Nah, southern Koreans are pissed, if highly divided on Yoon. It’s southern Korean tradition to kill or imprison presidents at this point. Yoon will likely serve most if not all of his sentence.

The purges were not simply Stalin lashing out. The purges were done by the broader Soviet government, in response to a real threat. The majority of cases simply resulted in an expulsion from government, it wasn’t a naked goal to execute a certain quota of people. There was a real crisis on hand, and the Soviets responded with legal action, those found guilty of treason or other crimes punishable by death (such as murder, severe sexual assault, antisemitism, etc) were sentenced accordingly.

I have no idea what you mean by “ivory tower.” The global south has a far more nuanced perception of Stalin than the west does. My stance on Stalin is a common stance among Marxist-Leninists, that he was more good than bad, especially when measured honestly and accurately against contemporary monsters like Churchill.

And no, it isn’t easy for Neoliberals to “destroy” us communists. When the Red Scare club of Stalin’s black legend is wielded against us, we can do one of the following:

1. Agree with the Red Scare version of Stalin, throwing existing socialist history and victories under the bus to “save face,” which backfires and makes socialism entirely unconvincing, and relies on lying to the working classes just to agree with people that already hate us

2. Accurately appraise Stalin and put him in the correct historical context. Honestly tell people of his successes and mistakes, without flinching. This is the practice that does result in advancement and spreading of communist ideas.

When picking between lying by regurgitaging Red Scare mythos and taking a principled, historically accurate stance, it’s clear that the latter is the only acceptable option. We cannot grow the movement through lies, we need to meet the people honestly, which involves honest engagement with past failures and successes. This does not mean conceding the point to bourgeois historiography.

Essentially, it isn’t the communists giving an honest and accurate account that hurts the movement, it’s the people trying to distance themselves from socialist history and alienating themselves from historical struggle. Experience shows this, which is why Marxism-Leninism is resurging while anti-AES branches of Marxism are faltering.

Here’s the excellent Marketing Socialism by Nia Frome:

When I was a kid I also believed ‘communists should ditch that label, for PR reasons.’ Now I think we make more headway owning it than dishonestly disavowing it. Not least because someone will almost always bring up Stalin no matter what we call ourselves.

Stalin is a powerful trope. His name stands for the perverse emergence of injustice from the overzealous pursuit of justice. It’s dramatic irony, a morality tale about how power corrupts. That mythic trope stands as a barricade for socialism no matter what kind of spin you put on socialism.

The ritual denunciation of Stalin on “the left”:

1. presents a utopia of socialism without antagonism, flatters first-worlders and academics,
2. spares people the unpleasantness of interrogating how their ideas about the past were formed, and
3. makes a virtue of losing and waiting.

First-worlders get to feel better about themselves if they believe that all the socialist revolutions that took place in the third world “weren’t really socialist.” The same goes for denigrating national liberation of ex-colonies as bourgeois, Bonapartist, etc. Intellectuals get to feel more important if they believe really existing socialism “failed” because of faulty ideas. This lends itself to an interpretation of history where ideas are the motive force, and fidelity to the text is paramount. It’s not surprising that they would also trash “developmentalism” as “merely” bringing food security, electricity, literacy, education, industry, healthcare, job security, etc.

What are the crimes normally attributed to Stalin? The show trials, the purges, the gulag, forced collectivization… in other words: state violence. The socialisms that define themselves in opposition to Stalin therefore downplay state violence as much as they can. This yields a socialism that’s just trying to sell itself to people like any other commodity. Disavowing negativity/terror means ignoring that the USSR made the world a better place partly by scaring porkie.

The question of who’s doing violence to whom, and to what end, is the fundamental problem of politics. It’s capitalism’s answer to this question that makes us hate it so much. “Nobody does violence to anybody” sounds good, but it’s not actually a political position. Political positions require charting out a plausible course from where we are now into the glorious future ahead, and that path goes through socialist states. Statehood is (a monopoly on legitimate) violence. Thus, the demonization of Stalin is the demonization of socialist statehood itself.

In other words, pretending our new thing is sui generis and doesn’t have anything to do with “Stalinism” doesn’t actually mean we’ll face different problems, or have better solutions. Stalin faced problems that were generic to socialism. Socialism isn’t just an infinitely malleable brand in need of better marketing, it’s a class project with definite and durable contours. We don’t actually transcend these problems just by calling ourselves something else, just like we don’t transcend capitalism by calling ourselves post-capitalist.

Anticommunism is most efficiently compressed and transmitted as demonization of Stalin, and it stands in the way of Americans joining any possible global left wing project, since it prejudices them against left authority everywhere (but especially overseas). International solidarity requires that we abandon great power chauvinism. Hatred of Stalin reinforces great power chauvinism, therefore defending Stalin weakens it.

If we decline to draw from the entire history of socialism-in-power in favor of utopian socialism or pragmatic liberalism, the range of results we can obtain will be limited to those achieved by utopian socialism (evanescent communes) and pragmatic liberalism (hellworld).

Read the Losurdo text I linked.

Thanks! 🫡

Makes sense, and I understand that.

Wikipedia shows the figure I gave for the purges, not 3.3 million. The deaths in the gulag system should not at all be counted with those related to cracking down on corruption and terrorist organizing (ie the purges), as a huge portion happened during World War II due to starvation. The Nazis took Ukraine, the USSR’s breadbasket, and this caused mass famine that hit prisoners the hardest. The soviet prisons were actually fairly progressive for their time, see Russian Justice for that.

