Marxism is as alien to my people as Capitalism and Christianity are.

- Russell Means, an Oglala Lakota patriot, July 1980

Below is an copy of the speech from which it comes, and a link to the full transcript at the bottom.

A must read for all of the kiddos getting into organizing rn. Read and print the whole thing here.

it’s always wild when people look at eastern europeans and other people who lived under communism or are descended from those did

see that most of these people have a lot to say about the human rights abuses and authoritarianism they and their families survived during communism, the repercussions of which they’re still dealing with today

and then reduce their lived experiences to “oh they’re just a capitalist” (whether that’s true or not) “only right wingers hate communism” (DEFINITELY not true lol) “this is united states propaganda” (buddy, u.s. propaganda is not the only state run propaganda project to ever exist! please stop making everything about the united states!!)

One of the funniest things about communism is that it rests on a premise that's basically like, "Hey, once everybody voluntarily gives up a specific set of strategies and advantages, everything will be wonderful. So, once we figure out how to coerce everybody into voluntarily giving those up, we'll be set."

THIS.

This guy from Romania put everything down splendidly.

I understand, most "woke" US teens want to push "US bad" narrative nowadays to look cool, but for those of you guys who feel depressed - because your media has been constantly telling you about America's many failures in foreign politics in the last 50 years as if it was all a failure.... But guys. Guys. My guys. Americans.

YOU LITERALLY FREED A DOZEN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES.

FREED. Do you understand me?

People here in Eastern Europe CELEBRATED it like they celebrated the end of WWII. People CRIED and hugged and went to the streets when the fucking empire fell.

People created human chains that SPANNED COUNTRIES to tell the world they do not want to be part of USSR (Google "The Baltic Way").

In Ukraine, the all-country vote for leaving USSR got the overwhelming ~90% in favor support throughout all the country (YES, IN RUSSIAN-SPEAKING DONBAS TOO)

The propaganda (fed by Russian spies in the West) has warped your own impression of yourselves, so I am putting it all in perspective so you would know - you did some incredible good too, guys. You helped a dozen of previously military occupied countries free themselves.

And now you are helping the same countries protect their Independence when the same regime that had occupied them previously have now recovered its strength and have started trying to re-collect them all again.

This, so much.

I can't believe how some young Americans idealize socialism nowadays.

FFS, just look at what countries people immigrate TO and what countries they have immigrated FROM for decades.

I think this is a good example of a time when snarky progressives online know more about socialist buzzwords than actual socialism. The land owning peasantry is a distinct class from the proletariat, and materially its interests are quite different.

(This is not to say the peasantry is a wholly reactionary class. It need not be smashed outright, like the bourgeois, but must be carefully managed to avoid reactionary uprisings, and eventually converted to proletarians to make progress towards socialism)

So when right wingers talk about "going off the grid", they're not accidentally communist. They're aspiring to be independent landowners. And the reactionary nature of this sentiment is multiplied further by the context of the settler-colonial state. USAmerican western expansion built itself on small landowning farmers & small businesses, to further align the class interests of expansionist settlers with capitalists. The Wehrbauer, Nazi Germany's plan to settle Asia via communities of agricutural settler-soldier landowners (very openly based on USAmerican settler practices), is even more blatant if you'd like to read about it.

I'd just like to highlight that in historical context "it must be carefully managed" has translated to serfdom 2.0 Some Of Us Are More Equal Than Others and it is recommended to avoid phrasings that suggest you support the multiple artificial famines and purges that depopulated Ukraine about by quarter way back when

like. please understand. ussr marketed itself as a 'union of peasants and workers' to its own population. people growing food everyone else eats are actually morally relevant. announcing that your ideology would have them be 'carefully managed' is a bit of a red flag (pun most assuredly not intended)

The thing is, I have nothing against socialism or communism as a political ideology; trust me, I'm as anti-capitalist as they come. The leftism is really not the problem here.

The problem is when in their leftism, people – Americans, really, and western Europeans – use the ussr as this sort of goal, this complete antithesis to the modern capitalist society, this almost-utopian place to live. They use hammer and sickle symbol, the ussr anthem; sometimes, as a joke, sometimes, not so much.

Not only that clearly shows that they know absolutely nothing about the ussr – it's also spreading russian propaganda, whether it's on purpose or not, which is especially insidious now, when russia is literally committing a genocide.

The ussr wasn't a socialist utopia where everyone is equal. It was a totalitarian dictatorship, responsible for colonisation and genocide of multiple people and cultures. Just like the russian Empire before it. Just like modern russia continues to do now.

For many Eastern European and Central Asian people, hammer and sickle is not just a symbol of a political ideology. It's the symbol, under which people were starved to death, imprisoned or executed for daring to write in their own language; in which cultures were erased, people – forcefully assimilated, stripped of their own national identity.

It's the propaganda of being "the same people, the same nation" that russians love to use; that westerners love to believe, for the sole reason of the oppressed daring to look similar to the oppressor; for the sole reason of Americans being unable to look past their own history and realize oppression comes in many shapes and forms.

By using the ussr symbols in your political movement, you're denying the atrocities commited under that symbol and spreading russian propaganda, whether it's on purpose or not.

