Cowbee
@Cowbee@lemmy.ml
- Comment on The Billionaires have spent a fortune making sure you hate Socialism. 15 hours ago:
No? What part of “famine was historically common due to feudal agriculture, so when the soviets collectivized agriculture famine was ended forever” is difficult to understand?
- Comment on Why are you wearing his tee-shirt 15 hours ago:
Yes it is, public ownership is the principal aspect of the economy and the working class runs the state. By Marxist analysis, it’s clearly socialist.
- Comment on The Billionaires have spent a fortune making sure you hate Socialism. 18 hours ago:
No? Socialism didn’t cause the famine. Famine was not a “price,” it was a historically recurring symptom of underdeveloped feudal agriculture that the soviets abolished as soon as they could.
- Comment on The Billionaires have spent a fortune making sure you hate Socialism. 21 hours ago:
When famine was common and regular due to feudal relations for centuries, and within a couple decades the Soviets eradicated famine forever, then yes, they were great.
- Comment on The Billionaires have spent a fortune making sure you hate Socialism. 23 hours ago:
Let me copy and paste my previous answer, bolding for new emphasis:
The majority of socialist states emerged from semi-feudal societies, and they factually made dramatic improvements. The 1930s Soviet famine proves my point, the early 1930s was the last famine in the USSR outside of wartime, becuse by 1933 they had successfully collectivized agriculture and abolished the former Kulak system. The famine wasn’t caused by socialism, it was ended by it.
- Comment on The Billionaires have spent a fortune making sure you hate Socialism. 1 day ago:
I already acknowledged that there was a famine in the early 1930s. If your point was that this was a deliberate, intentional famine, then even serious liberal scholars believe it to have been a combination of adverse weather conditions and mismanagement. For instance, Mark Tauger wrote:
[data] indicate that the famine was real, the result of a failure of economic policy, of the ‘revolution from above,’ rather than of a ‘successful’ nationality policy against Ukrainians or other ethnic groups.
Tauger believes it was a failure of economic policy, not an intentional attack on ethnic Ukrainians. The 1930s famine was a combination of drought, flooding, and mismanagement. Further, the Kulaks, wealthy bourgeois farmers, magnified matters by killing their own crops in the midst of a famine rather than letting the Red Army collectivize them. The Politburo was also kept in the dark about how bad the famine was getting:
From: Archive of the President of the Russian Federation. Fond 3, Record Series 40, File 80, Page 58.
Excerpt from the protocol number of the meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks) “Regarding Measures to Prevent Failure to Sow in Ukraine, March 16th, 1932.
The Political Bureau believes that shortage of seed grain in Ukraine is many times worse than what was described in comrade Kosior’s telegram; therefore, the Political Bureau recommends the Central Committee of the Communist party of Ukraine to take all measures within its reach to prevent the threat of failing to sow [field crops] in Ukraine.
Signed: Secretary of the Central Committee – J. STALIN
Letter to Joseph Stalin from Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine regarding the course and the perspectives of the sowing campaign in Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.
There are also isolated cases of starvation, and even whole villages [starving]; however, this is only the result of bungling on the local level, deviations [from the party line], especially in regard of kolkhozes. All rumours about “famine” in Ukraine must be unconditionally rejected. The crucial help that was provided for Ukraine will give us the opportunity to eradicate all such outbreaks [of starvation].
Letter from Joseph Stalin to Stanislaw Kosior, 1st secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, April 26th, 1932.
Comrade Kosior!
You must read attached summaries. Judging by this information, it looks like the Soviet authority has ceased to exist in some areas of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Can this be true? Is the situation in villages in Ukraine this bad? Where are the operatives of the OGPU [Joint Main Political Directorate], what are they doing?
Could you verify this information and inform the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist party about taken measures.
Sincerely, J. Stalin
Evidence doesn’t point to deliberately killing some of the Soviet Union’s most loyal citizens in the breadbasket of the entire USSR, when they desperately needed to advance agricultural production (and did).
- Comment on Why are you wearing his tee-shirt 1 day ago:
Thanks!
- Comment on The Billionaires have spent a fortune making sure you hate Socialism. 2 days ago:
The majority of socialist states emerged from semi-feudal societies, and they factually made dramatic improvements. The 1930s Soviet famine proves my point, the early 1930s was the last famine in the USSR outside of wartime, becuse by 1933 they had successfully collectivized agriculture and abolished the former Kulak system. The famine wasn’t caused by socialism, it was ended by it.
- Comment on The Billionaires have spent a fortune making sure you hate Socialism. 2 days ago:
No? Socialism is a mode of production and distribution, not something as simple as a social safety net operating within the bounds of capitalism. This isn’t a purity test, it’s a definitional distinction.
