The USSR (Soviet Union) and the PRC (China). The USSR is not Russia, and it doesn’t exist anymore.

And of course it’s fair, and in fact important to criticize them. We have the benefit of hindsight and can see how some of their decisions were serious mistakes. On the other hand, it’s also important to analyze what they did good and learn from that too. Neither was perfect, both were improvements, and the terrible fates of Russia and Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union is proof of how much good the SU was for its citizens.

which don’t respect the needs of there citizens.

They both inherited countries plagued with regular famine and have both eliminated it. In fact, in 1983 the CIA documented the SU as having a better typical diet than the USA. Clearly they respected the food security of their citizens.

The SU managed to rapidly build low-cost housing after repelling a HUGE invasion of extermination from Nazi Germany. The “commieblocks” were critical in housing people after war. China has also made huge strides in home ownership and elimination of poverty. Meanwhile, poverty and homelessness is increasing under capitalist countries, with them doing little to resolve their housing crises. Clearly they respected the need for shelter of their citizens.

Keep in mind, that both these countries were devastated by world wars and civil wars. Their countries started off in serious crisis and had already had revolutions. If they didn’t respect the needs of their citizens, they would have ended up failed states overthrown by their desperate population or quickly collapsing to invasions.

As for China, the government, despite censorship and political repression, still remains popular among its citizens, according to censorship-resistant US studies^[1]. It’s largely avoided war, hugely reduced poverty, and has become a world leader in technology.

There are many valid reasons to criticize these countries and it’s important we do that. But they clearly respected the basic needs of their citizens. There are few other countries which have done more to reduce poverty and homelessness than them.

China is a mass surveillance state which doesn’t protect any of the citizens rights for privacy and has lacklustre working environments

It is a mass surveillance state, but it’s definitely not any more mass surveillance than any developed country. Maybe one important difference is that in China the government has fewer restrictions for how they will spy on you, but in the US for example the NSA will do blatantly illegal things that aren’t even allowed under the Patriot Act and no one can do anything about it, so the extent to which surveillance is legal or not is irrelevant IMO. I would understand your criticism if China was actually a very repressive country where dissent wasn’t allowed and a huge portion of the population was jailed, but I think the quick response to the anti-lockdown protests and the fact they jail far fewer people than the US (while having 4x the population) means that it’s not a very reasonable criticism. Especially not when you consider the Western countries built up their stability while exploiting others, and China had to go through a hard process of occupation, civil war, and then many mistakes during the Cultural Revolution which still breed resentment at the state, even if things have gotten better.

As for the working environments, you’ll always see the worst of the worst in negative coverage of China (the suicide nets in Foxconn factories, for example, which to my knowledge have been debunked). Still, it is undeniable that China has had pretty bad working conditions. I think the key element to understand why working conditions are poor, yet more than 80% of Chinese people approve of their government, is that Chinese people understand that their government is committed to improving things and they consistently see those improvements. They also have a much more responsive political system that listens to their individual concerns very well, so whatever problems they have are more likely to be dealt with than if they had a situation in a western liberal democracy, where you write a letter to your representative and your representative has been paid off by 3 different lobby groups to ignore your concerns.

Cuba is stuck with a poor economy, but I guess that’s all developing nations so i don’t know much other than that.

That’s a huge understatement. Cuba faces a horrible, economy-stifling blockade from the US that essentially shuts them off from the entire global economy because they can’t access the global banking system or buy a huge number of basic goods. Despite that, they’re a global leader in medicine, have a far better education system than the US at all levels, have sent revolutionaries to assist in decolonizing countries in Africa, and were leaders of the NAM.

And I don’t know much about Laos or Burkina fasso.

Laos is honestly quite similar to Vietnam.

Burkina Fasso had a very successful few years of developing infrastructure and improving living conditions for the people under Sankara. It’s a very tragic story because he was assassinated and replaced by a regime that reversed much of the good he had accomplished. Nowadays, Ibrahim Traore is essentially just playing it back with many of the same ideas Sankara had, and he has been massively popular and successful for it (look no further than the fact his security team have had to stop many assassination attempts already, much like Castro).

To be clear I do consider myself a leftist and anti capitalist but I don’t believe there have been many properly successful socialist nations outside of Europe really.

What has been successful in Europe? Yugoslavia and the Warsaw Pact countries were great, but could only exist because of the pressure of the USSR on the capitalist bloc. All the social democracies are only social democracies, they have never put the workers in charge of their own destiny and are therefore not socialist at all.

don’t believe there have been many properly successful socialist nations outside of Europe

???

Wait lol you’re a MAGA account but you accidentally came to the right conclusion? JDPON Don does it again.

