cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1611808
To all full-grown hexbears, NO DUNKING IN MY THREAD…ONLY TEACH, criminal scum who violate my Soviet will be banned three days and called a doo doo head…you have been warned
How do you feel about Pussy Riot and the Russian Federation’s treatment of them?
How do you feel about The Plastic People of the Universe and the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic’s treatment of them?
what does the russian federation have to do with socialism?
There seems to be a trend amongst socialists of lauding the Russian people as past vanguards of socialism.
eh, to be fair looking at lemmygrad or hexbear i could see how you’d get that impression. but in reality most socialists really hate the russian federation
and the ‘critical support’ you’ll often see has less to do with socialism and more to do with being one of the major powers that stands up to the global hegemonic control of the u.s.in reality most socialists really hate the russian federation.
They are dancing around wearing the skin of a better, dead, country. Every moment the Russian Federation figuratively draws breath is an insult to the people who died to build a better world for their descendants.
The socialist personalities and content generators that I’ve been exposed to try to promote socialism but completely disregard the failures of China and the USSR. There have been some atrocities committed, oftentimes not intentional but a result of a person’s inability to meet the needs of their role, for example Chairman Mao’s failures with the great leap forward when he failed to understand what would be needed for manufacturing and industrialization and he had people running backyard furnaces trying to produce steel but failing, the killing of millions of sparrows, the 800,000+ deaths of the land reform movement, the struggle sessions of the cultural revolution, the famine and mass murder in the USSR. Maybe my question is how can Socialists control their message to show the merit in their cause? They cannot deny the past or place blame on others, there needs to be an accounting and accountability when advocating for communism. How do good socialists separate from the unapologetic party members who seem bound to repeat past failures?
I think a disatisfying but to me still helpful answer involves reframing this question to ask why we should go for the capitalistic liberal system, with all of the same sorts of questions, in addition to the disparity, the homelessness, the desperation, the war machine, et cetera.
At the end of the day, defending honest failures as if they were intentional actions is something socialists or communists are repeatedly asked to do. The better question, and the more interesting question, is “what do we practically learn from x mistake and how do we avoid replicating it?” On online forums you may get people earnestly trying to answer, or someone who wants to argue. You might even get radio silence. I would, in a way, expect the last one, since we’re trying to solve the world’s problems.
Regardless, remember that the goal is not to do a socialism, the goal is to build a better world. Sorry for a meandering response. :)
To add to this, to be a Marxist is to be non-utopian. And many arguments against Socialism/communism are arguing against utopianism. To be Marxist is to be a Scientific Socialist. Or in other words: you believe that society, the economy, etc, should be for the benefit of as many as possible, including through the democratic control by those who the economy serves. As well, this implies a need to criticize past decisions (socialist or otherwise), including your own decisions, and develop a better working view of the world.
So anyone who blindly says the USSR or China is amazing, without consideration for the problems associated with the way decisions were made, the decisions that were made, or anything like that, aren’t being good socialists.
I might call them the reactionary left.
And to bring up critical consumption of media: there is a lot of misrepresented information about every non-capitalist state, and every non-american ally, for clear geopolitical purposes. While awful things certainly did happen in the USSR (for example), amazing things happened as well. When comparing the “bad” and “good” with the western (imperial core) countries, a more honest assessment can be made. Ultimately helping us all envision how a better world might look.
And that’s dangerous for established power structures.