It's not "progressive" to wave around a hate symbol.

Do your research.

To the people in replies equating the hammer & sickle to the reclamation of 'queer':

No.

The word queer was created by queer people, and though it was appropriated as a slur for a while, it has been reclaimed as a self identifier for generations. The only people we hurt by calling ourselves by name is, perhaps, ourselves. Even if the term had originated as a slur, it would have been targetting queer people as victims, meaning we are the people to listen to about its reclamation.

US and W Euro communists did not create the hammer and sickle. It was not used to symbolize genocide against W Europeans and US Americans.

It is a military symbol of an empire that attempted, even occasionally succeeded at, genocide. The survivors of those attempts are the people harmed by its use.

We have no business 'reclaiming' the hammer and sickle; they aren't ours. The victims of USSR genocide alone determine who gets to reclaim it.

The rest of us would do well to defer to them, just like so many people deferred about the swastika after it was used as a symbol of genocide, too.

For a full century, use of the symbol was voluntarily deferred by Buddhists, Navajo, and other groups that used it. It is only being slowly re-adopted as the direct survivors of that genocide die of old age.

Meanwhile, the most recent USSR genocides were occurring during my own childhood and I'm a fucking millennial.

The only people who get to have an opinion about 'reclaiming' this symbol are the survivors of the genocides it represents.

We already have a simple, easy to use symbol for labour rights and equality that came out of our own history as W Euro and American communists. And it wasn't even used to justify mass murder!!

Shut the fuck up, put on your big kid panties, and use Bread and Roses. 🥖 🌹

Hi, Eastern European leftist here to cosign this.

The USSR was a brutal, genocidal, totalitarian dictatorship. The rest of the Eastern Bloc was no better. In the last century, the second most common cause of death in my family (after Nazis) was "torture and murder by the communist government".

I have family members whose NAMES I don't even know, because the government thoroughly unpersoned them. (This is not a TikTok euphemism, btw. It's from Orwell's 1984.) Many of my family members were still terrified of speaking out against the government, even twenty years after the communist regime fell, even in private.

I don't even know what to talk about, really, to get people to see my point. The multiple genocides that the Soviet Union did, in an attempt to leave only the good Russians? The way that Jewish and Muslim communities were targeted far, far more than Christian ones? The mass surveillance and propaganda campaigns that left the populace a nervous and confused wreck? The KGB?

I mean, I get it. Y'all grew up in the West, all you've known your whole life is the crushing boot of Christianity and capitalism. You learned the word "propaganda" and you learned how the west lied and subverted and waged war and you decided that if the west was bad then the governments they opposed, such as the USSR, must be good, and that all the horror stories are propaganda.

They're not. The reality of Eastern European communism, as told to me by my family and by my country's historians, is WORSE than whatever you learned in history class.

And you, Western leftists, are not the inheritors of that trauma, and you don't get to claim it's symbols.

Stop using the hammer and sickle. Stop calling people "comrade". Stop talking about the glory of the Soviet Union. And for fuck's sake STOP PLASTERING IMAGES OF LENIN AND STALIN EVERYWHERE, my god, why the fuck is this even a thing I need to say.

Incredible. They're so close to getting it.

Didn’t work out so hot IRL though, did it

writing my thesis on computational economics and it's just a summary of my playthroughs of paradox games

One thing about economic strategies / simulation games / etc is that for the most part they are already sort of... working on the basis of dictatorial communism.

The economy is built on resources held in some abstract “common” under the control of the government, which is controlled by one (1) person (the player) with no conceptually possible challenges to their authority. You the player need to be an expert on everything economy to be able to manage everything personally, because you have to, because everyone reports to you and everything centers on you and no problem will ever fix itself without your input.

(Conveniently, everything is simplified enough that one person CAN get their head around it and handle it)

One major difference from IRL is, of course, that you’re not a person in that world. Even if you do have some sort of player avatar, they’re still as much of an abstraction that you have as much reason to care about as the rest of the fake people in the simulation. Achieving the game’s goals (which are, generally, ensuring the wellbeing of your people) is the only motivation you’re naturally incentivised towards. Your personal bodily comfort is not impacted by in-game decisions (other than tweaking the settings, which notably does not impact in-universe events in any way). Your family and friends’ wellbeing is completely outside of the game. It’s impossible for you to make genuine social connections inside of the game. The game will not allow you access to resources you otherwise lack for your own pursuits if you make certain decisions.

And, of course, you’re not really managing a government of real people. Your virtual “advisors” are fairly simple algorithms, that don’t act in their own interests as people either, and you have no way of influencing them - you cannot, for example, punish someone who brings you bad news. It’s conceptually impossible, unless the game designers decided to make it part of the gameplay - but they usually don’t. The bureaucracy works perfectly, and you never have to doubt the accuracy of the reports you get.

Really, you can just... view the situation from bird’s eye view. Like fly above your lands at will and see what’s going on.

...so yeah, no matter how accurate the innards of gameplay are, they sure as fuck aren’t going to output the results that happen if you try to do shit like that IRL. The differences are in THE key points that make communism and centrally planned economy fail in practice.

Incredible. They're so close to getting it.

