If it were illegal, that would be a huge infraction to FREEDOM®🦅🦅

If I could point toward actual socialist governments not based on exploitation […] I would

There you go, now you can point towards a socialist government not based on exploitation! (USSR).

Anytime I discuss egalitarian and anarchic societies I can’t get beyond the point of humans are intrinsically greedy andviolent which that collapses the system

“Humans are greedy… That’s why we should have a system in which the greedy people can become ultra rich and use their money to exploit the not so greedy people”.

I known you’re joking, but the USSR in Stalin’s times (not Stalin personally) saved a hundred million lives in Europe by eliminating Nazism, which wanted to exterminate essentially every non-German between Berlin and the Urals. Life expectancy also doubled from 28 years of age to 55ish at the time of Stalin’s death (it kept rapidly climbing after).

Many excesses were made during the times of Stalin, and some 700k people died in the Gulags, but this needs the context that the Nazi invasion murdered 25 million Soviet citizens.

Everyone has basic rights

Wrong. Your country has homeless people without a right to housing and your country has unemployed people without the right to work. As for healthcare and education, your country is dismantling those systems in favour of private ones and worsening coverage, and the same can be said about pensions. This is almost universally true for capitalism except for a few countries in Latin America which manage to maintain rights for now (until right wing gets reelected). Now, tell me, what country are you from?

Praising few successes

Few successes like the lack of exploitation of the Global South? You’re just a racist who doesn’t give a shit about the billions suffering under capitalism.

What political freedom do we have in capitalism? I’m a European, and for the past 20 years we’ve been able to choose between either austerity policy (socialdemocrats) and harsh austerity policy (conservative/neoliberals). This applies to every country in the EU without exception, to the point that Greece tried something different with Syriza during the 2010s and elected a party more akin to your ideas and their political power got essentially couped by the EU’s Troika and central bank when they threatened that if Greece were to revise its sovereign debt, the central bank would stop working for Greece. Now in France a majority of people voted for something akin to your ideals with La France Insumise and Macron is preventing them from reaching government, furthering the advance of fascism. I’m Spanish and we had a left party called Podemos in the 2010s which got demolished in the elections after accusations of funding by Venezuela and Iran. Turns out the ministry of interior had fabricated false evidence and given it to the media to circulate it. In the USA, they can choose between orange fascist supporting genocide in Gaza, or female state prosecutor supporting genocide in Gaza. What an array of Democratic options we have in capitalism, mate. Meanwhile, China, with its single party government, enjoys the highest rates of satisfaction with the central government in the world.

You just spew and repeat bullshit anticommunist propaganda. I showed you the insane and continuous GDP growth of the USSR and you keep falsely talking of stagnation (I’m Spanish and under capitalism the living standards of 2025 are worse than those of 2005, in Germany, quality of life just dropped to the lowest level in 40 years). You aren’t even making coherent arguments because I can literally show you numeric evidence that you’re wrong, but your cognitive dissonance is too strong to listen and you keep repeating the same shit despite being literally proven wrong two comments above.

The mistake is millions of death while Mao walks away without any repercussions

Let’s look at how many “millions of deaths by Mao” (1949-1979):

India’s life expectancy in 1950: 34 years of age

India’s life expectancy in 1979: 49 years of age

China’s life expectancy in 1950: 40 years of age

China’s life expectancy in 2010: 62 years of age

Whoops, turns out that China gained 22 years of life expectancy where India gained 15, that’s 50% more and applied to the entire population of a country with a billion people, results in hundreds of millions of lives saved! Turns out you were wrong again because your arguments don’t come from real data but from anticommunist discourse vibes.

If it was an annexation in the same quality as what the Nazis did, then why did Poland not resist the invasion (which they did against Nazis) and why did the Allies not declare war against the USSR?

followed by mass arrests and deportations

There were arrests and deportations, true. And not just that, there were also summary executions of some thousands of Polish members of the army, of the police forces, of the previous government and many landlords and capitalists. If you ask a Pole they’ll invariably bring up Katyn massacre (which is generally attributed to the Soviets but AFAIK there’s room for doubting that, given some key pieces of evidence such as examination of munitions used in the executions revealing that they were German munitions). The thing is: the Soviets weren’t “annexing land” for the sake of annexion, they were propagating socialism, and to have socialism, you need to make sure you won’t suffer a capitalist counterrevolution organized by the formerly powerful ones who were benefiting from the exploitation of the workers and peasants.

