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  • You have a ball on a trampoline. Wind might knock the ball around, but its very likely to return to the center of the trampoline. This is a psuedo stable arrangment.

    No, it's a local minimum, not pseudo stable. It's just not the absolute minimum

  • Did... Did you just equate the former socialist state that was the Soviet Union to the contemporary proto-fascist and capitalist Russian Federation that literally emerged out of the dismantling and auctioning of the former??

  • "The government did all the nice things you mention" you don't get it, that's not the government doing things, all of those are mechanisms for democracy that barely exist in western countries. You're basically saying "well yeah those things did exist, but have you considered that you get to vote for republicans/democrats (US) or socialdemocrats/christian-conservatives (EU) every 4 years to decide which of the two parties will apply austerity policy?" You're not talking about democracy, you're talking about electoralism, yes we have electoralismo in the west more than they had in the USSR, it's just that electoralism isn't democracy.

    committed genocides, mass starvation

    Not true, there's not one case of genocide committed by the USSR. There was famine in the preindustrial soviet union during the period of land collectivisation, but guess what, there's famine everywhere in preindustrial societies recurringly, and once the country industrialised, hunger disappeared.

    massively oppressed its people

    Again, revisionism. We are literally living in an era in which the NSA has access to your information in a digital database, and in which the government will happily tell you how they use facial recognition on protests to see who's protesting. There are literally more people in jail in the USA TODAY than there were in Gulags at the peak of the gulag system.

    spent so much on its military

    The academic consensus is that the USSR constantly tried to put an end to the arms race with the US, at times going as far as unilaterally reducing their nuclear arsenal, which the US never corresponded back. The militaristic empire which forced huge military expenditure in the USSR was none other than the USA, and again, that's academic consensus. Fucking Zbigniew Brzezinski used to brag about that himself.

    they crashed the economy

    Again, ahistorical bullshit that you've never even bothered to look into. The USSR NEVER suffered a crisis after WW2, the only time that there were some problems economically was during the liberalization process in Perestroika, towards the end of the soviet union. It's the illegal and antidemocratic dismantling of the eastern block its centrally planned economy which drove the economy to the gutter and ended the lives of millions of people through unemployment, lack of basic goods, lack of healthcare, homelessness, alcoholism and suicide. Seriously, do a quick search, look at the historic GDP of the USSR/Russia, and tell me when it falls, before or after 1991.

    Not to say western democracy is perfect

    We are literally funding a genocide in Gaza

    instituted socialist policies without that baggage

    That's where you're wrong. It was the existence of the USSR being pioneer in all of those policies, and the struggle of hundreds of thousands of unionised workers in Europe trying to imitate this policy, and the resulting fear of a revolution in western Europe by the elites that made these concessions, that led to this progress. Again, you're talking ahistorically, as if these advances had been earned electorally in the west.

  • If the USSR had dissolved due to issues like the ones you're talking about (Gulags being basically entirely dismantled after WW2 so 45 years before the dissolution, and breadlines being nonexistent until the 1980s liberalisation during Perestroika), it would have been dissolved with the popular consensus. There was a referendum in 1990 that asked the citizens of the Soviet Union if they wanted to maintain their country under communism and 70% of voters (admittedly a few republics didn't participate) voted yes, so the USSR was extremely popular and people didn't want it dissolved. The reasons for the illegal and antidemocratic dissolution of the USSR are much more complex than that.

  • Real democratic mechanisms in the USSR: highest unionisation rates in the world, announcement/news boarboards in every workplace administered by the union, free education to the highest level for everyone, free healthcare, guaranteed employment and housing (how do the supposedly "authoritarian leaders" benefit from that?), neighbour commissions legally overviewing the activity and transparency of local administration, neighbour tribunals dealing with most petty crime, millions of members of the party, women's rights, local ethnicities in different republics having an option to education in their language and widespread availability of reading material and newspapers in their language, lowest rates of wealth inequality in any country, more female engineers in the USSR than in the rest of the world, higher representation of women in the party and in the justice system than anywhere else at the time...

    Please explain me how getting to vote for the less-evil but equally neoliberal party once every 4 years is more democratic than that.

