> On the other hand, life was secure. There were no bank loans, therefore there were no bank fees or percents. There was no real worry over one’s job or workplace; one was available for everyone. Wages were low, but fear of losing one’s job was almost nonexistent. A person pretended to work; the state pretended to pay him. Living accommodations were crowded and faint hope existed to find a better apartment, but all had a roof over their heads.There had to be, since homelessness was forbidden by law.
> Nowadays, there exist people who yearn for that mollusk-like life.
This isn't an inaccurate description, and yes, it's not exactly a utopian state to find yourself in.
But I'm not going to chuckle at the hypothetical people we're supposed to pity for wanting this; I bet there are quite a few people in the United States alone who would love to have this life, who would love to have a guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof over their heads, and the heads of their children.
> I bet there are quite a few people in the United States alone who would love to have this life, who would love to have a guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof over their heads, and the heads of their children.
I'd almost venture to say the majority of people, and definitely those who suffer from a disability of some sort; especially mental health, where one may not mentally function well enough from one day to the next to be able to reliably hold a job.
They definitely does not aware of soviet reality that “roof over head” usually is not in the place where human want to live, same with job. if student after university decided (not by student, by state distributing workforce) to go work at city on polar circle - that means that student will go live and work here, without sunlight for the rest of his life! not joking, personal story with soviet collapse as happy ending (moved to normal place after that)
Just so that you understand, what that inevitably brings is alcoholism, domestic violence and other depressive deformities. My grandpa died from daily drinking with his factory pals and my grand-grandma has axe damage on her wooden furniture and it was normal.
I think that lifestyle is easily achieved by basically anyone, you don't need much money to live that kind of life. The problem is that life is only enjoyable if everyone lives the same life. You could save a ton of money and not have to work much if you lived a 70s lifestyle. Many even long for that lifestyle, but it only works if everyone lives it. If you're the only one living in the 70s and everyone else lives in the 2020s, most people would not be happy. Somehow, enduring things is much easier as a group. I remember talking to a Chinese person who said for most of their youth they spent their days studying until 11pm with breaks for lunch and dinner. That would be hell for most western kids, but apparently they didn't suffer too much because they were studying together with their friends who all had to endure the same schedule.
This is averaging across ~40 years of history (none of this applied until mid-50s and certainly not before WWII) and comparing "middle class" with low income. The "guaranteed, if low-paying, job and roof over head" was the norm, but it certainly didn't apply to everyone, the modern Russian word for a homeless person is of soviet origin. I. e. a criminal convict would lose their home automatically.
> But I'm not going to chuckle at the hypothetical people we're supposed to pity for wanting this
We should.
What communists really want is to have their every need and desire magically provided for, as if they were fundamental rights. In other words, what they truly want is called post-scarcity: the absence of an economy.
Communism and socialism are economic models. There exists scarcity of goods and resources and therefore they must be economized. There's a system that chooses who gets access to said scarce resources.
Socialism is sold to people as
though it was post-scarcity. People think they'd be living comfortable "secure" lives where everything is guaranteed and provided for. Ah yes, the fabled memetic fully automated luxury space communism.
People who buy into this will probably end up doing forced hard labor in a field somewhere should communists actually come to power. They will not get to do what they want, they will work wherever the state puts them to work under penalty of death by firing squad. The state has no choice, anything else means mass starvation and millions of deaths.
Pity is far too lenient a reaction towards such reality distorting naïveté. If left unchecked, they will win elections and actually install socialism in your country.
We have a better chance of achieving post scarcity by collapsing capitalism with relentless automation.
I dont know how your life is, but my own impression is that life of many americans is worse than the life which was in the Soviet Union at least until the 80s (after Stalin). Maybe not in the sense of the capacity to buy junkfood and other junk, but as to sense of living and human relations. "Mollusk" sounds as the usual american antirussian propaganda.
The really funny part is that this is probably fairly easy to achieve in the United States. The only part of the Soviet system you'd need to implement is the migration and residency control regime.
Currently people all over the world are free to move to New York, which makes the city unaffordable. If you forbade anyone not born within it from moving there, Manhattan would be fairly affordable and homelessness would be much reduced.
All you need to do is to free yourself from that bourgeois delusion that a man from Mexico (or worse, West Virginia) has any right to live in that city.
When I was an undergraduate working in a molecular biology lab my two mentors, Andrei and Svetlana were Russian emigrants. Andrei taught me, in the 00s, that he couldn’t do the level of molecular biology in Russia because the downstream effects decades later put them far behind in the technical and cultural knowhow. Genetics was banned.