Didn’t work out so hot IRL though, did it

the fact that we have a global economy but no way of coordinating it seems like one of the biggest challenges humanity faces, although arguably that’s just a corollary of our inability to coordinate anything else at the global level.

"the economy" is just the totality of people making trades, why do they need to be coordinated

"the economy" is the production and allocation of goods and services; a priori there's no reason why this process couldn't be made more efficient through coordination

ask the soviets how efficient things can be with central coordination

Well, you can say a lot of things about political repression and free speech, or the post WWII imperialist stance, of the Soviet Union and it would be fair criticism. But on the economic side of things? The Soviet Union may be one of the most resounding successes of the history of humanity, and I'm not even exaggerating: the soviets took a country that were basically a feudal agrarian society, with serfs and all, at the beginning of the 20th century and made it a global superpower that lasted most of the century. They went from a country with most its people at the brink of starvation almost continually to put the first person in space. When the Soviet Union fell, both the GDP and the quality of life of the new Russia fell dramatically, to the point that it didn't reach the value of 1989 again until 2010.

Life expectancy at birth increased DRAMATICALLY in the Soviet Russia, and actually went down for two decades just after the fall of the Soviet Union, not being until the 2010s that started to rise again:

For comparison, this is the US:

Just before the Soviet revolution, life expectancy in Russia was just at 35 years, 40% lower than the value of the US at the time. 40 years after that, both countries had the same life expectancy.

So no... The Soviet Union was horrific in lots of senses. Economy-wise?? They aced it, for the most part. It would be hard to find a country at any point in history that actually doubled its life expectancy in 40 years like they did.

I think the dramatic jump in life expectancy in Russia and China after 1950 certainly demonstrates how a strong centralised modern state in peacetime with access to antibiotics and vaccines can do enormously better than a poor feudal state wracked by war, and of course we see similar improvements over in Japan and Korea and Taiwan in the second half of the 20th century as well.

Soviet Union didn’t have washing machines in the 90s.

Soviet Union had grain rotting in the fields and food deficits.

Soviet Union had deficits of everything except for the things the warehouses were pointlessly full of with no way to use them.

Sure, Soviet Union had its early successes, plucking the low hanging fruit. But then the problems of centralized economy kicked in.

Like, when you have one guy on top, for things to work well this guy has to know everything, understand everything and pay attention to everything. Oh, and actually care about and understand his job well.

When you don’t have a decentralized immediate feedback mechanism, the centralized feedback mechanism is going to produce the weirdest results. Like, Soviet Union had this thing where it had a “plan” (five year plan is most famous but there were quarterly plans etc), and it was a virtue to outperform the plan. Nevermind that if you’re making airplanes and you have twice as much of one specific airplane part but not of every other part you aren’t going to have twice as much airplanes, you’re going to have a mass of completely useless airplane parts.

When everything is centralized, you cannot quickly make immediately rational and reasonable decisions on location. You have your orders and your plan, and if you want to change anything, you have to either kick it upstairs and wait for permission, or risk your career and considering it’s the Soviet Union, your life and your family’s life. And this applies on every intermediate decision making level, meaning EVERYONE’s safe option is to kick it upstairs up to that one guy on top who needs to know everything, understand everything and pay attention to everything.

(This means innovation is stifled to near zero, except in the specific areas the guy on top is paying attention to)

(And in those specific areas you might get half a country’s worth of utterly destroyed land/climate because the guy misunderstood something and no-one below him had the authority to say no)

Like... no. Centralization works well on some small scale, but there’s a point where it becomes detrimental instead, and Soviet Union was way, way beyond that point.

Source: PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY LIVED IN THE PLACE

the comparison between the soviet propiska and chinese hukou systems is interesting because they’re seemingly comparable in form but ultimately had something like the opposite impact

in the USSR, housing registration was tied to where you were actually allowed to live - it was incredibly difficult to move somewhere without first acquiring the proper propiska. as a result, it was used for just what you might imagine: to prevent rural-dwellers from moving to large cities. this (1) slowed the pace of urbanisation in existing urban centers like leningrad and moscow, but (2) increased the pace of urbanisation in newly built, often geographically remote, monogorods, and (3) was compensated for by a campaign of rural industrialisation where light industry was brought to towns and villages instead of being concentrated in big cities. the overall impact was a relatively even distribution of industrial capacity across the territory of the USSR

in china, however, the opposite happened. there, hukou status is tied primarily to what level of state benefits you receive and only secondarily to actual place of residence. as a result, it was actually used to welcome a massive influx of rural-dwellers into existing urban centers - workers who would receive a far lower level of state benefits than people with urban hukou, and who could be freely exploited since they’re constantly under the threat of internal deportation by police. in combination with the chinese policy of keeping rural areas 100% devoted to agricultural production, this has propelled (1) some of the most rapid urbanisation in human history as well as the creation of the largest cities in human history, and (2) an astronomically unequal distribution of industrial capacity across the territory of china

anyway they’re both terrible but it’s an interesting contrast

if you take the naively reductive approach of viewing the modern world as a competition between Capitalism and Communism then the economic failures of Communism must give you pause.

it’s different for moral crusades for racial justice or gay rights or vegetarianism or whatever, in those cases any failure can be written off as a temporary setback, a bracing taste of adversity on the long road to justice, etc.

but Communism has to mean more than just “a more equitable society” (which as has been pointed out ad nauseam can be achieved quickly and easily by reducing everyone to an equal state of poverty), because if it is economically constrained relative to Capitalism then it will simply lose every time.

now of course there is always wriggle room: perhaps Communism wins over a longer time horizon (but that’s not possible if growth compounds!) or perhaps Communism wins economically but loses for some other reason like sabotage (but why is the superior system always so easy to sabotage?) or more realistically perhaps the conditions are not right yet and True Communism, like True Capitalism, has still not been tried.

