Alright Zig Forums how do we feel about modern day Belarus? Is Lukashanko actually an evil dictator who deserves to be overthrown in the name of "freedom" or is he actually worth a shit? Anyone here live or has lived in Belarus who can tell us about it?
Anything else about Belarus is welcome, at the very leased they have based aesthetics for their propaganda
What a loaded question OP. Nobody in this day and age is simply "an evil dictator who must be overthrown for freedom". More like, in this day and age, an autocratic government struggles to maintain power and stability after the massive shockwave that was the Soviet Union's collapse.
belarus is capitalist
belarus is capitalist
belarus is capitalist
belarus does not need "liberation" from other capitalist countries
belarus does not need "liberation" from other capitalist countries
belarus does not need "liberation" from other capitalist countries
No one that oppose the US deserve this
With the premise that Belraus has the highest standards of all ex socialist countries, he's a putin tier guy who understood that cashing in on soviet nostalgia would allow him to stay in power as long as he wanted too.
The KGB there is still called KGB proudly, there are still tanks and weapons parade besides that it's corrupt as fuck with mid tier standards of living. He's superior to gorby, yelstin and his predecessor but he's not even brezhnev tier.
That said Belraus it's one of the few place where you can revive ☭TANKIE☭ aesthetics, which makes it automatically better than most europe imho
I have some friends, acquired family and an ex lover there.
Friends now live in america an love capitalism, acquired family still shows me we pride their medals, photos and stuff from the USSR times. Specifically the oldest of these is still proud to wear the red army uniform everytime he has to dress formally.
Ex lover is kind of a mixed bag, never happy, doesn't like the weakness of people oustide of her home country and ex socialist states, proud to live there, wishes to have soviet union back but at the same time she low key wishes to have been born in America.
Anyway, fuck her.
It's not easy to enter (you can stay up to 5 days without visa if you are european), people there are always curios about what you are doing here, if you enter if some less than offical way and act strange i'm pretty sure you are gonna be tailed.
Everyone speaks Russian tho.
It's capitalism yes, but also ☭TANKIE☭ Disneyland. From clothes to architecture everything screams WE WHERE THE GREATEST THING TO EVER HAPPEN.
Basically slightly less corrupt Putinism with soviet aesthetics
It's interesting how communism has through contraction become a sort of WE WUZ KANGZ signifier in the former soviet union. It's an argument for the inherent failure of marxism too, it always devolves into a signifier for martial prowess and racial supremacy when it is imposed on a population.
Who let /r/neoliberal in?
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but then
Kek kill yourself liberal, Belarus is literally nothing more than a Putin proxy and life is still better than at least half the USA due to the programs retained from the Soviet days.
Literally not an argument
You don't need arguments, you need literacy rates, caloric intake and chocolate rations to have gone up since 1920.
sounds kind of shitty
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Eugene from EML is a Belarusian marxist
So the Soviet system improving the livelihood of all who were touched by it is a bad thing?
No, the bad thing is that some cretins reify those statistics as if their entire existence itself is nothing but a statistic of statistics. That the interpretation of those statistics by our residient homo sovieticus show a complete lack of understanding of the field of statistics is besides the point, to argue based on them only confirms his premise; your life means nothing, there being a 200% increase in hydro-electric dams does.
Let's do a thought-experiment; let us take one of those tribes living in the Amazon jungle, one of those that is threatened by loggers. Their literacy rates are zero, they have high infant mortality, they have no electricity, their productive capacities have barely expanded since the stone age. If we were to kidnap this tribe, put them in a prison somewhere in the U.S where they can be put to work, teach their children literacy, provide free medical care to decrease infant mortality, and add a whole bunch of other stuff that would see increases in their statistics far greater than the soviet union ever did, would we then be doing that amazonian tribe a much greater service than the soviet union ever did to its people?
Unironically yes
What surprises me most when talking to the far-left is that I often find they don't so much oppose capitalism, to the contrary, it doesn't go far enough for them.
you two annoying fuckers will both get a trip to gulag
kys social fascist
it's contrived anyway. the USSR didn't have to do any of that shit to help indigenous people (such as in Siberia) or Roma, they were all happy to have healthcare, education, electricity, etc. world communism would just give tribespeople goods and services in return for them taking care of the forests and fighting off illegal loggers.
These are some spicy dialectics
surprisingly, you don't have to fucking abduct and imprison people to give them doctors and medicine
Sure I was just replying to the autistic thought experiment of the liberal
I didn't literally mean that should be our goal as communists
This is downright fucking retarded. The Soviet Union would have had to kidnap people from other countries and force them against their will to take part in the society in order for this analogy to work.
Nah, you're definitely thinking of the far-right here.
It's an example concerning principle, the more contrived, the better.
What is the invasion of the Baltics?
That's not kidnapping ;)
Seriously though, tough shit. Their lives improved and freedom is an illusion.
