Propagating feel-goodism about climate change while taking money from the Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation and saying that eventually climate change will be solved by technology, whitewashing carbon capture technologies and overselling their potential, taking money from Templeton Foundation when making videos about consciousness, using the “Israel fighting Hamas” narrative in a 2025 video regarding wars…

Ok I thought I was talking to someone with basic political literacy. Yes, the overwhelming majority of EU citizens were/are against rise of retirement age and against defunding of public healthcare and education.

Greece was threatened with a default because EU states with Euro as their currency gave up their monetary sovereignty to the European Central Bank. England, the US or Japan have their own currencies so the state cannot default by definition, because the state can literally create an unlimited amount of the money it borrows through debt. Greece had a DEMOCRATIC REFERENDUM to revise its sovereign debt and the idea won by a long shot, and then the country was not allowed to exercise its democratic will under threat of cutting Euro supply by the ECB, i.e. default.

Every poll in the USA comes to some result close to 70% of USians supporting the idea of implementing universal healthcare because essentially every Democrat wants this and many Republicans want it too. It’s not done because the US isn’t a democracy, it’s a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

I’m actually done talking with you. You pretend to be a leftist but you have literally 0 support to offer to the working class, you have the narrowest understanding of politics as defined by whatever western outlets you consume, and you’re a smug debatelord who doesn’t care to inform themselves in the slightest, you haven’t picked up a single book about politics in your entire life and it shows. You constantly replicate lies and don’t care to admit it, you constantly miss information and you don’t care to admit it, and you think you’re the smartest person in the universe. Go waste someone else’s time.

If you’re unwilling to as much as listen, be honest to me and to yourself and stop wasting our time

You’re being purposefully obtuse. Did Bush obey the popular will when he invaded Iraq?

The only and best measure of democracy is the existence of multiple parties?

I’m trying to have an actual conversation with you, dont be a dick

Again, way to ignore 90% of my comment.

Democracy isn’t when there’s three parties, it’s when people generally get what they want. People in the entirety of Europe have been consistently overwhelmingly against Austerity Policy since 2008 and that’s all we’ve gotten, regardless of party in government or country in question, and when one country (Greece) decided to ignore austerity, it was literally threatened with a default by the European Central Bank and wasn’t allowed to do so. Plenty of parties and free vote in Europe, it all means nothing at the end of the day. If you’re USian instead, you’re probably aware that the overwhelming majority of USians want universal healthcare for decades and that’s systematically ignored by either party in government. What’s democracy then?

Again: why would an antidemocratic dictatorship of an owning class create free universal healthcare, free education to the highest degree, guaranteed housing and work, public services, thoughtful urban planning and walkable neighborhoods, quality public transit for the period, subsidies of basic foodstuffs, sports centres aplenty, paid holidays for everyone, high workplace safety, etc? Maybe, possibly, because it was more democratic than you’ve made out to think? Again, I’ve given you plenty of sources mate, and you’re just ignoring 90% of the comments I’m writing. Are you even a leftist at all? I wouldn’t have this patience with a rightoid

I provided three sourced quotes from contemporary western sources corroborating that the given reason for invading Finland was to put extra Soviet-controlled territory between the USSR and Nazi Germany.

Additional source, from Wikipedia’s article of the Winter War:

“In April 1938, NKVD agent Boris Yartsev contacted Finnish Foreign Minister Rudolf Holsti and Finnish Prime Minister Aimo Cajander, stating that the Soviets did not trust Germany and that war was considered possible between the two countries. The Red Army would not wait passively behind the border but would rather “advance to meet the enemy”. Finnish representatives assured Yartsev that Finland was committed to a policy of neutrality and that the country would resist any armed incursion. Yartsev suggested that Finland cede or lease some islands in the Gulf of Finland along the seaward approaches to Leningrad, but Finland refused”

Your and Soviet gut feelings about Finns collabbing with Nazis, however right they ended up being afterwards, weren’t the official reason to invade Finland’s south, the reason was simply putting extra land on the way, as explicitly said by Soviet officials during negotiations to try and peacefully get that land, and as proven by the fact that the Soviets stopped the war when they got these territories.

