People die without revolution, historically revolutionary Socialism has come with dramatic improvements in quality of life for the Working Class. Taking down the US Empire would massively uplift the burden on the Global South as well.

The road is revolution, not just against the Democrats or Republicans, but the entire system.

Noooooo you got me 🫠

I never said the genocide of Palestinians was in China, I said the Palestinian genocide has mountains of evidence while what you describe comes from Zenz.

Zenz is the sole source of claims of mass killings and torture of Uyghurs, along with claims of forced sterilization. If you aren’t even aware of your own sources, why are you arguing against someone who has done some degree of research into the subject?

I recommend reading the UN report, found here. It’s a good place to start, I also recommend reading China’s response. There’s a lot that can be discussed, but it’s clear that you care more about taking advantage of the subject to push a political agenda, like the Israelis who claimed Hamas beheaded babies, or the Kuwaiti claims of Iraqi soldiers taking babies from their incubators and leaving them on the floor. Read The Xinjiang Atrocity Propaganda Blitz.

No investigation, no right to speak.

Everyone can understand that good doesn’t outweigh bad, you don’t need an analogy to show that. Instead, you went out of your way to compare the Soviets to the Nazis, which I already showed is a form of Nazi apologia. It isn’t about not being able to talk about the Nazis, far from it, we should study them, and what gave rise to them (throwback to when I recommended you read Blackshirts and Reds, which you seem to have ignored).

Your next paragraph is unsourced claims of mass killings and deaths in labor camps. Given your tendency to believe literal propagandists uncritically shown in other comments, and that you haven’t given a source, it sounds to me that you’re probably getting it from Robert Conquest and other anticommunist myth makers from before the Soviet Archives were opened up. Again, throwback to Russian Justice.

Finland has been Imperialist for a long time, and is Imperialist today, correct. You can read the book I suggested from Lenin to see the general process of Imperialism. The vast majority of the labor you consume, in the form of commodities, etc comes from the Global South. The Western countries, with the US at the top, reap the largest benefits off of hyper-exploiting workers in the global south for poverty wages. Finland doesn’t rely on its own production, Finland relies on the labor of others.

As for the idea of a ruling class, it wasn’t about wealth inequality, but wealth in total. The highest ranking members of the Soviet Union did not live lavish, princely lifestyles. The top and bottom had a difference of roughly 10 times, not 100s or 1000s or more like in Tsarist Russia or modern Capitalist Russia. There was no “ruling class,” the Proletariat ran society.

See, I don’t think there’s evidence of that occuring, though. I don’t want my conditions to improve through slavery and torture of others either, the difference really seems to be your insistence on trusting unverified claims from the christian Nationalist Adrian Zenz, who believes he was sent by God to stop China, which he believes is the antichrist.

There are reeducation camps, but there’s no evidence of systemic torture, killings, or experiments. Meanwhile Palestinians are being genocided without question, with mountains of evidence.

You stated that the Nazis did some good things, but that they also did many horrible things, and used that to show that the good the USSR did was outweighed by the bad. That right there is Nazi apologia, the sheer scale of bad in the Nazis far surpassed that of the Soviets, just like the sheer good of the Soviets far outweighed that of the Nazis, to incomparable levels. Using the Nazis as an “easy example” doesn’t prove your point better, it serves as Nazi apologia.

No, Finland did not achieve better metrics at a larger scale, and further I already explained that Finland is Imperialist. It’s a landlord in country form, like the rest of Western Europe, and especially the US.

As for how Finnish Imperialism works, through various international loans and overseas production, Finland extracts superprofits off of exploitation of the Global South. To get into specifics of this takes up entire volumes, but you can start with Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism to see how the system generally works, though not specific to Finland.

20 million soviet citizens died in World War 2, and half of their buildings were destroyed. The Winter War does not compare, neither in proportion nor in raw quantity, to the sheer amount of rebuilding necessary. That’s also ignoring Finland’s history of anticommunism and cozying up to fascists.

The Workers in the Soviet Union were not sent to camps to die en mass. The "ruling class’ was the Proletariat. There was Prison labor, but overall incarceration rates, even despite having genuine Tsarists and fascists to contend with, were usually lower than the United States as a comparison. Consider reading Russian Justice.

The Soviet Union served the Working Class. Free, high quality healthcare and education, dramatically lowered wealth inequality, support for national liberation movements globally, defeated the Nazis, provided childcare, large movements in women’s rights, democratized the economy, and more.

The notion that there was a “ruling class” that exploited the workers is ludicrous, because they would have sucked at their job given that they dramatically lowered wealth inequality. They walked the walk as well as talked the talk.

H3H3 is a Zionist who defended his wife’s IDF membership, who volunteered for raids to “break up the monotony.”

All 3, including audiobook links, are on my list in the parent comment for this thread! Great suggestions, too.

deleted by creator

Not true, really, they tend to be some of the more democratic states for the Working Class.

AES leaders have never been “saints,” no human has been, but the Socialist systems nevertheless have resulted in robust systems with dramatic improvements in the lives of their people. The PRC is an example, I wouldn’t call Xi a perfect saint but the Socialist system itself works well.

The 1930s famine was neither intentional, nor a large movement for reducing poverty. It was also the last famine in the USSR outside of wartime, in a country where famine was common and regular under the rule of the Tsar.

What actually caused the reduction in poverty was a rapidly growing economy with robust social programs like free healthcare and education, and a dramatic lowering of wealth inequality.