> More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned, and numerous scientists were executed in the Soviet campaign to suppress scientific opponents.
During the 1940-s. And yet it undermined the molecular biology research in the USSR. It's very easy to destroy the institutions of scientific research.
I'm sure, nothing like this can happen in the US. It's not possible that people in power will just use theological and ideological reasons to just deny sound scientific results.
I was about 10 when the USSR has collapsed and have lived in the use for over 30 years yet I still see in my parents and even myself the remnants of dehumanizing ridiculousness that existed there. Eg my dad is instinctively terrified of dealing with anyone from the government even like the mailman because that person can wield their position against you even though that's not the case here at all.
Or for example I had to point out to my dad that his neighbor open carries. Like my dad is intellectually aware of the 2nd amendment but it didn't fit in his brain that people could actually exercise a freedom so his eyes were literally blind to it (obviously I drove him to the gun shop that evening)
The Bolsheviks were the first to get a country to legalize elective abortion in 1920. They did so as a temporary measure because so many women would have difficulty raising a child in the post-war environment.
It got to the point where hospitals were overwhelmed and they started setting up dedicated clinics.
They tried making it illegal again in the 30s but brought it back in 1955 because there was such demand.
So, presumably this 170 million number is written by someone who believes a fetus is a unique human life and the prevalence of elective abortion was so high as to be a not insignificant number of "lost lives".
The fact that you cannot even see how ridiculuous this piece of propaganda is, says also about your ability to reason. The great demographic drop in the Soviet Union happened after the WWII (you remember that Soviet Union defeated the nazis, right?), but even that was not "170 million people" and was due to the war started by the nazis (whatever your propaganda claims about that).
You can play with the scope to tell the story you want. If you scope in WW2 losses as well, about 30M Soviets died. Some other number were injured or disabled. If you look at fertility rates at the time, you can project how many children would have been born, and I’m sure you could be at that number.
Additionally, the after effects of the war and Stalin persisted - the loss of men resulted in higher numbers of childless women.
I lack the information to assess whether 170M is a meaningful number, but on a relative basis, the United States and even China didn’t contend with the sheer destruction and oppression that Soviet people did, and had higher fertility rates. It’s not a “pro” or “anti” Soviet/Russian discussion - the nation’s people suffered in various ways, which had an end result.
The 170MM figure is referring to all losses of life like the purges, man-made famines (Holodomor), inept ww ii strategies, as well as “unborn” children. This last one has no reference so it’s impossible to know what that means or how many people they attribute to that.
That said, the problem is a cultural one. The communists poured gas on the tendencies of the Tsars and modern Russia suffers from that legacy still. The legacy is a peasant (serf) : master way of thinking.
Culture is hard to cure and the change has to come from within. Japan had a similar problem but most of the sharp edges were dulled when they made a deal (surrender) with the Americans.
You also see this tendency to cling to bad cultural habits by some enclaves of immigrants. It can take decades of new generations to wipe some of those bad tendencies away. Some people see that as erasure of culture as a bad thing but it can also bring good.
> In their subconscious hopes that a societal formula is as simple and as universal as the famous E=mc², people are prepared to believe nonsense if it only sounds good.
One thing that only the "survivors" realize is just how materialistic the Soviet Bloc societies were.
And I don't mean philosophically materialistic, like "there is no soul". That too, but I mainly mean that in the shortage of everything (and there usually was a shortage of everything) people would become fixated on owning relatively banal objects.
Girls would prostitute themselves for a nice pair of Western jeans, people would snitch and steal, break the law, run illegal smuggling rings while bribing the police, take bribes themselves etc., over things such as stockings, tires or calculators.
I was not able to persuade one young American that not paying a fat bribe to a doctor could have fatal consequences back then. "But in socialism, there must be a common free healthcare for everybody!" - Yeah, lad, on paper. Paper tolerates everything. The one thing that was never in shortage were slogans, propaganda, red flags and red stars.
I look forward to the day when the capitalist and communist eras of the 19th-21st century are analyzed coldly, in the way we look at mercantilism or medieval market towns today.
Because it really seems like both are increasingly inadequate systems for handling modernity, and the obsession with defining one as intrinsically evil and the other the obvious superior option (I’ll let you choose which is which) is such a flattening, unhelpful approach.