“the most evolutionarily successful creature is one that hasn’t evolved yet” isn’t wrong exactly but is it helpful?

Seems like the relatively obvious solution to this issue is “the best economic system for ensuring its own perpetuation and hegemony is not the best economic system for human wellbeing.” There are some communists who view communism as inevitable and capitalism as obsolete, but that hardly seems like the majority view these days.

sure, you can take an Omelas view and posit a system that delivers higher economic growth but only at the expense of increased human suffering, but in practice it’s hard to reconcile that with actual working conditions in the US and the USSR in 1975 for example, or comparing Jack Ma’s “996″ work culture to Jeff Bezos today, so it just brings us back to True Communism/Capitalism has never been tried.

(plus of course a system that delivered higher economic growth would most likely over time result in less human suffering, both because an inequitable share of a much larger pie may still be better than an equal amount of nothing and because it’s less likely to be taken over by something even worse).

ironically at this point in history I think that the world is actually being held back economically by the suppression of the middle class, so whichever country can figure out how to solve that political conundrum will get a jump on the others.

I still feel like you’re simplifying a bit here. If capitalism fuels growth via aggressive consumption of natural resources, and eventually those resources run out and the byproducts of industrialization cause ecological (and economic) collapse, is it the better system because it managed to out-compete a more sustainable economic system for a few decades?

Worth adding in my standard disclaimer here that I am not a supporter of 20th-century-style communism, and that I don’t think it was a “more sustainable economic system” as my argument might imply - I’m more trying to get at the what I feel the limitations of the argument you’re making are.

“ironically at this point in history I think that the world is actually being held back economically by the suppression of the middle class, so whichever country can figure out how to solve that political conundrum will get a jump on the others.“

I’m curious what you mean by that - I don’t think I disagree, but I’d be interested in hearing you expand on it.

right, there are certainly limits to growth that can’t be exceeded in the long-term (all exponential processes are ultimately sigmoidal) and you can juice short-term growth with tactics that leave you stalled later on, as we see in just about every investment bubble.

so the fallback position here is that if Capitalism appears to deliver higher growth it actually isn’t really due to uncosted externalities, whether it’s carbon dioxide levels or depleted fishing stocks or what have you.

cold comfort though, as Communism must adopt similar growth strategies, hastening the collapse, or simply be overwhelmed; it’s not easy to unilaterally disengage from the incentives at play and skip the boom/bust cycle.

the erosion of the middle class is a problem because if the rich possess an outsized share of the national wealth then they can only do two possible things with it: spend it on consumption that only benefits themselves, which doesn’t contribute much to economic growth, or make productive investments that do, but which investments are productive when there are no potential customers because everyone has already been squeezed for everything they possess just to pay for the essentials?

Jeff Bezos might have dreams of creating a lean mean package delivering machine but it all falls to pieces if nobody out there can afford to buy anything.

posts that are just dogmatic enough to piss you off but just vague enough to make it hard to identify why exactly you are pissed off

*intoning solemnly* Luigi’s Mansion will not exist under socialism.

I can identify why it pisses me off! It’s because it’s talking about communism and personally I am specifically in favor of socialism and against communism, like I’m using the socialist label specifically because it’s not synonymous with communism, because I think communism is bad and does not work. I think capitalism has good foundation to build socialism on top of, and if a “total restructuring of society” happens it will be gradual and organic and not something we can predict right now. Viewing socialism as the more equitable version of the current order is the i+1 that we need to actually focus on right now if we want to talk about actual things that are / will be real and not to be hilariously wrong for fun.

Also, I swear to god how much hardcore leftists, especially communists, underrate how much more appeal their ideology would have if they just stopped making excuses for murder. I saw a guy in comments on a TikTok video unironically defending the Stasi, and it’s like… look, it doesn’t require an evil conspiracy by bourgeoise intellectuals and CIA psyops to convince people that the DDR or the USSR was evil when they ran notorious programs of torture and murder for decades! And whataboutism does not help you here–yes, the US does awful shit, too! And quite a lot of people are quite angry about it! Democracy and free speech and liberalism are popular not because the masses are brainwashed by a functional conspiracy of the elite, but because they are ways of trying to avoid political violence and repression.

Just… stop excusing murder! Stop claiming it’s all made up or exaggerated! I swear to God that you’ll get like a thousand percent more support if you say “economic justice, but also murder is wrong.”

It really depresses me because if you ask people in the leftoid subculture, nearly all of them are deeply hostile to the idea that Communism is widely unpopular due to anything actual communists ever did. The idea that Stalin and Mao were self-discrediting never even enters their minds. They literally do think it’s 1950s history textbooks and Prager U videos that are entirely responsible for mass popular skepticism of socialism.

