Stop being afraid of hearing your own voice. Your main purpose as a communist is to be an educator. So speak up and educate.
Practice public speaking.
Stop leaving your politics at the door whenever you enter public spaces.
Study theory, history, language, personal, and technical skills to help mold yourself into a better revolutionary.
Learn to be fearless in taking up responsibility.
Practice self discipline. Cut out needless distractions that take up too much time.
Link up with comrades across the web, organize, and dedicate yourselves to spreading communist thought on the internet superhighway.
Build the party. Serve the people. Lead the charge.
Support popular movements, domestic and foreign.
Don’t blindly fear failure. Failure is your greatest teacher. You pick yourself back up and try something different.
The butterflies in your stomach isn’t fear, it’s excitement and determination. It’s your body preparing itself for whatever obstacle you face. Never let a butterfly be the reason for your complacency.
Complacency is the enemy of study. You must be tireless in your learning and teaching.
Guard against conceit. You think your methods are better than the ones from a different ideology? Go outside and prove it.
Most importantly: the struggle will always continue. No matter what concessions are granted. No matter what small victories are won. No matter how more bearable a bad situation becomes. Struggle under capitalism and imperialism will continue to exist. It is your responsibility to recognize that struggle. Once recognized, participate. Once you participate, win.
Ask your parents for a 10pm curfew instead of 8pm.
Oh, ask them for the iPhone x too.
Eat your vegetables
Pick up an actual history book, talk to people who lived in Soviet countries, and actually learn about the horrible ideology you support.
Well I mean I did, but I think you should have a look too
Nostalgia is a very biased thing to use.
Either way: communism/stalinism/leninusm/maoism/marxism suck, they are awful ideologies and anyone who espouses support for them is a naive fool.
You: “refer to people who lived in the ussr and ask em what they thought about it”
Me: *gives you screenshots of 4 different articles stating how much most Russians loved and missed the ussr*
You: “Nope that’s bias that doesn’t count.”
🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
How many of them are people who lived under communist regimes and aren’t people in their twenties, who never lived under the communist regimes? Is that number shown?
Again: you’re a naive fool if you think communism is a good alternative to social democracy and capitalism.
How many of them are people who lived under communist regimes and aren’t
people in their twenties, who never lived under the communist regimes?
Is that number shown?
see this is funny because we actually do have that number [link]:
The groups that miss the Soviet Union most deeply, according to the
survey, are pensioners (85 percent), people who say they can’t afford
adequate food and clothing (79 percent), those between 40 and 55 years
of age (67 percent), and women (63 percent).
“Only 25 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 24 say they’re sorry the Soviet Union disappeared,” Mr. Volkov adds.
in other words, if you were to only count people who actually lived during the soviet era, the poll shows even more support for the proposition that the soviet era was preferable to the capitalist era. i gather from the context here that you had assumed the opposite would be true. are you willing to re-evaluate your beliefs in the face of this evidence?
see like this is always really interesting to me- anti-communists always go on about how “you need to LISTEN to people who lived in communist countries!” but then when it’s pointed out that the majority of people who have lived in marxist-leninist countries view it as, at the very least, preferable to capitalism, suddenly you pull a 180 and decide that actually, you don’t need to listen to people who lived in communist countries. maybe you’ll try the same goalpost-moving tactic with age, and declare that actually, being older and actually living during the soviet era makes people less reliable.
are you willing to listen to your own advice, and actually listen to what people who have lived in socialist countries have to say about how socialism and capitalism compare?
Interesting that it went down from 75% to 60%. Whether that’s because of… well, deaths of the elderly (I actually feel bad for saying that), or because of changes in mind, that’s still interesting.
Although your own source admits something at the end:
But all that doesn’t necessarily mean that people literally want to be back in the USSR.
“Our survey found that only 16 percent of respondents would like to see the Soviet Union restored just as it was,” says Volkov. “This nostalgia is a complicated sentiment, probably explained more by reactions to present conditions than any real desire to return to the past.”
Just because you miss something doesn’t mean you want it back.
So looks I don’t have to do anything because my point is technically correct.
except the point that was being debated wasn’t whether the Soviet Union should be restored “just as it was”, and no one ever argued that it should. the point that was being debated was your claim that communists need to “talk to people who lived in Soviet countries” with the implicit claim that the majority of people who lived in soviet counties would have an overwhelmingly negative opinion of the socialist era, to the degree that it would be an indictment of not just the soviet/maxist-leninist model, but communism as a whole.
but whoops, looks like you were demonstrably provably wrong, the majority of people who lived in Soviet countries view socialism more favorably than capitalism. but instead of acknowledging that your point was incorrect, you’re just brazenly lying about what your point was, so that you can pat yourself on the back and declare yourself correct even after being incontrovertibly proven incorrect. “ah, perhaps people who lived in soviet countries view socialism more favorably than capitalism, but do they want to literally resurrect lenins corpse??? no. checkmate commies.”
here’s a tip: grow up, take the L, and admit you were wrong.
Nope.
lmao
No, I’m serious. Here’s why.
1) All of the examples above show an obvious cognitive dissonance called “Rosy Retrospection”, where a person views the past as being better than the present. Like the term “The good old days”.
