It’s almost as if many countries within Eastern Europe and Asia have generational trauma associated with acts of violence, oppression, and genocide connected to those symbols.
I’ve never understood the obsession with Soviet iconography within communist spaces, especially when there are plenty of communists that acknowledge that the Soviet Union never actually lived up to the ideals of communism, and acknowledge the acts of imperialism and genocide committed by their regime.
The swastika and other ancient symbols are banned for similar reasons in many countries for their association with fascists, and most people seem to be on board with it. But when countries that were directly harmed by communist regimes start to ban soviet iconography, there is suddenly a double standard and a lack of understanding.
I think modern communists who sincerely believe in social justice need to divorce themselves from these symbols of oppression. There are plenty of symbols of solidarity, unity, and workers empowerment that could be used that don’t have the same level of taint. I’m a fan of the big dipper myself.
Absolutely. I feel like communism’s tolerance of Leninism is as problematic as conservatives’ tolerance of Fascism, and police tolerance of protecting the bad cops.
When someone tells me they intend to put me “up against the wall” (at least a few have said this to me over the years), and they are not loudly denounced by their “comrades”, then they are complicit in that attitude.
All of that would require accepting that having communism as the end goal has caused death and oppression similar, if not worse then, the Nazis.
And they’ll never admit that. Because if they do, then they open the door for criticism of any current “communism” like China. And we’re not allowed to talk about the genocides that China is responsible for. If China’s flags were green and they used a tractor instead of a hammer and sickle then there would be anough cognitive dissonance to allow for criticism of past regimes while pretending that you’re not doing the same thing now. But it’s too late. That iconography is now representing China, so they must defend the sanctity of those icons. It’s a lot like religion. Or a cult.
If following the Marxist definition, I don’t think the end goal of communism is inherently a bad thing. The issue comes from the means of achieving it, and the issue with Marxist-Leninism and Maoism is its tendency towards purity, conformity, compulsory adherence and authoritarianism.
I think you are right in the sense that because China calls itself communist, people are quick to defend it despite the fact that it’s current political economic system seems to resemble authoritarian capitalism moreso than even Maoism. Then again, North Korea seperated itself from its communist label decades ago, and Russia isn’t even the same political regime it was during the Soviet era, and a lot of self proclaimed communists still jump to their defense.
I can understand being critical of or even hostile to the United States and other first world capitalist nations, but the enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend. Otherwise Imperial Japan would’ve been based as fuck even though it raped and enslaved people under the guise of “antiimperialism” and “east Asian co-prosperity.”
I was wrong to say that the end goal leads to the outcome. What I should have said was that aiming for that end goal has led to the same outcome.
I think you and I are on the same page regarding this topic though. Maybe a better term would be “authoritarianism”, but then people claim that Communism is not authoritarian, which doesn’t matter because Communism hasn’t ever happened… It’s so easy to loose sight of the problem when focusing on the definitions.
There’s a song by Living Color called Cult of Personality that fits this well.
the end goal has caused death and oppression similar, if not worse then, the Nazis
I have extremely strong opinions about this. As someone from a family who was hurt by both, it’s not even remotely comparable. The Nazis wanted my family executed. Communists wanted quiet compliance, with penalties for speaking truth to power. Those things are not remotely the same.
Communism here was not pleasant, fair or safe, but at least you had a set of rules to follow (shut up, go to your job, loudly endorse the official party position, report infractions) and you’d be relatively safe.
This is very different from a regime who explicitly wants to murder you.
Those that survived the fascist period, yeah. A lot of my family didn’t make it (I’m talking greatuncles and greataunts), but a few managed to survive the pogroms, death trains and forced labour, including my grandpa.
He followed the party line meticulously and taught my dad to keep his mouth shut during the communist period, so they were pretty safe and actually had a reasonable life, despite some pretty horrible things happening around the country (Roma forced adoption policy, ban on birth control & reduced womens’ rights, worsening work conditions to accomplish the 5 year plan, etc).
EDIT: Just realized I didn’t actually answer the question about today :)) Yeah, my family’s doing absolutely fine these days.
Difficult question. I’ll try my best at making my thoughts somewhat legible.
