No you're not. You just think you disagree with my opinion.

Did he Make The USSR Great Again?

Oh I guess you're a better judge on my level of curiosity! Have a wonderful day.

I mean, it took capitalism about 200 years to be corrupted because the economic power starts off more decentralized than communism or socialism.

That's not to say capitalism is a good option, because it clearly isn't, but communism and socialism require a more centralized federal government by default which is a much smaller point of failure.

But the problem is people with cluster B personality disorders and those who follow them. Some systems are easier for them to infiltrate, but it happens to all of them eventually.

The people who should have power are rarely the ones who seek it, unfortunately. I like Heinlein's (I think, might have been Asimov) take on it. Government officials should be dragged in kicking and screaming and only be allowed to leave when they do a good job.

I invite you to describe the framework for a society that functions without any form of hierarchy, then.

All of recorded history is western imperialist propaganda.

Any proof of that

It's more that some people don't actively condemn him to the satisfaction of others.

The USSR under Stalin defeated Nazi Germany. Idle denunciation of Stalin in 2026 is the classic and most trusted pivot for (crypto)fascists to focus on when cornered or feeling insecure.

That's the primary scenario that people are accused of 'defending Stalin'. There's always a nazi all too willing to spearhead this conversation, 70 years on after his death. Usually can't even bring up Khrushchev and De-Stalinization usually since it's not focusing on Stalin enough.

Not necssesarily defend, but they shift blame away from Stalin. Essentially, "He was bad, but not THAT bad, that's just western propaganda"

You'll see commonly that .ml excuses the famines (yes, plural) created by Stalin by shifting the blame towards environmental factors like "oh but there was a bit of a drought" or "they actually did it all themselves by burning their grain", "it was to stop the Nazis from siezing the grain themselves", the list of excuses goes on.

I disagree with a lot of Ted Kaczynski's reasoning in his manifesto. But he wasn't wrong that we are destroying the environment and letting consumerism ruin everything. Honestly, I think most of the people on this site would agree with his assessments even if he came to the conclusions under faulty assumptions.

Half the people on this site are advocating for stochastic responses to the current U.S. government anyway. So whats the difference?

Clearly you've been brainwashed by capitalism.

The younger generation doesn't remember it in the first place, due to not being alive. And that is used against them.

It's why it's important to teach students to be critical of their sources. And try to find multiple reputable sources that corroborate the same information.

Israel weaponized the Holocaust and drilled two falsehoods into everyone's head:

1. Jews were the only victims.
2. The Holocaust is a special genocide that hasn't happened before or since, is the worst crime in recorded history, and no one should dare question that.

This allows them to genocide Palestinians while calling everyone who questions their ethno supremacist expansionist colonial project a Nazi.

6 million Jews were murdered, out of 17 million victims.

Genocide of Indigenous Americans (1492–1832): it is estimated that 90% of the indigenous population, amounting to over 55 million people, died due to violence, forced labor, and disease after European colonization.

Mao Zedong (China, 1958–1961/1966–1969): Historians estimate that between 30-70 million people died due to famine, persecution, and forced labor during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

Mongol Conquests (13th Century): Under Genghis Khan, it is estimated that 30-60 million people were killed, representing about 10% of the world's population at the time.

To name a few... Hitler was a monster, but he was hardly the worst monster.

American education has always given a pass to Stalin

Really? Stalin's Soviet Union is why Americans have such a knee-jerk reaction to the concept of communism. We had entire moral panics that people might be brushing their teeth in a particularly Soviet way. The Soviets have been rivals or enemies a lot longer than they were allies. You find me an American that doesn't agree with the statement "World War 2 was won with British intelligence, American steel and Soviet blood."

My American Education included...what Americans know as the Berlin Airlift, I'd be curious to learn what the Germans and ex-Soviets call this incident. That Germany as a whole was divided East/West, with the Western half being controlled by the capitalist allies, and the East being controlled by the communist Soviets. Berlin was too, despite the city being located well into the Eastern half. So there was this little enclave of capitalism in communist East Germany, some barbecue in the borscht.

Boiling this down a bit (there was some nonsense about Russia resisting the west introducing the deutchemark) Stalin blockaded the city with the ultimatum "become communist or starve." The West responded by flying in supplies by air, using the rationing expertise the British had developed during the war along with USAF and RAF airlift power. One pilot started dropping little parachute bundles of candy to the children who would hang out near the airport watching the planes, and when President Truman heard of this he ordered the candy drops increased.