Overall, I do believe that the expansion of the Soviet socialist model was a good thing in and out of itself, and therefore I generally defend the actions taken to expand this model to countries that resisted because I believe that the ones resisting this weren’t primarily the workers or peasants, but the ruling classes and the wealthy.

As for Molotov-Ribbentrop and the invasion of “Poland”: I’m gonna please ask you to actually read my comment and to be open to the historical evidence I bring (using Wikipedia as a source, hopefully not suspect of being tankie-biased), because I believe there is a great mistake in the way contemporary western nations interpret history of WW2 and the interwar period. Thank you for actually making the effort, I know it’s a long comment, but please engage with the points I’m making:

The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: “The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia’s assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused.” Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn’t want to. By the logic of “invading Poland” being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland was as imperialist as the Nazis.

As a Spaniard leftist it’s so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren’t dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn’t agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won’t find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.

The invasion of “Poland” is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn’t invade what we think of when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:

“Polish” territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:

The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you’d consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?

Additionally, the Soviets didn’t invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. Polish troops did not resist Soviet occupation but they did resist Nazi invasion. The Soviet occupation effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.

All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn’t allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that’s a given), and offered to send a million troops to France’s border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren’t allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:

“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)

“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.

"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact’s signing)

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this

Poor quality bait

Who talked about utopia? The USSR was far from a utopia, it was a state with flaws and lots of mistakes were made in the process. It is still demonstrably significantly more fair, egalitarian and less exploitative than anything we have in the west, which relies in the exploitation of the global south to sustain itself.

The whole “Utopian socialism” thing is a 200 years old argument that was dismantled back then, by the way. Engels himself has an essay called “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”, explaining how early branches of socialism followed utopian goals and methods, but Marxism is scientific socialism based off historical materialism and empiricism. If you look at my comments above, I’ve talked about historical evidence with hard data, not about good wishes for the future.

I don’t see communism making any sustainable inroads anywhere in the world

That is if you ignore the main industrial powerhouse of the world (China), the island of Cuba, or the nations of Vietnam and Laos.

unless things get much much worse

As if, for example, the west started to support a genocide that murders over half a million people (most of them children), or if militarized police started kidnapping and disappearing random citizens without due process in the USA, or if fascist governments linked to Nazism and Fascism started to win elections in Italy or Germany?

Even then, it’s just temporary until capitalism takes hold again

To quote Ursula K. Le Guin: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings”

Go tell those Uyghurs and Tibetan Monks how good they have it

You are literally free to do so. Take a flight to China tomorrow, and visit Kashgar in the Xinjiang province, or visit the Tibet region. You’ll find that people are living normal plentiful lives and support the Chinese government in their majority. China is, as a matter of fact, the country in the world with highest government satisfaction rates consistently

That info comes from western organizations like the University of California or the Pew Research Institute, BTW, not from any “evil CCP propaganda”.

The fact that you believe Uyghur or Tibetan people are unhappy with their government is because you’ve fallen for propaganda yourself. Western-manufactured organizations like the East Turkestan Liberation Organization (based in Türkiye, NATO nation) or the Tibetan Government in Exile (based off India) create propaganda implying that people in said regions aren’t happy with the government and want independence, but if you look inside China and ask the actual population, you’ll find that’s a very minority position. Certainly nothing in Tibet like the literal police violence against pro-independence protestors causing 800 wounded in Catalonia in my homeland of Spain because their right to self determination is violated abusing the Spanish constitution.

China is funding radical theocratic dictatorship in Iran who armed and organized Hamas to reignite the war in Gaza

Ohhhh, I get it, you’re a Zionist! Should have started from there, I would have wasted a lot less time if I knew I was dealing with a genocidal maniac, gotcha. Bye

Yeah, Cuba. Where everyone is poor

Source: émigré gusanos living in Madrid, Spain. Life expectancy is higher in Cuba than in the USA, and that’s despite the island country suffering the most comprehensive and long lasting economic blockade in human history. The blockade itself, according to the Office of the Historian of the USA, was put in place, and I quote: “to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government”. Seeing you’re so concerned with poverty caused by economic blockades, you may be interested to know that according to recent medical research US and EU sanctions murder above half a million humans per year since 1971.

USSR […] its internal economy was so shit…

…so shit that it took backwards feudal Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, etc. where 85% of the population were destitute peasants with a life expectancy of 27 years in 1929, and by 1970 turned into the second world power, rose life expectancy to close to 70, and did all this without exploiting the global south.

Totally terrible economy, much worse than anything before or after, right?

