Anyone who loves freedom owes such a debt to the Red Army that it can never be repaid.

—Ernest Hemingway

“whataboutism” means “you’re absolutely fucking 100% right and I am a big liberal baby who shidded his doodoo ass”

Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky,
We cut them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.

―Kahlil Gibran

Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce! To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet Union, to repudiate the history of the CPSU, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate Stalin was to wreck chaos in Soviet ideology and engage in historical nihilism. It caused Party organizations at all levels to have barely any function whatsoever. It robbed the Party of its leadership of the military. In the end the CPSU—as great a Party as it was—scattered like a flock of frightened beasts! The Soviet Union—as great a country as it was—shattered into a dozen pieces. This is a lesson from the past!

—Xi Jinping, 2013

the number one form of theft in the United States is wage theft, which annually dwarfs outright robberies by almost 3 to 1

My great grandfather had the monopoly of eggs in all of China and my grandmother was super rich living in a mansion when the cultural revolution happened and communism took everything away.

Sipping on a gin and tonic as I castigate my son for wearing long pants before the age of twenty. He asks me when he can see his mother— who is also my cousin— again, and I remind him not to ask about her, because I don’t know how to say that my uncle and I had her lobotomized and put in a hospital for crying too much. I send him back to boarding school for another six months as I head to my job as an executive for a large chemical company that my grandfather got me, overseeing South American mining operations. Upon hearing that a newly-elected government wants to levy a tax on our mining profits and institute an eight hour work day, I call up my old Skull and Bones chums who work for Zapata Oil and Air America, ask if there’s anything they can do to help, and they promise they’ll look into it. I will drink nine more gin and tonics throughout the day before switching to bourbon. Old Money Life.

from https://hexbear.net/comment/1605227

“I don’t know why you’re complaining,” I say to my fellow scavenger as I pull a shabby jacket off a frozen corpse in the alley behind an abandoned Applebee’s, “the economy is doing great!”

“authoritarian” is the worst libertarian meme of all time. The important difference between governments is who they work for— all states are class dictatorships, either ownership class or working class. Putting them on an “authority” scale implies that all governments are somehow separate from the people, and in the same degree.

—@[email protected]

[on a blind date] You listen to a lot of NPR? That’s cool, I hear the tiny desk concert things are pretty good. What do I listen to? Well there’s this thing called Cum Town and today I caught an extended segment where an adolescent Ben Shapiro gets his prepubescent testicles crushed inside the ass of child sex predator Mr. Feeny from Boy Meets World and that’s the backstory to why Ben Shapiro’s voice is so shrill in the voiceovers for those Nissan car commercials. Wait, why are you leaving? I thought this was going well?

It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.

Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.

—Georgian philosopher Ioseb dzе Jugashvili

I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953-56, p. 372

Marxists do not claim people should just work for society because of some selfless feelings, Marx was personally annoyed with people who constantly said this and commented on it himself:

Communists do not oppose egoism…The Communists do not preach morality at all. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc…the Communists by no means want to do away with the “private individual” for the sake of the “general”, selfless man. That is a statement of the imagination.

—Marx, The German Ideology

The reason Marx saw a post-capitalist society as having socialized production, where people work for society, is because they have to. But, I know what you’re thinking, “that’s authoritarian!” But you’d be misunderstanding, he did not believe people would work socially because the government would tell them to at gunpoint or that owning a private business would be against the law.

No, he thought they would work socially because any other sort of economic arrangement would simply not be possible. Even if you changed the laws to allow for starting a private business, you still could not start one, because it would just not be something feasible people could do.

Why? Because Marx observed that in all capitalist societies, private enterprises always grow in scale, and the proportion of small businesses to big is continually shrinking. The more this goes on, the smaller the proportion of businesses owners to workers in a society becomes, the more and more small businesses go bankrupt and people the business owners then become regular workers.

Why does this happen? Because the government outlawed private businesses? No, because as businesses grow in size, the smaller businesses that can’t keep up eventually just can’t compete and are less efficient and go bankrupt.

Not only this, but as businesses get bigger, the barrier of entry constantly rises. Can you start a small business in your basement to compete with Samsung? Of course not, you need hundreds of billions of dollars in capital to even begin to compete!

Again, it’s not the government making it illegal to own a business. It’s the physical conditions of everyday life making it simply impossible to own one no matter what the laws say.