Comparing the Nazis to the Communists is a form of Nazi Apologia, originating with Double Genocide Theory. The truth is that they are in no way comparable, read Blackshirts and Reds..

The Soviet Union existed for the workers. They doubled life expectancy, over tripled literacy rates to 99.9% from the low 30s, dramatically reduced wealth inequality, provided free and high quality healthcare and education, and democratized the economy.

Comparing Finland to the USSR is… odd. Finland funds its safety nets through Imperialism. The Soviet Union was also far larger and far more populous, and yet cared for its people while detached from much of the global economy. The Soviets did 80% of the combat against the Nazis and had half their buildings destroyed and 20 million people killed by the Nazis, while Finland saw no such comparable devastation. The Soviets largely rebuilt on their own, while Western countries had an unscathed United States propping them up. The point is that Finland didn’t accomplish any of this on their own, and moreover a lot of these concessions came to prevent revolution like was seen in Russia.

I recommend reading Blackshirts and Reds.

I suspect that this vague gesturing doesn’t really have a point for me to go off of if you aren’t giving an example. If you don’t want to, that’s fine, but I don’t see the point in this comment without one.

I don’t think reeducation camps should be considered “concentration camps,” which brings to mind the mass killings of the Holocaust, but regardless the reeducation program is pretty much complete.

As far as can be considered a successful country, the PRC absolutely fits that. Conditions for the people are rapidly improving, the economy when adjusted for purchasing power parity is the largest in the world, it’s a world leader in renewable energy, and is overtaking the rest of the world in key metrics.

“No investigation, no right to speak” is a good mantra. One should not speak on matters they don’t know enough about. Vaush is confidently incorrect, Hasan more often than not just won’t speak if he isn’t knowledgeable (in comparison). The fact that it “preserves his image” is a side-effect, the true benefit is not contributing to a miasma of misinformation and misguided analysis like Vaush does.

That’s why Vaush is a danger to Leftists, while Hasan is generally not.

The US Empire being incredibly evil and predatory towards anyone daring to exert domestic control over their economies and even their own allies does paint a better picture for AES states. It doesn’t make them automatically good, but it starts them off on the right foot.

Then you can analyze how AES states have brought immense democratizations of the economy, massive expansions in key quality of life metrics like education, literacy, life expectancy, Home Ownership, and more, while expanding worker rights and supporting the Global South against the Imperialist countries, it’s hard to see AES as “bad.”

There are genuine critiques of AES countries, but I wouldn’t call them “autocratic,” considering they are generally more democratic than western countries, and moreover the needs of the people are better met. For example, people in China believe the government represents their interests at rates surpassing 90%, and more Chinese workers believe they have democratic control than USian workers.

All of these considerations need to be taken into account, and the fact that these AES states have been treated with the harshest of violence from the US Empire means they are deserving of support for their own existence.

Fair enough. I guess my central point is that the fact that the PRC’s model exists is not proof that a system that takes away tools like control of media can also exist. I would agree that eventually, when more Socialist countries exist and especially the US Empire crumbles, this may be able to weaken, but I would also say that this depends on internal development as well, ie the Bourgeoisie must no longer exist anywhere for control of their speech to no longer be relevant, and this is abolished through development, not simple decree.

Really, it’s getting into the weeds and being nitpicky over theory, your comment was generally good, but I wanted to highlight that there are Material reasons for the PRC’s control of information.

Again, we were talking about the Soviet Union. You misunderstood and pivoted to the Russian Federation without telling anyone, but if you go up the comment chain the original comment was about the Soviet Union. Anyways…

Marxism - The overarching family of Marxist tendencies chategorized by Dialectical and Historical Materialism, Scientific Socialism, and Marx’s Law of Value.

Leninism - The term for the specific strategic and tactical advancements of Lenin upon Marxism, such as analysis of Imperialism, the Vanguard party platform, national liberation in the Global South, and much more.

Marxism-Leninism - The subset of Marxism that accepts Lenin’s contributions and upholds AES. By far the most common form of Marxism.

Stalinism - usually a reference to support for Socialism in One Country over Permanent Revolution.

Either way, you’re entirely wrong about what led the USSR to dissolve, and the nature of its economic model.

The USSR was Socialist, because Public Ownership was primary in the economy. The Proletariat controlled the Means of Production through the public sector. Marx was not an advocate for decentralization, but centralization over time as large industry formed and could and must be planned centrally.

The USSR dissolved for numerous reasons adding up, some of the larger reasons were the liberal economic reforms of Gorbachev and later Yeltsin, as well as needing to spend a much larger portion of their GDP on the millitary to keep parity with the US.

Your central argument is genuinely that the Workers in the Soviet Union, despite being taught Marxism in school, were too stupid to realize that they were not living in a Marxian system. This is wrong on both fronts, the Soviet citizens had a much better understanding of Socialism as people living in it, and the system itself did follow Marxist principles.

The State is the only method for which all of property can be held in public. “Statelessness” refers to the stage in upper-Communism where all property is publicly owned, and the elements that reinforce class society like armies and private property rights no longer have any reason to exist. Government will continue to exist even in Communism, as will social workers, yet this would be considered “stateless” by Marx as the oppressive elements of government whither away by virtue of having no reason to exist.

I recommend checking out my introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list, as you certainly have a confused understanding of Historical Materialism and Scientific Socialism.