My point is you don’t need to assume inclination to allying with the Nazis. I personally believe it too, but the motives for the invasion were ultimately different, as explained by the sources I’ve given you.

People needing to line up for basic goods

This is, as you say, the Soviet Union close to its dissolution. These are the post-1985 times of Perestroika, in which unsuccessful liberal reforms were implemented to Soviet industry in a radical manner, such as overnight replacing 50% of resource allocation by planning committee to markets that didnt exist, and general chaos ensued. It was a big mistake that led to issues such as bread lines, but it’s specific to the late 80s. You and I have lived the lack of stock of basic goods in supermarkets such as toilet paper and sunflower oil or eggs from particular historical events. Bread lines just did not happen in the USSR from the postwar recovery to the perestroika, and focusing on a few years of turmoil due to war or to bad policy towards the end isnt accurate of the experience of the rest of the time.

Based on the personal accounts of a relative

Then do your reading, mate, I’m sorry. I have relatives who have personal accounts of the streets being dangerous just because they’re racist pieces of shit and saw a black person. Look at the crime rates of my area and they’re at historic low, despite what personal accounts say. If you want personal accounts, go ask an old soviet person, most old people in Russia want the USSR back, and it was the case in Ukraine too until 10 years ago. Go ask old people in former Yugoslavia whether life was better under Tito or on what ensued. Or, be materialist, and don’t “listen to one personal account”: do your reading of actually researched studies. I gave you plenty of sources for my information regarding foodstuffs, access to housing and work, access to public transit, urban planning, infrastructure and the rural exodus since 1990, education, healthcare, sports… The information is there, and these books use sources that you can check by yourself. So please, don’t tell me “but I heard a relative say something different”.

My thesis mostly hinges on the Soviet Union not being democratic, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_Soviet_Union.

Exactly, your material and historical analysis of the Soviet Union is based off of NATOpedia.

In short: Wikipedia is primarily edited by white young males of english-speaking countries, so it features the bias or young males of English a speaking countries. This is well-known and even has Wikipedia articles dedicated to it. In particular, source selection on English Wikipedia is mostly taken from western news sources, so it reflects the bias of western news sources. Western news sources present systematic pro-western bias in geopolitically sensitive issues, you may recall the behaviour of western news sources regarding Palestine up to a few years ago, with no media talking of genocide and presenting the occupation of Palestine as a “both sides issue”. Other, possibly more egregious cases you may or not remember are Nayirah’s Testimony or the media flip on coverage of Russia in European countries, where up to 2022 Putin was said to be a “great governor and Russian patriot” (e.g. Francisco Marhuenda), which is now unthinkable. If you’re interested in this issue with Wikipedia, I wrote this detailed post about it some time ago.

I hope you, a self-declared socialist from what I’ve seen on your post history, will reflect on using mainstream western sources to analyze topics that are sensitive to western geopolitics as is the case for communism, we’re well aware of what the red scare in the US entailed and the lies that have been spread about socialism in general (not just the Soviet project) by the US state propaganda apparatus over the past century.

I encourage you to do some reading of my sources, especially Albert Szymanski’s “Human Rights in the Soviet Union”, which dispells a ton of western-manufactured myths about the USSR using mostly western academic sources.

And why does Russia’s life expectancy spike upwards right around the time the Soviet Union collapsed?

On the graph you can see Russia’s life expectancy peaked in 1990, then fell for one and a half decades coinciding with the dismantling of the USSR, and then in 2005 it starts to rise back, but doesnt reach pre-1990 levels until about 2015, so life expectancy didnt recover from capitalism until 25 years of technological advances passed. Regarding Brazil, yes, Brazil surpassed life expectancy in Russia during the crisis of the dismantling, I do think this supports my thesis that the dismantling murdered millions (by Paul Cockshott’s calculations, about 5-10 million in Russia alone).

