Cowbee [he/they]

Actually, this town has more than enough room for the two of us

He/him or they/them, doesn’t matter too much

Marxist-Leninist ☭

Interested in Marxism-Leninism, but don’t know where to start? Check out my “Read Theory, Darn it!” introductory reading list!

  • 6 Posts
  • 566 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlSoon
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    24 hours ago

    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.




  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlSoon
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    1 day ago

    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.



  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlSoon
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    1 day ago

    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.


  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlSoon
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    1 day ago

    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.


    1. The areas the Soviets went after were largely territories Poland had annexed during the 1919 Polish-Ukrainian War, and included territories of modern day Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus. The Lithuanians in particular were ethnically oppressed by the nationalists in Poland.

    2. Throughout the 1930s, the Soviets had tried to establish a joint French/British/Soviet/Polish defensive pact against Nazi invasion. Britain and France ignored the proposal, as they wished to see Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union destroy each other. Poland also ignored the negotiations, including the Soviet offer to send 1 million troops to Poland and France to help against possible invasion.

    3. The Soviets entered Poland after the Nazis, by several weeks. They prevented Nazi Germany from taking the entirety of Poland, and, as per earlier, mostly stuck to territories Poland had invaded only 20 years earlier.

    The Soviets and Nazis were never allies. They hated each other from the very beginning, and spent a long time preparing for war with the other. The Soviet Union in particular had to be careful, as it had an extremely short time spent on industrialization, which it began in earnest after toppling the Tsar, while Germany had a century of industrialization on its side.


  • They were never on the same side. There were numerous treaties with Britain, France, etc that the Soviets proposed in order to take on the Nazis together, but they were denied, as western Europe and the US were doing a ton of business with Nazi Germany and were more opposed to the soviets. In fact, Western Europe already signed numerous non-aggression pacts with Nazi Germany, similar to the soviet-Nazi pact, but far earlier. The soviet pact was made on the eve of war to buy time, the soviets and Nazis never trusted each other.

    This is only more clear if you look into how each country portrayed the other in the 30s. Communism and fascism are, again, polar opposites in property relations, they hated each other. The Nazis even saw Slavic peoples as being genetically inferior. Marxists were always opposed to fascism, and that didn’t change when the Nazis came to power. They were never on the “same side,” the soviets only went into Poland weeks after the Nazis did.

    When it came time for World War II, all of that tension came to a head. The Nazis despised the communists above all else, and unlike Britain and France, tried to commit genocide against them. The communists despised the Nazis, and liberated Berlin years later.