I saw a post that talked about racism towards people and when I talked about it the response I got was very heated and a person even called lemmy.world a community of ‘hitlerites’
I have been around for a week or so and this is my first time seeing such explicit vulgar reaction towards another community, is this a one-off or should I block hexbear?
Wait, really? The ones responsible for, among other things, the Holodomor? Those guys? Why?!
Marxists support the USSR as the world’s first Socialist State. They don’t believe it was some perfect wonderland free from troubles, issues, problems, etc, rather, they acknowledge that the USSR was real Socialism with real victories, like free healthcare and education, an elimination of famine in a country where starvation was regular, doubled life expectancies, dramatically lowered wealth inequality while dramatically raising wages, and over tripled literacy rates to near 100%.
Hexbear aren’t unique in general support for the Soviet Union, the overwhelming majority of Marxists see it as far better than Tsarist Russia and the modern Russian Federation.
“doubling” the life expectancy? Life expectancy was 30 years old prior to the USSR forming in 1922, so yes “doubling” to 67 took until 1967, and before they doubled it, they dropped it to 23.6 years old. Tens of millions of Soviet citizens died early deaths to get there. Starvation didn’t end for many and rationing was commonplace. I suppose killing off a sizable portion of your population would mean less mouths to feed, but what a horrible approach to try to solve that problem.
Perhaps a better measure would be infant mortality. The USA, with its “worse” healthcare, has had consistently less than half infant mortality (or even lower) for every year the Soviet Union existed.
…in Russian. If you spoke a different language, like Ukrainian, it was forbidden by USSR law from teaching it in schools. This happened to dozens of languages in other Oblasts.
On the surface this looks good, but that would be with a Western view of what earned wages could buy. Even with money there was limited food to buy for decades at a time during the Soviet Union. Further, you couldn’t just do something like go a buy a car. You had to get on a wait list for years to even have an option to buy one.
Better than Peter the great or Putin, probably, but those are both really low bars to gauge a win by.
I’m not saying everything about the Soviet Union was bad, but holding it up as an example to aspire to would be rejected by most folks that would be forced to live that life (or die an early death under its heel as a consequence of actions of the state). Do the Marxists you’re referring to really pine to live in 1940s or 1950s Soviet Union?
A bit dishonest to point to the drops in life expectancy and the general 1940s and 1950s period without mentioning World War II, where the Nazis waged a war of extermination and genocide on those they considered genetically inferior, don’t you think? Same with comparing a highly developed country that saw no land fighting in World War II to the country devastated the most by it that was a feudal backwater only a couple decades prior when it comes to infant mortality. The bit on literacy is also misleading, the vast majority of all SSRs pre-Socialism were illiterate.
Outside of curiously leaving out World War 2 and the massive devastation it brought (80% of combat in World War 2 was on the Eastern Front), as well as comparing directly to the United States that never saw the same destruction and started the century several laps ahead, your only real criticism was a lack of consumer goods. This is true, light industry was lacking and being closed off from the Global Economy was indeed a contributing factor to its dissolution, but you could have pointed to that honestly.
No, most Marxists don’t want to go back in time to the first Socialist state, they would rather learn from what worked and what didn’t and be part of building a Communist future.