yeah :deeper-sadness: ... like, most AES states have probably had occasional excesses with repression, but if I had all the imperial powers pointing their guns (and later nukes) at me, knowing that if I fuck up I'm possibly condemning all my people to suffering under capitalist exploitation, I don't really rank my chances for not becoming a paranoid mess particularly high. The Indonesian socialists tried being nice and peaceful, and they literally got genocided for their trouble
I listened to the Behind The Bastards episode on Trofim Lysenko, and besides how it happened both to the Soviets and then to the Chinese 20 years later, in a way that their state ideologies were very prone to, my takeaway was that the account suggests that all the rest of the famine deaths were few and accidental.
Me 6 years ago: "Marxist states have all failed or been corrupted."
Me today: "Although they run many risks of power structures being easily wiped out or turning into a political class, Marxist states have provided some of the best examples of governments that serve their people."
Yeah, if you actually look at their history objectively, without all the anti-communist brainworms that most of us have gotten fed our entire lives, you just have to be fucking impressed at what they've managed to accomplish.
The end of the Soviet Union is a great example, with the massive decrease in life expectancy that followed - even in its last years, when it was definitely a deeply flawed and troubled state, it was still massively superior to the capitalism that followed. If even "failed" and "corrupted" socialism is still just so much better for the average person than capitalism, then it makes one wonder about what these countries would have been able to achieve if they didn't have to deal with the constant pressure and threats from capitalist states - what would the Soviets have been able to do if they didn't have to spend so much money on the military in order to keep up with the Americans? Or if we go even earlier - what if they hadn't lost such a massive segment of their population in WW2? We had this thread some days ago, where someone brought up how the war completely wrecked the party's younger cadres, which contributed a lot to the later gerontocracy - how would things have been if all these young men (and women) hadn't died at the hands of the Nazis?
yeah :deeper-sadness: ... like, most AES states have probably had occasional excesses with repression, but if I had all the imperial powers pointing their guns (and later nukes) at me, knowing that if I fuck up I'm possibly condemning all my people to suffering under capitalist exploitation, I don't really rank my chances for not becoming a paranoid mess particularly high. The Indonesian socialists tried being nice and peaceful, and they literally got genocided for their trouble
I listened to the Behind The Bastards episode on Trofim Lysenko, and besides how it happened both to the Soviets and then to the Chinese 20 years later, in a way that their state ideologies were very prone to, my takeaway was that the account suggests that all the rest of the famine deaths were few and accidental.
Me 6 years ago: "Marxist states have all failed or been corrupted."
Me today: "Although they run many risks of power structures being easily wiped out or turning into a political class, Marxist states have provided some of the best examples of governments that serve their people."
Yeah, if you actually look at their history objectively, without all the anti-communist brainworms that most of us have gotten fed our entire lives, you just have to be fucking impressed at what they've managed to accomplish.
The end of the Soviet Union is a great example, with the massive decrease in life expectancy that followed - even in its last years, when it was definitely a deeply flawed and troubled state, it was still massively superior to the capitalism that followed. If even "failed" and "corrupted" socialism is still just so much better for the average person than capitalism, then it makes one wonder about what these countries would have been able to achieve if they didn't have to deal with the constant pressure and threats from capitalist states - what would the Soviets have been able to do if they didn't have to spend so much money on the military in order to keep up with the Americans? Or if we go even earlier - what if they hadn't lost such a massive segment of their population in WW2? We had this thread some days ago, where someone brought up how the war completely wrecked the party's younger cadres, which contributed a lot to the later gerontocracy - how would things have been if all these young men (and women) hadn't died at the hands of the Nazis?