:zizek: I LOVE COLLEGE :zizek:
edit: thirty years old, post-soviet country origins, used lived experience when I pressed the point :zizek-preference:
used lived experience when I pressed the point
I had a Polish student who wrote to me questioning why I include Marxist stuff in my teaching, and she be like “I grew up seeing the horrors and traumas of socialism.” She’s in her mid 20s. I was too tired to point it out so I just ignored.
“You grew up seeing the horrors of what happens when you stop doing socialism”
Exactly. But I was really, really, REALLY too tired to respond with anything at all when in the same email she was like “I’d rather read Thomas Sowell than Fanon.”
Shouldn't have signed up for Communism 101 if you didn't want to learn about communism.
The USSR doesn't have a spotless record here -- virtually no one does -- but it did a number of things that are almost unparalleled in terms of decolinization:
- Let some former Russian territories peacefully spin off as independent states (based on this; see Finland for an example).
- Gave political subdivisions of the new USSR (the constitituent SSRs) objectively more sovereignty than U.S. states or any comparable subdivision in a former empire. The SSRs had (mostly? entirely?) ethnic bases and had a constitutional right to secede.
- This right to secede was used (albeit tragically) in the breakup of the USSR, so it wasn't illusory. It didn't require some high-ranking official in the larger political structure to sign off (as the Good Friday Agreement's reunification referendum does) and it didn't result in mass violence (like the U.S. Civil War).
What other decolinization process has accomplished so much, so peacefully?
The SSRs had (mostly? entirely?) ethnic bases
some were designed to have ethnicaly based political self determination and (X ethnicity republic) with actual comprehensive ethnic character on those level even in chases that the ethnicity was a minority in the territories. Which is unprecedented
Post-1920, Bashkirs of the Bashkir Autonomous SSR were never a majority. In ’59, Bashkirs were 737,744 (22.1%), Russians 1,418,147 (40.6%) & the rest 1,185,718. (32.3%), yet the Bashkirs kept autonomy
in the Kazakh SSR in 1959, Kazakhs were only 2.79 million (30%), Russians 3.97 million (42.7%) and Ukrainians 762,131 (8.2%). Did the Russians/Ukranians claim the Kazakh SSR as “Orthodox land” b/c they were the +50% majority? No! They respected Kazakh autonom
This right to secede was used (albeit tragically) in the breakup of the USSR,
this is why it was fucking stupid
Working precarious jobs with less than living wage (eg you work an hour to be able to afford a pizza)
American minimum wage worker: :side-eye-1: :side-eye-2:
Vietnam didnt take a much different approach than China but due to various factors executed worse but a lot not of their own fault. Opened up, privatized and liberalized even more with Capital expansion and power getting more out of hand , got significantly IMF fucked and tangled , didnt have China's equivalent of massive anti-corruption campaign and shift in the last decades etc. So party's power and efficiency and its will to excersice power over capital and the market is lagging quite noticably behind the Chinese equivalent and doesnt present the positive trends towards that direction that have been noticed in China under Xi
Ask your prof why the USSR gave sovereignty to the Ukrainian people after a thousand years of not having designated Ukrainian political representation
It’s because Stalin wanted to eat grain, but he couldn’t eat grain from Russians, so he needed to invent a new group called Ukrainians to eat all the grain from with impunity.
cultural genocide is when minorities learn how to read their own language in numbers they never had before and had the state supporting and publishing their literature and art
literally brought up the minority cultural protection efforts by the soviet union but she just brushed it off
people ignoring or demonising that shit makes me see red. lionising countries actively extinguising indigenous peoples and languages while insisting soviet bi-lingualism and state sponsorship of cultural activities were equivalent or worse.
It’s true that the USSR imposed socialism unnaturally on some of the countries, but they weren’t really minorities :lenin-disguise:
colonial empire
Why did so many third world countries support socialism and/or the USSR over capitalism and the west after being independent :thinking-about-it:
Why did so many third world countries support socialism and/or the USSR over capitalism and the west after being independent
:calipers:Something, something, latin brainpan, something, authoritarianism:expert-shapiro:
Their lived experience was suffering under western imperialism after the USSR was already gone but they can't even understand that much
If you do that you should be entitled to mental health care
Didn't the USSR under Stalin literally make the supression of local languages against the law, along with racist language? :freeze-peach:
Poor dissenting intellectual, 30 years old and persecuted by a state that ended 31 years ago
People pay this professor to spout bullshit they've clearly never studied
I'd be down to do that except for a pro-socialist view of history
This is what we fight the revolution for, so that we can be the ones with jobs we're unqualified for that require nothing of us
I mean this is mostly true for the majority of countries around the world. Many European countries like Spain or France have minority languages and cultures that they've been oppressive against. The Americas gained their land by invading and eradicating indigenous nations. Even smaller countries like Tonga could be considered an empire if we use this logic.
France had like a dozen different languages and all of them were meat grindered for parisian french. One of the only languages that has a regulatory body for its use and evolution.
More like clown college.
It seriously amazes me how conservatives are like: colleges turn our kids into gay commies. And then there's this shit.
Tfw when you are a colonial empire but you go out of your way to give huge amounts of land and create ethnicaly autonomous republics for ethnic minorities in order to help preserve their culture and character https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FSkNchlXoAMtiJI?format=jpg&name=medium
This is why I simplely choose not to go to clown school anymore, for real American collage is a joke and anymore waving a degree around like it means should be publicly shamed :funny-clown-hammer:
