Andrei Suslenkou, director for ideological work at the Minsk Tractor Factory, is proudly showing off the benefits his company offers, at low or no cost, to more than 30,000 workers and retirees. At the plant’s health clinic, 560 doctors and staff use sleek Western equipment to provide care from routine checkups to surgery, including laser eyesight correction. A Palace of Culture opposite the factory’s ornate, Stalin-era gates includes a plush theater wired for light and sound. It just hosted a concert in honor of the “Day of Machine Builders.” Outside the capital, a woodland sanatorium provides cures, vacations, and summer camps for 300 employees’ kids at a time. “They were smart professionals back then who set up these social services,” says Suslenkou, adding that he audited the system Soviet planners made for the factory and found little “excess” to cut.
Basically shows how good Belarus has had it compared to every other ex-Soviet state up to now. Just look at this graph.
The "whatever you want to call your project besides a state" dig betrays the fact that you don't even understand the most basic concept of ML ideology--the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat will "wither away" when true, stateless communism is achieved. If you can't even conceive of and don't want to strive for a stateless society, you're not a communist.
"Whatever you want to call your project besides a state..." It's called communism. That's what communism is. I'm not even an anarchist, but this is not how you engage with anarchism as an ML.
"Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then "the state... ceases to exist", and "it becomes possible to speak of freedom". Only then will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized, a democracy without any exceptions whatever. And only then will democracy begin to wither away, owing to the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state."
The "whatever you want to call your project besides a state" dig betrays the fact that you don't even understand the most basic concept of ML ideology--the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat will "wither away" when true, stateless communism is achieved. If you can't even conceive of and don't want to strive for a stateless society, you're not a communist.
"Whatever you want to call your project besides a state..." It's called communism. That's what communism is. I'm not even an anarchist, but this is not how you engage with anarchism as an ML.
"Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then "the state... ceases to exist", and "it becomes possible to speak of freedom". Only then will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized, a democracy without any exceptions whatever. And only then will democracy begin to wither away, owing to the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state."
-Lenin
I see you repeating those words but I do not understand the significance