It’s so fucking frustrating because this is literally the only obstacle. All the basic aspects of socialism are overwhelmingly popular. People like strong labor unions, people like public control of industry, people like a generous welfare state, and people instinctively dislike the rich and corporations, and think they need to have something taken away from them.

It’s literally only fear of Stalin that causes the average person to be doubtful of socialism.

And that’s something entirely surmountable! I think the average person is very receptive to the message of Bernie or DSA who says “I’m for the good kind of socialism with healthcare and democracy, I’m not for the Soviet gulag”. I think the average person thinks it’s hysterical and bad-faith to treat Bernie like he’s a Marxist-Leninist future dictator.

But the vestigial Leninist rearguard won’t let it happen. They are the nucleus of the radical left and they jealously defend the supposedly “impressive” legacy of their blood-soaked historical project. And so we’re fucked, we’ll never be free of their taint.

Here’s a way to know Mao and Stalin weren’t self discrediting: they aren’t discredited among the sections of the left that achieves things.

What you call “achievements” are all failures, or things that would’ve happened anyway, things that you’d never give credit to anyone else for. Get fucked. You’re the problem.

“Stalin and Mao weren’t discredited among socialists who accomplish things” fits pretty badly with the USSR and PRC’s overt policy of trying hard to paper over both figures once they died

Adulation for Stalin and Mao is insidious liberal revisionism in rank insubordination against the collective will of the working class internationale as realised concretely and materially by actually existing communist leadership

I always think it’s silly to focus on Stalin and Mao given the constraints they were working under, like yes obviously they had lots of people killed, that’s kind of the job they signed up for, but what about later? if you want to judge the project judge it by Deng and Khrushchev surely, or for that matter judge it by Xi and Gorbachev.

I don’t understand the logic tbh, but I know of a comparison: Al Szymanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union (linked in my pinned post) has statistics from both Stalin and post-Stalin eras and comparisons to the US. Despite all the ways in which Khrushchev rolled back workers’ rights, the statistics are pretty great.

the logic is that it’s weird to dismiss the PRC based on the Great Chinese Famine given that it was sixty years ago and hasn’t reoccurred, nor is it likely to reoccur, and thus it isn’t very compelling evidence to base future predictions on.

similarly for the Cultural Revolution or Stalin’s Great Purge, as unpleasant as they were.

so if you want to critique the USSR it makes sense to focus on events post-1945, or even post-1953, which still gives you forty years to work with and should be more than adequate, and for China post-1979, which also gives you forty years to work with.

this screens off Stalin and Mao from consideration, which is fine given that they were only involved for a brief period of time in the establishment of these states, and regardless of whether you think they did a good or bad job it makes more sense to focus on the nature of the states they established in the decades after their deaths, I mean you wouldn’t try to justify the modern United States by obsessing over George Washington, would you?

I guess I don’t understand the either/or?

I agree that you shouldn’t dismiss a 70-year-long history based on stuff that lasted 1-4 years, but that’s just basic logic (of the sort that will get you branded a quasi-fascist tankie in these examples, but still).

But, on the other hand, S/M were both around for 30 years in a 70-year history, so it’s also weird to exclude nearly half the history?

I think one can look at things in their totality. The Great famine and the first two years of the cultural Revolution happened under Mao, but do did the doubling of life expectancy (unmatched in history AFAIK), the end of yearly famines (the big one was the last I believe), and the last eight years of the cultural revolution (barefoot doctors, unprecedented levels of freedom and education for workers, essays on philosophy by shipbuilders etc). I think one can hold both these great failures and great successes in one’s mind. The post Mao era was pretty stable, modulo tiananmen I guess, and had shown remarkable growth but that stability and growth did involve rolling back workers rights (which is really very horrible! Since 93 you can get fired in China for skipping work!), it has left China one of the most unequal countries on earth, and also it wouldn’t have been possible without the successes of the mao era.

Further, as a communist, I’m interested in replicating their successes without their failures; and so I think it’s really important to evaluate the early parts of the history very critically. But this I can understand if you don’t care so much about this. (:

most of Mao’s early successes come from ending a century of some of the worst wars and disasters in human history and achieving a monopoly on violence across all of China, admittedly something that kicks off each new dynasty, and the mortality reductions from rolling out vaccines and antibiotics and deworming etc. are impressive but of course can’t be replicated once you’ve already done them.

the policies of Mao that were successful were basic state stuff that you would want to do anyway and the parts that were Communist were not particularly successful: industry and agriculture did not benefit from collectivism and Chinese growth did not kick off until most of it was rolled back, and even that would have been much more difficult if Mao had succeeded in conquering Taiwan and taken back Hong Kong sooner.

like there’s really not much to learn from Mao and Stalin unless you’re fighting a civil war and clawing your way to the top of a party apparatus at any cost, which I’m sure is important for some people but not really of long-term importance for a successful state.

and Mao’s fundamental failure was replicating the classic Chinese imperial dynastic pattern with a new authoritarian hierarchy that happens to be called the Communist Party! this was bad! this was a problem that still dogs China today and will for the foreseeable future.

