Bolshevism is a hop and a skip away from Fascism

Fascism is when you guarantee jobs to everyone, when you give housing as a universal right at 3% of monthly average income, when you guarantee universal healthcare and free education to the highest level, when unionization rates are 80+%, when you don’t engage in economic imperialism, and when you’re the only country in the world to provide Spain (my homeland) with weapons to defend itself from fascism in the Spanish Civil War, and when you have more female engineers than the rest of the planet combined.

the working class were never gonna control the means of production as long as the Soviet Union endured

Surely the working class enjoys the means of production so much more now that Russia became a proto-fascist state infringing the rights of women, lgbtq and racialized people, when unemployment exists back again, and when Russia is militarily invading Ukraine. So fucking wonderful for workers to lose a decade of life expectancy, to never recover 1990 GDP levels and to suffer from unemployment, alcoholism, violent crime and mafia, drug abuse, suicide and capitalist exploitation. So much better and democratic workplaces than the USSR with 1 in 10 workplaces being vacant and workers literally being able to leave a job and find another within 2 weeks on average.

You may disagree with the first statement on being an imperialist propaganda outlet, but the rest of information is relevant.

I don’t get your point of posting the article on the Shining Path, though

supplementary wikis

We have them, e.g. ProleWiki, but good luck trying to explain to the average western Wikipedia user that for certain geopolitical topics they might be worth checking out and contrasted with Wikipedia. My problem isn’t the lack of alternatives, my problem is the anticommunist and pro-western bias in Wikipedia, the most used encyclopedia, in geopolitically charged topics.

It will get blocked and won’t happen, calling it now

Tankies don’t think Wikipedia is the devil. You could call me a tankie from my political views, and I very much appreciate Wikipedia and use it on a daily basis. That is not to say it should be used uncritically and unaware of its biases.

Because of the way Wikipedia works, it requires sourcing claims with references, which is a good thing. The problem comes when you have an overwhelming majority of available references in one topic being heavily biased in one particular direction for whatever reason.

For example, when doing research on geopolitically charged topics, you may expect an intrinsic bias in the source availability. Say you go to China and create an open encyclopedia, Wikipedia style, and make an article about the Tiananmen Square events. You may expect that, if the encyclopedia is primarily edited by Chinese users using Chinese language sources, given the bias in the availability of said sources, the article will end up portraying the bias that the sources suffer from.

This is the criticism of tankies towards Wikipedia: in geopolitically charged topics, western sources are quick to unite. We saw it with the genocide in Palestine, where most media regardless of supposed ideological allegiance was reporting on the “both sides are bad” style at best, and outright Israeli propaganda at worst.

So, the point is not to hate on Wikipedia, Wikipedia is as good as an open encyclopedia edited by random people can get. The problem is that if you don’t specifically incorporate filters to compensate for the ideological bias present in the demographic cohort of editors (white, young males of English-speaking countries) and their sources, you will end up with a similar bias in your open encyclopedia. This is why us tankies say that Wikipedia isn’t really that reliable when it comes to, e.g., the eastern block or socialist history.

Putting an LLM pront in 2 pixel size font, background colour in my resume?

While there were many reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union, their economy was one of them

Hard diagaree. Full employment, guaranteed housing at 3% of monthly income, constant healthy growth of real wages without the cyclic economic crises typical of capitalism… None of that precipitates any political crisis.

I’m not sure it is a great model.

Well, depends on what you compare it with. Before the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, life expectancy in the Russian Empire was less than 30 years of age, and 80% of the country were peasants, most of them not owning land and working for a landlord in exchange for miserable wages. After resisting the invasion by the USA, England, France and many other countries in the civil war that searched to reinstate the absolutist power of the Tsar, the country was wholly destroyed and didn’t really recover until 1929. At that time, the largest industrialization effort ever seen at the time in the world was kickstarted, which led to economic growths of 10-15% yearly and to the defeat of Nazis. The abolition of hunger through the industrialization of agriculture and the defeat of Nazis arguably saved a hundred million lives from starvation and genocide.

By 1961, barely 30 years after the start of the industrialization, the USSR put the first human in Earth orbit, and by the mid 1960s there were more female engineers in the USSR than in the rest of the world combined. By the 1970s, the USSR produced more steel than the USA, built 2 million flats per year, and was the second world power.

