Western
| jeans, people would snitch and steal, break the law, run illegal
| smuggling rings while bribing the police, take bribes themselves
| etc., over things such as stockings, tires or calculators.
|
| I was not able to persuade one young American that not paying a
| fat bribe to a doctor could have fatal consequences back then.
| "But in socialism, there must be a common free healthcare for
| everybody!" - Yeah, lad, on paper. Paper tolerates everything.
| The one thing that was never in shortage were slogans,
| propaganda, red flags and red stars.
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