Yea, I just open the comment in browser if I need to. Easier than googling the image and pasting it in.

It’s shifting from center “left” to libertarian right to match up with the ceo, and pretty soon will just be as bad as Twitter

Ex Can’t be critical of musk or any of his terrible products, that earns a ban

lenin

Would have been bad enough to specifically name Engels, but Lenin? hahaha oh wow

I’m glad I’m on db0 and can still see posts from .ml, hexbear, and .world.

I can get a gauge of what people from all servers are saying, and I’m finding the gist that what you’re saying is correct.

Leftism is when you vote for the democrats unquestioningly with out applying any sort of pressure or having primaries.

A recent question I’ve been asking my democrat friends in real life, now that trump is hiring 20k more ICE gestapo, lets say Democrats win the midterms and then win the next presidency; do you think they will fire them all? Do you think they’re going to “look soft on crime” and “defund the police” when they refused to last time during massive nation wide protest? The answer is pretty obviously no. The DHS and the USA-PATRIOT act are not even on the table.

The current McCarthyite tactic is to use “tankie” and “authoritarian” as the code-words for anyone who dares to oppose US / NATO hegemony and align themselves with the anti-colonial projects. Only the US-aligned countries are allowed to be “authentic marxists”, and everyone else is labeled a tankie.

These people have no concept that everyone from Paul Robeson to even MLK was called a “dirty commie”, or that the US is drone bombing like 8 countries in the middle east and north africa as we speak.

But you don’t identify the dominant mode of production. You see an overwhelmingly publicly owned and planned economy, and call it “capitalism.” There is no transition from Capitalism to Communism for you, it remains Capitalism until every last drop of former society is eradicated. I’m going to recommend What is Socialism? one more time, as it directly addresses your line of thought.

Stalin died 70 years ago, there is no Stalinist ML bubble.

Bordiga lmao

I don’t do shit but hate on communists, and that’s the truly revolutionary stance.

If a “transitionary period” takes more than a decade at what point do we say “they aren’t transitioning” and call it what it is, state owned capitalism.

I mean, how could we know how much time is needed for the transition? It has never happened yet, we’re still experimenting.

The fact that the transition takes a very long time isn’t proof that it isn’t transitioning. What even is this assumption that transitional periods must last less than a decade? Seriously, where the heck does that even come from?

To answer your question, this transitional state is necessary as long as capitalism remains the overwhelmingly dominant mode of production on the planet because in a mainly capitalist world, transfer of technology and resources mostly happen between businesses doing business.

If you try to go to a higher stage of socialism while the world is still almost only capitalist you’ll end up with all the problems that plagued the soviet union, with the capitalist countries able to very easily sanction and isolate you since they can’t get access to your markets even if they don’t anyway and with you having to re-invent every new technology the rest of the capitalist world create just to keep up since there is no way the capitalists would give you the blueprints among other problems.

Capitalism spent centuries being the secondary mode of production under feudalism before the bourgeoisie had developed the productive forces enough to transition away from feudalism. The USSR, Albania and others attempted to force a socialist mode or production before the productive forces were sufficiently developed and it didn’t work. China’s strategy of development of the productive forces has had very little downside and I think it’s unreasonable and kind of suspect to want them to turn back (to policies that ultras would also condemn for one reason or another, as they always do). Poverty fetishism isn’t Marxist and isn’t scientific.

Or you could just read The State and Revolution where Lenin goes into it for about a hundred pages. It’s been out for over a century.

What do you think the transition from Socialism to Communism looks like? Especially when Communism must be global.

Trade and wage labor also aren’t exclusive to capitalism.

I think China is a socialist country, and Vietnam is a socialist country as well. And they insist that they’ve introduced all the necessary reforms, precisely to stimulate development and to continue advancing towards the objectives of socialism. There are no chemically pure regimes or systems.

In Cuba, for example, we have many forms of private property. We have tens of thousands of landowners who own, in some cases, up to 45 hectares; in Europe they would be considered latifundistas. Practically all Cubans own their own homes and, what’s more, we are more than open to foreign investment. But none of this detracts from Cuba’s socialist character.

• Fidel Castro

Some more quotes from an article on China’s Long road to socialism:

For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly

The state capitalism, which is one of the principal aspects of the New Economic Policy, is, under Soviet power, a form of capitalism that is deliberately permitted and restricted by the working class. Our state capitalism differs essentially from the state capitalism in countries that have bourgeois governments in that the state with us is represented not by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat, who has succeeded in winning the full confidence of the peasantry.“

• Lenin

it is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world by employing real means, that slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine and the mule and spinning-jenny, serfdom cannot be abolished without improved agriculture, and that, in general, people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in adequate quality and quantity. “Liberation” is an historical and not a mental act, and it is brought about by historical conditions, the development of industry, commerce, agriculture, the conditions of intercourse”.