While the Soviet had stability, as all centralized authoritarian regimes do, they ignore many things about life in the Soviet union, such as:
A severe deficit of goods and services because the state controlled everything from food to housing.
Serious preferential treatment for those who were members of the Communist party vs those who weren’t. This meant cronyism, nepotism and corruption.
All forms of media were controlled by the state and had to follow party lines. No freedom of expression.
No rights for LGBT people.
Fear of the KGB, who monitored virtually every aspect of Soviet life.
So it was stable, but the reasons WHY it was stable are not positive. And these are admitted facts.
2) Even if some people in the former Soviet union look upon the past fondly, as old people are wont to do, looking at life in current socialist states shows a very different tale. Look at Venezuela:
So, again, you’re a naive fool if you think communism is a good alternative to social democracy and capitalism.
Venezuela is a social democracy you idiot, they don’t even claim to be communist. trying to use them as an example to show the supposed superiority of social democracy to communism is ludicrous, you’ve just shot yourself in the foot and demonstrated the inadaquacy of social democracy at ending bourgeoisie rule.
the claim that Zimbabwe “only recently ousted a Marxist president” also falls flat, Mugabe only flirted with Marxism decades ago.
the point which was being debated was whether the impression of people who lived through the soviet model viewed it as better or worse than capitalism. and the answer is that they found socialism better. trying to dismiss that as just ~Rosy Retrospection~ is childish of you, especially so soon after you admonished communists to listen to people who lived in soviet countries, when you are demonstrably unwilling to do the same.
is it possible to list bad things about the USSR? yeah, no shit dude. but claiming that people in the USSR are simply “ignoring” these things is ridiculous- they lived through them. the actual explanation is that most of those problems persisted after the transition away from socialism, because most of those problems are orthogonal to socialism, and remained after the switch to capitalism- OR they were replaced by worse problems- for example homelessness skyrocketed after housing was switched from public to private. people who have lived through the soviet period have said they prefer socialism to capitalism isn’t that they’ve forgotten the problems of the socialist era, and it’s insulting for you to claim they have, it’s that they remember the far worse problems which appeared when capitalism was re-implemented. bringing up “cronyism, nepotism and corruption” is also ludicrous- you realize that those things are far more prevalent in post-soviet russia, right? and are more prevalent in capitalism in general? if you think the preferential treatment given to party members is bad, oh boy, wait till you hear about the preferential treatment given to the bourgeoisie today.
no one is claiming that the USSR was without serious issues, but demonstrably, provably, capitalism has been worse for russia than socialism was, according to the people who lived through it.
but maybe you’d like something a little more concrete? how about life expectancy?
huh, that’s interesting 🤔
now, i’m sure like a lot of anti-communists, you’ll try to argue that the only reason for the massive drop in life expectancy was because of the political turmoil of the transition to capitalism- but guess what also caused a lot of political turmoil? the revolution which established socialism, and mysteriously life expectancy not only didn’t drop, but actually grew after the transition to socialism [link]. similar increases in life expectancy after the implementation of socialism occurred in china [link] and cuba [link].
you can keep making excuses and hiding your head in the sand, but the facts are unmistakable- even with all the flaws of the marxist-leninist model, it was still demonstrably better than capitalism, which suggests that a better, improved model of revolutionary communism could achieve better, more permanent improvements in well being, while avoiding the pitfalls of the past. and indeed, this is exactly what we are seeing in Rojava, where they are implementing democratic confederalism, a synthesis between marxist-leninist and anarchist political concepts, which shows every sign of having the capacity to liberate humanity from class oppression while correcting the errors of the ML model.
please, i’m begging of you, actually do some research into the history of communism, and develop an actual nuanced view on the subject, instead of just regurgitating cold-war talking points.
Nah. I stand by my conviction: communism sucks and is a blight on humanity, and anyone who supports it is a naive fool.
And you can also try and be a tool like all of the others who say that Venezuela and Zimbabwe aren’t socialist or marxist, but the fact is that they are, and do and did practice socialist programs. And it’s demonstrably proven that they don’t work.
This discussion is finished.
if socialist programs “don’t work” then how do you explain their success in Bolivia? [link] [link] how do you explain the aforementioned increases in life expectancy in the wake of communist revolutions? how do you explain that the majority of the people who actually experienced socialism have said it was preferable to capitalism?
you can’t, and that’s why you’ve declared “this discussion is finished”- because you know you’ve lost, and you’re trying to end the discussion to avoid admitting that.
Why am I doing this? Okay, here we go.
Were Russian Jews a part of this polling? Russian gypsies? No. Because they are all fucking dead. You CAN NOT glorify the Soviet Union. To many, the hammer and sickle is just as horrifying as the swastika.
When are we going to grow the fuck up and realized things are nuanced? That these ideologies of the past have no place. I don’t want the government running my grocery store, but I sure as fuck want them to destroy ADM and be involved in the food supply. I want more human centered government. I want more socialism and less class warfare (which is mostly perpetrated by the rich).
What we need now is more democratic forms of government. That’s the key. They sure as shit didn’t have that in the Soviet Union. We sure as shit never really had it here in the US.
