Did… Did you just equate the former socialist state that was the Soviet Union to the contemporary proto-fascist and capitalist Russian Federation that literally emerged out of the dismantling and auctioning of the former??

“The government did all the nice things you mention” you don’t get it, that’s not the government doing things, all of those are mechanisms for democracy that barely exist in western countries. You’re basically saying “well yeah those things did exist, but have you considered that you get to vote for republicans/democrats (US) or socialdemocrats/christian-conservatives (EU) every 4 years to decide which of the two parties will apply austerity policy?” You’re not talking about democracy, you’re talking about electoralism, yes we have electoralismo in the west more than they had in the USSR, it’s just that electoralism isn’t democracy.

committed genocides, mass starvation

Not true, there’s not one case of genocide committed by the USSR. There was famine in the preindustrial soviet union during the period of land collectivisation, but guess what, there’s famine everywhere in preindustrial societies recurringly, and once the country industrialised, hunger disappeared.

massively oppressed its people

Again, revisionism. We are literally living in an era in which the NSA has access to your information in a digital database, and in which the government will happily tell you how they use facial recognition on protests to see who’s protesting. There are literally more people in jail in the USA TODAY than there were in Gulags at the peak of the gulag system.

spent so much on its military

The academic consensus is that the USSR constantly tried to put an end to the arms race with the US, at times going as far as unilaterally reducing their nuclear arsenal, which the US never corresponded back. The militaristic empire which forced huge military expenditure in the USSR was none other than the USA, and again, that’s academic consensus. Fucking Zbigniew Brzezinski used to brag about that himself.

they crashed the economy

Again, ahistorical bullshit that you’ve never even bothered to look into. The USSR NEVER suffered a crisis after WW2, the only time that there were some problems economically was during the liberalization process in Perestroika, towards the end of the soviet union. It’s the illegal and antidemocratic dismantling of the eastern block its centrally planned economy which drove the economy to the gutter and ended the lives of millions of people through unemployment, lack of basic goods, lack of healthcare, homelessness, alcoholism and suicide. Seriously, do a quick search, look at the historic GDP of the USSR/Russia, and tell me when it falls, before or after 1991.

Not to say western democracy is perfect

We are literally funding a genocide in Gaza

instituted socialist policies without that baggage

That’s where you’re wrong. It was the existence of the USSR being pioneer in all of those policies, and the struggle of hundreds of thousands of unionised workers in Europe trying to imitate this policy, and the resulting fear of a revolution in western Europe by the elites that made these concessions, that led to this progress. Again, you’re talking ahistorically, as if these advances had been earned electorally in the west.

Damn, you should tell that to the 700k homeless people in Germany, I’m sure they’ll be happy to know that

If the USSR had dissolved due to issues like the ones you’re talking about (Gulags being basically entirely dismantled after WW2 so 45 years before the dissolution, and breadlines being nonexistent until the 1980s liberalisation during Perestroika), it would have been dissolved with the popular consensus. There was a referendum in 1990 that asked the citizens of the Soviet Union if they wanted to maintain their country under communism and 70% of voters (admittedly a few republics didn’t participate) voted yes, so the USSR was extremely popular and people didn’t want it dissolved. The reasons for the illegal and antidemocratic dissolution of the USSR are much more complex than that.

Real democratic mechanisms in the USSR: highest unionisation rates in the world, announcement/news boarboards in every workplace administered by the union, free education to the highest level for everyone, free healthcare, guaranteed employment and housing (how do the supposedly “authoritarian leaders” benefit from that?), neighbour commissions legally overviewing the activity and transparency of local administration, neighbour tribunals dealing with most petty crime, millions of members of the party, women’s rights, local ethnicities in different republics having an option to education in their language and widespread availability of reading material and newspapers in their language, lowest rates of wealth inequality in any country, more female engineers in the USSR than in the rest of the world, higher representation of women in the party and in the justice system than anywhere else at the time…

Please explain me how getting to vote for the less-evil but equally neoliberal party once every 4 years is more democratic than that.

Lmao, Germany has guaranteed housing?! Germany has Vonovia, a company that hoards real estate and rents it in terrible conditions, and own about 500k+ houses. In what universe does Germany have guaranteed housing when Berlin tried to implement a directly democratically voted rent cap on housing and it got repelled by the tribunals a year after it began?

