Understandable! It’s one of the more difficult topics for westerners like us to grasp, and it took me some time to come around to the ML consensus on the Russian Federation (ie, it isn’t imperialist if we accept Lenin’s analysis, and actually is anti imperialist even if run by bourgeois oligarchs).
Of course Russia is no longer socialist. My point is that what I said is the standard communist stance on the Russian Federation, that of critical support.
What in particular do you question? It’s a complex and ongoing subject, so there’s no one-stop shop for it. The closest I can do is point you to threads like this one.
Can you elaborate? Since when did Reddit have a sizable communist userbase?
Thanks! 🫡
The Russian Federation is not trying to colonize Ukraine. Their goal is NATO neutrality, and annexation of the four oblasts, which are largely pro-Russian. This is a response to the ethnic repressions against Russians in the Donbass following the coup of Yanukovych in 2014, and the ensuing secession of Donetsk and Luhansk and the civil war that followed.
The war was never supposed to be over in days. This was circulated as a means to humiliate Russia, but all talks of an attack lasting days either came from many years before 2022, or from the west.
As for Putin rigging elections, this might be true, but we also know that he is legitimately popular in Russia. The nationalists are most popular, followed by the communists. The pro-western liberals like Navalny was are in the minority and have no real support base.
Makes sense, and I understand that.
Wikipedia shows the figure I gave for the purges, not 3.3 million. The deaths in the gulag system should not at all be counted with those related to cracking down on corruption and terrorist organizing (ie the purges), as a huge portion happened during World War II due to starvation. The Nazis took Ukraine, the USSR’s breadbasket, and this caused mass famine that hit prisoners the hardest. The soviet prisons were actually fairly progressive for their time, see Russian Justice for that.
The problem with your framing, that we “must never let this happen again,” is that it assumes deliberate malpractice by the Soviets. The purges were a response to real infiltration, corruption, and terrorism, such as the assassination of Kirov. Your characterization of the purges as “soviet rank-maxxing” are absurd and baseless, it was a period of intense paranoia due to the successful assassination of one of the top soviet figures and the discovery of terrorist cells within the Soviet Union. The purges were widely supported by the public, it was not a period of terror.
The deaths in soviet prisons during World War II were causes by the Nazis, not the Soviets. Deaths due to dekulakization, which your Wikipedia article references, are analogous to the deaths of slave owners in the United States. Liberation of the peasants was paid for with the blood of the kulaks, bourgeois semi-slave owners.
There’s also the question of “Stalinism.” Stalinism does not exist outside of specific socioeconomic policies under Stalin, it isn’t an actual ideology. Marxism-Leninism is an ideology, and Stalin’s contributions to it are largely limited to advancements on the national question and linguistics. The bulk comes from Marx and Lenin, and moreso Engels than Stalin.
You were given good answer to all of these questions in that thread. The Marxist position isn’t that “Stalin did nothing wrong,” but that western framing of Stalin is incredibly biased. Your Wikipedia article does this well, it blames Stalin for deaths inflicted by the Nazis, and it capes for semi-slavers, fascists, and terrorists. Stalin of course made mistakes, and there was excess committed under Stalin, there is no doubt of this. However, you take the incorrect stance that Stalin was more bad than good, and do so by also caping for the same semi-slavers and fascists Wikipedia did. This is why historiography is important, and why dispelling the “black myth” around Stalin is important.
I highly recommend Domenico Losurdo’s Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend. Losurdo cites near exclusively western sources, and explains both why Stalin is so hated, and why Stalin is so loved as well. It’s a history and critique of Stalin’s legend more than the man himself, which is important considering how much the figure is distorted by historiography.
You admit to not knowing the history, maybe take that as a chance to dig into it?
The task of western MLs is to organize the working classes, build up a political party, and agitate and educate among the rest of the working classes for a coherent and all-inclusive political line. Marxism is not a religion, there is no set of holy principles to uphold, it’s a guide to action.
Where are you getting 3.3 million killed in the purges? The number of sentencings to death was ~799,455, and we know many were canceled as the purges went beyond what was expected.
Russia isn’t fighting imperialism out of a sense of altriusm, though, as with all things, there are genuine altruists in Russia that do wish to help the world even if this isn’t why they are doing it. Russia is fighting imperialism out of its own desire for survival. In this case, it is playing a progressive historical role, even if it needs to transition to socialism in the future.
As for being in the west, I am too. I want to be a part of establishing socialism and ending settler-colonialism. Anarchism isn’t convincing to me as a former anarchist, I am a Marxist-Leninist. I think your idea of “trusting world leaders to sieze the world for us” is highly flawed, that’s not the Marxist position. The Marxist position is that we critically support anti-imperialist countries, and support socialist countries.
Further, your analysis of intellectuals isn’t really fleshed out in my opinion. Intellectuals are not a class, each class has its own intellectuals. The role of the political party is to organize the intellectuals of a given class and bring the political consciousness of the rest of the class up to the level of the intellectuals. This is by the people, for the people.
The magic of the Red Scare at work, you can say literally anything and people will believe you.
Lemmy was made by communists, seeking to build an alternative to Reddit where communists will not be able to be fully censored. Federation also is similar to how the USSR was federated, and FOSS attracts the left. As such, many areas on Lemmy are going to be pro-CPC (and supportive of socialist states in general).
This isn’t the case on every instance, though. Each instance has its own political leanings, some very anti-China and anti-communist in general. It depends on the moderation, federation practices, and focus of the instance itself.
Communists tend to be pro-African, especially the Alliance of Sahel States.
There are a lot of communists here. We don’t “glorify enemies of the USA indiscriminately,” but we do oppose western framing and propaganda. There are plenty of valid reasons to be critical of Putin.
Many Lemmy instances have their own focus, themes, vibe, knowledge, culture, and more. Searching exclusively within local is useful for that. If you want broad federation, then Lemmy.world is ironically worse than instances like Lemmy.ml, because Lemmy.world blocks leftist instances like Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml. Lemmy.world is basically Reddit but FOSS, with all the good and bad that comes with that, while other instances are genuinely unique and interesting by themselves. Federation is just a bonus that adds variety and more engagement.
It’s useful for onlookers to see clear takedowns.
The social credit score myth in China is highly exaggerated in the west, and is largely projection, considering the very real credit scores dictating where we can live and get loans for.
No, the US Empire has been a genocidal settler-colony since its existence, and is actively plundering the world of surplus value created by the global south. It actively bombs and destroys countries that go against that, under both major parties, because both major parties serve capitalist interests.
Tankie is a pejorative for those who defend socialist states. The “authoritarian” part doesn’t really make any sense, considering the Marxist analysis of authority is that what matters most is which class has the authority of the state.
Either way, the ethnic cleansing of the Donbass region was widely reported even by western organizations until 2022, then this was all wiped away and minimized.
The communists have been on Lemmy since the beginning.