• Karl Marx, “The German Ideology”

“”We want to do business.” Quite right, business will be done. We are against no one except the domestic and foreign reactionaries who hinder us from doing business. … When we have beaten the internal and external reactionaries by uniting all domestic and international forces, we shall be able to do business with all foreign countries on the basis of equality, mutual benefit and mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty.

• Mao Ze Dong, On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship

So, to build socialism it is necessary to develop the productive forces. Poverty is not socialism. To uphold socialism, a socialism that is to be superior to capitalism, it is imperative first and foremost to eliminate poverty. True, we are building socialism, but that doesn’t mean that what we have achieved so far is up to the socialist standard. Not until the middle of the next century, when we have reached the level of the moderately developed countries, shall we be able to say that we have really built socialism and to declare convincingly that it is superior to capitalism. We are advancing towards that goal.

• Deng XiaoPing

You liberals act like these arguments against the “state capitalism” haven’t been debunked for > 100 years, even by Marx and Engels themselves.

If a state (CPC controlled or otherwise) oversees an economy where wage labor, capital accumulation, commodity exchange persists, then it’s still state capitalism.

Socialist states have a surplus, after all, they do need to use some of the value to defend themselves from imperialist aggression, and to direct it into social services, research / science, and capital accumulation just like any country. The point is, that this surplus is not controlled by private capital, but by political decision within the communist party, whose members are made up of the worker-peasant alliance.

From Parenti:

The upheavals in Eastern Europe did not constitute a defeat for socialism because socialism never existed in those countries, according to some U.S. leftists. They say that the communist states offered nothing more than bureaucratic, one-party “state capitalism” or some such thing. Whether we call the former communist countries “socialist” is a matter of definition. Suffice it to say, they constituted something different from what existed in the profit-driven capitalist world–as the capitalists themselves were not slow to recognize.

First, in communist countries there was less economic inequality than under capitalism. The perks enjoyed by party and government elites were modest by corporate CEO standards in the West [even more so when compared with today’s grotesque compensation packages to the executive and financial elites.—Eds], as were their personal incomes and lifestyles. Soviet leaders like Yuri Andropov and Leonid Brezhnev lived not in lavishly appointed mansions like the White House, but in relatively large apartments in a housing project near the Kremlin set aside for government leaders. They had limousines at their disposal (like most other heads of state) and access to large dachas where they entertained visiting dignitaries. But they had none of the immense personal wealth that most U.S. leaders possess. {Nor could they transfer such “wealth” by inheritance or gift to friends and kin, as is often the case with Western magnates and enriched political leaders. Just vide Tony Blair.—Eds]

The “lavish life” enjoyed by East Germany’s party leaders, as widely publicized in the U.S. press, included a $725 yearly allowance in hard currency, and housing in an exclusive settlement on the outskirts of Berlin that sported a sauna, an indoor pool, and a fitness center shared by all the residents. They also could shop in stores that carried Western goods such as bananas, jeans, and Japanese electronics. The U.S. press never pointed out that ordinary East Germans had access to public pools and gyms and could buy jeans and electronics (though usually not of the imported variety). Nor was the “lavish” consumption enjoyed by East German leaders contrasted to the truly opulent life style enjoyed by the Western plutocracy.

Second, in communist countries, productive forces were not organized for capital gain and private enrichment; public ownership of the means of production supplanted private ownership. Individuals could not hire other people and accumulate great personal wealth from their labor. Again, compared to Western standards, differences in earnings and savings among the populace were generally modest. The income spread between highest and lowest earners in the Soviet Union was about five to one. In the United States, the spread in yearly income between the top multibillionaires and the working poor is more like 10,000 to 1.

Third, priority was placed on human services. Though life under communism left a lot to be desired and the services themselves were rarely the best, communist countries did guarantee their citizens some minimal standard of economic survival and security, including guaranteed education, employment, housing, and medical assistance.

Fourth, communist countries did not pursue the capital penetration of other countries. Lacking a profit motive as their motor force and therefore having no need to constantly find new investment opportunities, they did not expropriate the lands, labor, markets, and natural resources of weaker nations, that is, they did not practice economic imperialism. The Soviet Union conducted trade and aid relations on terms that generally were favorable to the Eastern European nations and Mongolia, Cuba, and India.

All of the above were organizing principles for every communist system to one degree or another. None of the above apply to free market countries like Honduras, Guatemala, Thailand, South Korea, Chile, Indonesia, Zaire, Germany, or the United States.

But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic, cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.

The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.