How did Communists in America and the West react to the collapse of the Soviet Union?

...

They started calling themselves "democratic socialists"

uesful idiots cried in dismay.

one became a senator from vermont

the rest became "liberals, progressives, social democrats, etc" and worked on bringing down the west.

t. don't know shit about the history of leftism

There have always been tankies and anti-tankies. Each side reacted as you would expect. I remember Chomsky hoped for the soviet union would fall and was shited on by tankies.

I meant the communismball thing with the scrolling text but that works too

I know its track record is pretty bad

Ebin, my professional memester user.
The soviet union and all the experiments that derive from it have had massive opposition inside leftism since its inception, whether you like it or not.

>Russian Federation and North Korea
Terrible bait

The majority of American and Western Communists denounced the Soviet Union's Bureaucratic Tyranny as a corruption of Marxist philosophy

>i-it wasn't real communism

you are a living stereotype

You're not even trying are you?

>I don't need arguments, I have meme pics!

>Russian federation
>communism

you dense motherfucker

He should have been, reformed soviet union would have been a much better result than the world today.

They looked at the misery and chaos they had caused and promptly vowed to TRY IT AGAIN FOR REAL THIS TIME

I didn't make the picture but its not hard to guess what they meant.

Marx stated that Communism comes when infrastructure and efficiency is so high that the state withers away, seeing as how it is no longer necessary.

Marx's communism is anarcho-communism.

It pisses me off how often people confuse socialism with communism.

(I'm neither socialist nor communist btw)

Communism fails because it's extremely difficult to introduce "real Communism"

Communism depends on a strong central state in the beginning to enforce sharing (because nobody wants to share unless it's forced), and all the power and resources of the powerful state will almost always end in corrupt autocracies that want more and more power.

And no, Anercho-communism/socialism is even less realistic if it involves a population of more than 100

>strong central state in the beginning to enforce sharing

So communism is that annoying mom in the playground diligently making sure everyone gets equal slide time

I hate annoying moms

The elites of the state don't want to wither away; they want to stay relevant and keep power. It's unavoidable greed in the most human and basic form.

That's when the secret police and "gulags" start to come in and "real communism" starts to change a la Animal Farm.

"the state should enforce sharing"
t. Pyotr "I want a centralized vanguardist authoritarian state" Kropotkin

>That's when the secret police and "gulags" start to come in and "real communism" starts to change a la Animal Farm.
This is the typical "communism turned wrong due to some inherent issues" bullshit myth. The bolsheviks created the cheka right after gaining power, it wasn't the consequence of some "unavoidable greed" that hadn't been taken into account.

>(I'm neither socialist nor communist btw)
t. pictured

Create a suppressive police force immiediately after a successful communist revolution or 50 years later, it still does show that people in power wants more power.

Question for your died red commie shills.

Why should the world give you one more chance?

You have has so many chances and no great success.

They are just roleplaying dude. Don't take them seriously.

Interpret it however you want, but the sequence you described is wrong. Bolsheviks got into power and did exactly what they intended to do, they didn't magically turn evil do to greed.

due*

What? Okay we both agree it's not magic that turns communist states into oppressive autocracies.

Please then, tell my what caused the Bolsheviks turn revolutionary Russia into a corrupt and oppressive autocratic state?

They were an oppressive autocratic vanguard party, that's the point.

What exactly is an "vanguard party"? I'm not familiar with the vocabulary used by the opposite end of the political spectrum.

The party to lead the masses into revolution.

a number of factors
>stalin had just purged the officer corps of its best and brightest
>Finland had a civil war after ww1 like Russia but unlike Russia the whites won, the russians thought they could capitalize on residual bad feelings from former reds to get a fifth collumn but this did not happen at all and the Finns came together 100%
>the original plan was just to use superior firepower and manpower to overwhelm the defensive line on the karelian isthmus but Stalin rejected this as not being flashy enough since he wanted to show the world he could do blitzkrieg too
>come up with a second plan that has them invade the whole country at once, its ridiculously overcomplicated and spreads resources too thin, the middle group gets almost completely annihilated
>want to show off their flashy new tanks which were every bit as good as the german ones in 1939 but there are only a handful of narrow dirt roads and everything else is dense forest
>as soon as lead tank in column gets knocked out the road is blocked and if the rear tank gets knocked out too they can't retreat
>can't go off road without ski infantry because the snow drifts are 10 feet high
>only around 4 hours of sunlight a day, worst winter in atleast 40 years, it gets so cold that the lubricants the soviets were using for their rifles freeze and the guns become inoperable after firing a single shot

its really an incredible story because the finns weren't just massively outgunned they also had a far less modern military. They really did themselves no favors by having been reluctant to adopt armor over cavalry. If the Finns had had just a handfull of tanks the mobile fire support would have gone a long way. As it stood they basically had to isolate pockets of russians by blocking roads and then wait for them to starve to death. There's this idea that the Russians are masters of fighting in winter, but that's only because they learned some very hard lessons about sub-arctic warfare from the Finns