Personally, having moved from capitalist America to post-communist Poland, a few things seem true to me:
…the communist era in Poland was a disaster and the country today is unquestionably better off as a modified capitalist one;
…contemporary American culture really seems to be struggling under an unquestioned capitalist ethic;
…the conflict seems artificially egged on from think tanks, corporations, academics, and maybe even the simple alliteration of the letter c (i.e., you don’t hear nearly as much about Capitalism vs. Socialism, even though historically that’s a more accurate label of what governments actually were.)
…and that neither capitalism or communism has ever really been implemented in a pure sense.
Which is all a long way of saying that Mark Fisher’s quote seems more true every day, not as a pessimistic statement but just one describing a lack of imagination and the inability to transcend the debate:
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
> While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II, making the return of this form of totalitarianism impossible
Even written in 2021 rather than today, it's difficult to take the OP seriously after this. Both Hitler's nazism and Stalin's communism are manifestations of the deeper authoritarian sympathies that infect the human psyche and to which the modern world is quickly succumbing.
It is not that but systematic destruction of any institution standing in the way. Once that is done it is easier to wield power and suppress people to do stuff. Just look at Russia today, where dissent is extremely risky to you and people around you, where shitnews television is pumping people with weird narratives, etc. Similarly T.Snyder argues that a precursor to the atrocities (not the war per se) in WWII were the destruction of the institutions.
Communism was quite different from nazism, whatever they tell and told you in the west. You just did not live there, and some people rewrote the history for you. Equating communism and nazism is one of the most abominable aspects of western propaganda
I’m the farthest thing imaginable from a Bolshevik sympathizer but I often wonder whether big-C Communism could have survived and how it would have fared if the United States hadn’t engaged in sustained economic warfare against it. I imagine it might look something a bit like Chinese Communism does today, although perhaps those days came and went in the later eras of the Party system.
Important to understand that these are "absurdities" only when viewed from the angle of market economy and democratic society. For people living in Soviet Union this was just a "state of the world".
Communist values (or lack of values) shaped the political and social systems in which people were born and raised.
> While nazism and its crimes were condemned after World War II [...] this has not happened with communism.
This resonates quite deeply. In my country nazis go straight to jail but communists walk our soil completely unpunished. They have half a dozen political parties, are well coordinated, are popular and are constantly elected by the population when they promise them heaven on earth. This is especially ironic since nazism is short for national socialism.
Communism is alive and well in Latin America. Brazilian president Lula declared to CNN his intention to install communism in my country not even a week ago. It has been his intention for over 40 years. He and his party has been in power for over 20 years. Yet people act as though it was fake news.
I'm not saying USSR was a panacea or that Stalin did nothing wrong (Tankies are the fucking worst. I hung out on /r/communism for a while, and, as the kids used to say "gross").
I take writing like the OP with a HUGE grain of salt.
There are plenty of crimes and problems with what happened in the Soviet Union. Some of these were intentional by the leadership both before, during, and after Stalin. Some of these were self-owns (War Communism much?) some of these were forced errors (when doing battle one makes tough choices, and this includes in ideological/economic/actual war). Some of these were straight up evil policies (gulags, great purges, Katyn, etc...)
If someone can do real analysis I'm down, but once you start quoting Black Book of Communism, I know you're coming with an agenda and it's hard for me to take you in good faith. Especially if you're counting "The Unborn" - go on, just call the US a "Nazi Nation with the unborn holocaust" (I grew up in that shit, so saw the propaganda first hand).
Are you contending existence of mass murders under almost any communist regime? What agenda are you talking about? You are making it sound communism is a noble idea, which someone is trying to discredit undeservingly.
>>2. "Unborn"
It was about an estimation of how much more people would Soviet Union have in time if it hadn't murdered so many of its citizens. Imagine children of children of missing 20 million people.
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|7 months ago|reply
> Nowadays, there exist people who yearn for that mollusk-like life.
This isn't an inaccurate description, and yes, it's not exactly a utopian state to find yourself in.
But I'm not going to chuckle at the hypothetical people we're supposed to pity for wanting this; I bet there are quite a few people in the United States alone who would love to have this life, who would love to have a guaranteed job, a guaranteed roof over their heads, and the heads of their children.
[+] [-] sedawkgrep|7 months ago|reply
I'd almost venture to say the majority of people, and definitely those who suffer from a disability of some sort; especially mental health, where one may not mentally function well enough from one day to the next to be able to reliably hold a job.
[+] [-] search_facility|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ponector|7 months ago|reply
That is quite inaccurate. Or partially accurate. Accurate for white russian people.
For others it was quite easy to loose a job and get a forced psychiatric treatment or gulag trip (depends on the year).
