What went wrong?

Nope

...

Everything that could.

TROTS GET OUT

Imagine being so deranged that you even go beyond Soviet narratives in order to become an apologist for Stalin

the european revolution did not take off

you realize Bordiga and Trotsky are both technically leftcoms right?

What's your point?

Lenin set up the mechanisms of authoritarianism which would later be used by Stalin to permenantly destroy proletarian democracy. Once that happened the government was largely unaccountable to the people, which meant that it became highly susceptible to corruption and unresponsive to the needs and desires of the public.

Stop listening to Noam Chomsky

thread should've ended here.

That your first image makes no sense

Leftcom=/=everything that isn't Stalin you stupid fuck

Bordiga called himself a Leninist so I could say they're technically both M-L's by your logic

Stop clinging to a failed state. Even if Stalin’s actions can be justified in terms of rooting out reactionaries, you can’t argue with their ultimate failure. A large proportion of senior CPSU members went on to become porkies or straight up fascists, meaning that the destruction of the political power of the Soviets and mass repression ultimately accomplished nothing.

Stalin is the greatest communist of all time and it isn't even close tbh.

Leninist and ML aren’t the same thing.

That was my point you fucking mong

Shitty foreign policy and repression of science

Why? I didn't make it, but it makes perfect sense. What, "Bordigist" left communists can't tell trots to fuck off now, because by some vague definition they're both "leftcoms"?

No.2225268
Stop clinging to a failed state. Even if Catalonia’s actions can be justified in terms of rooting out reactionaries, you can’t argue with their ultimate failure. A large proportion of senior Spainards went on to become porkies or straight up fascists, meaning that the destruction of the ties with the Popular Front and mass democracy ultimately accomplished nothing

...

I’m not an Anarchist. Catalonia was a failure just like the USSR, Free Territory, GDR, China, Yugoslavia, etc. We shouldn’t emulate failures, we should learn from them.

Nothing

I have literally never met anyone who says this who then proceeds to make a statement about the positive attributes of the Soviet Union or what we should takeaway from its experiment, they just criticize the shit out of the CCCP, say "i'm like totally not just a salty anarchist bro" and then smugly quit the argument then and there. You have no perspective on how to improve socialism or the modern Left you just want to get off on having the moral high ground without taking an actual position on anything. You're essentially the Far Left version of a centrist liberal who says "Look guys Nazis and Communists are BOTH bad, the truth is somewhere in the MIDDLE!"

I think there was a lot the Soviets did right, but the subject of the thread is what went wrong.

The USSR objectively improved the standards of living of its people, it crushed fascism, helped many nations achieve freedom from imperialism, provided for the basic needs of all its citizens, and made major advancements in science and culture.

And while all these things are true it was still a quasi-imperialist police state with a ruling class that was calcified and unresponsive to demands to fix the many flaws of its political and economic system.

I agree but if you are going to go this far in the first place why not also admit that Stalin had a lot to do with this?

No such thing. It either was Imperialist in its relations with foreign countries or it wasn't

Because it had police who functioned?

Again I agree with this to some degree but you can't even say that Stalin was the worse one about this, as you have implied.

I agree with you that the USSR wasn't perfect and that Stalin (and later Kruschev and Brezhnev) did things that made it susceptible after his death to backward-looking liberals and reactionaries but you can't say "Stalin is what was wrong with the USSR" then attribute to him a bunch of things that were 95 percent not his fault

I mean around 800,000 executions is still pretty crazy when you think about it. Considering in the US there were only 4,000.

Decades after Stalin's death edgy faggots post gulag memes instead of rob banks to fund socialist groups.

It was 30 fucking years. The number includes not only Nazis and Fascists and their spies but White Guard, Western invasion, and nonpolitical capital criminals. And when they did start putting fascists in the gulags it was during one of the biggest wars in the history of the planet, largely from an aggressive nation which seeked to completely wipe out the Soviet union.