- Comment on The Billionaires have spent a fortune making sure you hate Socialism. 2 days ago:
Welfare isn’t socialism, this isn’t the gotcha you think it is.
- Comment on The Billionaires have spent a fortune making sure you hate Socialism. 2 days ago:
Life expectancy doubled in Russia, literacy rates went from 20-30% (depending on the region) to 99.9% within the span of decades. Healthcare was made free and high quality, same as education. Famine was gradually eliminated in a region where Tsarist agriculture made that a common affair. Homes were dramatically upgraded from wooden shacks in rural areas to decent apartments for everyone. I don’t know where in Eastern Europe your family is from, but the great majority of society saw dramatic improvements compared to semi-feudalism before it. Aristocrats and capitalists definitely lost out, and the transition wasn’t bloodless, but the vast majority of society pulled ahead.
- Comment on The Billionaires have spent a fortune making sure you hate Socialism. 2 days ago:
Socialism always works, and has always dramatically improved the lives of the people as compared to what came before.
- Comment on Why are you wearing his tee-shirt 2 days ago:
The OP is wrong, lmao. And modern Cuba has only been a state since 1959, Batista’s regime is living memory for some. Be more serious.
- Comment on Why are you wearing his tee-shirt 2 days ago:
Fair.
- Comment on Why are you wearing his tee-shirt 2 days ago:
Gay people weren’t murdered. The revolutionary government did continue the former reactionary policy towards gay people and imprisoned them, but this was corrected and overturned through the newly implemented democratic system. Today, Cuba is one of the most LGBTQIA+ countries on the planet thanks to their popular Family Code.
- Comment on Why are you wearing his tee-shirt 3 days ago:
Right now the genocidal blockade is preventing vital cancer-treating medicine from entering Cuba, so while Cuba does have numerous advantages over the US even with its imperialism, right now the people are being starved and cut off of vital necessities.
- Comment on Why are you wearing his tee-shirt 3 days ago:
The narrative that socialism has always failed is also wrong, too. Cuba is doing far better than they would have for its people had it remained a sugar colony. China is quickly advancing to the top of the world stage. Socialism does work, despite siege, even if it would do better without it.
- Comment on Why are you wearing his tee-shirt 3 days ago:
Yep! It’s also resource poor as an island, which makes it that much more impressive!
- Comment on Why are you wearing his tee-shirt 3 days ago:
I don’t like fascists, and Fulgencio Batista certainly was.
- Comment on Why are you wearing his tee-shirt 3 days ago:
The revolution freed the slaves in Cuba, ended its colonialism by the US, provided free medicine and education for every citizen, reformed land so there were no big landlords any longer, created vast amounts of infrastructure in rural areas that did not have any before this, and much, much more.
- Comment on Is being apolitical and being Independents in politics the exact same thing? 2 weeks ago:
Identifying as “apolitical” is a choice to ignore politics, which typically means the person is privledged and benefits from the status quo (but not always). Being “independent” can mean different things, from organizing with a non-dominant party to having a weird, ill-defined set of beliefs not covered by any party.
- Comment on free time 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think these are opposed concepts.
- Comment on Happy Labor Day! 3 weeks ago:
Look to what Engels did. There are plenty of class traitors throughout history.
- Comment on Happy Labor Day! 3 weeks ago:
I’m aware of Graeber’s work. I don’t really agree with much of his conclusions or analysis, as he is an anarchist and I’m a Marxist-Leninist, but we would agree that much of office work is indeed socially unproductive, if we were to pivot to a socialist economy. That being said, we exist in capitalism, and thus office workers are working class, regardless of how necessary the work they do is beyond helping generate profit.
- Comment on Happy Labor Day! 3 weeks ago:
That doesn’t make the people filling those roles not working class, in fact it highlights how disposable the working class is to the capitalist class, and further reinforces my point: capitalists are the enemy.
- Comment on Happy Labor Day! 3 weeks ago:
Office jobs are still jobs. If a business genuinely was wasting vast amounts of money on fake work, then these jobs would be eliminated already. They are gradually being automated away, same as physical labor, but they still exist because they are still important for production.
The target of your ire should not be this or that subsection of the working class, but instead the capitalist class.
- Comment on How are you going to never forget 9/11 this year? What are you never forgetful for? 3 weeks ago:
I’ll never forget the lies about WMD to justify killing 1 million Iraqis in an imperialist conquest of oil.
- Comment on Curious! 4 weeks ago:
If you consider yourself a socialist, then get organized! It’s a very fulfilling task, and most orgs have secondary memberships that don’t have the same time and monetary requirements. Also, you get to meet cool comrades!
- Comment on perhaps 4 weeks ago:
Getting organized is always a useful and valuable thing to do!
- Comment on *Eyeroll* 4 weeks ago:
And destroyed Libya for many of the same reasons the US is attacking Iran.