If you ask 10 different people what communism is, you’ll get 10 different definitions, so just to be absolutely clear, when I think “communism”, I think of authoritarian, centralized socialism where the state is the ultimate arbiter of all things. Communism has proven to work extremely well and be pretty nice at the level of a town or village as long as everyone has the option to stay or leave (for example, kibbutzes). The important part here is the voluntary nature and human scale. This amount of centralization and power is insane at the level of a state.
I think any authoritarian government has certain inherent problems, and leads naturally and inevitably to institutional paranoia. This is extremely bad for citizens. Not all authoritarian systems are equally bad, but this part I feel is unavoidable in any authoritarian government.
I am a big proponent of socialism, especially syndicalism (although recently, the more I read about anarchism the more it makes sense), but it has to be in a system where people have control over their own lives.
What happens if we throw AI into the mix? Would anyone trust an AI to manage the state?
It’s been on my mind for a long while now. It’d remove human biases, though how resilient should it be against corruption and the political elite? Guess such things are pointless to think about, but still
Absolutely not. There’s an unavoidable problem of goal divergence.
The AI will have to have some goals that it’s trying to accomplish. That’s the score by which it measures which actions it takes. That goal has to be measurable.
What is the goal our AI overlord will have? If it’s GDP maximization, that’s immediate ultra-capitalist dystopia on a scale that makes today look like a utopia.
Okay then, human happiness? How do you measure that? If by survey, let’s say, a logical and easy way to maximize happiness is to hold a gun to every citizen’s head while taking the survey and shooting if they put less than maximum score. Very efficient.
Maybe by lifespan and/or child mortality? The easiest way of maximizing that might be putting as many people into medical comas so they can’t hurt themselves and preventing as many pregnancies as possible (children can’t die if women can’t get pregnant!)
I hope you see my point here. Any goal you set, there’s probably some loophole somewhere which will maximize whatever you program the AI to care about.
Eventually, it won’t matter what people trust. Our opinions will matter about as much as a pet gerbil best case, or bugs to be exterminated in the worst case. I’m sure everybody’s aware of how things can go wrong, but here’s an author talking about his series where the various AIs like us and keep us around:
The essay talks about the political structure that he thinks would arise in that situation, and I tend to agree with his conclusions, assuming we don’t go down the paperclip route.
I think it depends on who “you” are when you say that it was a regime that wanted to explicitly murder “you”. The first think that the Soviets did was kill off all the land owners, who were the people that actually knew how to cultivate that land, which caused a huge famine. They they murdered Ukrainians that tried to keep the enough food they produced for themselves to avoid starvation.
I’d say the main difference between the two was that Nazis wanted to replace “you” with “them” and Communists wanted to extract all of the labor you might have left in you before they kill you.
That didn’t happen here (Romania). They confiscated the land, but they didn’t murder anyone for it. Over the last 2 decades, there’s been a lot of reappropriation as well, where those who still have the pre-communist deeds to the land can sue to get it back.
That’s very interesting, thanks for sharing.
It almost looks like Romania is an example of what happens when the process of collectivization occurs naturally and not forced through authoritarianism. That’s actually nice to see.
It would be wrong to hold up Romania as too much of a shining example though, even here. When the USSR expressed disappointment and offered their help, Romanian communists were very willing to show their independence from Moscow by refusing and breaking heads on their own to speed up the process.
The first think that the Soviets did was kill off all the land owners, who were the people that actually knew how to cultivate that land, which caused a huge famine.
That’s… not at all what happened. The land owners largely emigrated after the conclusion of the Russian Civil War, and they didn’t know jack shit about farming, leaving behind the peasantry. Things were fine on the agricultural front up until around 1928. The cause of the Soviet-wide famine in 1930 was the forced collectivization started in 1928, in which poorly-run kolkhoz were given frankly absurd conditions and shuffled labor around without concern for skill or morale. It wasn’t that those who knew how to farm were killed or even thrown out - it was that they were simply ignored, or rather, had their input in a system that was notoriously slow to change in response to conditions.
Then they murdered Ukrainians by forcibly exporting grain at a much higher rate than the rest of the Soviet Union.
They did kill somewhere between 400,000 and 5,000,000 during Dekulakization between 1917 and 1933. It just took longer, so the estimates are fuzzy, but they did at some point designate a group of land owning peasants that were designated to be sent to the Gulags. And that’s about as systematic as you can get.
