this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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I’m “collectivize the farms and factories” left, and even I recognize that it’s a hell of a lot easier to get to the second state from the first state than from where we are now.
I do wish the left broadly could unify under the idea that we need to make incremental progress.
A lot of people on this very site think there's going to be a glorious people's revolution any day now. I could spend hours describing how unrealistic that fantasy is, but I think more people rather live with their indulgent fantasies than go out and plant trees that they will never sit in the shade of.
That's literally been the last century + of western politics, and uh we've all seen how that's turning out.
I wish centrists could unify under the idea that we need to make a complete and total overhaul. That they could recognize that the climate alone will kill us if we don't do, let alone the fascists and capitalists at our back.
The label we're gathering under is progressives, it's mostly leftists but you leave the praxis at home and recognize that no one is going to read a pamphlet
Turns out, when you have good messaging, most people are on board with the practical changes we could make today. Mumdani is a rockstar at it
The Zohran Mamdani campaign has peeled the curtain back from American politics and exposed how much of it has been kayfabe all along. And the people writing the scripts are not happy about it.
I hope it continues, while I know he will win, I hope he also succeeds against the ringmasters and production executives who have manufactured our reality.
I don't think it's kayfabe so much as a bunch of consultant brained fucktards desperately grasping at power, but also having no idea why they're doing this anymore
But Mumdani has shown us that the people really are desperate for leftism. They want what we want, they just need crisp and simple messaging
It is true that far, far more Americans (particularly in larger population centers) want more social and economic benefits from their tax money and aren't being distracted by the culture war nonsense.
But I do believe the establishment democrat platform is basically owned and operated by the same forces that are empowering the right. AIPAC for one, the rest are a who's-who of corporate interests and financial institutions.
Creating an opponent against your own cause, but one you can actually control and manage is a trick as old as time itself for fooling people into supporting your side while thinking they're opposing it. This is why sites like reddit are basically under state control, even though you think it's swinging left or liberal, the entire spread of narratives there are tightly managed and the closer you look, the more apparent it becomes. (Look up Eglin Air force Base + Reddit for a real tinfoil-clad rabbit hole.)
Oh man do I ever with you. I’m absolutely an idealist, I agree with the OP’s sentiment. But I will absolutely support anyone with any ideology that gets us closer. Small steps are easier to take, this bullshit that everyone thinks we need the perfect candidate with the one weird trick.
See what that got us. I have no goddamned idea where to go from here. I’ll support any ham sandwich that drags us in the right direction.
That incremental progress has been so slow its reversing into fascism, congratulations this is the enviable outcome of reformism.
I forget about this colloquialism, but find it a good description for how I try to be day to day
Welcome back Karl Kautsky. Excited for World War 1?
While that's true, I think by positioning ourselves at the 2nd state, it allows us to "negotiate" our way down to getting the 1st state. Its kind of like haggling. If you start at the more extreme position, opposition will (in an ideal scenario) try to find a middle ground to agree on. And that middle ground would look like the 1st state. It's a way of combatting the ratcheting effect.
Are you aware of how many people starved when farms were collectivized in the Soviet Union?
It is possible to improve on the methods and priorities of previous attempts.
The problem with the previous attempts was prioritizing ideology over real life problems. Doesn't sound like socialists are capable of understanding why that's a problem because they believe that conforming to ideology will magically solve all problems. Just like they believed that in the Soviet Union... which is what caused the famines.
It was actually not the case, the USSR was the most materialist and least idealist country. The 1929 collectivization drive was kicked together with the first 5-year economic plan of the Soviet Union, which drove a growth of 10%+ in economic output YEARLY during the following decade. This was a necessary preparation measure against the constant threat of external invasion for the sin of being communist, as demonstrated during the Russian Civil War when the Reds were invaded by England, France, the USA, Italy, France and Germany, all of whom helped the Whites in hopes of restoring absolutist monarchy and the Russian Empire. Stalin famously gave a speech in 1931 saying that the USSR was 50-100 years behind in industrialization and they had 10 years to make up for it or they would be crushed. 10 years later, Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.
If it hadn't been for the industrial boom made possible by the rapid collectivization of agriculture, the Soviets would have lost to the Nazis, leading to the extermination of tens of millions of Eastern Europeans according to the Generalplan Ost, ideologically very similar to the contemporary genocide of Palestinians by Isn'treal as an attempt of settler colonialism. Additionally, the industrialization led to the total elimination of famine in a formerly backwater feudal Russian Empire, raising the life expectancy from about 30 years in the 1920s to 60+ years by 1955.