  • Lmao, Germany has guaranteed housing?! Germany has Vonovia, a company that hoards real estate and rents it in terrible conditions, and own about 500k+ houses. In what universe does Germany have guaranteed housing when Berlin tried to implement a directly democratically voted rent cap on housing and it got repelled by the tribunals a year after it began?

    Free healthcare in Germany is absolute bullshit. Yes, it's free, but the quality of healthcare is astonishingly low. I've had the misfortune of living there for a few years, and the whole system is horrendous, especially for how ludicrously expensive it is compared to other European countries. In Germany, you have sick senior people queuing at 7AM in frosty winter mornings STANDING ON THE STREETS to be able to see the family doctor, you can consider yourself lucky if you can wait sitting in a stairwell indoors while waiting for the doctor. It's beyond me how German people aren't constantly on the street complaining about this bullshit, again especially given the absurdly high costs of public healthcare there.

    Funny that you also mention freedom of speech, when in Germany they are literally arresting Jewish people for expressing antizionist and pro-Palestinian points of view. The actual Nazis run rampant though, friends of the police if not outright members of it, with an extreme rise of the far right.

  • I'm sorry but calling the USSR a "vanguardist dictatorship" is just not historically accurate. Plenty of democratic mechanisms in the USSR, at any rate much better than anything else we've had so far. For a dictatorship, it dissolved itself quite peacefully didn't it?

    Sadly, attempts at socialism in which workers didn't take the power of the state, ended up like Salvador Allende in Chile, like Mosaddegh in Iran, like the Spanish Second Republic... Idealism only gets you so far, sadly.

  • There's an ideological ocean between utopian socialism and actually-existing socialism, yes. There's a reason why there's not been a successful historical instance of socialism in which workers collectivised without taking the power of the state in their hands.

    Calling it "authoritarian state" kinda portrays lack of knowledge at democratic power structures and mechanisms in former socialist countries. Examples for the USSR: highest unionisation rates in the world, announcement/news boarboards in every workplace administered by the union, free education to the highest level for everyone, free healthcare, guaranteed employment and housing (how do the supposedly "authoritarian leaders" benefit from that?), neighbour commissions legally overviewing the activity and transparency of local administration, neighbour tribunals dealing with most petty crime, millions of members of the party, women's rights, local ethnicities in different republics having an option to education in their language and widespread availability of reading material and newspapers in their language... Please tell me one country that does that better nowadays

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  • Overpopulation isn't defined by how much people there are, but by the total amount of sustainably produced goods and services divided by the total population. Fewer people producing unsustainably would also be overpopulation. We need to transition to sustainability regardless of amount of people, reducing population only leads to slower decline, not to a stop of it.

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  • The only solution I see at this point is mass protest and starting to assassinate CEOs, shareholders, and boards of directors, in self defense

    Historically, terrorism isn't really a good way towards the elimination of capitalism. The creation of strong unions linked to communist parties (not in the "liberal democracy" sense of party, but in the communist sense) is a historically more proven way to fight against capitalist power structures. Unionise, create local dual power structures and mutual aid, join a militant communist party.

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  • Your logic: "We've identified the problem is capitalism. Stop pointing at it and start pointing at something else, that'll solve it!"

    Now what?

    Now we organise to abolish capitalism in historically achievable ways, such as unionisation of workers, creation of socialist and dual power structures, and the eventual revolution.

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  • The problem isn't methodology. There are plenty of ways to predict, detect and measure pollution, its origins, and ways to prevent it. The problem is systemic: capitalism simply doesn't account for pollution, and the ruling class which it generates actually fights against regulations. The result is what we see. To solve climate change, we need systemic change

  • unlike Americans they're not inoculated against these ideas

    Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha did you watch the election results in the US mate? The US has a system with a far right party and a slightly less far right party

  • Saying that Israel has a right to defend itself from Oct 7th is completely equivalent to saying that Nazi Germany had the right to defend itself from Polish resistance attacks under occupation. Please learn about the Naqba before spewing IDF propaganda about the right of Israel to defend itself.

  • the pflp caused Trump to win

    ROFL

    Israel has a right to defend itself. So does every country

    Why would you even say those words when it's not the case? Israel isn't defending itself, it's committing genocide.

  • So: start organising to fight fascism immediately. We've been saying this for years: you don't fight fascism at the urns. Unionize, make collective grassroots power, read leftist theory (the only ones who managed to stop fascism in the last century).