So, back when I was a social-democrat slightly intrigued by communism I tried to listen to "both sides" to form my opinion and so I looked for videos from both communists and anti-communists. Out of the few things I watched I retained mostly, "Debunking every anti-communist argument ever" by spooky scary socialist on the pro-communist side and this series of 3 videos on the anti-communist side:
Marx, responsable des goulags ? La lutte des classes
Critique de la lutte des classes selon Karl Marx
Critique de l'économie selon Karl Marx
Those 3 struck me as relatively convincing at the time (I knew nothing about Marxism whatsoever back then).
Recently, seeing recommended videos from this channel made me look back and wonder how I would see these same videos now as a Marxist-Leninist and after procrastinating it for months I finally decided to re-watch them. And low and behold, they are dumb.
The youtuber makes a big show of explaining his bare minimum knowledge and shaky comprehension of Marx's writings which makes it looks like he know what he's talking about to the uninitiated but it's really mainly the old anti-communist drivel: denying class struggle and the labor theory of value, pretending that communists want a perfect utopia and say "that wasn't real communism" when AES are brought up, pretending that Marx was an accelerationist, etc...
I would be interested in having other MLs opinions on this brainrot, especially since for better or for worst it has been part of my political evolution.
If you judge countries by GDP, you should adore not only systems of USA, but also Quatar and Emyrates. Numbers only tell a fraction of story. Of course, when industrialisation came to USSR, GDP growth in the ashes of war was impressive in percentages. Like if you go from 1 to 3 dollars a month, you grow astonishing 300%. And all just by copying foreign solutions: there was almost nothing originally created in USSR. Even now russia is primarily primitive dig-out-and-sell economy. Russians often say that we in the Baltics owe them all these factories. As if we wouldnt build industry ourselves after a prosperous interwar period. As if Finland now was poor and regretting that it fought back this "marvelous" empire. And of course you are right: employment in almost forced labour environment was high :) Even if GDP numbers were ok, life was shit: you couldnt buy things even having money, and people wer not allowed out, instead of not allowed in, like real prosperous countries do. So no, GDP is not a good benchmark here.
As for the sentiment for USSR - of course it is strong inside brainwashed russia, where all media is state controlled. Currently their main national narrative is about the war, about being a superpower. USSR was a large, war-winning empire (even if with allies, even if repressive and evil). Sadly they are still killing Ukrainians to become empire again - all enabled by those sentiments and loss of narratives about human dignity. War, power and greatness is what matters to them. On top of that, russians who still remember USSR are on the edge of poverty in their current cleptocratic liberalism, but they were young and somewhat secure then. But try looking at this data not from imperial centre of russia, but any Baltic state - you will see a different picture.
If the citizens of Bad Country agree with my propaganda, that's proof of how bad their country is.
If the citizens of Bad Country reject my propaganda, they're brainwashed, which is proof of how bad their country is.
You could replace USSR/Russia with USA/NATO and Ukrainians with Russians in your second paragraph and everything would match. You can't in good faith tell me Russia is brainwashing it's population but that the West isn't commanding every major media platform to parrot it's geopolitical narratives. You can't tell me that "Greatness" is what matters most to Russia and pretend that the US/EU isn't drowning in rabid chauvinistic sentiment against it's opponents out of fear of losing it's greatness to a country like China.
Oh look, more Baltic capitalist brainrot. I hope you enjoy living in an ethnostate.
The Baltic states are like scabs praising a company because of their boss immediately made them employee of the month after they got hired and made them feel special.
‘[Axis] crimes have been eliminated from the Estonian collective memory, both in the West and, as far as can be seen, in present‐day Estonia as well.’
I never said that GDP was the only metric worth looking at, this is bad faith.
Ha yes, excuse me. They only went from a backward quasi-feudal society poorer than India that still used horses in their army and fields to an industrial superpower capable of repelling what was then the most powerful military on earth and becoming the first nation to send a human to space in 40 years despite a civil war, an invasion from a dozen major world powers, a famine, the great depression, the second world war, constant internal and external sabotage and more, nothing worth mentioning.
This is just anti-communist cope that ignore reality.
Blatantly false. Even if you ignore all their world's first achievements in the space race the soviet have invented plenty of stuff: the world's first nuclear powerplant(1954), the world's first implantable artificial heart (1937), The world's first cell phone (1961), etc. Plus, of course countries that are technologically late -as the soviet union was- are going to copy what the more advanced are doing, that's just the smart thing to do, why bother spending the time and resources to re-invent a tech that's already out there?
This has nothing to do with communism though, it's the Russian nationalists and capitalists who say and do those things.
[citation needed], again.
No sources for claims so bunkers that not even notoriously rabid anti-communist try to make them. From where do you get that the entire population, or at least a majority, was forced to work? Or that peoples were not allowed out?
The only claim in here that's even remotely defendable is the "you couldn't buy things even having money" part in the sense that since the consumer industry was underdeveloped consumer products were not systematically available, but given the rest of the paragraph I doubt that's what you mean.
This is more complicated than that. While the government narrative do like to refer back to the USSR for it's military might and geopolitical influence, they are verry anti-communist and anti-Lenin. So the pro-communist sentiment can't be explained by the propaganda alone.
Good on you for not dismissing the opinions of peoples who lived under socialism as just nostalgia, a lot of anti-communists like to pull this one to "get rid" of inconvenient testimonies. Yes, indeed these peoples have noticed that they are far worst off now than before the dissolution of the soviet union and that's why they regret the dissolution.
As for your second link, I may read it and get back to you with my thoughts later, but given my quick look at the sponsors and content I already seriously doubt the objectivity of this document. 👇
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