There are a bunch of sicko neoliberals and insufferable redditors there, yes, but there are also some normal libs and a few comrades, and it seems like a good way to encourage lemmy generally to re-embrace leftism.
I’ve been using an alt to talk on there and it’s honestly not that bad. It’s a little bad, but not that bad. I think if we just try to patiently explain ourselves, we have a reasonable chance of reaching people and shifting the general political alignment.
Those of us who aren’t up to dealing with ghouls (I am frequently included in this group) can just stay at home here and that’s just fine.
Anyway, just an idea. I would appreciate feedback.
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I think that the US should stop doing genocide
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The US is the primary genocidal power on Earth right now
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Russia is not ethnically cleansing Ukraine. It is engaging in a conventional war and being far less inhumane than NATO countries’ engagements in war, particularly relative to civilians. At least, for now.
Ukraine was trying to de-Russify Donbas since 2014, however. Banning language, cultural references, etc.
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I’m going to be honest with you, you aren’t going to find a lot of sympathy for Ukraine here. Civilians perhaps because civilians always suffer under war, but not for the country and especially not the government. If you are here expecting us to be sympathetic to Ukraine you will not last long. What is happening in Ukraine is unfortunate but it is a natural result of NATO brinkmanship and constant encroachment of Russian red lines since the fall of the USSR.
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i’m an american, so I place the blame on America for prolonging and instigating the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the first place. It was the USA that instigated and guided the 2014 coup in Ukraine, then encouraged Ukraine to ignore the Minsk agreements, and now continues to encourage rejections of ceasefires or de-escalation. The entire war didn’t simply pop up out of nowhere. The Russian state didn’t simply wake up one day desiring land and then pick a target at random.
Rather, the entire conflict is the culmination of decades of American and western meddling.
I’ve also known Russian-speaking people in the Donbas, but they were more associated with the separatists, so I haven’t heard from them in a long time. They were probably shelled to death by Ukraine sometime between 2015 and 2022.
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Ukraine federally required the use of Ukrainian across several domains, including education, publication, hospitals, and political parties, excluding Russian. It additionally excluded those who could not speak Ukrainian sufficiently from public office despite not providing education programs to establish universal knowledge of Ukrainian. This was an action taken deliberately against ethnic Russians (and some others), as some other ethnic minority languages were regionally protected. In numerous public speeches, analyses, etc, it was commonly understood that this was an attempt to remove Russian from the public sphere. For the duration of this period, Ukrainian was itself regularly spoken only by a minority of citizens of Ukraine at home or at work.
Since 2022, the crackdowns have only gotten more severe, even banning things being named in Russian.
Would you have noticed this during your visit?
Yes, that’s one of the ways of erasing culture. For example, the Irish language has been revived only through incredible effort due to its suppression by the British and many indigenous American languages are lost or nearly lost due to schooling systems that banned their use.
It is telling that bans occurred before actually educating the public in a so-called official national language.
What you have just said here is chauvinist and wrong-headed. Ukraine is a multilingual country with wide regional variation where some languages are dominant where others aren’t. If you want a universal national language to facilitate national communication, you can implement education programs that still maintain regional ethnic culture and identities and education programs. Looking down on those that haven’t opted to adapt to the plurality language of another region is not okay.
Public sphere bans have a massive impact on private sphere use. Given the form of the bans, it would be reasonable to expect yet more Russophobic escalations - and Kyiv has consistently done so.
A common experience for someone living in Donetsk city, shelled for nearly a decade by far UA sanctioned right forces. I am sorry your friends were killed just as I am sorry for those shelled in Donetsk. Civilians are the primary casualty of UA’s war against Donbas and Russia’s war against Ukraine.
If you would like to understand the true horrors that are visitable by such a military power, I would recommend reviewing the living conditions in Iraq from 1989 to 2007. Two invasions and an interceding sanctions regime. In the first invasion, Western forces destroyed the vast majority of essential civilian infrastructure. In the sanctions period, Iraq lacked for electricity, food, medicine, doctors, forced to buy expensive food aid with oil. Millions died, mostly children. In the second invasion, the pattern repeated, with what little had been rebuilt immediately targeted with “shock and awe” (terrorism) and then a long-term occupation with widespread extrajudicial killings.
Ukraine still has electricity and clean running water and healthcare. Think of what it would mean for the population for those to simply be gone. Think of what it would mean to see masses those around you dying of treatable diseases caused by malnutrition and contaminated water.
