So, uh, did communism work for them?
I grew up in USSR, it worked fine. The real horrors started after the wonders of markets and capitalism were introduced.
Socialism did work in the USSR, yes. They doubled life expectancies, ended famine, passed prison reforms, dramatically expanded democracy, nearly eliminated homelessness, transformed a semi-feudal backwater into a modernized industrial country, passed free universal healthcare and education, and plenty more. There were problems and struggles, and obviously it no longer exists, but socialism absolutely worked for the soviets for neaerly a full century.
The dissolution of socialism in Eastern Europe was multi-faceted and complex, and had more to do with conditions particular to the soviets as compared to universal to socialism. Today, the CPRF is rising in popularity and is the most significant opposition to United Russia, and the majority of Russians wish to return to socialism.
Seems relatively on par with the rest of the world…
https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20250731-112524/grapher/life-expectancy.html
- Across the world, people are living longer. In 1900, the global average life expectancy was 32 years. By 2023, this had more than doubled to 73 years.
- Countries around the world made big improvements, and life expectancy more than doubled in every region. This wasn’t just due to falling child mortality; people started living longer at all ages.
Thanks for providing a graph that makes it difficult comparing socialist states with captialist ones. Your graph also doesn’t capture how fast life expectancy increased, it purposefully expands the timeframe to make it less significant. After the dissolution of the Soviet union Russia suffered the largest known drop in life expectancy in peace time
It has knobs, twiddle them or use the raw data.
Yes - societal collapses tend to do that.
Which knobs do you twiddle to out the Soviet bloc, China n all?
And if you are talking about it without doing the twiddling when younshared it, aren’t you now just making s pasable reply?
My confusion is why collapse back to capitalism?
Let’s start with some axioms. There is a continuum of stages of human societal progression with socialism following after capitalism. Under socialism the workers run the state. USSR socialism was great for the worker.
Given the axioms, why would the USSR decide to create a capitalist class again?
The USSR’s results in the face of outside pressure were great however. Why buckle after putting up such a fight?
Why can struggle against external power move human societal progression backwards?
The USSR didn’t “decide” to do so, it was couped and hollowed out by Yeltsin and co. These are the new “oligarchs.” While the economy had started to slow, the combination of the devastation of World War II resulted in the deaths of 27 million soviets, many of which were some of the most dedicated to socialism and defending it. This was also combined with growing nationalist movements, often supported by the west. This complicated mish mash gave favorable conditions for a coup, despite popular support for retaining the soviet union.
On the spaceflight note, it’s rather sad that the Soviets harassed and imprisoned Yuri Kondratyuk since his work was vital in the moon landing and orbital mechanics in general.
If his work in space flight was supported and not repeatedly crushed by authorities, the USSR might’ve landed on the moon first. Instead, he was imprisoned by the NVKD for some of his engineering designs (for “sabotage” of not using nails, which is a dumb thing on its own).
And eventually, he gave all his aerospace notes to a friend to smuggle them out of the country because he feared the govt would accuse him of treason like they had Sergei Pavlovich Korolev (the guy who made Sputnik 1).
The Soviets could have won the space race, if it weren’t for the “authoritarianism” you’re trying to make light of
The Soviets could have won the space race
A) that’s actually good meme haha
B) the space race ended when the US landed on the moon, if you run a 5k and get to 4.9k ahead of everyone but then don’t cross the finish line, you’ve still lost the race
Anyway the point of my comment wasn’t “the US beat the Soviets because they’re authoritarian” it was “the Soviets had everything they needed to absolutely dominate space travel but their authoritarianism hindered their scientific progress significantly”
B) the space race ended when the US landed on the moon, if you run a 5k and get to 4.9k ahead of everyone but then don’t cross the finish line, you’ve still lost the race
Im not sure how to explain to you that if youre the one declaring what the goal is, you essentially declare yourself the winner. If I declare that the first person to be in space is the winner of the space race, the UDSSR won? It’s what the meme is hinting at
the Soviets had everything they needed to absolutely dominate space travel but their authoritarianism hindered their scientific progress significantly
A) every single state in this planet is authoritarian. What matters is the class character. Read this: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
B) habe you considered that the reason the Soviet had everything they needed to absolutely dominate space travel was due to the system they had?