Everything else you said also happened, just concurrently.
I think the only point of contention is the cause of the famine (you assert that agriculturally vital skills were removed from the labor pool; I assert that the problem was organizational and that the vital skills were still present in more-than-sufficient quantities), rather than the cruelty of the Soviet Union.
I think at this point I jump straight to malice because before the '22 invasion of Ukraine there were still a lot of people online openly denying Holodomor as a actual genocide caused by the Soviet Union. And the common argument I’ve heard was that it wasn’t a “real” genocide because it was a “logistical issue”. So people were saying that it was incompetence that led to it, which doesn’t fit the exact definition of a “genocide”. Which I think is a disgusting way to defend a regime that caused so much pain.
I’m not saying that you’re doing any of that. I think that technically you’re correct and I’m just splitting hairs at this point. I just have a personal aversion to drawing distinctions between intent and effect in this specific case due to my past experiences. But it’s important to have all your facts straight when making an argument, so I’ll work on that.
No, no, I totally get it, I’ve run into Holodomor deniers using that line of thought too. It’s important, for that very reason, to split the broader issue of the 30-33 famine and the Holodomor. The former was a very particular brand of callous incompetence. The latter was malice, absolutely.
Kind of true. The hammer and sickle as a combined symbol was a creation of the Soviet period. The hammer represents the proletariat, wage laborers. The sickle represents the peasantry.
In orthodox Marxism (as opposed to Marxism-Leninism), the peasantry are seen as not having significant revolutionary potential, and it is the movement from peasant societies to industrial societies which creates the necessary working class for a revolutionary transition to socialism. But there was no widely adopted symbol like the Soviet hammer and sickle - a variety of diverse symbols (including hammers and sickles separately) were used by socialist groups before the Soviet Union.
It’s almost as if many countries within Eastern Europe and Asia have generational trauma associated with acts of violence, oppression, and genocide connected to those symbols.
I’ve never understood the obsession with Soviet iconography within communist spaces, especially when there are plenty of communists that acknowledge that the Soviet Union never actually lived up to the ideals of communism, and acknowledge the acts of imperialism and genocide committed by their regime.
The swastika and other ancient symbols are banned for similar reasons in many countries for their association with fascists, and most people seem to be on board with it. But when countries that were directly harmed by communist regimes start to ban soviet iconography, there is suddenly a double standard and a lack of understanding.
I think modern communists who sincerely believe in social justice need to divorce themselves from these symbols of oppression. There are plenty of symbols of solidarity, unity, and workers empowerment that could be used that don’t have the same level of taint. I’m a fan of the big dipper myself.
Absolutely. I feel like communism’s tolerance of Leninism is as problematic as conservatives’ tolerance of Fascism, and police tolerance of protecting the bad cops.
When someone tells me they intend to put me “up against the wall” (at least a few have said this to me over the years), and they are not loudly denounced by their “comrades”, then they are complicit in that attitude.
All of that would require accepting that having communism as the end goal has caused death and oppression similar, if not worse then, the Nazis.
And they’ll never admit that. Because if they do, then they open the door for criticism of any current “communism” like China. And we’re not allowed to talk about the genocides that China is responsible for. If China’s flags were green and they used a tractor instead of a hammer and sickle then there would be anough cognitive dissonance to allow for criticism of past regimes while pretending that you’re not doing the same thing now. But it’s too late. That iconography is now representing China, so they must defend the sanctity of those icons. It’s a lot like religion. Or a cult.
If following the Marxist definition, I don’t think the end goal of communism is inherently a bad thing. The issue comes from the means of achieving it, and the issue with Marxist-Leninism and Maoism is its tendency towards purity, conformity, compulsory adherence and authoritarianism.
I think you are right in the sense that because China calls itself communist, people are quick to defend it despite the fact that it’s current political economic system seems to resemble authoritarian capitalism moreso than even Maoism. Then again, North Korea seperated itself from its communist label decades ago, and Russia isn’t even the same political regime it was during the Soviet era, and a lot of self proclaimed communists still jump to their defense.
I can understand being critical of or even hostile to the United States and other first world capitalist nations, but the enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend. Otherwise Imperial Japan would’ve been based as fuck even though it raped and enslaved people under the guise of “antiimperialism” and “east Asian co-prosperity.”