The authoritarian brand of "marxists" wanted a group of enlightened individuals to lead and govern the retarded masses (aka the opposite of socialism). They won in russia.

>communists conveniently disowning communists that ended up being oppressive

kek the mental gymnastics of commies are real

how do you enforce wealth redistribution without someone to mandate it with force

Then why are you trying to discuss the Russian revolution if you don't know shit about it?

>literally fail to meet the definition of communism
>still have people argue you were communist on the basis of the fact it was one of your long term goals

just because i want to be a scotsman doesn't suddenly make me a scotsman, doubly so if i live in Wisconsin with Persian ancestry. this is true even if i start to label myself as a scotsman due to my long-term goal.

>ended up being oppressive
Again, that's the point, they didn't "end up being oppressive". They were oppressive since the beggining, including against communists.

How do you enforce private wealth without state enforced violence against the dispossessed?

So communism needs a powerful and potentially dangerous force to topple the establishment?

Fight fire with fire? Well it's clear in historical hindsight that the whole house burned down in the process.

Communism succeeds only if the vast majority agrees to share. That's why socially-cohesive states like smaller European countries and Singapore had more success with socialist policies.

Communism that are born from bloody civil wars and powerful "vanguard parties" and later powerful states almost always end up with problems.

>enforce private wealth without state enforced violence against the dispossessed?
you pay someone to shoot the hobos if they try to take your shit
this is the reason even anarcho capitalism is more grounded in reality than anarcho communism

>So communism needs a powerful and potentially dangerous force to topple the establishment?
Just like Republicanism.

>pay someone to shoot the hobos
>gets paid more by the hobos and shoots you instead

ancap paradise

>So communism needs a powerful and potentially dangerous force to topple the establishment?
That's the interpretation of the minority that are vanguardists.
The success of socialist experiments has been in direct correlation to the degree of their decentralization and anti authoritarianism.

>not just nuking the hobos

In Capitalism, society just says "haha you suck" and leave the "dispossessed" in the dust. There is no state-enforced violence (there kinda is with laws, but you're over exaggerating).

State communism violently seize everything, get a cut of the sharing (as in 99%), and give out scraps for everyone to share.

Ah, yes, and the dispossessed accept to starve because they're retarded, not because of the threat of violence from the police. Concentrated distribution of wealth is 100% enforced through violence.
And who is defending "state communism"?

Communism truly succeeds only if everyone agrees to share. I don't know how decentralization helps socialism.

How are you going to introduce communism/socialism in America if, let's say, 50% of Americans don't want to share? "Decentralize" the state? Then how are you going to make gun-toting far-right Christians open up their wallet?

You can't without force and an Autocratic communist/socialist state and police. Let's hope that the strong state remains uncorrupt, but that's not going to happen.

It's Marxism-Leninism they refer to as failed communism, this problem would be solved if people bothered to check basic definitions.

What threat of violence? Does the police bar unemployed people from applying for jobs?

>How are you going to introduce communism/socialism in America if, let's say, 50% of Americans don't want to share?
>If you didn't want to join the collective you were given some land but only as much as you could work yourself. You were not allowed to employ workers. Not only production was affected, distribution was on the basis of what people needed. In many areas money was abolished. People come to the collective store (often churches which had been turned into warehouses) and got what was available. If there were shortages rationing would be introduced to ensure that everyone got their fair share. But it was usually the case that increased production under the new system eliminated shortages.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia

do you suddenly think people will band together and redistribute the wealth for everyone?
no they will band together in smaller groups to try and keep the wealth for themselves because humans are instinctually individualistic and self perserving
there is no larger proletariat, a class is not a homogeneous entity like an ant colony

>try to go into a factory to manufacture goods
>get arrested for trespassing
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. – Adam Smith

Ebin.