There’s no benefit in linking theory. They will read it once, not interpret a single thing of value, and then simply say they don’t agree with it even though their view completely contradicts the material reality.
You’re placing far too much importance on the potential excessive actions taken by a state under constant infiltration and siege against a scientist. As we showed, the soviet space program, without said scientist, took numerous firsts over the US. The soviets weren’t incompetent and needed a super-scientist to save them, they had an extremely competent team that took them to space before the US while being a semi-feudal backwater 50 years prior. If anything, the fact that they took so many firsts despite their dramatic hinderances, including recovering from World War II, is an excellent showcase of the effectiveness of soviet science.
This is what the lack of dialectical & historical materialism does to a motherfucker. You shall serve as a great example of what happens to the chumps who refuse to read theory.
Ah yes, life was just a peach for ppl living behind the iron curtain for the bulk of the 20th century.
Even the CIA admitted they had just as much food as they did in the US. People voted not to dissolve the USSR for a reason and then they did it anyway. Overall, life wasn’t that bad there, you’re mostly falling for propaganda.
Even the surveillance wasn’t that bad (compared to let’s say the US where the FBI was running amok at the time spying on every leftist organization, doing assassinations, blackmail, wiretapping, etc). They didn’t have Pizza Hut and jeans were hard to come by, but other than that, they managed to improve the lives for the vast majority of their population without having to do the colonialism and imperialism of the US and the West.
Not being mean, but curious, why did they dissolve the union? How does it differ from what I was taught about it being an economic collapse
It was dissolved illegally. It was a coup, and those involved got rich selling the commons off to Western capitalists at fire sale prices. They became oligarchs.
Was it peach for others?
Compared to where they were, their progress was quite cool. Their revolution also motivated a lot of the anticolonial movements.
To be fair, I’m not endorsing capitalism. Capitalism is the 21st century blight as communism was in the 20th.
straight up nazi shit
Socialism was never a blight, while capitalism in the 20th century absolutely was, and had already reached the imperialist stage.
I can get onboard with socialism. I understand the need to have a strong social safety net. But many here seem to be falsely conflating socialism and communism.
Socialism isn’t safety nets, it’s a mode of production characterized by public ownership as the principle aspect of the economy with the working class in control of the state. Communism is a post-socialist mode of production by which all of production and distribution have been collectivized, are oriented towards satisfying the needs of everyone, and the state, class, and money have withered away. States like the PRC, DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, the former USSR, etc are socialist, not communist yet, even if most of those are governed by communist parties.
How can you not know what socialism is if you’re gonna bark all fucking day long about it? How sad are you?
Thing #1 bad. The thing that destroys the thing #1 and solves the problems created by it is also bad. I swear centrists are the peak of historical illiteracy! Communism was never achived, you idiot! Communism is the end state where every society on earth has overthrown capitalism and has become stateless, moneyless, and classless society. Before that it’s socialism: the transitory phase of fully-realized communism. There was no fully-realized Communism in the 20th century. It was Capitalism vs socialism. Socialist states work towards Communism. So what you call socialism is also an ‘early phase communism’. And Capitalism was also the blight in 20th century. As it was in the 17th, 18th, and the 19th century, idiot.
Go read a fucking book, kid. I beg you! 🙏 Your lack of education embarrasses me.
Go read a fucking book
I don’t think just “a book” is a good advice for deprograming the anticommunists, the bookstores and libraries are full of anticommunists lies pretending to be true by virtue of nearly entire academia of anticommunists and state/publishing market censorship of communism.
Like in Poland we had something like 5 communist publications in 36 years, of which three were printed in very small numbers, one was accidental selfown by illiterate succdems and one was highly contextual. For comparison Orwell shit or Ossendowski slander against Lenin has literally new edition every year.
You would need to be more specific, unless you want them to read Pipes, Montefiore or one of the million other propagandists of capitalism.
Overall it was indeed pretty good, and got significantly worse after the dissolution of socialism and restoration of capitalism.
kindly shut your hole
Yeah it’s crazy what you can achieve when you turn millions of people into a slave army for a dictatorship
You’re thinking of Tsarist Russia, not the USSR.