It is not coincidental that these are the conditions faced by Gazans, also under the thumb of a Western-backed occupation. An actual genocide. Most of the deaths are children.
Please do not use that term so casually unless you are ready to defend its use.
The most common sentiment among communists looks at this from a few different angles.
The first is that the common civilians are who suffer here, caught between a struggle between the Russian Federation and NATO powers led by the US. Most people in Ukraine just want to live their lives, they are not ideologically committed to a geopolitical project. Yet they are killed by bombs/shelling/missiles, alienated by ethnically discriminatory policies, forced into the military to be cannon fodder. Communists, generally, oppose this and want the war to end for the sake of the people.
There is also a larger geopolitical angle where we analyze the material interests and actions of states and how they relate to their economic realities. Communists, while of course seeing Russia as a capitalist state, also see Western powers as being those doing the most to escalate and make the situation unbearable for the RF until they saw this war as the most viable option. None of these NATO countries would ever accept these things happening on their borders. They have invaded countries for less several times. It is not like the RF does not bear responsibility for literally invading a country, but you won’t understand the impetus nor the continuation of the war without seeing Kyiv as a proxy for Western interests and with those interests constantly escalating. Those interests are also why the war is ongoing. They don’t want a peace deal, they have actively disrupted the chance for peace talks several times. The common theme is a desire to use Ukraine to hurt Russia and isolate it from EU countries (making them more US-dependent) no matter how many Ukrainians (or Russians, or Germans, etc) it harms.
Another geopolitical angle that communists take is to understand the US-led global capitalist hegemony as the primary enemy. Russia is responding to its exclusion from the imperialist side of this order (the US et al have pushed it towards immortalized status) and this conflict is emerging as maximum pressure from the West via Ukraine and Russia’s invasion. Overall, this war is also a metric by which to evaluate and understand the imperialist bloc’s power, particularly its financial weapons (e.g. kicking the RF off SWIFT), and hoping to see them fail or at least be far weaker than expected. Our larger projects for liberation are also targets of these weapons. In addition, any economic partner that is targeted by the US but can still facilitate a global south trading block is good for the wider project of undermining US imperialism.
Finally, Ukraine has a Nazi problem and liberal media outlets try to lie about it despite covering it nonstop up until 2022. The shock troops, the ideologically committed, for UA, are largely Nazis. This is why it is damned hard for the press to get pictures of soldiers without Nazi patches or tattoos. That and Azov/Azov-associated groups have an inordinate influence over what gets out, they basically run their own whole outfit on that front. Communists are, historically and now, the only group that actually opposes Nazis in the necessary terms and means.
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I can sort of understand being pro-Ukraine in this war given you probably don’t know the context from before 2022 and have been thoroughly propagandized by western media portraying these fascists as freedom fighters.
But calling this war a genocide? I genuinely don’t understand how anyone could come to that conclusion while we’re watching an actual genocide unfold in Palestine. Russia could have immediately and relentlessly terror bombed Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure back into the stone age like the US and NATO typically do. But they didn’t. Clearly they intend for Ukrainians to still exist at the end of this. In order to call this a genocide, you’d need to say essentially every war ever fought was also a genocide.
There is no racial prejudice or settler designs in Russia’s motivation here. They’ve made themselves very clear since the fall of the Soviet Union that Ukraine joining NATO is their red line. But even after the US orchestrated the 2014 Maidan coup to install a fascist, rabidly anti-Russian government, even after Ukraine violated the Minsk agreements by continuing to ethnically cleanse Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, Russia still attempted diplomacy until there were no other options left when NATO had Ukraine shut down all talk of peace.
You can’t goad someone into a war for literal decades and then start crying when, on their own terms rather than yours, they join the existing civil war on the side of the people you are trying to erase.
What aspects do you agree and disagree with? This doesn’t tend to be a topic people are lukewarm about.
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As do we; the issue where these beliefs seem to diverge is when looking at ongoing or past conflicts and identifying the instigator. There’s also significant disagreement in other areas where people are dying due to the actions of an oppressive class like lack of housing, healthcare, or nutritious food, not to mention the general living conditions of the poor worldwide while a select few do everything they can to maintain their position at the top
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I can’t tell if you’re doing “both sides”, “all lives matter”, or “whataboutism”. Other people care about things outside of meaningless platitudes.
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If you live in Russia, opposing your own government’s involvement in the war is quite different than an American opposing Russia’s involvement in the war.