There were mistakes and failures in the collectivization policy which led to a degree of unnecessary suffering, but these weren't due to idealism, Marxist-Leninists are fundamentally materialist in their analysis which is the polar opposite of idealism, they were the consequence of lack of knowledge and of hurries to do the first successful complete collectivization of land of a nation in human history.
I didn't know socialists were GDP-obsessed neoliberals here, socialism is good because it outpaces capitalism in GDP growth? How nice.
And five years before that, Stalin was collaborating with the Nazis. Strange.
And at the same Stalin was deporting millions as part of his policy of russification. Do you apologize for all the other Allied Powers war crimes during WW2 as well? Critical support to FDR and the USA war machine?
Socialism is when the government does stuff
As a matter of fact socialists are concerned with economic output, but not GDP. If you bothered to open a book, you'd know that the USSR did have a macroeconomic variable that guided some of its policy regarding growth of production, but it was not based off total economic output, only of agriculture and industry. It was Net Material Product. Industrial output wasn't important because number go up, it was important because it allowed the USSR to become the nation manufacturing most tractors by the late 30s, and it allowed the manufacturing of the rifles, tanks, planes, munitions and artillery that enabled the defeat of Nazism.
You probably mean two years before that, in 1939, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact happened, but you don't really care about what happened, you're just replicating anticommunist propaganda because that's your preconceived view. If you care to read a bit on Molotov Ribbentrop, I suggest you to read a previous comment I wrote about it. Suffice it to say that Molotov is the surname of the foreign affairs commissar that was put in place that very year after 10 years of Maxim Litvinov being the foreign affairs representative, whom if you really care to read about the topic, will know staunchly argued in favour of a collective assault on Germany by France, Britain and the USSR, honouring the mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia together with France as an alternative to the Munich Agreements, and led the USSR to being the only country in Europe offering help to republicans and anarchists in Spain fighting fascism 3 years earlier in the Spanish civil war which happened on the opposite corner of the continent. Europe would rather see the USSR destroyed by Nazism and that's why they rejected every attempt of a mutual defense agreement, even the one where Stalin offered to send one million soldiers to France in exchange for a mutual defense agreement against Nazism, which the French refused. If you still, after learning that, believe that the Soviets "collaborated with Nazism", you simply have an anticommunist agenda, because that statement represents the opposite of what really happened in the 1930s Europe.
Millions were deported, but there was no policy of Russification. The only racist deportation events that took place were those of the Koreans and the Crimean Tatars, both horrible mistakes of racist policy that we should criticize, but let's remind ourselves this is the 1930s, in the US black people couldn't sit next to whites in the bus. Stalin's position in the party in 1917 was commissar of nationalities, because he had written an important essay on the problem of how to achieve the preservation of nationalities while at the same time being international solidarity communists.
The USSR was amazingly progressive in terms of diversity and respect of nationalities for its time, which is why each republic had the right to determine its own official language (see Ukrainian, Kazakh, Uzbek, Estonian, etc.), most books and newspapers in those republic were printed in the official language, people had a right to an education in their own language, and while Russian was encouraged as a língua franca, it was not generally imposed instead of smaller local languages. For example, Mari language in the Republic of Mari El was taught in Mari El schools all the way to the 90s, when schools stopped teaching in Mari and started teaching in Russian. If you look at the number of Estonian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, Uzbek, Georgian or Armenian speakers over time you will find that at least it's stable, with most of those languages growing over time. You can compare that with for example Occitan language in southern France, which in the 1920s had 1.5mn speakers and now barely has 100k. That's what successful policy of Frenchification looks like, yet I don't think I've seen you once complain about Occitan people.
Please go through your comment history and tell me how many comments you have making it a point to talk about western power war crimes not as a tool to shit on the Soviet Union, but to actually criticise them.
Socialism is famously when you get almost total land redistribution among peasants in collective farms, yes, I don't even see your point here.
Critical support to FDR and the AFL and their joint venture of industrial policy to massively increase the United States industrial base to defeat the nazis?
They literally worked together to carve up Poland and signed a Mutual Defense Pact with each other while the USSR supplied the Nazi regime with raw materials as part of their trade agreements. Everything else you've talked about is just Realpolitik.
I don't disagree. Lenin was right about The National Question and the Soviet policy of Korenizatsiia (a theory of Stalins creation) was good. I will give you that, BUT Stalin reversed all of this with his mass deporations and genocide of Ukranians with the cultivation of the Soviet-Russian National Identity culminating in the inter-imperialist literally termed "Great Patriotic War"!