Free healthcare in Germany is absolute bullshit. Yes, it’s free, but the quality of healthcare is astonishingly low. I’ve had the misfortune of living there for a few years, and the whole system is horrendous, especially for how ludicrously expensive it is compared to other European countries. In Germany, you have sick senior people queuing at 7AM in frosty winter mornings STANDING ON THE STREETS to be able to see the family doctor, you can consider yourself lucky if you can wait sitting in a stairwell indoors while waiting for the doctor. It’s beyond me how German people aren’t constantly on the street complaining about this bullshit, again especially given the absurdly high costs of public healthcare there.

Funny that you also mention freedom of speech, when in Germany they are literally arresting Jewish people for expressing antizionist and pro-Palestinian points of view. The actual Nazis run rampant though, friends of the police if not outright members of it, with an extreme rise of the far right.

I’m sorry but calling the USSR a “vanguardist dictatorship” is just not historically accurate. Plenty of democratic mechanisms in the USSR, at any rate much better than anything else we’ve had so far. For a dictatorship, it dissolved itself quite peacefully didn’t it?

Sadly, attempts at socialism in which workers didn’t take the power of the state, ended up like Salvador Allende in Chile, like Mosaddegh in Iran, like the Spanish Second Republic… Idealism only gets you so far, sadly.

There’s an ideological ocean between utopian socialism and actually-existing socialism, yes. There’s a reason why there’s not been a successful historical instance of socialism in which workers collectivised without taking the power of the state in their hands.

Calling it “authoritarian state” kinda portrays lack of knowledge at democratic power structures and mechanisms in former socialist countries. Examples for the USSR: highest unionisation rates in the world, announcement/news boarboards in every workplace administered by the union, free education to the highest level for everyone, free healthcare, guaranteed employment and housing (how do the supposedly “authoritarian leaders” benefit from that?), neighbour commissions legally overviewing the activity and transparency of local administration, neighbour tribunals dealing with most petty crime, millions of members of the party, women’s rights, local ethnicities in different republics having an option to education in their language and widespread availability of reading material and newspapers in their language… Please tell me one country that does that better nowadays

User: “we don’t have a lot of problems with capitalists here”

Also user: immediately starts to shit on a flavour of socialism

Again, you believing that holding a rifle in your hand is imperialism is why anarchists consistently fail. And again, please question yourself why you repeat every position on communism that US state propaganda shares

“Akchually I wasn’t referring to the pact that I explicitly mentioned by making reference to the ‘Polish partition’ and which you successfully argued against using historical points that I will proceed to disregard with a deep fried picture of Jake Peralta, I am very smart”. Your willful lack of understanding of Realpolitik and the needs of revolution are exactly the reasons why 1) you agree with every point fabricated by US state department propaganda against communism 2) anarchism has systematically failed as an alternative to capitalism. Literally “picking up a gun to defend against US imperialism is actually imperialism too, despite the lack of economic exploitation of periphery areas that characterises imperialism”

ROFL, not the liberal Molotov Ribbentrop pact, I expected better from an anarchist NGL. Again portraying the absolute belief of US state propaganda to the same level that libs do, and a complete lack of understanding of the material and historical conditions.

There is well documented evidence that the USSR sought after mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland early in the 30s, way before the Nazis started invading other countries, and facing a decade of rejection because they expected Nazis to firstly invade the communists, which was desired. In 1939 the USSR offered to send ONE MILLION soldiers together with artillery, tanks and aviation to France on exchange for a mutual defense agreement. The diplomats from France and England were both given orders (leaked wires prove this) to not accept any agreement, and only to pretend to be interested but delay the negotiations as much as possible. The USSR also offered, previous to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, to start an offensive against the Nazis as an alternative to the Munich agreements, if Poland England and France joined in the offensive, which they of course refused because, again, they wanted communism destroyed more than Nazism. The USSR in 1939 had had a total of 10 years of industrialisation to get out of being a feudal backwater country and have the industrial drive to fight threats like Nazism (Stalin famously predicted in the late 1920s that they had 10 years to make up the difference in industrialisation or they would be wiped out of the map). Every single year was crucial in the rapid development of the USSR industrial base, against the industrially superior Nazi Germany which had been industrialising for 100 years at that point. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was the only possible chance of survival for the USSR, it wouldn’t be able to stop the advances of fascism by 1939 singlehandedly, and the “partition of Poland”, while obviously not desirable, was the only option other than all-out war against Nazism without the intervention of France and England, or directly allowing the Nazis to take the entirety of Poland and increase the scope of the genocide. Again you show that your knowledge of the historical and material conditions isn’t adequate, and that you’re willing to replicate Josep Borrell levels of state propaganda. What a shame to be honest, I didn’t expect even this low from an anarchist.

