In the morning 10 comments. Now 110.
Let’s see who is the debatelord vibe basing facts against cowbee…
I highly recommend the recent Deprogram podcast (ep #248) where they go into a discussion of the daily life experiences of people in socialist countries. Hakim’s father lived in the USSR and Yugo, living in a the former Yugoslavia, has a ton of anecdotal experiences from family and friends.
Thank you for sharing, this seems interesting
And public transport was dirt cheap, a third of the population had summer houses. If we could replicate the capital distribution without the human rights infringement, that would be amazing. But recently the US is doing the opposite: replicate sky high prison population with skyrocketing inequalities
Human rights were also quite strong in the USSR, especially compared to capitalist countries. The soviets were nearly always at the forefront of social liberties.
Hold on there bud let’s not jump the shark. Yes there was advancements for women’s rights and they did have some laws against racism and colonialism although you can definitely argue they didn’t exactly respect that colonialism part. Fantastic workplace and education.
But there were a massive lack of human rights – religious freedoms, freedom of movement which is fucking huge you cannot even go where you wanna go, extreme lack of political freedom and above all being gay was completely illegal.
So not really quite strong and not really that far ahead of capitalist countries, maybe in some facets but saying it was just straight better is completely untrue. The only point it wasn’t illegal to engage in homosexual relationships was when they forgot to codify it into law basically but they fixed as soon as Stalin consolidated his power.
Both countries had their problems which was more reflective of global culture than anything. Across the globe women were handling more work, across the globe racism was growing as people started to integrate, and across the globe people still hated being queer. Countries you would argue are socialist or formally socialist today lag behind drastically compared to western countries, many repress it out right and ban anything about it, some criminalize it entirely. Today Russia is completely barbaric in how it handles same sex relationships so clearly the cultural shift didn’t happen and some of that progress was never made.
Yes there was advancement for women’s rights
I’m not trying to have a go at you personally, but this is something I see from anti-communists and it drives me up a wall. The way it’s just casually handwaved away that former socialist countries had significantly better rights for one half of the entire population, and it gets relegated to a footnote. It shows just how more work still needs to be done to respect women’s rights. Even if these counties accomplished nothing else, the fact that they actually successfully addressed the needs and rights of HALF the population is a monumental achievement. In the GDR a woman could divorce her husband on her initiative while at the same time in the FRG a woman needed her husband’s permission to work outside the home. This should not be waived off as “yeah yeah I guess women had rights but you couldn’t find a good pair of blue jeans”.
I’m reading Albert Szymanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union right now and they made massive changes. I would recommend it.
I’m not gonna be offended trust me. But it drives me equally up a wall when I read anything from .ml that acts this way. A huge tenet of socialist views is the idea of proletariat internationalism, the idea that the working class globally should be working together to fix the entire system everywhere. Instead there is a constant desire to frame east vs west, socialist vs capitalist, Russia vs the US. And that’s disingenuous and really just makes everyone dumb.
The West absolutely has a laundry list of the evil cruel awful terrible shit it has done, I rarely see that denied. What I do see is that same lens not applied the same to socialist/communist countries especially the USSR.
Women were still barred from any position of power through an invisible glass ceiling, they were still completely expected to work a full time job AND handle women’s works, feminist movements were pursued by a state and often crushed, the USSR denied spousal abuse even existed and offered no solution for abused women. Not to mention to overall economic limitations, at least in the west women could own real estate/invest in a stock market/run a business, that wasn’t really the same in the USSR where things were mostly state run or decided by the state which limited everyone’s freedom equally which I guess you could argue is better in some ways but that’s still completely against socialist sentiment.
So yeah I guess women had rights, but it wasn’t paradise and in ways it lacked in contrast to their contemporaries.
You just can’t have actual discussions here because everyone wants to defend the USSR and it is evident in the culture of former soviet countries how they fared and what the government pushed culturally. Spousal abuse is terrible in these parts of the world, racism runs amok, anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment is massive. People in this thread are literally arguing the USSR was better, yet somehow their culture has completely 180’d? Someone said how the west attributed homosexuality to pedophilia, so did the USSR and so does Russia today because no ground has been made in all those decades since. So what are people even talking about?
The two biggest gaps between communists and your views are that communists recognize the imperialist stage of capitalism as the dominant contradiction globally, which pits the imperialist countries like the US against the global south, as well as the insistence that we place our analysis within the specific historical context that it exists in. This latter process is part of Historical Materialism, which is one of the most significant advancements of Karl Marx.
