Counter point: Current-day Russia is many things but socialist certainly isn't one of them. Inequality is massive and health care is drinking yourself to death.
So, you know, fuckin' #BASED
Precisely why the MAGA types love it! Traditional values!
I’m okay with the MAGA types drinking themselves to death. At least then most of them won’t vote.
Yep, ignoring the 'shock therapy' from the 90s entirely that allowed a bunch of criminals to gain control of former state assets is anything but socialism.
Has Muscovy been anything other than backwards; wearing a cape of ideology? I see the threaded simulacra from the con of khans to Putin as a consistent parade of the Terrible'.
There is no exercise which occupies the average tanky's mind more than explaining why a literal oligarchy run by a guy who sees himself as the fascist messiah envisioned by the guy who invented christian fascism, is actually totally socialist and critical support and shut up liberal america bad!
It's because these spaces have just been infested by Russian trolls and it's super blatant. Lemmy.ml, at times, feels like it's legitimately an intro course for shitty Russian trolls before they get moved on to Facebook and reddit.
Well now I feel so cultured.
I dont think most tankies would say Russia is today socialist. 30% of employees in Russia work for the state in 2016 compared to 70-90% in 1985. And the biggest predisessor parties of Putin´s party United Russia were hard supported by the CIA and the US(because the parties were right wing and for capitalism and free markets etc. .) to win the russian 1991 and 1996 election before they started to rig election results.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_sector_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Russian_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_Russian_presidential_election https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/14o601y/oc_how_well_the_richest_top_1_have_been_doing_the/
They won't say it's socialist, but they still defend anything Russia does because it's anti-western, which is more important for the current generation of tankies.
If thats the case i think thats stupid and i think many would call me a tankie.
The litmus test for me is whether you support/apologise for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I dont support it i think it was crazy by Putin. But i still praise many things about the former Soviet Union and Maoist china and yugoslavia and cuba etc. . For example that everybody was garanteed a minimum income through the federal job guarantees and the low income inequality etc. .
That's cool, sounds lke you are a based leftist, not a tankie.
I'm under 30, but I remember when Russia was the big bad in western politics. Now our fascist parties are aligning themselves with Russia? It's very odd to me.
Oligarchy isn't odd, its a predictible outcome of "trickle down"
To be fair modern Russia is significantly closer to the fascism MAGA wants than the USSR.
I hate that "soviet MLs" is used as a label here, because the failure of the USSR is down to the undermining of the soviets.
The economy being centralised and then destroyed is why post-USSR states are disfunctional, and it's the same vulnerability the EU faces.
Were the economies actually managed democratically, they might have been able to weather the storm instead of getting fucked over by the world bank and IMF.
Instead of cooperating to sort out their affairs post-empire, countries are expected to play monopoly and somehow magically not have the same end game as monopoly.
Thank you! Workers councils actually run societies quite well
I hate that “soviet MLs” is used as a label here, because the failure of the USSR is down to the undermining of the soviets.
I mean, yes, but when most people use 'Soviet', especially in context of Russia and its history, they mean 'The Soviet Union', not the people's soviets it got its name from and then subsequently neutered. It's an unfair quirk of etymology or language development or whatever, but 'Soviet' as in 'Of the Soviet Union' is in far wider use than 'soviet' as in 'of workers' councils'.
The excuse I get from more intellectual Republican friends is that socialism in countries like Sweden and Norway work because they are monocultural.
This is such a "tell me you've never been in the north" claim. XD
Ah.
"Ethno-national socialism" you might say, yes, I can see why they would support that.
This is a bizarre take, even by PugJesus standards.
It would be like saying, "Oh, you claim to hate Nazism, yet you like West (or East) Germany which is still recovering from the effects of Nazism. Curious."
Russia isn't socialist to anyone who has developed object permanence. There's no hypocrisy in someone hating socialism and liking Russia, because Russia isn't socialist.
The only reason I can think why anyone would call Russia socialist is if their worldview still revolves around Cold War anti-communism and they haven't figured out how to adjust or adapt their mental frameworks or rhetorical points since then. Which seems to include a fair number of confused liberals, apparently.
Chuds typically say the Nordic Social Democracies are nice, but can only exist because they are small, and nearly ethno-states, because "they care strongly about helping their like-minded neighbors." Hardly anyone thinks the Nordics are Socialist. Chuds are usually nationalists, so this fits neatly into their worldview, for why others can have it nicer while they currently cannot.
As for the Russian Federation, I think anyone can agree that it's far from Socialist, and Shock Therapy absolutely destroyed Russia as Capitalists brutally plundered the remains of the USSR. Chuds like the Russian Federation because it is socially reactionary and highly Capitalist.
Modern Russia and the Soviet Union are very far from each other
In us units it's like Thanos and Ultron
"Russia used to have a different political system, therefore current-day Russia can't be traditional."
Or what exactly is the point here?
"MAGA hats have no real reason to mistake the Nordic countries as socialist, but do; and every reason to mistake Russia as the product of 'socialism', including a number of still-nationalized industries and high public sector employment, a former KGB member as leader who constantly praises the Soviet Union, and a still-active Communist Party, yet (correctly) identify it as the kind of non-socialist traditionalist shithole they'd love to live in. To them, 'socialist' just means 'gives LGBT people basic rights'."
Norway isn't in EU. Crazy right?
They'll join the very second they run out of oil
Yet they like the Viking ancestors of those socialist hellholes.
Worse actually. They like the Romantic-era aethetic of Vikings used for nationalist propaganda, not the actual ancient Norse peoples. Their characterizations of the Norse peoples are little more than ahistorical racist stereotypes.
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