All of this was achieved without exploiting the labour or resources of the global south and implementing the highest welfare the world has seen before or since. The dissolution of the Eastern Block led to horrifying crises all over: mass migrations, increased mortality through unemployment and hunger, suicide, alcoholism, crime, drug use, mass rural exodus due to the lack of funding of infrastructure… The poverty crisis hit very hard on Ukraine for example, with horrible demographic losses and an economy that by 2022 it hadn’t recovered the 1990 level

We’ve even seen wars nationalist wars like the Chechen war, the war in Donbas, the bombing of Yugoslavia or the invasion of Ukraine. I don’t see what part of the economic system doesn’t seem good based on the outcomes of its dissolution.

It just threatens the employer /capitalist class so it never happens

It has happened, for example in the USSR the the right to a job was guaranteed to everyone who could work. The state invested so much into capital to mobilize the workforce, that by the mid-1970s there was 1 vacant for every 10 jobs! The average unemployment time was 2 weeks, and people unhappy with their job could literally leave it and go to another workplace easily because a vast number of positions was available. Must have been nice not having to worry about being allowed to freaking work to get a salary

This comes from a bullshit study done by an idealist without looking at material conditions and cherrypicking examples. There have been mass protests bigger than that leading to nothing all over Europe in the past 15 years.

Protest, by all means, but more importantly organize. Join an active and radical union, join a communist or anarchist organization and do activism through that, do mutual aid, support worker struggles, do civil disobedience and organize against evictions in your area… There’s so much you can do, and a Democrat-organized protest is just the tiniest step.

Clearly not, as Russia is currently on war against Ukraine. What NATO excelled in was turning Libya from the highest developed country in Africa into a war-torn hellhole.

Would you happily agree to Mexico’s democratic right to host Russian military bases next to the US border if they so wanted? I’m from the EU myself, and it’s obvious to me how if that were the case, this would lead to escalation, so I wouldn’t Desire Russia to pursue a military alliance with Mexico.

And why did those tensions explode later? Just coincidence?

Give me number of murdered civilians in Libya at the time in comparison with Egypt or Chad, both neighboring countries.

And you’re not answering: which country did Libya invade?

the only way for Africans to be properous is if they are ruled over by a strongman dictator

That’s only if you believe the western propaganda. [Libya had a functioning representative democracy and the role of Gaddafi is overblown. Morocco today is a monarchy and so is Saudi Arabia and I dont see you calling for the bombing of either country.

One of the cornerstones of democracy is education for everyone, and Libya had an extremely successful education system that turned Libya into one of the countries with highest education level in Africa, hardly pointing to the decisions of a dictator wanting to keep the masses oppressed.

I understand you believe Gaddafi was a bloody, ruthless, corrupt dictator, but Libya was arguably more Democratic than any country in its surroundings and the source of most claims of horrible dictatorship come from western media apparatus of “eagle burger freedom institute”.

Oh, which country did Libya invade? What was the civilian murder rate compared to neighboring countries? Give me numbers instead of vibes, please

I’m saying each community bans something different. I agree with banning fascist discourse, I dont agree with banning communist discourse. .world thinks otherwise and that’s why it’s shit IMO.

Well, NATO hasn’t carried out a single defensive operation in history, and has carried out (officially like in Libya or unofficially like in Iraq) several invasion wars.

Gaddafi was bad, sure

By creating the country in Africa with highest Human Development Index instead of becoming your run off the mill slavery-sustained petrostate like Saudi Arabia?

The destruction of the Libyan airforce so Gaddafi couldn’t drop bombs on his civilian population like Assad did in Syria

Brown leader inevitably bombs civilians if not for glorious white interference

good thing that saved lives.

Yeah, surely Libya wasnt catapulted into horrifying civil war that lasted decades after and killed hundreds of thousands of people in formerly the most developed country in Africa…

Russians wanted to join Europe, it simply wasn’t allowed, I don’t know what part of agency I’m removing from Russians. Funny how some countries are “democratically” allowed to join NATO (was there a referendum in Ukraine?), and some aren’t.

Hopefully you won’t categorize a 2014 BBC article transcribing a leaked call from Victoria Nuland as Russian Propaganda. She openly conspires as to who they wanna put as president of Ukraine, and propose Yatsenyuk, the guy who would go on to become prime minister after Yanukovich. From the transcribed call:

Nuland: Good. I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government. I don’t think it’s necessary, I don’t think it’s a good idea.

Nuland: [Breaks in] I think Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience. He’s the… what he needs is Klitsch and Tyahnybok on the outside.