their imperialism in Afganistan

Wow, again with the US state propaganda! You’re quite literally indistinguishable from a lib in your understanding of history. Tell me. What should the USSR have done when the US started to unilaterally arm and train militias of local tribal radical theocrats? “Sorry guys, sending troops to fight against a primitive version of fascism is wrong, we’re communist after all, so much as picking up a rifle and showing any resistance to American imperialism would make us just as bad as them”.

US state propaganda was all too happy to call USSR socialist/communist

Dumbest take I’ve ever seen. The US called the USSR communist firstly because it was, and secondly because it’s a way to prime people who have been radicalised against Russians in the US to be blindly critical of socialism (as you are proving to be).

Really, mate, I wasn’t expecting this lib-level analysis of the international policy of the USSR, but I should have known better. Point by point replicating the anticommunist propaganda… Sad shit ngl

too naive in allying with red fash

I’m sure Republican Spain and the anarchists (who refused to seize power and maintained the local bourgeoisie) would have resisted fascism so well without the guns, ammunitions, tanks, planes and troops from the USSR, lmao.

There was wage slavery, therefore it was capitalist. The extracting class where the party bureaucracy.

Same old bullshit argument. “The bureaucracy” loosely defined by a select group of party members who didn’t disproportionally enjoy a much higher standard of living, isn’t enough of an argument to talk of a class division. There were no markets, there was no imperialism, there was no generational consolidation of a class (with most political positions being taken by non bureaucratic families)… Talking of capitalism in the USSR is simply delusional and portrays a lack of understanding of the meaning of capitalism itself, or more likely, willing misinterpretation and mental gymnastics to bash on other form of socialism that are more compatible with US state propaganda.

Same is true in other “AES” like China, which have literal billionaires ffs

China is currently a capitalist economy. Markets, the existence of a capitalist class appropriating themselves of the surplus value generated by workers, and the only “redeeming” factor being a high participation of the state in the economy. Until proven otherwise I won’t call modern China socialist.

its satellite states immediately splintered and switched to capitalism at the first chance they got which shows just how much the soviet experiment failed at all its goals and how hated it was for persisting only through oppression.

Ignoring the influence of cold war and the material conditions of the moment into all of this is crazy, you literally have no regard of material and historical conditions. BTW, the overwhelming majority of USSR citizens voted for the continuation of the country in a referendum towards the end of the eastern block. Surprise surprise: if you don’t exercise a certain level of oppression, you can’t fight capitalism… one of the many reasons why anarchism never seems to take off and always seems to be incapable of fighting capitalism and fascism.

No, I dont agree that AES is capitalism, it’s just that you don’t have historical knowledge of the decision-making power of the working class over policy and the means of production in AES countries.

Strong unions with legal power and decision-making capabilities, local committees supervising political and administrative activity, extremely high social mobility, participation in state politics through the party and through discussion in the press, and most importantly, the absence of a capitalist class. There is no capitalism without surplus extraction from one class to the other, and without a receiving class to absorb whatever metric of surplus value you want to define, there isn’t capitalism. It obviously was flawed, as all systems ever in humanity, but it’s the best we’ve got so far in the struggle against capitalism.

Thank you also for not addressing how anarchism has historically consistently failed in creating an alternative to capitalism and to fighting fascism even in countries with strong anarchist tradition.