[+] [-] kachurovskiy|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] martindbp|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] SoftTalker|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tliltocatl|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|7 months ago|reply
We should.
What communists really want is to have their every need and desire magically provided for, as if they were fundamental rights. In other words, what they truly want is called post-scarcity: the absence of an economy.
Communism and socialism are economic models. There exists scarcity of goods and resources and therefore they must be economized. There's a system that chooses who gets access to said scarce resources.
Socialism is sold to people as though it was post-scarcity. People think they'd be living comfortable "secure" lives where everything is guaranteed and provided for. Ah yes, the fabled memetic fully automated luxury space communism.
People who buy into this will probably end up doing forced hard labor in a field somewhere should communists actually come to power. They will not get to do what they want, they will work wherever the state puts them to work under penalty of death by firing squad. The state has no choice, anything else means mass starvation and millions of deaths.
Pity is far too lenient a reaction towards such reality distorting naïveté. If left unchecked, they will win elections and actually install socialism in your country.
We have a better chance of achieving post scarcity by collapsing capitalism with relentless automation.
[+] [-] saubeidl|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] justsomejew|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] username332211|7 months ago|reply
Currently people all over the world are free to move to New York, which makes the city unaffordable. If you forbade anyone not born within it from moving there, Manhattan would be fairly affordable and homelessness would be much reduced.
All you need to do is to free yourself from that bourgeois delusion that a man from Mexico (or worse, West Virginia) has any right to live in that city.
[+] [-] Herodotus38|7 months ago|reply
When I was an undergraduate working in a molecular biology lab my two mentors, Andrei and Svetlana were Russian emigrants. Andrei taught me, in the 00s, that he couldn’t do the level of molecular biology in Russia because the downstream effects decades later put them far behind in the technical and cultural knowhow. Genetics was banned.
[+] [-] baxtr|7 months ago|reply
Scientists were executed… ok wow
[+] [-] Duanemclemore|7 months ago|reply
I can't find the link at the moment, apologies.
[+] [-] cyberax|7 months ago|reply
During the 1940-s. And yet it undermined the molecular biology research in the USSR. It's very easy to destroy the institutions of scientific research.
I'm sure, nothing like this can happen in the US. It's not possible that people in power will just use theological and ideological reasons to just deny sound scientific results.
[+] [-] mindslight|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] xyzelement|7 months ago|reply
Or for example I had to point out to my dad that his neighbor open carries. Like my dad is intellectually aware of the 2nd amendment but it didn't fit in his brain that people could actually exercise a freedom so his eyes were literally blind to it (obviously I drove him to the gun shop that evening)
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|7 months ago|reply
Why would that be obvious?
[+] [-] Mars008|7 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] whycome|7 months ago|reply
wait, does this just mean pregnancies that didn't reach full term? Or like, a hypothetical number of kids that could have been born?
[+] [-] zdragnar|7 months ago|reply
It got to the point where hospitals were overwhelmed and they started setting up dedicated clinics.
They tried making it illegal again in the 30s but brought it back in 1955 because there was such demand.
So, presumably this 170 million number is written by someone who believes a fetus is a unique human life and the prevalence of elective abortion was so high as to be a not insignificant number of "lost lives".
[+] [-] justsomejew|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] j4coh|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|7 months ago|reply
Additionally, the after effects of the war and Stalin persisted - the loss of men resulted in higher numbers of childless women.
I lack the information to assess whether 170M is a meaningful number, but on a relative basis, the United States and even China didn’t contend with the sheer destruction and oppression that Soviet people did, and had higher fertility rates. It’s not a “pro” or “anti” Soviet/Russian discussion - the nation’s people suffered in various ways, which had an end result.
[+] [-] hulitu|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] mc32|7 months ago|reply
That said, the problem is a cultural one. The communists poured gas on the tendencies of the Tsars and modern Russia suffers from that legacy still. The legacy is a peasant (serf) : master way of thinking.
Culture is hard to cure and the change has to come from within. Japan had a similar problem but most of the sharp edges were dulled when they made a deal (surrender) with the Americans.
You also see this tendency to cling to bad cultural habits by some enclaves of immigrants. It can take decades of new generations to wipe some of those bad tendencies away. Some people see that as erasure of culture as a bad thing but it can also bring good.
[+] [-] davejagoda|7 months ago|reply
This is an interesting insight on human nature.
[+] [-] robotnikman|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] inglor_cz|7 months ago|reply
And I don't mean philosophically materialistic, like "there is no soul". That too, but I mainly mean that in the shortage of everything (and there usually was a shortage of everything) people would become fixated on owning relatively banal objects.