And this all falls away when you accept every country does an imperialism if it has the ability to do so. The Aral Sea didn’t dry itself, people didn’t deport themselves, languages got erased by the state and cultural repression was a tenet of the USSR.
Imperialism is not an action to be committed on a whim, in the eyes of communists, but relevantly is a stage in capitalist development. As bank and industrial capital consolidate and monopolize, they form finance capital, which seeks to expand internationally and thus the economy shifts from focusing on commodity export to capital export. This is a material system, with definite material causes, not something to be engaged upon at a whim.
The idea that countries would simply be evil if they had the opportunity to is an idealist argument, not a materialist one, and thus is anti-scientific. This is closer to a religious look on life than a scientific one.
Further, as we are placing the Soviet Union in its actual, historical context, nationalities were protected, languages that were never written were alphabetized, and the right of secession was protected. Tremendous development happened, and ethnic minorities were culturally protected and celebrated. There were instances of population transfer, and this by modern standards would be considered barbaric. However, this practice was enormously common among capitalist peers like the UK and US, and neither of them had the same level of thought and care placed into respecting and uplifting various ethnicities.
The only conclusion here is that you either are entirely unfamiliar with the true severity of repressions committed by the west, and therefore the shift to the positive direction as compared to their peers, or are entirely unfamiliar with the sheer care and uplifting that did go on when it comes to ethnic minority rights in the USSR, despite failures like population transfer.
This is why we are pointing out that you do not take a scientific approach to history.
The soviets absolutely respected their anti-colonial stance, not only did they free Russia’s colonies but they also contributed to anti-colonial movements. Regarding religious freedom, it was actually quite high. Atheism was pushed by the state, but protections on nationalities also protected right to religion. Political freedom was also much, much higher for the majority of society, who remain disenfranchised by capitalist systems.
As for queer rights, penalties for being gay were often lower than in capitalist countries, and usually gay rights were at the forefront for capitalist countries. They were severely lacking compared to today, but compared to their peers, they were progressive.
I don’t see how referencing post-socialist states, where reactionaries took power, indicates anything of meaning when it comes to human rights under socialism.
Don’t forget how the West rewarded Alan Turing for his contributions during WW2 by castrating him for being gay. Or how the west linked homosexuality with pedophilia.
Or a bigger example being Ronald Reagan letting AIDS run rampant in the LGBTQ+ community.
Yep, even with the homophobia of the early Soviet Union, they were generally at or near the top when it comes to queer rights in their peer countries. That’s both depressing to think about, and also indicative of their own progressive nature as they sit in their historical context.
A case of Homosexuality. Feifer, George. Justice in Moscow. Simon and Schuster, 1964. pp 207–8
To return to the cases behind closed doors: There is an article in the code that I would have thought unnecessary; it deals with homosexuality.* Muscovites are so strongly heterosexual—so little titillating talk, so much real activity. One never sees obvious homosexuals in public places, and I had assumed that I would never see them in court. Russians seemed too healthy for that.
The exception proved the rule. Late one afternoon I came across it in a wretchedly damp, low-ceilinged basement room in the form of two elderly men, fifty-five and sixty-one, the first with a full eighteenth-century peasant beard, the other in high boots and a tunic. Insensibly drunk, they had exposed themselves on a bitter November day in a park and made some sort of contact with each other. They listened in deep embarrassment while the court found them guilty; but “considering their ages, their families, their honest confessions, and their promises of future good behavior,” it decided not to deprive them of freedom but merely to fine them 20 per cent of their salaries for a year.
The men sputtered thanks to the judge and left separately without exchanging a glance. A once-very-pretty, fortyish woman who heard the sentence with me shook her head incredulously. “I just don’t believe it. You mean they . . .? The two of them? Good God, what for?”* Article 121: Homosexuality.
Sexual relations of a man with a man (homosexuality) is punishable by deprivation of freedom for a period of up to five years. Homosexuality committed by means of application of physical force, threat, or in relation to a minor, or by taking advantage of a dependent position of the victim, is punishable by deprivation of freedom for a period of up to eight years.Yep, they weren’t great by any stretch, but the cartoonish idea that queer people were executed in the streets is horrendously false. Meanwhile, Turing was chemically castrated and driven to suicide despite being a hero, simply because he was gay.