Because we can see that ML regimes always leads to oppression and capitalism

Marxism-Leninism saved Eastern Europe from Nazism, the level of genocide we would have seen in Eastern Europe if it hadn’t been for the existence of the USSR is unimaginable. Anarchists, on the other hand, have been proven absolutely incapable of stopping fascism, as was the case of the Spanish Second Republic, with some Anarchist unions such as the CNT numbering ONE MILLION members, and refusing to take action against the growth of fascism because “taking action would make us as bad as them :(”. The consequence were 40 years of fascist dictatorship. At least AES countries, flawed as they were, can claim to bring industrialization, wealth redistribution, meaningful fight against fascism, a stop to unequal exchange, solid and moral geopolitical positions and support for emancipatory movements elsewhere in the world. Anarchism doesn’t have a single serious historical claim other than Rojava and Zapatistas, two extremely small movements without much potential for growth, with one of them directly supporting the regional interests of US imperialism.

You’re buying the framework of the ruling class of your country, ask yourself why you reach the same conclusions about socialism than libs

Seriously though, I don’t know how anarchists can look at the consequences of the Perestroika, Glasnost and eventual dissolution of the Eastern Block, the millions of lives lost to unemployment, alcoholism, drugs and suicide, and still use the word “tankie” (coined to degrade the communists in support of the intervention of the USSR in Hungary when it went down that very path).

Please remind us!

Sorry, but your comment is based on vibes and not on evidence.

But they also had catastrophic failures in food provision

Not the case. The famines suffered in the USSR were preindustrial, and a consequence of difficulties during collectivisation together with bad crops. After the industrialisation of the country, hunger was abolished.

And large, centralized economies are vulnerable to seizure by centralized power structures, who then turn them to their own ends

You’re conflating centralisation with bureaucracy. There’s such thing as democratic centralism, and it’s arguably as resilient to corruption as decentralised competing structures.

But even ignoring those issues, a lot of this is just the same argument apologists for capitalism use. “Life got better and it was all thanks to our ideology!” A lot of this is conflated with general technological progress and other social changes, and the fact that human welfare was shockingly low in the economies that preceded modern ones.

You’re saying all of that as if the industrial development in these areas is something independent of the ideology. Latin America and the Russian Empire in 1917 were in very similar stages of development. By 1970, the USSR was the second world power and brought immense welfare state while Latin america was left underdeveloped and exploited. Eastern Europe would most likely be on the level of development (and capital participation by western countries) of Latin America if it weren’t for actually-existing socialism. The only other countries that managed to industrialise meaningfully since the early 20th century have been Japan and South Korea by being geostrategic US allies that directed immense aid towards industrialisation (a possibility not all countries, especially not socialist ones, have the luxury of); and China, first through planned economy and after the Sino-Soviet split again through opening the floodgates to western capital mixed with central decision-making. Technology doesn’t improve everyone’s lives, go to Guatemala or to Peru, or go ask immigrant workers in Saudi Arabia, or farmers in Sri Lanka. It’s precisely socialism that allows everyone to enjoy these benefits.

Looking at history I don’t see much difference. Both systems centralized wealth and goods into fewer hands

Laughably false. You say “looking at history” but you patently haven’t researched any serious economic analysis of inequality in AES countries.

at the expensive of those that lacked political power, often with horrific consequences.

Then please explain to me whether there was a marked reduction in income disparity between farmers and white collar workers in the Soviet Union after the 1950s. I’ll look for the numbers in a second (a good source is Albert Szymanski’s “Human Rights in the Soviet Union”). Edit: found the numbers:

Both destroyed the environment as they industrialized, and continue to do so

Both don’t continue to do so because most AES countries are gone, but you’re right, we need to have a model of countries with high human development and sustainable carbon footprints… as is the case of Cuba, the only country in the world to my knowledge with both high HDI and sustainable carbon footprint. Concerns for the climate and for ecology are very much a 21st century thing, and it’s to be expected that a power such as the USSR which was in a constant struggle for survival, didn’t prioritize that. We can and should do better in the future.

Seriously, you are showing a clear lack of knowledge in the material and social conditions in actually existing socialist countries, and you should reconsider how much of what you know about them is factual and how much is a consequence of the power structures in your particular country telling you that.

Here we go again, an anarchist calling Marxists leninists “red fash”. What country destroyed Nazism, please remind us.