Chinese agricultural output increased at a steady pace every year after the Great famine, so collectivisation worked; data in Mobo Gao’s The Battle for China’s Past. Soviet agricultural output grew from collectivisation till the second world war, and fell because of Khrushchev’s disastrous policies of industrial farming Agricultural data the world over shows that what is best for agricultural output is land controlled by the tiller, see data in The Rule of Experts by Timothy Mitchell. I could go over each such claim and cite data but I have a life and typically people on here just ignore my references anyway so

And also, while, distributing vaccines etc does deserve its credit, your narrative is falsified by a control: India. India was in a somewhat better position than China in the late 40s, and is now an absolute hellhole with a lower life expectancy than North Korea.

What I want to learn from Mao and Stalin is how to give workers bottom up control of politics and economy, the sort of this “democratic” socialists talk about. These aspects were unprecedented in these periods. See Szymanski for some data. See the fact that workers had philosophy study collectives. The autocracy narrative is mostly the whining of the class that writes books in foreign languages, whining because they’ve lost power. China has always been a multi-party democracy, and despite some searching I couldn’t find any data showing that their democracy was a sham (any more than any bourgeois democracy is a scam). But focusing on the centralised authority is wrong, because these countries had local democracies beyond the widest imaginations of the West (dismantled to some degree after Stalin and Mao). See Two Commonwealths, linked in my pinned post.

I think countries like Australia might be a better control given that they have already achieved the lifespan gains and more, along with higher economic productivity.

China is only a multi-party democracy in the sense that it maintains several potemkin parties who meet every few years to acclaim what a good job the Communist Party is doing, come on (Taiwan is a multi-party democracy, since the end of military rule, funnily enough).

and yeah it’s great that workers could study the official ideology but today it’s easier to start a Marxist study group in Australia than in China, that’s weird, no?

but that’s also what I’m saying: if Mao’s achievements are dismantled immediately after he died then he fucked up the most important thing of all: establishing a proper succession mechanism! something that China still lacks today, to its enormous cost.

but I think if you look closer you will see that the current trajectory of the party is not so different to what Mao was doing; he never envisioned a democratic China in the sense of the party potentially losing power one day.

I don’t think a setller colony reaping the benefits of being a setller colony as well as global imperialism is a good control for China actually? There needs to be some similarity in material conditions man!

Another thing that comparison with a place like Australia hides is how much harder it is to get basic material advances like literacy in the countries that are the victims of imperialism. And workers having the mental space to think through their work philosophically? Impossible outside cultural revolution era! In India workers are just about staying alive and most of them can’t read! I invite you to read the shipbuilders’ essay in the collection linked in my pinned post, there they think through their own work in a philosophical way. This is not simply study of official ideology, it is a real spiritual empowering of workers.

Regarding whether China is a multi party democracy, you haven’t cited any data or study. I could make similar claims about any country. The US is a multi party democracy in that there are two parties serve the same masters. What’s the difference between these statements? I’m not so familiar with Australian or Taiwanese politics but I’m sure similar statements can be made.

I agree that democracy in the liberal model wasn’t an aim of Mao’s, or any communist’s. Communists are more interested in autonomy and local control of politics and economic relations than in symbolic changes in leadership. I was just countering the claim that it’s an autocracy. I am unaware of any suppression of elections in China, and haven’t found any data showing such.

Mao’s achievements were not dismantled immediately after he died! Some rights and privileges of workers were rolled back, but it is because of Mao (era policies) that China is a competing superpower right now, make no mistake about this. Why did all the industry in the neoliberal period go to China and not India? Because China has a skilled educated workforce and India didn’t. Why was the Chinese workforce skilled and educated in China? Mao era policy. Especially the (last eight year of the) cultural revolution.

And the point of succession thing… agreed, actually. The succession mechanism was tied into the cultural revolution and the whole thing blew up in Mao’s face (he got depressed and brought Deng back it’s a whole thing), and this mistake will need to be rectified in future. Very likely with a different model of democracy than seen in that era of socialist states or in liberal democracies. After Mao, there hasn’t been any serious issue with succession though I believe. Weren’t they all elected in the party congress as expected? I haven’t studied the details.

if Australia doesn’t count because being a settler colony conveys benefits to literacy rates and life expectancy (actually drags it down, for obvious reasons if you think about it) then you could compare with Japan and South Korea, and if they don’t count because they are beneficiaries of being in the US empire then maybe that empire has something going for it, further research required.

the spiritual empowerment of workers is great but until the hukou system is abolished (and until Marxist activists aren’t arrested) it doesn’t count for much in practice, like it’s worth considering exactly what happened to the workers who felt a little too empowered and started asking questions and issuing demands that potentially challenged party rule.

we could commission a study on whether China counts as a multi-party democracy but I think you could just read some Xi Jinping thought, particularly all the bits about how the rule of the party and its grip on the military is absolutely paramount, or for that matter you could just try starting a political party (I was going to say “on the Mainland” but in Hong Kong also works, now) and see what happens when you try to raise attention to it.

the issue with succession is that it’s purely power games and nepotism, keep an eye on the running tally of how many of Xi’s former and future challengers have been arrested on corruption charges for example.

now, the succession within most political parties is like that, but in a multi-party democracy there are additional steps before the winner of that dirty game can take power: we don’t know exactly what Hillary did, but it ultimately didn’t help her win the presidency, there was an additional step involved and these extra steps matter.

who will replace Xi? when will Xi step down? only Xi knows, and nobody else can even ask.