>invaded and taken back by nationalists
you're not helping your argument

My only arguments in this thread are:
1. The soviet union didn't suddenly turn to shit due to egoism, human nature, greed, or whatever, it was a perfect materialization of the shit ideas of bolsheviks
2. Capitalism is enforced by violence
If you think communism is impossible due to human nature that's fine, I just object to pretending the soviet union is an example.

>specific special snowflake example that lasted too short to see the long-term effects of Communism

1. Okay I did say that it works better in socially-cohesive and smaller states.

Try the same shit in France, Russia, or America. It won't last even 3 years.

2. I want longer examples! You either die young as a hero or live long enough to become the villain. If Hitler died in 1939, besides Antisemitism people would view Hitler's legacy favorably.

ok sorry i got in the thread late

So every failed communist state in existence was just another bolshevik-type mishap?

How very convenient for you.

You never disproved the human nature argument.

You just said "muh bolshevism" and used that to explain how every communist state failed one way or another.

There aren't longer examples of libertarian socialism. Keep an eye on rojava if you want, although there isn't much info about it going around. But, again, it's pretty evident that how successful the experiment is is heavily correlated with its non authoritarian non vanguardist nature (North Korea is more authoritarian than the soviet union and its derivatives were, which were more authoritarian than yugoslavia, which was more authoritarian than revolutionary spain).

>So every failed communist state in existence was just another bolshevik-type mishap?
What "communist state" are you referring to?
inb4 mentions explicitly leninist states

Because we don't really have any longer examples to debate over, let's just agree to halt this debate.

We're both going into theory/speculation land.

>infrastructure being competent
That will never exist with current infrastructure, lack of a living landscape and sprawling roads and devolpment fragmenting any chance at one, industrial agriculture is running out of arable land, "best agricultural practice" Acidifies soil, depletes soil carbon, while topsoil erodes away. Water tables are running dry and domesticated land is at %43 which is way over budget if we want the earth systems entropy to be constrained. Agriculture fosters an astonishing lack of biodiversty in crops and their environment, which is a huge problem, blights! Along with the mass extinction events of the anthropocene eroding biodiversty which now lacks the complexity and habitat to rebuild itself with out immediate teleological(human) help.
cites while highly connected are not capable of sustaining themselves by their own means and will suffer significantly from the urban heat island effect and resource scarcity. without resources from the devolping world global trade will collapse inevitably.
our oceans need to be left largely unexploited for a long while to recover but they are in nearly the same shape as the terrestrial biosphere and is getting hit the hardest.
Anyways if anyone wanted to fix our infrastructure they need to try again from a different angle, shit man
i don't think marxist utopia will ever happen, some kind of ecological-mutualism makes more sense

>elected a government to seize the means the means of production

hahahaha

Fair enough.

Sigh. If you want to be passive-aggressive and make the "I'm not talking about Leninist communism" defense, then so be it.

We are now talking about two different things so I'm going to stop here.

this. dont be fooled.

>bolsheviks created the cheka
>created

Yeah so you prove that it isnt a problem of communism, its a part of its implementation.

Any utopia is practically impossible.

How is it passive-aggressive? Your post implied that saying that "every failed communist state in existence was just another bolshevik-type mishap" was some kind of ridiculous idea, but those states are explicitly bolshevik/leninist inspired.

Democratic socialists are capitalists, democratic means free market.

sure it does, comrade. *wink*

Nobody is really arguing that communism sucks. We're arguing over whether communism can be realistically implemented and maintained.

Let me speak ur language, buddy

>democratic means free market.

No it doesn't. It means 51 percent of the country decides what to do about the other 49 percent's property.

The norks literally removed every mention of communism from their constitution
they're pretty open about not working towards communism

>taking labels at face value

from the documentaries i've seen from inside north korea. They describe them selves as socialist until real communism can be implemented.

who sez it has to be realistic
aim for the stars and you'll at least get to space

Would a russian state really be a russian state if it did not have secret police

Sanders is a Social Democrat.

I don't care what he calls himself, the platform he ran on was social-democratic (kind capitalism with a pretty single-payer healthcare system and everything) not democratic socialism (means of production, workers, ownership thereof, you get the idea.)

Every state in this world has a secret police in one form or another

>Property

Too bad that didn't translate well

Could you link such

now you've reminded me of that fascist video using the song about the anarchists who got death-penalty'd for a crime they probably didn't actually do.

goddamn we live in a crazy world.

So then what's the problem with the cheka

Is that Godzilla made out of scorpions?