Also they supported the Nazis during Poland’s invasion

Wrong, wrong and more wrong. I’ve answered to that in a separate comment because of how wrong that is, feel free to read it and give me a well-informed opinión afterwards on my comment. “Le evil Soviets invaded poor wittle Poland” is pure historic revisionism that you’re regurgitating from some other Lemmy comment you’ve seen.

As for the rest of your comment I won’t bother because it’s just more “hooman greed” nonsense.

I mentioned nothing about not liking Finland, I just don’t like their governance system because it’s leading to fascism. You can stop your weird adhominem and address my points

Ok, great, both systems have done good things and bad ones. Now let’s make a balance.

Capitalism by the UK, in India alone, has murdered over a hundred million people. Tell me something on the same order of magnitude done by the USSR (hint: the worst famine in the USSR was 5 million deaths and less than a million people died in Gulags).

Communism has defects in real life implementation, but if it’s empirically better at giving better life outcomes at comparable levels of development, why not go for it?

Close your ears if you want, I made my point and you’re just shouting “lalala I didnt listen”.

The excess in your opinion is forbidding rich people from exploiting the poor. There were plenty of people making the same point against abolition of slavery in 200BCE that you’re making right now.

lets not pretend Mao Zedong and North Korea didn’t exist

Under Mao Zedong, China’s life expectancy went from 23 years of age to almost 60, more than doubling. Apply this to 1 billion Chinese, and you get that communism in China saved hundreds of millions of people. China in the early 1900s was a western colony much like India, and it had similar levels of industrialization and economical progress. Comparing the development of India and China since communism, the only possible conclusion is that communism uplifted a billion people from destitute poverty, gave them healthcare, education, pensions, jobs and housing. Mistakes were made during Mao? For sure they were. The balance is still overwhelmingly positive by any metric you want to apply.

As for North Korea, maybe if the USA hadn’t bombed the country using more explosives than in the entire Pacific theater of WW2, and destroyed literally 85% of the buildings in the entire country, North-Koreans wouldn’t have had such an extreme policy of international isolation and self-defense.

Yeah, communism may have provided all the astonishing advances in human rights to hundreds of millions of people, saved hundreds of millions of lives from poverty and serfdom, and introduced doubling and tripling of life expectancy where it arrived despite having to contend against the western capitalist empire. But did you know they had prisons during the WW2 times when 25 million soviets were murdered by Nazis?

Do you have the same stats for wealth inequality too?

I don’t but they’re irrelevant. The only possible way to get money in the USSR was through labor and income, since there was no capitalist accumulation or return rates on investment by design. The highest paid individuals in the USSR were actually highly trained professionals such as university professors, members of research institutions and high profile artists and media personalities.

Are you trying to say that communism leads to a failed authoritarian state resembling the US in terms of income inequality?

No, that’s what the end of communism leads to, to a return to capitalism. That was only possible because communism began in a 400-million pool of people in backwards and unindustrialized Eastern Europe, the cold war was uneven from the start.

I gave you a plethora of actual evidence of human rights in an actually existing socialist country, and you went with the “gommunism impossible because hooman greed”.

But please elaborate: why is the nationalization and collectivization of means of production so vulnerable to greed? A system in which power is distributed among all workers is actually less prone to greed issues than one in which a single human is in control of the whole company. The whole “human greed” argument is a hollow sophism without any actual analysis of everything.

How is it more sustainable to maintain an elite of wealthy company owners with interests opposed to those of the workers than to maintain a worker controlled state? You are witnessing with your own eyes the disintegration of the western capitalist system, the fascists entering power in USA, Italy, Finland, and probably soon Germany and France and Spain will follow, likely UK too. All the “center-left checks and balances” with strong union membership in the 1960s-1980s disappeared overnight when the threat of global communism disappeared in the 1990s and capitalism didn’t need to appear to be better anymore.

All those Commie Bastards were just fucking Red Fascists

Yeah, fucking red fascists and their completely free healthcare and education, guaranteed housing, guaranteed employment and guarantee of retirement pensions at 60 years old (55 for women). Fucking red fascists supporting anticolonial movements all over Latin America, Africa and Asia, allowing Vietnam to decide a future for itself instead of being forced into submission by American bombing. Fucking red fascists saving Europe from Nazism and saving tens of millions of lives from extermination and genocide. Fucking red fascists with their self-sufficient economic system that doesn’t rely on the exploitation of the global south. Fucking red fascists respecting the cultural diversity of the peoples (look up the evolution of number of speakers of Occitan Language since 1900 to see what’s real cultural erasure happening in real time)