4/15 of my comments are literally about criticizing a western powers crimes (although, not for WW2)!
Land reform is a petty-bourgeoisie demand culminating in the recreation of the capitalist social relation and the destruction of the Peasant class. Many capitalist countries have undergone the same transformation, just without the level of state interference and control the Soviet Union had. Just because the state manages the farms does not mean it is not capitalism as the fundamental mechanism of capital accumulation remains.
I'm gonna please ask you to actually read my comment and to be open to the historical evidence I bring (using Wikipedia as a source, hopefully not suspect of being tankie-biased), because I believe there is a great mistake in the way contemporary western nations interpret history of WW2 and the interwar period. Thank you for actually making the effort, I know it's a long comment, but please engage with the points I'm making:
The only country who offered to start a collective offensive against the Nazis and to uphold the defense agreement with Czechoslovakia as an alternative to the Munich Betrayal was the USSR. From that Wikipedia article: "The Soviet Union announced its willingness to come to Czechoslovakia's assistance, provided the Red Army would be able to cross Polish and Romanian territory; both countries refused." Poland could have literally been saved from Nazi invasion if France and itself had agreed to start a war together against Nazi Germany, but they didn't want to. By your logic of "carving up Poland" being akin to Nazi collaboration, Poland DESERVED to be invaded for carving up Czechoslovakia. I don't personally believe this, but I hope you apply the same logic here or don't apply it anywhere.
As a Spaniard leftist it's so infuriating when the Soviet Union, the ONLY country in 1936 which actively fought fascism in Europe by sending weapons, tanks and aviation to my homeland in the other side of the continent in the Spanish civil war against fascism, is accused of appeasing the fascists. The Soviets weren't dumb, they knew the danger and threat of Nazism and worked for the entire decade of the 1930s under the Litvinov Doctrine of Collective Security to enter mutual defense agreements with England, France and Poland, which all refused because they were convinced that the Nazis would honor their own stated purpose of invading the communists in the East. The Soviets went as far as to offer ONE MILLION troops to France (Archive link against paywall) together with tanks, artillery and aviation in 1939 in exchange for a mutual defense agreement, which the French didn't agree to because of the stated reason. Just from THIS evidence, the Soviets were by far the most antifascist country in Europe throughout the 1930s, you literally won't find any other country doing any remotely similar efforts to fight Nazism. If you do, please provide evidence.
The invasion of "Poland" is also severely misconstrued. The Soviets didn't invade what we think of when we say Poland. They invaded overwhelmingly Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian lands that Poland had previously invaded in 1919. Poland in 1938, a year before the invasion:
"Polish" territories invaded by the USSR in 1939:
The Soviets invaded famously Polish cities such as Lviv (sixth most populous city in modern Ukraine), Pinsk (important city in western Belarus) and Vilnius (capital of freaking modern Lithuania). They only invaded a small chunk of what you'd consider Poland nowadays, and the rest of lands were actually liberated from Polish occupation and returned to the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanian socialist republics. Hopefully you understand the importance of giving Ukrainians back their lands and sovereignty?
Additionally, the Soviets didn't invade Poland together with the Nazis, they invaded a bit more than two weeks after the Nazi invasion, at a time when the Polish government had already exiled itself and there was no Polish administration. The meaning of this, is that all lands not occupied by Soviet troops, would have been occupied by Nazis. There was no alternative. The Soviet invasion effectively protected millions of Slavic peoples like Poles, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the stated aim of Nazis of genociding the Slavic peoples all the way to the Urals.
All in all, my conclusion is: the Soviets were fully aware of the dangers of Nazism and fought against it earlier than anyone (Spanish civil war), spent the entire 30s pushing for an anti-Nazi mutual defence agreement which was refused by France, England and Poland, tried to honour the existing mutual defense agreement with Czechoslovakia which France rejected and Poland didn't allow (Romania neither but they were fascists so that's a given), and offered to send a million troops to France's border with Germany to destroy Nazism but weren't allowed to do so. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a tool of postponing the war in a period in which the USSR, a very young country with only 10 years of industrialization behind it since the first 5-year plan in 1929, was growing at a 10% GDP per year rate and needed every moment it could get. I can and do criticise decisions such as the invasion of Finland, but ultimately even the western leaders at the time seem to generally agree with my interpretation:
“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, August 24, 1939 (one day after pact's signing)
You talk about the rest being "realpolitik", but what's the problem with that? When you're attempting to win an all-out war against NAZIS of course you need to apply realpolitik, I don't see the issue with that.