I was wrong to say that the end goal leads to the outcome. What I should have said was that aiming for that end goal has led to the same outcome.
I think you and I are on the same page regarding this topic though. Maybe a better term would be “authoritarianism”, but then people claim that Communism is not authoritarian, which doesn’t matter because Communism hasn’t ever happened… It’s so easy to loose sight of the problem when focusing on the definitions.
There’s a song by Living Color called Cult of Personality that fits this well.
https://youtu.be/7xxgRUyzgs0?si=SH_YZ8_dSwZdjWF-
I have extremely strong opinions about this. As someone from a family who was hurt by both, it’s not even remotely comparable. The Nazis wanted my family executed. Communists wanted quiet compliance, with penalties for speaking truth to power. Those things are not remotely the same.
Communism here was not pleasant, fair or safe, but at least you had a set of rules to follow (shut up, go to your job, loudly endorse the official party position, report infractions) and you’d be relatively safe.
This is very different from a regime who explicitly wants to murder you.
I’m very sorry to hear that happened to your family. Are all of you okay now?
Those that survived the fascist period, yeah. A lot of my family didn’t make it (I’m talking greatuncles and greataunts), but a few managed to survive the pogroms, death trains and forced labour, including my grandpa.
He followed the party line meticulously and taught my dad to keep his mouth shut during the communist period, so they were pretty safe and actually had a reasonable life, despite some pretty horrible things happening around the country (Roma forced adoption policy, ban on birth control & reduced womens’ rights, worsening work conditions to accomplish the 5 year plan, etc).
EDIT: Just realized I didn’t actually answer the question about today :)) Yeah, my family’s doing absolutely fine these days.
How do you feel about communism as a whole?
Difficult question. I’ll try my best at making my thoughts somewhat legible.
If you ask 10 different people what communism is, you’ll get 10 different definitions, so just to be absolutely clear, when I think “communism”, I think of authoritarian, centralized socialism where the state is the ultimate arbiter of all things. Communism has proven to work extremely well and be pretty nice at the level of a town or village as long as everyone has the option to stay or leave (for example, kibbutzes). The important part here is the voluntary nature and human scale. This amount of centralization and power is insane at the level of a state.
I think any authoritarian government has certain inherent problems, and leads naturally and inevitably to institutional paranoia. This is extremely bad for citizens. Not all authoritarian systems are equally bad, but this part I feel is unavoidable in any authoritarian government.
I am a big proponent of socialism, especially syndicalism (although recently, the more I read about anarchism the more it makes sense), but it has to be in a system where people have control over their own lives.
What happens if we throw AI into the mix? Would anyone trust an AI to manage the state?
It’s been on my mind for a long while now. It’d remove human biases, though how resilient should it be against corruption and the political elite? Guess such things are pointless to think about, but still
Absolutely not. There’s an unavoidable problem of goal divergence.
The AI will have to have some goals that it’s trying to accomplish. That’s the score by which it measures which actions it takes. That goal has to be measurable.
What is the goal our AI overlord will have? If it’s GDP maximization, that’s immediate ultra-capitalist dystopia on a scale that makes today look like a utopia.
Okay then, human happiness? How do you measure that? If by survey, let’s say, a logical and easy way to maximize happiness is to hold a gun to every citizen’s head while taking the survey and shooting if they put less than maximum score. Very efficient.
Maybe by lifespan and/or child mortality? The easiest way of maximizing that might be putting as many people into medical comas so they can’t hurt themselves and preventing as many pregnancies as possible (children can’t die if women can’t get pregnant!)
I hope you see my point here. Any goal you set, there’s probably some loophole somewhere which will maximize whatever you program the AI to care about.
Eventually, it won’t matter what people trust. Our opinions will matter about as much as a pet gerbil best case, or bugs to be exterminated in the worst case. I’m sure everybody’s aware of how things can go wrong, but here’s an author talking about his series where the various AIs like us and keep us around:
http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
The essay talks about the political structure that he thinks would arise in that situation, and I tend to agree with his conclusions, assuming we don’t go down the paperclip route.