Still leaves the question as to why the Soviet Union just collapsed?

If there were a class of owners strongly gripping to power in order to keep exploiting the majority of workers, you would expect very violent revolutions being needed to dismantle the system and remove them from power, but the transition to capitalism in the Eastern Block was overwhelmingly peaceful, which again supports my thesis that there wasn’t an owning class enjoying the fruits of others’ labour. As to why the USSR was dismantled this is a long topic, and if you’re interested in some materialist historical analysis, I recommend “Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union” by Robert Keeran and Thomas Kenny. It gives a good historical outlook on how it’s possible that the USSR survived something as impossibly difficult as WW2 and the murder of 25 million Soviet citizens (13% of the population) by Nazis, but it was dismantled in half a decade since the start of the perestroika in 1985.

Please, you’re patently showing that the reading you’ve done of the topic of the USSR is superficial and based off primarily western anticommunist sources. I encourage you to keep an open mind and read more about the project that uplifted 150 million peasants in the Russian Empire from extreme poverty to being the second most powerful nation on Earth, guaranteeing healthcare, education, housing, work, not performing unequal exchange or economic imperialism with any sort of colony unlike US and Europe with Africa and Latin America, and helping emancipatory movements such as that of Vietnam or Cuba.

Stop looking for excuses with on-the-spot reading of graphs or moving the goalposts (first wealth and de-jure ownership, then income not mattering, then radio silence about widespread access to social services and essential goods).

The reason to invade Finland wasn’t sue to Nazi collaborationism, Finland still wasn’t allied with the Nazis. The reason was the need for the USSR to put additional territory between themselves and the Nazis due to the geography of the region, i.e. the Great European Plain, a vast flatland without natural defenses that is very hard to protect from Nazi blitzkrieg. USSR attempted negotiations with Finland to gain terrains to have control over lands further from Moscow, Leningrad and the oil fields at the south of Russia, and only when those negotiations failed did the Soviets invade. This isn’t just explicitly what the Soviets were saying at the time of negotiations, it was openly said so by all western leaders at the time of the Molotov Ribbentrop truce:

“In those days the Soviet Government had grave reason to fear that they would be left one-on-one to face the Nazi fury. Stalin took measures which no free democracy could regard otherwise than with distaste. Yet I never doubted myself that his cardinal aim had been to hold the German armies off from Russia for as long as might be” (Paraphrased from Churchill’s December 1944 remarks in the House of Commons.)

“It would be unwise to assume Stalin approves of Hitler’s aggression. Probably the Soviet Government has merely sought a delaying tactic, not wanting to be the next victim. They will have a rude awakening, but they think, at least for now, they can keep the wolf from the door” Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States, 1933–1945), from Harold L. Ickes’s diary entries, early September 1939. Ickes’s diaries are published as The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes.

"One must suppose that the Soviet Government, seeing no immediate prospect of real support from outside, decided to make its own arrangements for self‑defence, however unpalatable such an agreement might appear. We in this House cannot be astonished that a government acting solely on grounds of power politics should take that course” Neville Chamberlain House of Commons Statement

Read it yet?

You explained it perfectly well: you have as an axiom based on no sources provided yet (I.e. hearsay) that the “owning class” of the USSR owned the state property de facto, and so inequalily was perpetuated. Not through income, conveniently, as I already provided data contradicting that, so you shift to saying money was worthless.

I have explained and given you numbers and evidence on how access to many goods and services was subsidized to the working class and stopped being so after the transition to capitalism, which again contradicts your initial assertion that it was also capitalism and a class society with an owning class and a working class. Now, answer my proposition: given how universal access was I such things and how it stopped being the case, why did the “owning class” previously grant the working class access to such healthcare, education, housing, foodstuffs, energy, public transit, infrastructure, sports facilities, and even holiday resorts?