So you're saying it's fine that 8 million people starved because ideological bullshit goals were achieved? Fucking commie Marie Antoinette over here. Let them eat ideology!
Not because ideological goals were achieved. If you read my comment you'll see I'm concerned with material outcomes. Eliminating Nazism saved tens of millions of lives. Industrializing the Soviet Union eliminated hunger and gave universal healthcare, saving tens of millions of lives. Compare the life expectancy of the USSR in 1929 with that of Brazil 1929 (countries with similar level of development) and you'll see that the rapid industrialization by the 1970s had led to such massive improvements of life expectancy that tens of millions of lives were saved in comparison with Brazil, no other country industrialized so quickly up to that point in history. I care about saving tens of millions of lives, yes, and you're also inflating the number of deaths from starvation
This is a fallacy. You're assuming only socialism in Russia could've lead to the defeat of the Nazis. I'm explaining the Nazis were stupid (as all fascists are) and their defeat was inevitable, but you're completely what I'm saying. You're also ignoring that fact that socialism is not required for a country to industrialize.
This is something like the anthropic principle. Just because it went A -> B -> C doesn't mean it's not possible to get to C any other way. Socialism is not a requirement for industrialization and socialism is not a requirement for defeating fascism. It's just a flawed system that a lot of people starved under.
Are you aware of how many tens of millions of people were saved from Nazi genocide thanks to the industrialization that underpinned the collectivization of farms in the Soviet Union?
Are you aware that many other countries industrialized without collectivizing farms? That's not at all a requirement for industrialization and doesn't have anything to do with the Nazis stupidly entering into a two front war because of the general incompetence that goes hand and hand with fascism.
Yes, the other countries at the time who had industrialized had done so through slavery (USA) or colonialism (UK, France, Germany, Japan), all of which killed tens of millions more than collectivization failures ever did.
Nazis are stupid, but don't diminish the Soviet war effort. 80% of dead Nazi soldiers died in the Eastern Front, and it costed the lives of 25 million Soviet heroes to achieve this.
Fuck the Soviets. The reason we went to war is because the Nazis invaded Poland, and the Soviets were complicit in that. Just because Hitler was a dumbass and attacked the Soviet Union doesn't mean we owe that fucked up government anything. I respect the soldiers that fought despite the fact they had that asshole Stalin oppressing them, but I have no respect for the Soviet Union or Stalin because of the events of WWII, and neither should you.
Are you aware of the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” logical fallacy?
You think you're ever going to get the working class on board with a socialist movement by using pretentious latin phrases?
The Kolkhoz system in the Soviet Union is really not to dissimilar to modern farming practices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolkhoz
The system of petty/peasant farming is over. Successful farms are already "collectivized", and hire farmhands to do the work.
https://www.epi.org/blog/how-many-farmworkers-are-employed-in-the-united-states/
WTF are you talking about? Undocumented immigrants are the peasant class of the USA. Are you so out of touch you don't know who harvests the food you eat?
Proletarians work for a wage, peasants do not. The undocumented immigrants on USA farms are proletarians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasant
Your main claim was that, the Soviet Union "collective" farming system caused famine; but in reality it was just the conversion from traditional feudal peasant farming to modern capitalist farming, entirely orchestrated by the state.
Modern farms are already "collectivized" and so your claim does not hold water or is at best accurate but completely irrelevant to the modern day.
Well you're a pedantic one aren't you? Undocumented immigrants don't have the rights of a citizen and therefore are a lower class. They work in the agricultural sector for the landowner while having no rights. That's a peasant to me, but go a head and continue be pedantic about everything to avoid having any new thoughts.
Well the only people who are talking about stopping at one state are the centrists arguing we must 'compromise' and accept the top only.
I fully support going to both..
Uh...I don't think you've done a check up on where the centrists are lately. Centrists split the difference between the parties, they're over there going "well, healthcare is good, but who's going to pay for it? I don't like what ice is doing, they're hurting too many people while they look for the criminals"
The abundance liberals also claim they want to do the first one, but they seem like a fresh wave of neolibs
It seems like progrssives are the only ones serious about the first one, and they're largely on board with the second one
I think you've still identified that the meme is trying to get at "there's 'left', and there's LEFT." The U.S. public suffers from a dearth of broadly-accepted terminology for labeling these groups, so some group will always misunderstand exactly who you mean.