The former is advocating peace, the latter more dead Ukrainians and Russians.
How would identifying with Palestinians make you less empathetic and rush to the defense of the US?
Instead of leaving decisions of how society builds and invests to the whims of the rich who are primarily motivated to maximize return on investments (liberalism), it is possible to engage in and win a class war to allow these decisions to be made democratically in a way that is motivated by creating a better society for those within it (socialism).
This is bad.
That message with that pfp is really something. I hope you can forgive me for forgetting the very obvious fact that other instances can see my post, since I intended it to just be directed at hexbears (not that your presence is unwelcome).
As you can probably tell from the post and the instance, I’m a communist. My agenda is arguing for the infeasibility of liberal capitalism to address the problems that we face, and that the solution to this is to replace that system with one that is a) radically democratic, empowering the popular will to the most thorough extent possible and b) uncompromisingly represses the political power of capitalists, who are the current masters of society and the principal force we need to struggle against.
Good so far?
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As a heads up, I’m not the person that wrote the previous message.
No. Switzerland is a liberal state and by capitalists. In Switzerland, one’s relationship to work is part of a petty dictatorship in each company. There is a social democratic system in place that mediates this relationship to an extent, but at the end of the day your ability to provide for yourself is decided by private company hierarchies and forces largely outside of your control. Even with a referendum system, such a country is constrained by having provided so much power to the capitalist class. Want guaranteed housing for everyone? I dunno, profits are low right now and taxation might crash the economy. Want to end unemployment? No can do, this makes the workers too powerful and their wages increase. You will have an army of Very Serious Economists from the Child Labor is Good School of Economics getting breathlessly cited by the state and the privately-owned media to propsgandize the full population against the idea of full employment and more or less threatening a capital strike should the population try to vote for it anyways.
In addition, Switzerland depends on imperialism, of an unequal trade system enforced by force by the US, NATO, etc, in order to do this. Effectively, the violence inherent to the capitalist system is split in two parts between Switzerland and global south countries, with the Swiss getting cheaper goods with better working standards while the Imperialized are forced into worse and worse conditions.
The term communism is thrown around in different ways. The Soviet Union was communist in the sense that it was created and run by communists, though liberal (revisionist) reformists eventually gained enough power to dismantle it. Communists are socialists that understand that capitalists - really, the capitalist system - will never allow us to liberate ourselves from their control and control our destinies, they will always use violence and coercion to prevent this, and so we must educate each other and organize so that we may overcome them when they inevitably attack.
This is an uncommon view for people that were adults in the USSR. It is primarily those who were children and politically unaware who feel this way, having primarily lived under capitalism, the associated dramatic drop in quality of life during capitalist restoration (shock therapy), and subsequently been bathed in propaganda. Millions were killed by capitalist restoration.
Under capitalism, corporations control the state. Even in countries where corporate bribery is illegal. Capital permeates the public consciousness through education, journalism, entertainment media, think tanks, lobbying groups, and most subtly (and as mentioned before) placing hard constraints in what is possible. The facade of liberal democracy is just a way to more stably maintain capital’s position. You will discover this when you attempt to do anything against the interests of capital, especially imperialism.
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I think our friend will be perfectly capable of providing their own citations, but since I happen to have some familiarity with this topic: Here’s an article discussing the data on nostalgia for the USSR and here’s a study that shows the spike in mortality caused by capitalist restoration.
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If you have any follow-up questions for GarbageShoot’s links I would be happy to discuss them + add more. You may be interested to review the shock therapy doctrine as applied to the former USSR during capitalist restoration. People usually talk about it as being directed at Russia, but Ukraine also bore the brunt and had its social safety net dismantled, its industries sold to foreign interests for pennies, etc. It suffered just as much as Russia from this process and this treatment is a big part of the reason that those who were adults before and after, say, adults in the 1970s, believe times were better before. Ukraine has never fully recovered.
This is nonsense. Everyone had personal property. People worked jobs, participated in clubs, did sports, etc.
The two were confluent. The party ran the state and having influence over the state meant joining the party and working through it. They were not divorced, separate things.
Bullshit.
“Able to build a better life” is not very concrete. Perhaps you could share what your source is and examples of what this means.
If you were a child in the 80s (the only way you would have grown up just before capitalist restoration) then this would make your great grandfather someone born around 60-90 years prior, i.e. 1890-1920. Anti-Kulak sentiments were only made relevant in the late 1920s/early 1930s and meant basically nothing after 1960.