Girls would prostitute themselves for a nice pair of Western jeans, people would snitch and steal, break the law, run illegal smuggling rings while bribing the police, take bribes themselves etc., over things such as stockings, tires or calculators.
I was not able to persuade one young American that not paying a fat bribe to a doctor could have fatal consequences back then. "But in socialism, there must be a common free healthcare for everybody!" - Yeah, lad, on paper. Paper tolerates everything. The one thing that was never in shortage were slogans, propaganda, red flags and red stars.
[+] [-] hagendaasalpine|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gampleman|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] vectorcrumb|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] keiferski|7 months ago|reply
Because it really seems like both are increasingly inadequate systems for handling modernity, and the obsession with defining one as intrinsically evil and the other the obvious superior option (I’ll let you choose which is which) is such a flattening, unhelpful approach.
Personally, having moved from capitalist America to post-communist Poland, a few things seem true to me:
…the communist era in Poland was a disaster and the country today is unquestionably better off as a modified capitalist one;
…contemporary American culture really seems to be struggling under an unquestioned capitalist ethic;
…the conflict seems artificially egged on from think tanks, corporations, academics, and maybe even the simple alliteration of the letter c (i.e., you don’t hear nearly as much about Capitalism vs. Socialism, even though historically that’s a more accurate label of what governments actually were.)
…and that neither capitalism or communism has ever really been implemented in a pure sense.
Which is all a long way of saying that Mark Fisher’s quote seems more true every day, not as a pessimistic statement but just one describing a lack of imagination and the inability to transcend the debate:
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
[+] [-] croes|7 months ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843605
[+] [-] blks|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kibwen|7 months ago|reply
Even written in 2021 rather than today, it's difficult to take the OP seriously after this. Both Hitler's nazism and Stalin's communism are manifestations of the deeper authoritarian sympathies that infect the human psyche and to which the modern world is quickly succumbing.
[+] [-] sublimefire|7 months ago|reply
It is not that but systematic destruction of any institution standing in the way. Once that is done it is easier to wield power and suppress people to do stuff. Just look at Russia today, where dissent is extremely risky to you and people around you, where shitnews television is pumping people with weird narratives, etc. Similarly T.Snyder argues that a precursor to the atrocities (not the war per se) in WWII were the destruction of the institutions.
[+] [-] justsomejew|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] binary132|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] divan|7 months ago|reply
Communist values (or lack of values) shaped the political and social systems in which people were born and raised.
First we shape systems, then systems shape us.
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|7 months ago|reply
This resonates quite deeply. In my country nazis go straight to jail but communists walk our soil completely unpunished. They have half a dozen political parties, are well coordinated, are popular and are constantly elected by the population when they promise them heaven on earth. This is especially ironic since nazism is short for national socialism.
Communism is alive and well in Latin America. Brazilian president Lula declared to CNN his intention to install communism in my country not even a week ago. It has been his intention for over 40 years. He and his party has been in power for over 20 years. Yet people act as though it was fake news.
[+] [-] cosmicgadget|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] simlevesque|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sexyman48|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wormius|7 months ago|reply
2. "Unborn"
Yeah, no.
I'm not saying USSR was a panacea or that Stalin did nothing wrong (Tankies are the fucking worst. I hung out on /r/communism for a while, and, as the kids used to say "gross").
I take writing like the OP with a HUGE grain of salt.
There are plenty of crimes and problems with what happened in the Soviet Union. Some of these were intentional by the leadership both before, during, and after Stalin. Some of these were self-owns (War Communism much?) some of these were forced errors (when doing battle one makes tough choices, and this includes in ideological/economic/actual war). Some of these were straight up evil policies (gulags, great purges, Katyn, etc...)
If someone can do real analysis I'm down, but once you start quoting Black Book of Communism, I know you're coming with an agenda and it's hard for me to take you in good faith. Especially if you're counting "The Unborn" - go on, just call the US a "Nazi Nation with the unborn holocaust" (I grew up in that shit, so saw the propaganda first hand).
[+] [-] nec4b|7 months ago|reply
Are you contending existence of mass murders under almost any communist regime? What agenda are you talking about? You are making it sound communism is a noble idea, which someone is trying to discredit undeservingly.
>>2. "Unborn" It was about an estimation of how much more people would Soviet Union have in time if it hadn't murdered so many of its citizens. Imagine children of children of missing 20 million people.
[+] [-] unknown|7 months ago|reply
[deleted]