It was that easy to come off looking like the Big Damn Heroes in this situation; they come bearing cold and starvation, we answer bearing fuel and food.

If anything, it's the Japanese our schools go easy on; Imperial Japan were easily peers of the Nazis in the atrocity department, yet more American textbooks contain the word Auschwitz than the word Nanking.

Adding quotes for reference:

"The Russian revolutionaries believed that the international struggle for socialism could be started in Russia—but that it could only be finished after an international socialist revolution. A wave of upheavals did sweep across Europe following the Russian Revolution and the end of the First World War, toppling monarchies in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire and shaking many other societies. But workers didn’t succeed in taking power anywhere else for any length of time. So the Russian Revolution was left isolated. In these desperate circumstances, Russia’s shattered working class couldn’t exercise power through workers’ councils. More and more, decisions were made by a group of state bureaucrats. At first, the aim was to keep the workers’ state alive until help came in the form of international revolution. But eventually, as the hope of revolution abroad faded, the leading figure in the bureaucracy, Joseph Stalin, and his allies began to eliminate any and all opposition to their rule—and started making decisions on the basis of how best to protect and increase their own power. Though continuing to use the rhetoric of socialism, they began to take back every gain won in the revolution—without exception." / "To finally consolidate power, Stalin had to murder or hound into exile every single surviving leader of the 1917 revolution. Russia under Stalin became the opposite of the workers’ state of 1917. Though they mouthed socialist phrases, Stalin and the thugs who followed him ran a dictatorship in which workers were every bit as exploited as in Western-style capitalist countries." / "..The popular character of the Russian Revolution is also clear from looking at its initial accomplishments. The revolution put an end to Russia’s participation in the First World War—a slaughter that left millions of workers dead in a conflict over which major powers would dominate the globe. Russia’s entry into the war had been accompanied by a wave of patriotic frenzy, but masses of Russians came to reject the slaughter through bitter experience. The soldiers that the tsar depended on to defend his rule changed sides and joined the revolution—a decisive step in Russia, as it has been in all revolutions. The Russian Revolution also dismantled the tsar’s empire—what Lenin called a “prison-house” of nations that suffered for years under tsarist tyranny. These nations were given the unconditional right to self-determination. The tsar had used the most vicious anti-Semitism to prop up his rule—after the revolution, Jews led the workers’ councils in Russia’s two biggest cities. Laws outlawing homosexuality were repealed. Abortion was legalized and made available on demand. And the revolution started to remove the age-old burden of “women’s work” in the family by organizing socialized child care and communal kitchens and laundries. But just listing the proclamations doesn’t do justice to the reality of workers’ power. Russia was a society in the process of being remade from the bottom up. In the factories, workers began to take charge of production. The country’s vast peasantry took over the land of the big landowners. In city neighborhoods, people organized all sorts of communal services. In general, decisions about the whole of society became decisions that the whole of society played a part in making. Russia became a cauldron of discussion—where the ideas of all were part of a debate about what to do. The memories of socialists who lived through the revolution are dominated by this sense of people’s horizons opening up." / "The tragedy is that workers’ power survived for only a short time in Russia. In the years that followed 1917, the world’s major powers, including the United States, organized an invasion force that fought alongside the dregs of tsarist society—ex-generals, aristocrats, and assorted hangers-on— in a civil war against the new workers’ state. The revolution survived this assault, but at a terrible price. By 1922, as a result of the civil war, famine stalked Russia, and the working class—the class that made the Russian Revolution—was decimated." (from the book "The Case For Socialism" by Alan Maass)

"Partisans of the free market point to the failure of Soviet planning as a reason to reject, out of hand, any idea of an organized economy. Without entering the discussion on the achievements and miseries of the Soviet experience, it was obviously a form of dictatorship over needs, to use the expression of György Márkus and his friends in the Budapest School: a nondemocratic and authoritarian system that gave a monopoly over all decisions to a small oligarchy of techno-bureaucrats. It was not planning itself that led to dictatorship, but the growing limitations on democracy in the Soviet state and, after Lenin’s death, the establishment of a totalitarian bureaucratic power, which led to an increasingly undemocratic and authoritarian system of planning. If socialism is defined as control by the workers and the population in general over the process of production, the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors was a far cry from it. The failure of the USSR illustrates the limits and contradictions of bureaucratic planning, which is inevitably inefficient and arbitrary: it cannot be used as an argument against democratic planning. The socialist conception of planning is nothing other than the radical democratization of economy: If political decisions are not to be left to a small elite of rulers, why should not the same principle apply to economic decisions?" / "Socialist planning must be grounded on a democratic and pluralist debate at all the levels where decisions are to be made." (from "Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative To Capitalist Catastrophe" by Michael Löwy)

I have a library full of books on the subject, but you can start at https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/anarchism

The "tribal savage" attitude/behavior is created/reinforced by capitalistic societies/interests. We need to actively create an alternative system and it will reshape society as we go.