I think it depends on who “you” are when you say that it was a regime that wanted to explicitly murder “you”. The first think that the Soviets did was kill off all the land owners, who were the people that actually knew how to cultivate that land, which caused a huge famine. They they murdered Ukrainians that tried to keep the enough food they produced for themselves to avoid starvation.
I’d say the main difference between the two was that Nazis wanted to replace “you” with “them” and Communists wanted to extract all of the labor you might have left in you before they kill you.
That didn’t happen here (Romania). They confiscated the land, but they didn’t murder anyone for it. Over the last 2 decades, there’s been a lot of reappropriation as well, where those who still have the pre-communist deeds to the land can sue to get it back.
I won’t pretend to know details of Romanian history. I do doubt that Dekulakization was bloodless there.
EDIT: Didn’t understand we were talking about collectivization, sorry. Never heard the term Kulak before.
Actually, collectivization in Romania was very bloodless, at least until the USSR decided to lend a “helping hand” to “speed up” the process.
That’s very interesting, thanks for sharing. It almost looks like Romania is an example of what happens when the process of collectivization occurs naturally and not forced through authoritarianism. That’s actually nice to see.
Until, like you said, USSR tried to “help”.
It would be wrong to hold up Romania as too much of a shining example though, even here. When the USSR expressed disappointment and offered their help, Romanian communists were very willing to show their independence from Moscow by refusing and breaking heads on their own to speed up the process.
That’s… not at all what happened. The land owners largely emigrated after the conclusion of the Russian Civil War, and they didn’t know jack shit about farming, leaving behind the peasantry. Things were fine on the agricultural front up until around 1928. The cause of the Soviet-wide famine in 1930 was the forced collectivization started in 1928, in which poorly-run kolkhoz were given frankly absurd conditions and shuffled labor around without concern for skill or morale. It wasn’t that those who knew how to farm were killed or even thrown out - it was that they were simply ignored, or rather, had their input in a system that was notoriously slow to change in response to conditions.
Then they murdered Ukrainians by forcibly exporting grain at a much higher rate than the rest of the Soviet Union.
They did kill somewhere between 400,000 and 5,000,000 during Dekulakization between 1917 and 1933. It just took longer, so the estimates are fuzzy, but they did at some point designate a group of land owning peasants that were designated to be sent to the Gulags. And that’s about as systematic as you can get.
Everything else you said also happened, just concurrently.
I think the only point of contention is the cause of the famine (you assert that agriculturally vital skills were removed from the labor pool; I assert that the problem was organizational and that the vital skills were still present in more-than-sufficient quantities), rather than the cruelty of the Soviet Union.
Fair enough. Malice vs incompetence.
I think at this point I jump straight to malice because before the '22 invasion of Ukraine there were still a lot of people online openly denying Holodomor as a actual genocide caused by the Soviet Union. And the common argument I’ve heard was that it wasn’t a “real” genocide because it was a “logistical issue”. So people were saying that it was incompetence that led to it, which doesn’t fit the exact definition of a “genocide”. Which I think is a disgusting way to defend a regime that caused so much pain.
I’m not saying that you’re doing any of that. I think that technically you’re correct and I’m just splitting hairs at this point. I just have a personal aversion to drawing distinctions between intent and effect in this specific case due to my past experiences. But it’s important to have all your facts straight when making an argument, so I’ll work on that.
No, no, I totally get it, I’ve run into Holodomor deniers using that line of thought too. It’s important, for that very reason, to split the broader issue of the 30-33 famine and the Holodomor. The former was a very particular brand of callous incompetence. The latter was malice, absolutely.
Also, the sickle is Marxist-Leninist revisionism. HAMMER ONLY, PEASANTS OUT OF MY GOOD WORKER’S REVOLUTION
Is this true or a joke? Was the sickle actually added later?
Kind of true. The hammer and sickle as a combined symbol was a creation of the Soviet period. The hammer represents the proletariat, wage laborers. The sickle represents the peasantry.
In orthodox Marxism (as opposed to Marxism-Leninism), the peasantry are seen as not having significant revolutionary potential, and it is the movement from peasant societies to industrial societies which creates the necessary working class for a revolutionary transition to socialism. But there was no widely adopted symbol like the Soviet hammer and sickle - a variety of diverse symbols (including hammers and sickles separately) were used by socialist groups before the Soviet Union.
Super interesting and thought-provoking, thanks.