My dad called me one last week. I told him I’m not even a communist, just a moderate social democrat who likes Soviet symbols for the shock value. (Not true, I’m a Marxist-Leninist, but gotta keep the peace with family, IYKYK.) But now I’m wondering, is “Stalinism” even a thing? Are any of you bears “Stalinists”?

                • alexei_1917 [mirror/your pronouns]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
                  2·
                  3 months ago

                  This comment reminds me of some old “left unity” spaces I used to go to in my teenage anarchist days. That quickly turned into ML spaces. It was surreal to watch happen. Yeah, that’s the thing. There’s stuff both sides can learn from each other, despite being an ML now I definitely still have a soft spot for the more rational libertarian socialist types because I don’t think my teenage self was entirely wrong, and if you want a strong leftist anything, we gotta be cool with each other.

                • alexei_1917 [mirror/your pronouns]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
                  2·
                  3 months ago

                  I’ve definitely dealt with some idiot “ancoms” more cool with liberals than “Stalinists”… but even at 13 in the height of my own anarchist phase I knew those guys were idiots.

          • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
            3·
            3 months ago

            1. Comm is on Hexbear, and follows Hexbear’s rules. It’s kind of like you crossing an open border to another country and expecting the laws to be the same, we don’t ask for your passport or credentials but we ask that you abide our rules.

            2. The USSR, both during Stalin’s tenure and not, was the largest and most significant socialist state in history (until the rise of the PRC). Slandering the USSR is pretty basic anti-communism, and is in no way comparable to Israel conflating anti-Zionism with anti-semitism.

            3. Fair, it happens.

              • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                7·
                3 months ago

                You’ll still see this comment, you just won’t see these comms show up.

                The thing is, we can’t separate Stalin from the USSR’s successes. We can either look at the USSR (and Stalin by extension) honestly, for the good and the bad, or we can just say Stalin and the USSR were bad. Looking at Stalin’s achievements, he was actually right a broad majority of the time despite existing in the most chaotic and dangerous period of soviet history. He was often socially reactionary, but at the same time he played a large (but not all-encompassing) role in the dramatic improvements the working class saw in the soviet union.

                To quote Nia Frome:

                The thing is, delinking socialism from Stalin also means delinking it from the Soviet Union, disavowing everything that’s been done under the name of socialism as “Stalinist.” The “socialism” that results from this procedure is defined as grassroots, bottom-up, democratic, non-bureaucratic, nonviolent, non-hierarchical… in other words, perfect. So whenever real revolutionaries (say, for example, the Naxals in India) do things imperfectly they are cast out of “socialism” and labeled “Stalinists.” This is clearly an example of respectability politics run amok. Tankies believe that this failure of solidarity, along with the utopian ideas that the revolution can win without any kind of serious conflict or without party discipline, are more significant problems for the left than is “authoritarianism” (see Engels for more on this last point). We believe that understanding the problems faced by Stalin and Mao helps us understand problems generic to socialism, that any successful socialism will have to face sooner or later. This is much more instructive and useful than just painting nicer and nicer pictures of socialism while the world gets worse and worse.