"The world as we enter the 21st century is one of greed, of gross inequalities between rich and poor, of racist and national chauvinist prejudice, of barbarous practices and horrific wars. It is very easy to believe that this is what things have always been like and that, therefore, they can be no different. [...] The anthropologist Richard Lee [said]: "Before the rise of the state and the entrenchment of social inequality, people lived for millennia in small-scale kin-based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalised reciprocity in the distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian political relations." In other words, people shared with and helped each other, with no rulers and no ruled, no rich and no poor. [...] Our species [..] is over 100,000 years old. For 95 percent of this time it has not been characterised at all by many of the forms of behaviour ascribed to ‘human nature’ today. There is nothing built into our biology that makes present day societies the way they are. Our predicament as we face a new millennium cannot be blamed on it." (from the book "A People's History Of The World: From The Stone Age To The New Millennium" by Chris Harman)

-

"Is it true that our human nature is “survival of the fittest”, greed, competition; that we can't really think about the benefit of the whole and that it's all about the individual - “if I can survive, if my family can survive, that's fine, I don't care about anyone else”? Or maybe it's human conditioning, a second nature, which means a condition that's been practiced for so long that now it seems like it's innate. Because when you think about it, from a very early age we go to school, and the main purpose of this is to basically propel us into the “real world”, where we need to find a job, get a career, and try to survive as isolated people in separate houses, with the family, the car, and all that. But it's a very isolated experience, where you try to build wealth only for yourself. And that's what we're pushed to do, that's what we're encouraged to do, that's our definition of success. But who says? We don't come up with these ideas when we're born, we learn these ideas." (from the book "How To Change The World" by Elina St-Onge)

-

"Ownership of things in common was so universal throughout the American continent when the Europeans arrived that even the cooking pot, Columbus noted, was available to anyone who wanted to take from it, and this even in times of starvation. Two centuries later, Thomas Morton could also say of the Five Nations inhabiting New England that “although every proprietor knows his own . . . yet all things, so long as they will last, are used in common amongst them.” The idea of ownership of land was so alien among Native Americans that individuals made no effort to secure for themselves the lands they occupied, frequently moving grounds, and readily sharing them with newcomers. As Kirkpatrick Sale writes, “Owning the land, selling the land, seemed ideas as foreign as owning and selling the clouds or the wind.” William Cronon too comments, “This relaxed attitude towards personal possession was typical throughout New England.” [..] No effort was made to set permanent boundaries around a field that a family used, and fields were abandoned after some years and allowed to return to bushes. What people possessed was the use of the land and the crops; this is what was traded, and this usufruct right could not prevent trespassing. In fact, different groups of people could have claims on the same land, depending on the use they made of it, which might not be the same. Several villages could fish in the same rivers recognizing their mutual rights. And when one left the clan they left everything they had possessed. Yet, these unattached, nomadic tribes had a far deeper communion with the land and agriculture than the privatizing Europeans and so much respect for it that though “they had taken their livelihood from the land for eons, hunting, foraging, planting, fishing, building, trekking,” at the time of the Europeans’ arrival “the land of North America was still by every account without exception a lush and fertile wilderness teeming with abundant wildlife in water, woods, and air.” The result of this lack of attachment to private property among the Native peoples of America was a communal outlook that valued cooperation, group identity, and culture. [..] The dislike for individual accumulation was so strong that they invented the ritual of the potlatch, that is, a periodic redistribution of wealth, to free themselves from it." (from the book "Re-enchanting The World: Feminism And The Politics Of The Commons" by Silvia Federici & Peter Linebaugh)

I'll take that as a no

I didn't ask for a library of books. I invited you to explain it.

Is this post satire?

"Stalin was a communist leader inspired by Leon Trotsky"??? The two were massive rivals with completely different ideologies.

Huh! No I didn't.