The Soviet union literally occupied parts of central and eastern europe? They crushed uprisings in Hungray and Czechoslovakia that still impact how those countries exist today. They even deported Tartars and Chechens. That’s some pretty colonial stances. Their funding for anti-colonial movements was really just anti-western colonialism so it kinda became a “which flavor of colonialism do you want” game. That’s literally what was the basis of the Cold War.
No religions were not protected. They nationalized most church property from the get-go, they abolished muslim schools and actively forced people to stop learning Arabic and Hebrew which was pretty necessary for them to engage in their religion.
As for queer rights, penalties for being gay were often lower than in capitalist countries.
They were not progressive at all, 7 years in prison is nowhere near progressive. You can literally just look up Article 121 Soviet Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_history_in_the_Soviet_Union what are you talking about?
I don’t see how referencing post-socialist states, where reactionaries took power, indicates anything of meaning when it comes to human rights under socialism.
Because it is reflective of the culture that was pushed. You’re basically saying being queer was free and everyone was cool with it, today the sentiment in post-soviet countries is extremely negative, some of the worst on the planet. You don’t get that shift overnight, that is a cultural standard that has been reinforced by a legal system for decades.
On the flip side, even though the US went through the lavender scare and the AIDs crisis it was far better. It still is far better because of the cultural impact of those experiences, there is massive queer support in the US because of events like the Stonewall Riots. A plethora of people famous and rich in the US are openly queer, I can see queer couples when I look out my window and pride flags on most streets.
Just wait until you find out about what the US was doing in East and Southeast Asia at the time. There isn’t a single criticism you can make of the USSR that the West wasn’t doing bigger and more savagely.
I 10000% agree and that is my entire point.
Is it? Because it’s the same point I made, yet you seem to be arguing against it.
The Soviet Union did not “occupy” the other countries in the socialist bloc or otherwise. They had favorable trade relations, but were not colonial. Ethnic deportations were wrong, and did happen, but their peers were worse, for example see how Churchill treated Bengal. Their funding for anti-colonial movements was tremendously freeing, it wasn’t a “parallel colonialism” but genuine anti-imperialism. You can only make this “parallel colonialism” argument if you ignore any and all hard evidence and numbers comparing interactions between western countries and their colonies, and the Soviet Union and formerly colonized countries.
Regarding Hungary and Czechoslovakia, both had counterrevolutionary uprisings that were dealt with as any country would. Far-right elements took up arms against the left wing states, and as such these were contested by the Warsaw Pact countries. This isn’t colonialism.
As for queer rights, I specifically said their penalties were often more lax than capitalist countries at the time. Alan Turing was castrated and pushed to suicide, homosexuality was strongly punished in the west. In the Soviet Union, the 5 year mark was a maximum sentence, one that was rarely carried out. Hence it was more lax, and in some socialist countries like the GDR eventually free gender affirming care began to be rolled out, far ahead of trans acceptance in the west.
As for comparing post-socialist countries to contemporary capitalist countries, you are not making an honest comparison of socialism to capitalism. This already throws out your point, but again, we were comparing the Soviet Union over its whole existence to their western peers over their whole existence, as peers. This is not a comparison of reactionary regimes, but socialist countries vs. their capitalist peers.
were worse,
You’re just not gonna budge it doesn’t matter believe what you want. Thousands of queers were imprisoned. Millions lost their cultural and religious identity. The Soviet Union did not have favorable trade deals, they had full scale occupations. We can sit here all day and say who was worse but the bigger thing is NOBODY WAS SAFE so it’s completely irrelevant it isn’t even a light slap vs a death penalty, it is straight up government-funded harassment campaigns everywhere. There is no “lax” when it comes to government repression dude.
And then you look at today and the West has absolutely come out far ahead for the LGBTQIA+ community by a long shot because it actually was better in the West.
As for comparing post-socialist countries to contemporary capitalist countries, you are not making an honest comparison of socialism to capitalism.
I don’t have to because fortunately human rights don’t apply directly to those structures, they’re different across each nation that embraces those ideals. Socialists governments want to pretend they champion for human rights but they don’t if anyone is oppressed, they’re just choosing which demographics to support which is exactly how the rest of the world does it too. You’re being completely disingenuous trying to frame it as a this or that argument, there are not two sides to human rights.
But you’re not interested in being fair, you just want the soviet union to be some rainbow paradise or something when it was not. It constricted so hard on the queer community that the identity was completely shadowed and still to this day is goes largely unidentified and unrecorded except for a few like Gennady Trifonov who barely managed to get his story out. Whatever man.