Stalin was directly responsible for much of that, and probably indirectly responsible for the rest. He was also a tyrant who crushed any hope of democracy becoming a real force in Soviet politics. History is complicated fam, a single person is often responsible for both amazing good and catastrophic evil (pardon my spooks).

It depends on what you mean by imperialist. According to Lenin’s definition it probably wasn’t, but it certainly was responsible for crushing the political autonomy of countries in Eastern Europe. I would call that strategic rather than economic imperialism, where a country is deprived of its political freedom by a larger power to serve that power’s geopolitical interests.

Because it conducted mass surveillance of the population and arrested people who openly dissented.

While the US had its fair share of political repression it wasn’t to the same degree or of the same scale. In fact if capitalists or the state wanted to conduct such repression, they often had to do so illegally. In the USSR repression was the law.

All I said was that Stalin was the one who dealt the death blow to Soviet democracy. Lenin laid the groundwork by banning factions, instituting one party rule, dismantling workplace democracy, and revoking the autonomy of the Soviets. Stalin simply intensified it to the point where there was no hope of undoing it without either another revolution or a spontaneous change of heart of a critical mass of the Soviet elite. If anything Lenin is equally responsible, although given the circumstances he was working with I’m not quite as harsh on him.

Hahahahahahahahahaha

You mean like fascists?

It depends on what you mean by imperialist. According to Lenin’s definition it probably wasn’t, but it certainly was responsible for crushing the political autonomy of countries in Eastern Europe. I would call that strategic rather than economic imperialism, where a country is deprived of its political freedom by a larger power to serve that power’s geopolitical interests.
Like who?

Watch this: youtube.com/watch?v=6gtUaGV6mNI
Read pic related

M8 even at the height of the Red Scare and McCarthyist hysteria it was never illegal to be a communist or a member of the CPUSA. And while it was happening there were many prominent American political figures (such as Harry Truman) who were warning of the dangers of descending into authoritarianism and the destruction of the first ammendment. Fuck m8, Reagan almost went to jail for illegal imperialist bullshit he pulled in Latin America.

Or Trotskyists, or Anarchists, or Leftcoms, or the Left SRs, or the Mensheviks, or anybody who wanted to form a fucking trade union outside of stage channels. Think about that for a second. It was illegal for workers to independently organize SOVIETS in the SOVIET UNION.

Poland, GDR, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc. If you think that any of those governments were free and independent of Soviet control you are dreaming. Look at how hard Stalin tried to kill Tito just because he didn’t want Yugoslavia to be a Soviet puppet.

Kek, wat?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Act_trials_of_Communist_Party_leaders

Absolutely irrelevant if it wasn't "literally" illegal, even being too liberal was criminalized and demonized, much less an open communist. Also have you actually ever even read about COINTELPRO? You downplay it (and the fucking NSA, but that's a whole nother post) as if it was just some benign surveillance program that paled in comparison to anything the United States did but people were literally murdered by the FBI (and probably the CIA in coordination with the FBI) for standing up against capitalism and the Vietnam War. And no I'm not fucking talking about John F. Kennedy, I mean shit that is on the record, particularly in regards to the Black Panther Party. And even at the local level the police were given carte blanche by the local and federal government to pursue repression of dissidents. Google MOVE and what happened to them in the 1980s.

US intelligence organizations have conducted mind control programs without the consent of the people being experimented upon, have had the media in their pocket literally forever, have overthrown far more democratically elected governments and replaced them with literal fascists then the Soviet Union would have ever even wanted to do.

Since you can't seem to be capable of actually judging the USSR on its own merit and must contrast it with the USA's supposed "successes" in being a "freer" country you should flip it around every once in a while and challenge yourself. Hell there are plenty of instances in the fucking Revolutionary War where the Forefathers had their own men purged due to dissidence or mutinity. This doesn't justify the supposed instances of Stalin doing it, but you pretending as if the USSR is MORE guilty than the United States of corruption is one of the funniest and least-true statements I have ever seen on this board

Yes and George W. Bush almost went to prison over the Iraq War lmao

So people who were an existential threat to socialism as such because their rebellion would literally destroy the State apparatus all together and open it up for subversion by reactionaries?