The problem with your framing, that we “must never let this happen again,” is that it assumes deliberate malpractice by the Soviets. The purges were a response to real infiltration, corruption, and terrorism, such as the assassination of Kirov. Your characterization of the purges as “soviet rank-maxxing” are absurd and baseless, it was a period of intense paranoia due to the successful assassination of one of the top soviet figures and the discovery of terrorist cells within the Soviet Union. The purges were widely supported by the public, it was not a period of terror.

The deaths in soviet prisons during World War II were causes by the Nazis, not the Soviets. Deaths due to dekulakization, which your Wikipedia article references, are analogous to the deaths of slave owners in the United States. Liberation of the peasants was paid for with the blood of the kulaks, bourgeois semi-slave owners.

There’s also the question of “Stalinism.” Stalinism does not exist outside of specific socioeconomic policies under Stalin, it isn’t an actual ideology. Marxism-Leninism is an ideology, and Stalin’s contributions to it are largely limited to advancements on the national question and linguistics. The bulk comes from Marx and Lenin, and moreso Engels than Stalin.

You were given good answer to all of these questions in that thread. The Marxist position isn’t that “Stalin did nothing wrong,” but that western framing of Stalin is incredibly biased. Your Wikipedia article does this well, it blames Stalin for deaths inflicted by the Nazis, and it capes for semi-slavers, fascists, and terrorists. Stalin of course made mistakes, and there was excess committed under Stalin, there is no doubt of this. However, you take the incorrect stance that Stalin was more bad than good, and do so by also caping for the same semi-slavers and fascists Wikipedia did. This is why historiography is important, and why dispelling the “black myth” around Stalin is important.

I highly recommend Domenico Losurdo’s Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend. Losurdo cites near exclusively western sources, and explains both why Stalin is so hated, and why Stalin is so loved as well. It’s a history and critique of Stalin’s legend more than the man himself, which is important considering how much the figure is distorted by historiography.

You admit to not knowing the history, maybe take that as a chance to dig into it?

Where are you getting 3.3 million killed in the purges? The number of sentencings to death was ~799,455, and we know many were canceled as the purges went beyond what was expected.

Lemmy was made by communists, seeking to build an alternative to Reddit where communists will not be able to be fully censored. Federation also is similar to how the USSR was federated, and FOSS attracts the left. As such, many areas on Lemmy are going to be pro-CPC (and supportive of socialist states in general).

This isn’t the case on every instance, though. Each instance has its own political leanings, some very anti-China and anti-communist in general. It depends on the moderation, federation practices, and focus of the instance itself.

Communists tend to be pro-African, especially the Alliance of Sahel States.

Hexbear.net is anarchist, Marxist-Leninist, and Maoist. It’s best seen as “left unity” rather than ML, which is why it’s federated with dbzer0 and quokk.au while Lemmygrad.ml is not.

Lemmy was made by communists, seeking to build an alternative to Reddit where communists will not be able to be fully censored. Federation also is similar to how the USSR was federated, and FOSS attracts the left. As such, many areas on Lemmy are going to be pro-CPC (and supportive of socialist states in general).

This isn’t the case on every instance, though. Each instance has its own political leanings, some very anti-China and anti-communist in general. It depends on the moderation, federation practices, and focus of the instance itself.

Communists tend to be pro-African, especially the Alliance of Sahel States.

Many Lemmy instances have their own focus, themes, vibe, knowledge, culture, and more. Searching exclusively within local is useful for that. If you want broad federation, then Lemmy.world is ironically worse than instances like Lemmy.ml, because Lemmy.world blocks leftist instances like Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml. Lemmy.world is basically Reddit but FOSS, with all the good and bad that comes with that, while other instances are genuinely unique and interesting by themselves. Federation is just a bonus that adds variety and more engagement.

It’s useful for onlookers to see clear takedowns.

The social credit score myth in China is highly exaggerated in the west, and is largely projection, considering the very real credit scores dictating where we can live and get loans for.

No, the US Empire has been a genocidal settler-colony since its existence, and is actively plundering the world of surplus value created by the global south. It actively bombs and destroys countries that go against that, under both major parties, because both major parties serve capitalist interests.

I’m not sure which post @Objection@lemmy.ml is referring to, but in simple terms, markets are useful in that they stitch together and connect production. This is a progressive development on disparate, unconnected production, be it for necessities or for luxuries. However, once production is all stitched together, it’s easier to see the whole and plan it, by which point the progressive aspects of markets have outlived their usefulness.

What’s key, though, is control. Class struggle remains alive until it ends. In order to maintain socialist control, the large firms and key industries need to be dominated by a working class state. This way capitalists cannot leverage control over the means of production and turn it into political power, they are kept to secondary and highly competitive industries in a birdcage. They may fly as they see fit within those bounds, but the owner of the cage can shrink it as they see fit.

Capitalism’s historic role is in connecting humanity. In other words, in socializing production. The working class’s historic role is socializing distribution as well, moving from the chaos of markets to a scientific plan gradually after siezing political control.

Hope that helps!

Kiev has been slaughtering civilians in the DPR and LPR since 2014, when they seceded following the Banderite coup.

Czechoslovakia was 1968, well after Stalin’s death. You’re referring to Khrushchev in Hungary in 1956, which is indeed the incident that led to the split in the CPGB, but when people use the term today they use it against those who generally support socialist states.

People that support existing socialist states.

Kiev has been murdering civilians in the Donbass region since the Banderite coup in 2014. Pointing out the reverance the modern Kiev regime has for Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera, and their far-right politics, is just highlighting an uncomfortable truth for westerners that rely on fascists. Despite your hatred of communists, we aren’t going anywhere.

Who sets those terms? And why don’t the people living in Donetsk and Luhansk get a say?

Nope. Just like the charges against Maduro, this is bullshit used to manufacture consent.