It feels like you are struggling to understand historical events and entities as parts of historical processes. Yes the USSR did stuff we look back at and go, wow that was fucked up huh. That’s to be expected as we have historically progressed from the point they were at. The USSR wasn’t gonna undo centuries of social conditioning in a decade, that was not feasible. You can’t thanos snap homophobia from existence by royal decree. I would have loved if the Soviet Union spawned into existence with all the values I have today but it didn’t. It was birthed with all the prejudices of working people in Czarist Russia and had to eat away at them over time. Not only this, it came about in a world of prejudices and was consistently surrounded by them. They weren’t going to have an ideological epiphany that severely broke from their tradition and world culture for no reason.
You’re doing historical anachronism
The claim I gave was that the Soviet Union was historically progressive compared to peer capitalist countries. I never said they were progressive compared to modern western countries when it comes to queer rights, and when it comes to women’s rights, worker’s rights, and more, the Soviet Union was more progressive than the US is today. You are shifting the goalpost to the idea that I said the Soviet Union was flawless even by modern standards, which I never said.
Further, you again try to draw a direct line from a socialist federation of countries to the horrendously reactionary states that replaced them. There is no material basis for this, otherwise the Tsarist system would have continued culturally into the Soviet system. They clearly did not, the Soviet Union was enormously progressive compared to the Tsarist system, just like the modern reactionary states are far more reactionary than the Soviet Union was.
You have no leg to stand on.
Five years.
- Religious freedom is an oxymoron. Religions must be suppressed
- Your assertion regarding homosexuality in USSR is wrong, they knowingly decriminalised homosexuality before but stalin recriminalized it - which is his fault
- Today russia is hyper conservative because thats what liberals wanted - to dissolve the USSR they needed a strong nationalist movement which they got.
As a communist myself, point number was proven to be incorrect by the USSR. Suppressing all religious expression was the wrong move and created a massive reactionary backlash that could not be managed. Religions must be allowed to wither away and repression only employed when the religion is being used as a cover for counter-revolutionary organizing.
Agreed, this is a lesson from the USSR we must take to heart (and to be fair, a lesson the USSR itself seemed to learn over time).
stalin recriminalized it - which is his fault
This seems like Great Man theory. Was he really single-handedly imposing this? Or where there more to it?
I am blaming the collective leadership but took stalins name coz he was at the top
Religion is synonymous with culture to some groups. I have seen the sentiment of how Indigenous Americans were treated to be genocide, which I agree with. For largely the exact same reasons and metrics as religious prosecution in the Soviet Union, destroying a national identity, forceful integration, language erasure, basically indoctrination.
They didn’t support it, they wanted to abolish the entire concept of marriage. Which included same-sex relationships. Saying they supported it is disingenuous.
Russia is hyper conservative because of a ton of reasons, a lot of those cultural. Which the Soviet Union reinforced in many ways and didn’t push against in many other ways. Saying the entire culture flipped because liberals is just not true, c’mon.
There was all good,just the government was always right. So,if person kept low profile,lived his life,didn’t spoke against the president, he could live life working and nit bothering about tomorrow. Roof over head, some food always available. Free med care,education, ect. It was very suitable for normies, lazy people were made work, and the smart ones… eh,those suffered in Russia…
I don’t like the implication that workers are unintelligent, lazy, “Normie’s,” while rentiers, capitalists, etc. are “smart people.”
Your comprehension of text is outstanding, but please, try to read again and point were I said that normies were lazy or not intelligent? Where I am saying that capitalist are smart? If not minding , I will ask you personal question- what is your direct experience with Russia?
Considering the conversation is about the USSR and not Russia (in its modern form) then everyone on this site likely has the same personal anecdotal experience of roughly 0 and is instead working off data and stories they’ve been told. (Apologies if any senior citizens happen to be lurking Lemmy I just don’t think it’s likely).
Under the soviet union, the large majority of those who benefited were the working classes, while those who lost out were the formerly owning classes. You don’t directly reference them by their classes, you indirectly do by describing those who won and those who lost accordingly.
In my experience with “smart” people from former Eastern Bloc countries now living in the West, what they “suffered” from was the idea that they didn’t get to live a life of significantly higher material comforts than “normal” workers in their country, similar to how things were in the West.