Why do you need stalin to improve your life for you?
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…what? I don't.
Ya know, a little over a year ago i considered myself a liberal and seeing just how fucking impossible it was to get even affordable healthcare here drove me to the left. Capitalist insurance companies don't give a rat's ass about anything other than their profits. I don't need Stalin to improve my life, I need a economic system that allows for me to get the healthcare i need. I shouldn't have to sell an arm and a leg just so I can get one fixed!
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Full. Circle. With the exception that you completely lack ambition.
And so you advocate for a system that took human resources to its most literal meaning…
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Do you mean socialists see people as simple tools? If that's what you mean, you have it completely backwards. If I got seriously ill and had to stay in the hospital for a couple months, I'm broken. It would be a in a capitalist's best interest to fire me immediately and bring in someone new. I got replaced. Just like a worn out cog in a machine. Luckily, there was a point in time in my country when people fought for worker's rights. Unluckily, thanks to Reagan and the neoliberal movement spurred on by the dissolution of the USSR, these rights are slowly being torn away from us.
also, in response to your other response: You assume that by simply working hard EVERYONE can have a BMX to cry in. This is impossible under capitalism. There must be have-nots in order to have the havers.
BMW is obviously what i meant
Yes, as in the people in this thread and their great leaders doing so.
Then why advocate for a system that was most comparable to a gigantic Fordist cooperation to which you are nothing but a production statistic?
No I don't assume that, I said that you have the same ideological attitude to life as BMW-girl, without the ambition of BMW-girl. Unlike her, you cannot imagine yourself as anything but a passive pure subject of a managerial state.
This is a laughably inaccurate description of communism and communists. There are no historical examples of communists who view themselves or the proletariat at large as passive subjects. The process of building communism requires extending democratic control both politics and economy. The working class are an active participant in this process.
All states track statistics. I don't get what your point is. My point is that capitalists are the ones who treat people like objects. If we are unable to work we might as well be dead. We have no guarantee of shelter, food, water, education, or healthcare. It's not the capitalists problem you live on the street, digging for food in dumpsters. If you can't make a profit for him, fuck off.
Man, you're just bitching about the things all states do, regardless of ideology. Communists do anything but see themselves as passive subjects. We have the power to change society should material conditions align.
You're confusing the ideal with actual. It's this my wife never cheats on me, for when she cheats on me she is no longer my wife closed logical loop that makes discussions about communism impossible with many communists.
My point is that the homo sovieticus in this thread treats people as objects, as things that are the superficial surface of the statistics collected about them, instead of the other way around. You project this onto the "capitalists", as if the simple fact of owning a business or land makes one a merciless slave driver, an intrinsically inhuman creature of pure calculation. As such, communists can defend fencing of provinces and confiscating the food of the inhabitants to sell it abroad for a profit, as a revolution against a class of people who treat others as objects whose life's are only worth what they can produce.
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I don't see how examining historical examples can be interpreted an intangible ideal. The socialist states that were trying to build communism all achieved a high degree of political and economic democracy. Far higher than most currently existing so called "developed" capitalists states. Even socialist states that are not trying to build communism such as Cuba and the DPRK today have superior democratic institutions compared to most capitalist states.
Then why aren't people allowed to leave them?
Hate to break it to you bud, but…
I don't get this
defecting to enemy is treason
AnCaps, SocDems, and MLs believe the more stuff a Government does the more Communist and Socialist it is.
We must support Lukashanko in his anti-imperialistic struggle against the Colorado potato beetle
It's an even more reactionary version of Putin's Russia.
That's not even true. Also the USSR, like it or hate it, wasn't just "the government doing stuff"
Corporations are very much about increasing shareholder value to the exclusion of any other calculation. They can "choose" not to, but the choice exists only abstractly rather than concretely. Private property, in the form of business and land, does force us to consider and calculate in order to act according to a profit motive; even without that, the possibility within private property is necessarily linked to the enforcement mechanisms of property: laws, the courts, the police, etc. This process relies on calculation, but it's the type of calculation homo idioticus happens to like. Because this good calculation is "freedom" and not the evil "authoritarian" calculation of socialists.
The type of freedom being defended is itself not the freedom actually offered to the general populace but the freedom of the ideal within capitalism, the wealthy capitalist himself. And even that ideal is imagined without the consideration of his need to accumulate continually in order to maintain his position. Such "freedom" exists for him only abstractly rather than as the concrete set of choices foisted upon him by the necessities of his position within capitalism.
he is based & redpilled
to you neoliberals treating people like humans is just merely giving them the theoretical possibility of owning property, forever competing in a race to see who can extract more money out the rest, only taking into consideration their needs as humans in so far as they can be made use to make more money,is this what you call "treating people like humans"?, because at least the soviet statistic collection was a way to measure how well the state could actually give people a better quality of life