The Soviet Union wasn’t communist

How so? I already dispelled your erroneous, CIA-manufactured understanding of ownership of the means of production in the USSR and gave you my sources, to which you haven’t replied other than by making up stuff on the spot. Would you care to argue otherwise from data?

Here is the graph with your methodical errors corrected

Thanks, I wasn’t aware of the caps-sensitivity of the Ngram viewer, good point. Regardless, you do notice that your graph proves further my point, right? That “Holodomor” is a word essentially unused from 1930 to 2000, and now it grows in usage each year as a consecuence of unaware pro-capitalist propagandists like you. I repeat: do you use such scary words for capitalist-inflicted famines, or is it something you reserve for punching to your left?

Dude, 3.5 million deaths (That’s the low estimate, by the way) through famine does not qualify as “successful nation-wide land collectivization”.

Depends. Famines were commonplace in the Russian Empire, and it’s to be expected that in a country in preindustrial agricultural production famines would happen. Ultimately there were mistakes during the land collectivization that led to unnecessary degrees of famine, true, but remember, it was the only successful attempt in the sense that it did collectivize land in a long-lasting and widespread manner, which had been attempted countless times over the past 5 millenia with no success until that point and many deaths in every attempt, e.g. the Gracchi brothers already attempted land collectivization in ancient Rome.

The collectivization of agriculture in the USSR enabled the first ever case of a state-owned industrial revolution, which managed to make the country grow by 10-15% YEARLY in economic output. The former Russian Empire went from being a pre-capitalist agrarian society to becoming an industrializing nation in 10 years, and that wasn’t out of desire, it was out of necessity. The 1929 collectivization coincides in time (not by coincidence) with the first 5-year plan, which set in motion the industrialization of the USSR that would lead to an increase of life expectancy from 30 years of age to 60 in 30 years, even with the most devastating war in history inbetween those years. Not only did it solve hunger forever and allow for widespread healthcare, it also enabled the industrial revolution that ended up DEFEATING NAZISM. Nazis had plans to murder and forcibly reallocate all Slavic and many other peoples between Germany and Urals, which amounts to hundreds of millions of people. By defeating Nazism, the industrial revolution of the USSR, kicked off in 1929, effectively saved TENS OF MILLIONS of lives from genocide, and then gave those very people healthcare and guaranteed food that DOUBLED life expectancy in a formerly feudal backwards empire. For reference, a comparable country in economic situation in 1930 would be Brazil, which by 1965 had a life expectancy of 55 years, where at that point USSR had raised it to 68. Multiply by 200 million lives, how many tens of millions of lives saved is that?

Now tell me: knowing how many tens if not hundreds of millions of lives were saved by the 1929 collectivization and industrial plans, do you still deny its success?

Ohhh, so now we bounce from your misunderstanding and conflation of wealth and income which now you conveniently forget about, and jump to “actually, money didn’t mean anything, so it doesn’t matter that income inequality was low”. Good to see you keep making up stuff on the spot.

If you had bothered to read my first comment, you’d have seen that highest wages were given not to party members but to highly trained professionals of the intelligentsia such as university professors or researchers (many of the latter in military projects). If wages were used as an incentive for these people, then how come money wasn’t real and didn’t mean anything? Then they would have paid those professionals the same!

Your point of “access to goods and services in the USSR through non-monetary means” has a bit of merit though, but it actually backfires to your agenda. Food basics, energy, heating, housing, basic clothing items, public transit and even housing were astonishingly low-priced, with housing costing about 3% of monthly family unit income, and with metro tickets in Moscow not changing price between 1940s and 1980. Healthcare was free to everyone, education was completely free to the highest level for everyone, and there was universal access to such important services. Those things actually work in the opposite direction that you mean: the poorer people were heavily subsidized in comparison to capitalist states. It’s especially relevant to rural areas, with tens of millions of formerly rural people being forced to abandon their hometowns after the deterioration or outright closure of formerly state-subsidized services (e.g. Moscow metropolitan area has grown by 6mn people over the past 30 years whereas the total population of Russia has shrunk by a few million).