Chiming in to say that you can check out the book Getting Free: Creating An Association Of Democratic Autonomous Neighborhoods (James Herod) (though it might not be 100% framework), and the book "Anarchy Works" by Peter Gelderloos (the latter might supply less of a framework but still worth reading I think)

2 quotes from "Anarchy Works" for general reference:

"Korean anarchists won an opportunity to demonstrate people’s ability to make their own decisions in 1929. The Korean Anarchist Communist Federation (KACF) was a huge organization at that time, with enough support that it could declare an autonomous zone in the Shinmin province. Shinmin was outside of Korea, in Manchuria, but two million Korean immigrants lived there. Using assemblies and a decentralized federative structure that grew out of the KACF, they created village councils, district councils, and area councils to deal with matters of cooperative agriculture, education, and finance. They also formed an army spearheaded by the anarchist Kim Jwa-Jin, which used guerrilla tactics against Soviet and Japanese forces. KACF sections in China, Korea, and Japan organized international support efforts. Caught between the Stalinists and the Japanese imperial army, the autonomous province was ultimately crushed in 1931. But for two years, large populations had freed themselves from the authority of landlords and governors and reasserted their power to come to collective decisions, to organize their day-to-day life, pursue their dreams, and defend those dreams from invading armies. One of the most well known anarchist histories is that of the Spanish Civil War. In July 1936, General Franco launched a fascist coup in Spain. [..] While in many areas Spain’s Republican government rolled over easily and resigned itself to fascism, the anarchist labor union (CNT) and other anarchists working autonomously formed militias, seized arsenals, stormed barracks, and defeated trained troops. [..] In these stateless areas of the Spanish countryside in 1936, peasants organized themselves according to principles of communism, collectivism, or mutualism according to their preferences and local conditions. They formed thousands of collectives, especially in Aragon, Catalunya, and Valencia. Some abolished all money and private property; some organized quota systems to ensure that everyone’s needs were met. The diversity of forms they developed is a testament to the freedom they created themselves. Where once all these villages were mired in the same stifling context of feudalism and developing capitalism, within months of overthrowing government authority and coming together in village assemblies, they gave birth to hundreds of different systems, united by common values like solidarity and self-organization. And they developed these different forms by holding open assemblies and making decisions in common."

"One economy developed over and over by humans on every continent has been the gift economy. In this system, if people have more than they need of anything, they give it away. They don’t assign value, they don’t count debts. Everything you don’t use personally can be given as a gift to someone else, and by giving more gifts you inspire more generosity and strengthen the friendships that keep you swimming in gifts too. Many gift economies lasted for thousands of years, and proved much more effective at enabling all of the participants to meet their needs. [...] gift economies, in which people intentionally kept no tally of who owed what to whom so as to foster a society of generosity and sharing."

I grew up in the Cold War era, and I hardly ever heard any real talk of Russian leaders, which was mostly Breshnev when I was growing up. Instead, it was a just a general hatred of the entire Communist/Soviet system in general. The guy at the top was just considered a figurehead. He certainly didn't seem to have the same vicious stranglehold that Stalin had. The purges seems to have mostly died with him.

So we didn't learn much about the people over there, mostly just the names Lenin, Stalin, Kruschev, and Breshnev. Occasionally Trotsky's name came up. But mostly we just heard "Commies Bad. Don't be a Commie."

If he's on Lemmy he is more than likely not a capitalist. You're more than likely a tankie though. The left can exist without authoritarianism dipshit.

All your life you’ve lived under capitalism and have been exposed to anti-communist propaganda, because to date communism has been the only successful alternative to capitalism.

Somehow OP thinks that a lifetime of anti-communism isn’t enough anti-communism.

I mentioned my library on the subject to indicate that there is no simple answer to that question, and probably not even a single answer for all situations/locations/peoples. The theory of non-hierarchical societal structures is an entire field of study, and the practice of it, like all anticapitalist movements, is always stamped out to the greatest extent possible by those in power. There are however existing examples of anarchist or pseudo-anarchist communities.

The EZLN of the Chiapas region of mexico has largely maintained autonomy since the early 90s, and the Kurdish resistance movement in Rojava (inspired by the writings of Abdullah Öcalan) has established similar autonomy despite the ongoing war efforts.

On a smaller scale, you'll find "intentional communities" around the world, most of them taking elements of Libertarian Socialism in the ways that are most feasible and useful to them.

I can hear the Hexbear slop community furiously masturbating at thought of ripping this post to shreds.