Pic related

That's interesting because literally all of those countries preferred that type of society to what they have now

Meant to post this pic and it is the pic i meant by "Pic related" but I also meant that other picture to be posted sorry am a bit drunk

Is that picture just going to leave out all the shit reagan did?

The image is a joke about how Americans view their history, so it makes sense that they don't know about anything that Reagan did.

to be fair it looked as if they were running out of room and reagan honestly did way more shit than bush or obama combined foreign policy wise

also this

Demonized yes, criminalized no. In the US you could lose your job, your friends, etc, but you could not be imprisoned for your beliefs, at least not legally or explicitly. Whenever it did happen (and it did) it was done on trumped up charges or secretly. In the USSR it was open and obvious.

Yes and those killings were illegal and clear violations of the constitution, which is why they were carried out secretly.

I’m not suggesting that there was no political repression in the US, I’m pointing out that it had to be done by contravening the institutions of American politics and law. In the USSR it was those institutions openly carrying out that repression.

I didn’t say that, I said that there was less room for free expression and bottom up political change in the USSR than there was in the US. That doesn’t mean that there was no room for such change in Russia, or that the US didn’t try to clamp down on it. In the US there was often repression of that freedom carried out illegally, literally relying on criminal gangs like the Mafia and KKK to do the actual dirty work. Do you honestly think that you could carry around a sign that read “I hate communism” in the USSR without getting in shit? There was no non-state media, no legal political parties outside the CPSU, no worker organizations outside the party approved Soviets, etc. In America there were communists preaching in the streets, communist newspapers being sold, communist parties running for public office, independent unions popping up left and right. Do you not think that the CIA would have black bagged every single one of them if they could have? If they are as evil and despotic as you claim, then why did they allow it to be preached openly instead of launching an explicit, non-clandestine crackdown? It’s because they had no legal power to do so, so they had to get creative, because the institutions of the US guaranteed the freedom of people to speak, associate and act freely.

It wasn’t the Left SRs or the Mencheviks that openly imposed one man factory rule, or neutered the institutions of working class democracy, or made it illegal to openly dissent from the party line. The Bolsheviks did all that, and in doing so they completely destroyed the power of the workers. That sounds more reactionary than anything the other leftist parties did.

Yeah, they loved it so much that they launched multiple popular uprisings against it in 56 and 68, and fled in droves to the west. They loved it so much that there was a wall keeping them in. Even if people liked having free housing, education, and all the other good things Soviet socialism provided them, that doesn’t mean they liked the Stasi watching them masturbate, or the fact that their governments were Moscow’s bitch. If you ask those people why they remember it fondly they will tell you about the sense of community and the gibsmedats, not the fucking police state.

someone should totally make a reagan one

I should also point out that it wasn’t just non-communist ideas that were suppressed in the USSR. You couldn’t even be the wrong kind of communist.

Like Trotsky? Want decentralization? Like labour Syndicates? Don’t like the vanguard party? Too fucking bad for you then.

he should've read bordiga and orwell and stopped his oppressive ways

So you admit it fostered community and social welfare much more than the United States and its system ever did?

It's freedom when it's done in secret

LMAO

Also read these:
reddit.com/r/communism/wiki/debunk

reddit.com/r/communism/comments/3lot78/bad_history_indeed_in_defense_of_the/

I know you think that since they are reddit they are automatically bad but seriously, try reading them. I'm p sure they will open ur eyes fam, you seem to be a thoroughly brainwashed red liberal, not even anarkiddies suck the CIA's dick this much

come on man try harder, the stalin society would've been a better link

Lmao good job you fucking brainlet