Every single measurement of inequality has grown since the dismantling of the soviet state: reduction in life expectancy over the 90s and 2000s leading to above ten million premature deaths, lower childbirth rates, destruction of the public pension system, dismantling of public healthcare and education, removal of basic services in rural areas that have forced migrations of millions to cities, crime rates skyrocketed… What argument will you make up on-the-spot now?

No comment on the millions of Ukrainian deaths and lives ruined in the transition away from communism?

So everything bad that happens during communism is communism’s fault, and everything bad that happens after communism is also communism’s fault, gotcha.

Btw, keep in mind that you’re being a CIA pawn when you make such political use of “Holodomor”:

It’s a western-promoted propaganda word to refer to the Soviet Famine of the collectivization effort, and it’s used to blow over the Russian and Central-Asian deaths from the famine as if only Ukrainians had suffered it. It attempts to turn an unfortunate hunger during the first successful nation-wide land collectivization in human history into some sort of manufactured genocide of Ukrainians now that they can be used as a token to promote hate on communism and Russians. Do you also have a special scary word to refer to, e.g., the Bengal Famine in India, or is it something reserved to the enemies of capitalism?

Ok, so why if they already de-facto controlled everything, did they have comparably much lower INCOME. What stopped them from having higher INCOME? Why do you refuse to answer to that?

…and local businesses constantly close in favour of big companies, as countries develop the amount of self-employed people goes down:

Source

Local businesses simply cannot outcompete ever-growing big businesses, and because big businesses are in a need to ever-grow to satisfy the raising stock value imperative, they inevitably intrude the market share of local businesses. This is well-known since the mid-1800s.

And when the Crimean annexation by Russia took place, where was the referendum to allow NATO troops? Or does the government suddenly get the unilateral decision-making power when it comes to NATO?

Because there’s nothing to say about it other than that it was bad

Yes, there is plenty to say, actually. You could, for example, stop pretending that you actually do care about the well-being of Ukrainian people, since you apparently have no mention of the millions of deaths from destruction of public healthcare, alcoholism, drug abuse, violence, suicide, shitty diet and outright hunger that took place after 1991 and kept happening as Ukraine became the poorest country in Europe. You could admit that you only care about Ukrainians suffering now because the war happens to be against the geopolitical enemy of your country.

If you gave one flying fuck about the well-being of Ukrainians, you’d be supporting communism and the Soviet Union right now, since its disintegration led to the worst humanitarian crisis the country has seen since the Nazis invaded it, and to an ever-ongoing disintegration of public services which led to millions more premature deaths than the illegal Russian invasion. You would be complaining about Russian capitalism which is the one that invaded Ukraine, and you’d understand that there was no such war during Soviet times. It is precisely capitalism that brought all of this to Ukraine, and if you cared genuinely about Ukrainians and wished the best for them instead of using them as a pawn for your media-induced hatred of Russia, you’d wish for the USSR never to have fallen.

You’ve shown us in other comments that you’ve done no reading on the topic to the point that you don’t even bother to understand the difference between income and wealth, and you make up on-the-spot assumptions from your ill-informed, poorly-read, west-propagandized version of the topic. The problem isn’t that you do this, the problem is that you do this while claiming to be a leftist/anarchist. I’ll tell you something: if you, as a leftist/anarchist, share 90% of your opinion about a geopolitical enemy of the USA with the CIA, you’re doing something wrong.

They gave a response which you can check out. It boils down to “I don’t understand the difference between income and wealth, and I’m choosing to make up an on-the-spot interpretation based on my preconceived views”.