As they should, with factual errors this fucking baby-brained

It shouldn’t be, because it’s a work of fiction.
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/06/archives/solzhenitsyns-exwife-says-gulag-is-folklore.html

LOL LOL of course a tankie came out for this one.

Most of the focus is on how bad communism is, not how bad its leaders were.

Edit: people are assuming that I took a stance vis-a-vis communism but I’m really talking about where western propaganda focuses

There’s a spectre haunting stoly

Hitler was a monster, but we really don't talk enough about how bad Stalin was

Not only is The Double Genocide Theory a form of soft Holocaust denial, it's deeply comical to claim "we don't talk enough about how bad Stalin was". Yes we fucking do??? American popular code culture has been built on anti-Communism for decades!

But a governing council and a military are both examples of a hierarchical structure.

Guys DAE umm...... Stalin killed a gorrillion people I know this because my 5th grade teacher told me in history class. And that's why communism is really bad

THE END /s

Did we finish animal farm today and the teacher told you the Pig = Stalin?

Any actual notes?

because most of the atrocities that Stalin commited didn't happen in Western world.

A non answer to a request for evidence on an idiotic statement. Go take your pills shitbrain.

It kinda makes sense, though. She was a "transvestite" for a very long time, and I guess just finally realized she was a she. :) For a while, she said she didn't mind being called Eddie or Suzy, but more recently said that actually, she would prefer Suzy, although I suspect she's pretty relaxed about it. :)

Not necessarily. Councils can be an effective form of consensus decision making without those councils having any greater authority than the people they represent. Militaries can also operate (effectively) without top-down hierarchical structures. I've heard the term "leaderful" (as opposed to leaderless) used to describe these types of organized-yet-nonhierarchical structures.

That’s a very large conclusion to reach from one person’s completely undetailed single statement.

They don't have to be, they can be cooperative/communal endeavors where people arrive at decisions together, where nobody is coerced

I was born about a week after Reagan said "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Growing up in the 90's I didn't get the childhood "better dead than red" stuff, we didn't practice hiding under our desks from nuclear bombs. We did fire and tornado drills. As an aside, being an American school kid in the 90's felt sane in a way I don't think it did before or since? The Metroid were eradicated, the galaxy was at peace.

From our perspective, we had won the Cold War by default. With the iron curtain down, it was fairly easy to take a look at our old adversaries and we saw...very little we wanted. A few nice symphonies and ballets, a warehouse full of really cool rocket engines, and precisely one video game. By my era, we said "Don't be a Commie, or you'll end up like that."

But the councils have to have more authority to be the ones making the decisions instead of the people they represent.

Any form of delegation of responsibility is going to have some hierarchical aspect to it because you're giving the delegate the authority to make decisions on your behalf.

I don't think it's possible to completely remove hierarchies from society, but I think the real issue is the general population glorifies those positions of power, and that attracts people who shouldn't ever be in a position of power.

"In politics, obtaining power and maintaining power justifies anything"

I mean if that doesn't sum up most big name politicians I don't know what does.

That's a rather paltry article to link to declare "fiction", based solely on his ex-wife. From wikipedia -

Solzhenitsyn constructed his highly detailed narrative from various sources including reports, interviews, statements, diaries, legal documents, and his own experience as a Gulag prisoner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago

It's not "100% accurate, detailed notes from one man's point of view", but this book is widely acknowledged to be a nonfiction account, even if many of the tales & details are anecdotal and not verifiable.

I would argue Maximilien Robespierre did it before him

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccolò_Machiavelli

wrote an influential book in 1500 to argue exactly the same point. it caused quite a lot of ruckus because it deviated from medieval philosophy where even kings had to adhere to morals.

But if that delegate (and the council itself) has no more authority than the people they represent, anyone who feels their position isn't being represented can raise the issue and represent themselves or their point of view. These types of systems are reliant on civic engagement far exceeding what most people in the western world would consider possible.

This is also part of why many anarchists make the distinction of just vs unjust hierarchy. Just hierarchy is when the respected elder or community organizer in a neighborhood represents the neighborhoods interest in the council, and has regular meetings with the people they represent to ensure all views are represented. Unjust hierarchy is when 51% of the 20% of the population that actually voted puts the person who invested the most money into their campaign in charge.

The point is to structure your society in a horizontal way such that no person or group of people has any degree of power greater than any other, and has no method of gaining greater power. As I've said elsewhere, there are miriad ways of accomplishing this, and each community tends to have solutions that work for them even if that solution wouldn't work for another community.