1. What the US empire has going for it is in the name actually. Imperialism confers cheap labour, and labour costs are >80% of costs. So imperialism gives you a bunch of very cheap stuff.

2. Actually in Mao era China (and Stalin era USSR) there are very few examples of the repressive apparatus being turned on the working class. All the horror stories are from middle class intelligentsia types, party officials, managers, etc. Yes, the fact that it is turned on the working class now is bad

3. Regarding your claims about succession, you’ll have to refer me to serious study. Your off the cuff statements are not sufficiently detailed to evaluate things. For example, how many of the challengers arrested for corruption were, you know, corrupt? Why does Xi know his successor, has the procedure of electing the chairman in the party congress been changed?

4. The bits about the party’s grip on the military, it is supposed to be contrasted with the military having a grip on the party/ies like in say the US. About the rule of the party, yes China was never supposed to be a multi-party liberal democracy. It’s a different model of democracy, study it both in contrast to liberal democracy and also on its own terms.

1. but the US outsources to China for cheap labour (among other things), right? and Australia has had historically high wages and high living standards, so I think you’re missing something here.

2. to say that the “repressive apparatus” (!) was not turned on the working class is a bit of a tautology given that anyone it ground to dust was labelled a class enemy or class traitor, but okay sure; the non-working class people that were tortured to death were still people though, kind of important to note that in passing I think.

3. if all of the (very high level party members!) arrested for corruption were corrupt then that’s actually really bad, and if some of them weren’t corrupt, well, that’s worse, this is really a no-win situation.

the real question is when two of these guys goes head to head and one is jailed for life, how do you know the one doing the jailing is the non-corrupt one given that he’s in control of the “repressive apparatus” and also bans anyone from independently investigating?

it’s a bit like the justifications for biblical inerrancy that cite the bible itself, you have to trust the party leadership is right because the party leadership said so!

sadly I don’t think it’s possible to find a study that you would find sufficiently serious on this question but I guess if we live long enough we may yet get to see the man step down and find out who he’s groomed to take over.

4. if you can’t seriously critique the government then it’s not a democracy in any shape or form, if you can’t politically organise without getting shutdown by the government then it’s not a democracy in any shape or form, if you can’t write about the leadership etc. etc. and so on.

like if the word “democracy” is confusing just dissolve it into the terms that matter:

- freedom of association

- freedom of speech

- the right not to be detained without charge

- rule of law

- plurality, not everything suborned to one hierarchy

and so on, democracy is not just about voting, and yes wealth inequality is a part of it but China doesn’t do particularly well on that front right now either.

I agree with point 2. I hope that future socialist states will use their relatives apparatus less freely. We’re probably a long way from not having a repressive apparatus at all, but I hope that we as a species live to see that day.

Edit: I actually believe this will happen. The ideological and material conditions today are very different.

Regarding point 1 I’ll recommend Zak Cope’s Divided world, divided class because it does some nice calculations. And I’ll leave it at that. Both the facts you mention are true and not in contradiction with the broad thesis.

Regarding point 3, I agree that the situation is bad, and don’t disagree with your laying out of possibilities. Serious study can also involve a serious study of circumstantial evidence etc though, and need not have to be a full investigation. That’s what labour movement people do in cases where the repressive apparatus is turned on workers etc

Re point 4, I’d critique it in saying that those freedoms are predominantly restricted to some classes in every case we know of. And I hope that future socialist states will be able to offer those freedoms to a wider range of people. And regarding China specifically, it has a burgeoning labour movement, very Maoist actually, so those freedoms haven’t gone away to the extent you mention based on three examples of the party leadership.

but 72 years after the Communist Party took power, a working class person still has more freedom of speech, freedom of political activism, and higher income and longer life expectancy in many capitalist nations, yes?

now it’s too soon to call it, but eventually that has to change or the project has failed, or mutates into some pseudo-religious thing where all the workers get their rights in the hereafter, or maybe the suffering of the overtly Communist nations is a sacrifice used to get real socialism in other countries, but that’s not great either.

but my real question is: what if an authoritarian single party state cannot ever deliver what you want, by construction? if liberating the working class requires the party to give up power, then it doesn’t seem like it will ever happen, and what then?

First para: the capitalist countries you speak of are all industrialised countries benefiting from imperialism. Compare with capitalist countries that aren’t either of those things, like India or Latin America, or the first 100-150 years of industrialisation in say Western Europe. You’ll find that the socialist countries actually do quite well. Also please read Szymanski’s book that I mentioned above, and that is linked in my pinned post.

Second para: I agree. And I think current day China is heading that way. Unless there’s a major reversal, it won’t become some sort of communist utopia, and will keep becoming more capitalist. It has some better aspects (covid handling, climate change response) and some worse aspects (insufficient democracy for any class) than industrialised nations in the imperial core.

