Lemmy.world blocks Lemmygrad.ml, unfortunately, so they can’t see Horse’s comment.

No, this is wrong.

1. The Soviet economic system was federated and planned. The political control in Moscow wasn’t absolute by any stretch.

2. The various Soviet Republics were not colonies, not by any stretch. Resources and goods were shipped around the whole system as needed, not just imported into Moscow.

3. There was no forcible cultural assimilation. There was a huge effort to cultivate a soviet identity, but there wasn’t an attempt to erase cultural identity. The famine in the 1930s was caused by natural causes, not “demographic engineering,” grain was re-allocated to Ukraine once it was known that there were famine conditions. There was forcible re-allocation of various ethnic groups like Koreans, which did exist, but this isn’t the same claim you made either in scope or character.

So no. The USSR was not imperialist, not by the correct concept of imperialism as a form of international extraction, nor the vague “Soviet Bad” thing you tried to make it out to be.

The US is absolutely an Empire, it practices imperialism, by which it extracts vast wealth from the global south. The USSR didn’t do that.

Further, I’m absolutely focused on economics. The Soviet economy slowed, but was still growing. The dissolution of the USSR was multifaceted, complex, and not boiled down to one failure. Further, its conditions are entirely different from the US, which is a decaying Empire, the fruits of imperialism are diminishing and disparity is rising.

I’m a Marxist-Leninist, economics are core to my analysis.

The US has always been a settler-colony, but it became more Imperialist after World War I with the inter-ally debts. It became world hegemon after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, however.

The USSR wasn’t an Empire, which played into that. Further, the reforms it introduced weren’t because it opened up too late, but because they played against the socialist system of planning. The PRC’s approach to economic reform retained full state control and is focused on unity, rather than disunity, which is why it’s working.

No, Tattorack is correct. Material conditions decaying makes it easier to topple, but Materialists know that without the working class organizing and acutally overthrowing the system, it won’t fall. The system still has to be killed and replaced, otherwise it will linger on.

Join an org like the Party for Socialism and Liberation!

Evergreen meme. 🇨🇺

I don’t mean “historical source” as an old source, but one that acknowledges the history of the terms. Your beloved Wikipedia explains the origins of liberalism in the same way I did. If I point you to Chinese economics institutions that agree with me, you’ll dismiss them. Again, liberalism is not a science, it’s an ideology centered around the dominant mode of production.

Even Time Magazine, itself an intensely liberal publication, recognizes the role of property relations in what determines left and right, ultimately chalking up the modern US viewpoint implicitly to the Overton Window, a political outlook that centers the median of any given society, rather than property relations.

This is not the “same argument” that Trump voters made. Again, you rely on equating me to the far-right to emotionally attack me, rather than the logic of my arguments or the overwhelming fact that you only accept western, liberal publications, and precisely the ones that focus on the Overton Window when describing concepts as left and right instead of their origin as property relations. You’re making an appeal to authority as your only argument, yet you don’t accept non-western sources.

It’s clear that by avoiding the discussion that you aren’t a serious person. I accept sources that aconowledge the historical answers to the questions I asked you.

Again, for the 5th time or so, the categorization of “left” vs “right” originated in France. When debating the power a King should hold, those who were against the monarchy sat on the left, and those who wanted to uphold the monarchy sat on the right. Liberalism, therefore, was a historically progressive and revolutionary ideology, as it was anti-monarchist and pro-bourgeois property. It was left not because it was liberal, it was left because it stood for progression onto the next emerging mode of production, that of bourgeois property.

Now, however, bourgeois property is dominant. Kings hold nearly no power on the global stage. The question of which position is revolutionary, which position stands for progression onto the next mode of production, is to be found in the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, not the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy as was found in the late 1700s. Liberalism is the status quo, as capitalism is the status quo. Socialism, whether it be Marxist, anarchist, etc, is the proletarian position, while liberalism is the bourgeois position, once revolutionary, now reactionary.

The publications that you listed, like Princeton, are portraying a narrow scope based on median viewpoints within liberal society. “Left-liberalism” is used in reference to liberals with socially progressive views, and perhaps supportive of some level of welfare expansion, but this doesn’t fundamentally change the property relations in society. It is “left” in comparison to conservativism (which itself is right-liberalism), but right wing overall.

Now, if you can make the case why you believe liberalism to be left, then please, do so, because you haven’t outside of linking liberals saying they are left in the context of a liberal-dominated society. Liberalism is not a science, it’s a viewpoint, so disagreeing with liberal economists is not the same as disagreeing with the CDC. The PRC’s economists are trained in Marxism, and there are far more of them than there are western liberal economists, so the argument that I disagree with economic consensus doesn’t hold water unless you take a western exceptionalist viewpoint.

What does “left” mean to you? What did it originally mean when it first became a phrase, and how does that apply to modern times? Again, I may be a Marxist, but this is a dominant viewpoint outside of highly western, liberal publications, and it isn’t just Marxists that have this understanding of right and left. Trying to equate my logic to anti-vaxx movements is just a baseless jab that avoids answering the arguments I made.

The reason it’s a false dichotomy is because the implicit point of the OP is that revolution is necessary. The original commenter either didn’t pick that up or ignored it, centering voting as the primary means of political engagement without addressing the point raised by the OP.

Voting is a very small part of what the average person can do to use their political power.

Deeply unserious behavior. Again, see my comment here.

See my comment here.

No problem!

I already explained elsewhere that it isn’t a binary, what’s important is which is the principle aspect, public or private ownership. There are elements of private property in socialism, and elements of public in capitalism.

Cooperatives do not eliminate the need for eventual full public ownership. Cooperatives are still based on competition and profit, not fulfilling needs. As cooperatives grow and develop, they will form monopolies, long past when coherent planning and public ownership becomes more efficient at fuflilling needs and growth.

Further, we as the workers cannot restructure capitalism. Capitalism is dominated by capital. In order for workers to have genuine power over the system, we need control of the state, large firms, and key industries, without ownership we cannot pivot to a cooperative society to begin with. Political economic systems are not thoughts in your head, recipes to be picked out, but real, material things, and as such what comes next will be what our current system is economically compelled towards. As centralization is a key side-effect of capitalism, common, collective ownership and planning is what will come next, after revolution sped up by capitalism’s own drive for disparity.

Ultimately, you have a very idealist, utopian view, and not a materialist, scientific view. That’s why you’re running into opposition so heavily.

It isn’t a binary. Elements of private property exist in socialism, and elements of public property exist in capitalism. What matters most is which is the principle aspect of the economy. Liberalism stands for the current, capitalist system, but usually argues for minor modifications. That lands it squarely in the right-wing side.

Cooperatives are neither left nor right. They do not fundamentally change property relations, in that they are based on private property and petite bourgeois class relations. Cooperatives can be part of early socialism, like Huawei in the PRC or the agricultural sectors in the USSR and PRC, or they can be a part of capitalist systems like Mondragon in Spain. At best, they could be considered quasi-socialist.

The reason why “fixing laws about investing” isn’t really “left” is because it doesn’t alter the base mode of production of society. It keeps capitalism intact, it just tweaks how you interact with it. This makes it less right wing than, say, Nazi Germany, but it doesn’t make it left, either.