Assuming any of this is true, it sounds like you may be describing actual Kulak actions re: private landlordism (which would explain using euphemisms rather than saying what actually happened). Please elaborate on what your great granddather did, particularly if it was during a famine.
I don’t understand how this is a response to millions getting killed by capitalist restoration.
The Soviet Union developed from a semi-feudal regional monarchy to an industrialized global superpower in about 20-30 years, raising millions from serfdom, ending famine, and dramatically increasing quality of life. It did this without the Imperialism used by Western Europe and the US, without slavery. This experience is not what happens to those excluded from the imperial pie, or often, even those who are in imperialist countries but are of the (larger) lower classes. Were it not for the Soviet Union your ancestors would likely have starved, died of treatable disease, or died young. See Sub-Saharan Africa. See how it is intentionally prevented from development and how kt s economies are structured around material exports for which the people never see the profits. They don’t get the healthcare. They don’t get the industry. They don’t get the housing.
You do not have a choice to simply be a capitalist country enjoying the fruits of being on top (achieved at the dear coat to others). That is not how the system works. Your option is to overthrow that system or be dictated to by it and more likely than not when dictated to you will not only be voiceless, you will be dispossed, just like Ukraine was in the 90s, just how most of the world that has not directly confronted capitalism has suffered. Compare the stories and state of India to those of the USSR and China. Ukraine got the India treatment and has now been used as a pawn to fight another capitalist power in Russia.
To be clear I am not saying all of this just to get the point across that capitalism is bad or simply worse than the Soviet System (which I am saying was a fantastic achievement, for all its faults). My real point is that it has never been in the cards for Ukraine to be both capitalist and well-to-do. The prospect for prosperity from the 1900s to the foreseeable future came and went with the USSR. Now, the real, actual situation is a capitalist autocracy pretending to be liberal democracy laden with huge foreign debts due to the capitalist powers using Ukraine as a pawn to poke Russia. This will mean very, very bad things for the common Ukrainians not forced into disability or death through conscription. If Russia doesn’t end up bombing away electricity and clean water and food, the incoming capitalist disposession to “pay the debts” will do something horribly similar, only rather than the infrastructure being gone, it will simply be so expensive compared to the work a person is lucky enough to find that most things a person would want to do will be unachievable. If you spend all your money on electricity and food and renting an apartment you will have none for children or a health emergency. The current trajectory will have Ukraine will experience a continued diaspora, one that actually accelerates, as it becomes all but impossible to have a desirable life without leaving. Excluded from the EU due to poverty, Ukrainians may also find immigration difficult in many places as the rest of Europe experiences a contraction due to the US siphoning off its industries bit by bit via the imposed energy crisis.
I should say that there is room for experimentation in socialist state projects, in how to organize and defend revolutions, but the revolution and control of the state are both absolutely essential to leave the current global political economic system. The USSR was the first project to do so and look at what they accomplished being virtually alone outside of the global anti-colonial movements they supported.
a) Referendums and recall elections (to pick two examples) are both cool and good
What year were you born, just to be clear? In any case, the Soviet Union was a revisionist government really from the late 40s on (though much more openly so after the Secret Speech), we (the people on this instance) have severe criticisms of it, but the misappropriation of Marxism, etc. by Khrushchev does not mean they own the term, and I guess that leads me to the better response to your question: Marxism is the best way to analyze politics and form a worker’s movement to oppose the capitalists, with the goal of ending class antagonisms by ending class itself. That’s what communism is, and it would be silly (and obscurantist) to try to say “Oh, we’re not communists, we just have this belief system that people referred to as communism for almost 200 years, but that we call, uh, workerism” or whatever. Not that our beliefs are 1) identical to Marx’s or 2) monolithic, but there’s a clear genealogy here.
b) Being a capitalist inherently means having power. Removing all power from a capitalist means making them not a capitalist. As an ultimate goal, yes, we’d like to do that, but each country’s level of development is different, and it could be necessary to keep capitalists around for some time in many of them, albeit suppressed by the proletariat. This is not the case in America, where the level of development means the intermediary period, the dictatorship of the proletariat as it is conventionally called, would need only be very short. In India, it would need to be somewhat longer and in other states, longer still.
Political education to understand the political economy and subsequently engage in work against the capitalist system.
Look up liberal elmo on YouTube.