Third para: the answer to the what if is yes. Till we abolish the need for a centralised, professionalised repressive apparatus of the state, there will be repression. But I think future socialist states will have a lot more parties and specific freedoms. We’ll be building on examples like Bolivia as much as examples like China. It is hard to estimate how much of the repression in previous socialist experiments was because of the need to industrialise, but I think it’s a lot (eg it always got worst when the need to industrialise intensified).

We’re in a different world now, and a result of the greater wealth of humanity is that there are a lot more important groups that have interest in making the world better in specific ways (eg identitarian groups, ecological preservation groups etc). And communist parties of the new generation work with these groups a lot.

Anyway, this has been a good conversation, but I’m afraid I have to sign off because I have to begin my day’s work and it’s going to be a busy few days. Feel free to have the last word. (:

there’s never a last word, it just keeps going on like this! both this thread, and history as a whole.

I think that’s why it’s misleading to speak of “socialist experiments”: it implies a degree of repeatability that simply isn’t there, you only industrialise once, you only abolish feudalism once, you only deal with the rise of the internet once, and so on, and at every stage it’s just power struggles all the way down and different power struggles each time, trying to analyse Mao’s policies independently of the specific challenges that Mao himself was facing is always going to be of limited use.

you can imagine an immortal being who was keeping an eye on the Great Qing and the Tokugawa Shogunate and then got distracted for a few centuries before looking back today, what would they see?

- both empires have modernised, industrialised, and globalised

- the power of the aristocracy is gone but the palaces are still there

- megalopolises studded with high rise buildings, birthrates falling below replacement level, an increasingly ageing population

- life expectancy way up, no wars for decades

and so on, and at some point they might dig into the history books and find out that as Japan modernised it briefly had a fascist government that tried to take over all of Asia (!) but quirks of geopolitics led to it keeping its emperor in name even after defeat, while China flirted with collectivism for a few decades before moving on and the emperor was reduced to an ordinary citizen, but the quirks of ideology seem fairly minor compared to the broad sweep of history (the rule of thumb is that everything Japan does China will also do but twice as fast and twice as big, whether it’s industrialisation or foreign investment or the real estate bubble!)

so there’s this paradox where history seems inevitable, which does suggest fundamental rules at play, but those rules are too low level (physics, biology, economics) to be relevant to politics, where the only real issues are who you’re going to ally with and who you’re going to shoot, obviously the most contingent of questions.

as a result “should we copy Mao?” only makes sense if you’re facing Nationalist attack and wondering whether you should flee to Yan'an or whatever, or more realistically using Mao as a kind of religious totem to inspire other unrelated political activity along what you hope are similar lines.

anyway luckily none of this actually matters.

As a person who grew up in early post-Soviet years, like literally I was born 2 years after Soviet Union ended and 50+% the books I read as a kid were books published in the Soviet Union, as a person who grew up surrounded by adults who were born and lived in the Soviet Union...

THERE ARE SIGNIFICANT FLAWS WITH COMMUNISM AS AN ECONOMIC SYSTEM.

I won’t even touch the “they... killed people... a lot...” with a 10ft pole because oh boy is this another rant, but

Communism, as distinct from socialism - THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING - is not very implementable! It has flaws baked into the very basic idea!

Money exists as a medium of exchange for a REASON. Centralized planning is one big point of failure that fails all the time in all kinds of new and interesting ways. Collectivist agriculture literally enslaved people to make them conform to it, at least in the USSR (cannot say a lot about China). Like, people weren’t allowed to get a job in a city if they weren’t registered there, and you couldn’t register there without having a job there or having been born there, and this accumulated all kinds of exceptions over time all of them intensely socially dysfunctional, people from rural areas treated as “invasive immigrants”, “понаехали тут“ as they FLED agricultural parts because they FUCKING SUCKED to live & work in because the collectivized agriculture was just REALLY not good for people who had to do it. USSR was behind on science and industry and production except for select lucky areas and only vaguely managed to keep up with some technological innovations in others by literally stealing ideas. Like, spy shit. My mom still can’t forgive that THERE WERE NO WASHING MACHINES in the USSR. In the 90s when I was born there were no washing machines available, because the centralized Soviet industry didn’t produce them. The centralization was a point of failure and it failed. It failed so fucking much.

Like, the human rights abuses came from the need to keep up the propaganda that life in the Soviet Union was better than life outside of it. The propaganda required mass killings and mass incarceration and terror state because it was a LIE. And it was a lie because communism failed as an economic system in the long term no matter how USSR tried to experiment with it and tweak it to make it work, beause you cannot force collectivism and because central planning is a fucking hierarchy of single points of failure connected with an AND - if a single one fails the whole chain fails, and you can only innovate or get something done if luckily the whole chain lights up green, and you might still get put in jail for that if there’s a sanity failure later on and your stuff gets accused of going against the ideology.

Again, I don’t know what it’s like in China, and to my understanding they’ve long been communism in name only, keeping the state terror but allowing private enterprise etc. What I do know is USSR, and in USSR communism proved itself a comprehensive failure as an economic system.

It’s based on flawed premises that don’t take into account how human beings, incentive systems and industry and innovation actually work.

Socialism fucks, and is a great idea and we need more of it.