It is a misunderstanding of Marxism to think that what Marx had in mind was just to make all private businesses illegal. Rather, the vision he had was to nationalize the “big industry” which has already grown so large that there is hardly much competition anymore anyways, and then to use it to try and speed up economic development, because this will make more of the small business sector grow into big businesses, and then eventually they too can be nationalized.

Hence, Marx argued for a gradual, “by degree” nationalization process, alongside encouraging rapid economic development, “the development of the productive forces.” Not just making all private enterprise illegal.

People would work for this big industry because there would simply be no other industry to work for and it would not be physically possible for them to start a small business even if the laws allowed them to.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/DebateCommunism/comments/v5p1pe/forcing_people_to_work/ibjupi2/

Liberal conception of “human rights” is just so stupid.

You have the “right” to own things, but you don’t have the right to the means to actually own things, so in practice you might own nothing, but who cares? This piece of paper says it’s your “right” to do so!

You have the “right” to free speech, but you don’t have the right to an actual platform, i.e. the right for your speech to actually be heard. If the system doesn’t like what you say, they can just kick you from all platforms. You have the “right” to shout as loud as you want as long as it’s in a place no one can hear you, so you don’t actually have the right for your speech to actually mean anything.

That’s how all liberal “rights” are. They’re in practice useless, because you have the right to something in principle, but don’t have the right to actually use that right, you just have the right in some vague, ethereal, almost magical sense, disconnected from reality, and many indeed view it as magic, saying these “rights” are handed down by God almighty and not social constructions.

Because you can’t actually use these “rights” in practice, then in the real world, they only serve as justification for restricting people’s freedoms. Why does this corporate giant get to censor dissenters? Because they have the “right” to do what they want with their platform! Why do billionaires get the “right” to control hoards of wealth and other people’s labor? Because they have the “right” to do so! Why does this landlord get to tell me how I should live when I’m the one taking care of the actual apartment and living here? Because they have the “right”!

It’s a funny thing, because it is very reminiscent of divine right of kings. Since many people genuinely believe these rights come from God almighty, then suddenly, Jeff Bezos’s rule becomes sanctioned by God almighty. It’s not much different than saying, the king has the authority to control the nation’s wealth and its people, because the “right” was given to them from on high!

from https://np.reddit.com/r/CommunismMemes/comments/v5np64/liberals_and_libertarians_say_we_will_starve_yet/ibbdjhq/

Libs don’t know any basic history. They claim Hitler “allied” with the USSR because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, ignoring that:

1. Hitler openly declared his intention to invade the USSR in Mein Kampf and the Soviet archives show us Soviet leadership was well aware of this. It’s absurd to suggest they ever had any sort of mutual trust that could be considered an “alliance” since the Soviets were convinced Germany was planning to invade them. Only a year after the pact which is supposedly an “alliance,” the Soviet government declared the Wehrmacht as “the most dangerous threat to the Soviet Union.” Soviet spies also repeatedly even reported on potential invasions, with Richard Sorge even reporting the exact date of the invasion. Western media likes to portray this 1939-1941 period as an “alliance” where the Hitler breaking the pact was a “sudden shock” to the Soviets, when in reality, the Soviets were paranoid of being invaded, they all were convinced they were going to be invaded, and historians universally agree they were trying to militarily prepare for an invasion.
2. The Munich Agreement signed by western powers such as France and UK also agreed to partition Czechoslovakia to appease Hitler. Was this an alliance? No, it was appeasement. In hindsight, appeasement was the wrong decision, but as they say, hindsight is 20/20. The Holocaust did not begin until 1941, years after both these agreements, and you can’t know if someone will break the agreement until they already broke it. In other words, knowing this was a bad decision required seeing into the future. If Hitler never carried out a Holocaust, and WW2 was completely avoided, then we wouldn’t be looking back on history with things like Molotov-Ribbontrop pact and the Munich Agreement so poorly.
3. Appeasement could have been avoided in its entirety if UK and France agreed to have a mutual defense treaty with the USSR to contain Germany. The USSR proposed this to the UK and France, but were ignored (source). If you are a weakened country from war, your powerful neighbor has openly stated they wish to invade you, and no one wants to form a military alliance with you, how do you possibly defend yourself? Through appeasement of course.
4. Appeasement did at least delay WW2. The Soviets were very weak from WW1 and their civil war. They needed time to build up their industry, and this should not be understated. You can see a graph here of how fast they were industrializing. Given how close the war between Germany and the Soviets were, without delaying the war, the Soviets might have lost, meaning that this pact delaying the war is arguably one of the most humanitarian political decisions ever carried out, since it prevented the Holocaust from spreading to all of eastern Europe. To quote Stalin, “What did we gain by concluding the non-aggression pact with Germany? We secured our country peace for a year and a half and the opportunity of preparing our forces to repulse fascist Germany should she risk an attack on our country despite the pact. This was a definite advantage for us and a disadvantage for fascist Germany.”
5. Some will say the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is worse than the Munich Agreement because the partition of Poland also included a joint invasion. But nothing in the agreement actually calls for an invasion. The Soviets could’ve not entered de facto Polish territory at all and still the agreement would not have been voided. It only called for “spheres of influence,” meaning that both powers would not try to stretch any of their political influence beyond certain defined boundaries. So the Soviet entry into Polish de facto territory should be treated as a separate question to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact itself.
6. Indeed, the Soviets did end up militarily entering de facto Polish territory in response to seeing the Germans invade Poland. But what you aren’t told is that much of this territory either belonged to Soviet Russia or Ukraine prior, and that Poland took this territory after embarking on an imperialistic conquest, viewing themselves as the rightful inheritors of the Polish empire that existed some centuries prior, so they tried to expand their borders to take land that was the same as that empire.
7. What cities did the Soviets invade? If you name them, you quickly find none of them are actually part of Poland today. They were only held by Poland for an incredibly brief period of time, after Poland’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia, and prior to the Soviets taking the land back, not even 2 decades, about 18 years. The only exception is Bialystok and a few small towns around it, which did go beyond what the Poles originally took, but the Soviets restored this land pretty quickly after the Poles complained. The Soviets had no intent to “conquer” or “occupy” Poland, but just took their land back which rightfully belonged to them in the first place.
8. Take Lviv for example. Lviv was controlled by Ukraine, and the declared capitol of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic. Poland invaded and the government retreated into exile, and then held this land for 18 years until Soviet Ukraine with the rest of the Soviet Union took it back. It seems to set a weird precedence to insist a country invading another to restore its empire from centuries ago is justified, but that one country using its military to take back land stolen not even a quarter of a lifetime ago is actually the evil one.
9. Poland was settling large amounts of Poles into the territory it took and oppressing the Ukrainians there, rounding them up and putting them into concentration camps. Naturally, this made Poland take interest in Nazi ideology, and came under heavy influence of Nazi Germany. To quote Boris Shaposhnikov from the time, “Poland is already [drawn] into the orbit of the Fascist bloc while seeking to demonstrate supposed independence of its foreign policy.”
10. Soviet entry into Polish occupied territory also provided a pathway for Soviets to begin evacuating Jews from the Holocaust. To quote James Rosenberg, “of some 1,750,000 Jews who succeeded in escaping the Axis since the outbreak of hostilities, about 1,600,000 were evacuated by the Soviet Government from Eastern Poland and subsequently occupied Soviet territory and transported far into the Russian interior.”
11. While the Soviets eventually did cross into actually rightfully Polish land, this was only when Germany had already taken it over and attacked the USSR, and Germany was carrying out the Holocaust at this point. Meaning, the Soviets liberating Poland from the Nazis is a good thing, and they should be grateful for it, and owe a debt to the Soviet army.
12. Even some western powers were in agreement that the Soviets were right in the expanding in order to contain Hitler. Churchill, for example, would even admit that the Soviet entry into the Baltics was a positive thing because it could help contain Hitler (source). So it’s really a new-age historical revisionism to act like nobody knew Hitler had expansionist tendencies and that the Soviets were not in the right trying to contain it.

To summarize: the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was one of the most humanitarian political decisions in human history. Soviets were trapped in a corner with no allies willing to help them and knowing German expansionism was coming, which would spread the Holocaust throughout all of Eureasia, and they made the hard decisions necessary to stop it, as well as liberating territory unrightfully occupied by Poland that rightfully belonged to several other republics, notably Ukraine. There are millions of people’s lives we can point to who were directly saved by this, but potentially tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, who would’ve died if the Germans managed to defeat the Soviet Union.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/CommunismMemes/comments/vf79er/an_old_political_cartoon_im_sure_theyd_make_a/icuhcvb/