Wars and proxy wars since 1776.
EDIT: The post is not an endorsement of the USSR. You can now stop fighting for your "team" and start defending the anti-war values you claim to uphold.
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2025
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Was the USSR actually “left” lmao
I feel like people don’t understand the origination of left and right, at all.
No. People can’t get past the propaganda and the fact that while the revolution started as a leftist movement, it was quickly captured by reactionaries who transformed the liberatory movement into a repressive police state. Police states cannot be leftist, full stop.
I mean, leftism typically centers around who controls the means of production and is largely defined in economic terms.
I think the Soviets would argue against being called a repressive police state, especially in Russia where they made huge strides in liberty compared to serfdom under the empire. They would argue you have to maintain a dictatorship of the proletariat to ensure the means of production remains in the hands of the people.
Where I differ in this belief is the expansive nature of the Soviet government, and the difference in treatment of Russians under the system compared to especially non Slavic groups within the USSR.
They have lots of arguments but they’re all bullshit. Leftism is about more than economics, that’s a particular Marxist obsession. Leftism is broader than that. But even if you want to focus on economics alone (which is ridiculously myopic since other political topics obviously have a direct impact on economics), workers in the USSR lost control of the means of production almost immediately. State control is not liberation, particularly when that state is repressive and undemocratic.
And being left of the Tsar doesn’t make you a leftist in the modern context. If that’s the case then Donald Trump is a leftist.
How so? I mean there're a lot of ways to generalize the political spectrum, but an easy and common way is to separate left and right into socialized economies and privatized economies, and then from there those respective government can run from authoritarian to libertarian.
Yeah, but economic have an even greater direct impact on shaping politics.
In some ways I would agree with that, but I doubt the majority of workers in the USSR would have made the same claim. We have a the perspective of hindsight and didn't have to live through the brutality of serfdom in the Russian empire.
Again, it depends on your definition of leftism, and what you are interpreting. Was the USSR liberating compared to the average lifestyles of most modern western government? No probably not. Was is liberating compared to being serfdom under the Romanov? Yeah, it was a pretty huge upgrade.
Right, but is the value of evaluating history outside of its historical context?