But isn’t it funny how nowadays working normals in USA struggling with same, didn’t you noticed that ? Or they are living dream life on edge of bankruptcy. Dave Ramsey speaks OnLive with many regular working class Americans about this "suffering " and proposing ussr lifestyle 🤣🤣 Omg, the point is to see ALL this capitalism/socializm as brokoli and carrots swimming in same soup and people arguing till blood to prove that one is poison and another is antidote while eating the soup. People are played around, fooled to involve them in debating and spending their time and energy on this , while Teo fights, tge third wins… P.s. been on both sides of world , lived both regimes, now living peacefully and just enjoying shitshows here in comments…
damn you are super enlightened
Ah yes, the “smart” ones.
Stable geniuses, and very high IQ, always having had a very high IQ, according to many people.
And with very strong instincts, more important than any degree in a university.
Always known how to make the right moves in business.
You know, the ones people say about that they’re geniuses, and they don’t disagree with them because they’ve been building empires from the ground up.
Typical .ml bait but I’ll bite.
You can get similar conditions for a fairly similar price right now. Current monthly rent of 2 bedroom apt in regional slav city (1m population) is about €200. Any .ml users wanna move in? USSR ideation is very very welcome
That would be so nice. A single bedroom apartment where I live is like $700 in the city, $600 out of the city. For context, that is 50% of my salary and I work full time in a job that requires a college degree. And it is applied.
i’d do anything to get the fuck out of america. i can be a software engineer and firefighter anywhere. my wife can paint anywhere. but i’m disgusted at my country’s behavior on the world stage, and locally, and how The Jungle is a god damned documentary.
“Oh, you like communism? Well how about paying almost nothing in rent, huh? Living in some hell where people agree with you? Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
And what’s the income in these cities? How much is said 200 of the average inhabitants income?
(Hint, more than 5% and often these regional cities dont exactly have great employment prospects due to shock therapy nuking whatever industry the city was built around)
State sources claim 760€(on 03.26 by rosstat). But it’s a good point to start asking more questions when the claim looks too good to be true – just as it is with the OP’s meme
The official average salary is a half-truth (hence a russian saying: if my boss eats meat and I eat cabbage, on average we eat golubtsi), most people in the regions are living on 30000 RUB a month or so. It may still be better than the US because you get public transit and thus don’t really need a car but it’s still not good. Capitalism ruins everything.
China is a more enticing proposition but it’s very difficult/impossible for a foreigner to get a permanent residence permit.
But it’s a good point to start asking more questions when the claim looks too good to be true – just as it is with the OP’s meme
The only question you asked was, “does anyone want to move in to a living situation completely dissimilar to the one described in the OP (which effectively no longer exists, contrary to the point I was trying to make)? Didn’t think so 😏”
Bruh, the meme is a frame of western modern movie with western actors glamorizing the past, palatable version of which never actually existed. It is a propagandist solution for the global housing crisis
It’s “Make X Great Again” from the other end of the horseshoe
Idk how to engage with this populist twisted media in direct good faith argument. At the very least, my joke gives more information to those struggling with housing to seek out better opportunities
Yeah man verifiable data that happens to be reflected in one movie is exactly the same as psychosexual nostalgia for a 1950s coke commercial America that never existed. Everything anyone earnestly believes in is all equally stupid regardless of what it is, there is no alternative to tepid omnicidal liberalism.
So 25%
Also:
The average rent in the USSR around 1970 was 2–3% of the average urban family budget. This compares to an average of 20–25% before the Revolution, and 25–30% in the USA in 1970.24
Albert, Szymanski. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. Zed Books. 1984. Chapter 5
Your preoccupation with incomes and percentages makes you look anti-revolution and maybe even capitalist, comrade. For people like you, glorious fatherhood has special completely free of charge housing facilities!
Your preoccupation with incomes and percentages makes you look anti-revolution and maybe even capitalist
Math is capitalist now? Since when???
.ml account with 5k comments asking about kulaks
Oh no, bro, I don’t have as much free time as you do
Oh I see, you’re doing the shitlib thing of pretending to be a Red Alert character and confusing it for biting satire instead of the slav minstrel show it is.
Do an impression of someone from the DPRK next, I’d love to see how funny it is. You’re like the next Sacha Baren Cohen dude.
Man, I actually wanted to go visit DPRK but it’s seems like an unpopular (hence expensive) destination. A couple of friends went there and said it is like asian Belarus. Which is ehhh idk kinda underwhelming… But maybe one day!
Work hard and keep your head down and you too may one day have a good enough FICO score to purchase a plane ticket, citizen.
