Muh ☭TANKIE☭s just want the USSR back

The USSR was ultimately a failure. Sure it made some great achievements, but it failed to achieve the ultimate goal of the proletarian revolution: the overthrow of capitalism and establishment of a lasting proletarian state.

I find it ironic that ☭TANKIE☭s will always say that their repression, centralization, and limiting of democracy was necessary to preserve the revolution, even though it didn’t actually do so in the long run. The Soviet Union had many critical flaws and internal contradictions, and recreating it will have the same result. 21st century socialism should begin with an autopsy of the failures of the last century, learn from them, and not repeat them. Anything else is brainlet LARPer/nostalgia tier.

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I get your point. Now imagine Cuba 'opening up.' They would get a Venezuelan-type US funded opposition in seconds, the groundwork for which is already in place.

I agree, but there's one critical point to be made here: every communist state or territory will have as its internal contradiction an externality: the rest of the capitalist world. It's an 'unfair' advantage of any status quo over its opposing revolutionary movement. The USSR decided to enter the arms race, for instance, massively pulling down its resources. Is there telling if they didn't then the US wouldn't invaded them? I don't know.

liberationschool.org/interview-with-ex-cia-html/

Yes but in addition to external pressure the USSR had internal flaws that crippled their economy and political system. Rampant corruption and an unaccountable leadership were probably the greatest of these, since they inhibited any attempt at real reform of a flawed economy.

Because wanting to recreate dead nations out of Nostalgia and ireventism is dumb

Dengistfag was right, even if for the wrong reasons.

Pathetic.

How did the Soviets limit democracy ? They had a Tsarist regime before. They didn't have democracy to begin with, you can't limit something that wasn't there in the first place.

That's not an issue inherent to the system, that's an issue of individuality. This is literally the humans choosing God or Lucifer idea all over again. People make mistakes, even the most dedicated communist is human and can change. Shifting political opinions happen, power can corrupt and chance occurrences can throw following events into a completely different direction than before.

I think the problem is systemic, simply because corruption flourishes in conditions where there is a lack of accountability. This was the case in the USSR because of its many undemocratic tendencies, which allowed corruption to run rampant in the leadership without being held to account by the public. In addition the rigidity of the political system and the vested interests of government officials (such as bureaucrats) prevented the reform of the Soviet system, which could have been improved with tools such as cybernetics.

Isn't the Communist Party recreating the USSR Reactionary?

You have to explain what's bad with reactionary in this case fam.
The label ain't shit

is that supposed to be some kind of gotcha?

Except that this was NOT the case in the USSR and its proven by how long the USSR lasted.

disproven bullshit.

The USSR was not democratic in the traditional western sense, because that meaning of democratic means "Mob Rule". Capitalist democracy is a farce, since the single 'vote' of a upper-classman is equal to many votes of a prole; 1 cote for his interests and the votes of proles he influences through the sheer overwhelming power of superiority in education, wealth and class, which means that they can bend the rules easily, utilizing these, even if they did nothing to deserve it, and are only 'superior' by their arbitrary social position.

Back to the USSR, it was a Polity of worker soviets, which started on a local level, and built up to the federal government. It is a Cooperative Federalist system in that sense. No soviet leaders until Yeltsin were appointed power based on bloodline, political position or any of that kind of tripe, even Stalin was elected. If you just look at the Soviet Union's honored constitution, you can clearly see the evidence.

Quote:
"Article 36. The Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. is elected for a term of four years."
You can argue semantics but that is individual and not systemic. Farming Co-Ops and Industrial centers were given basal supervision and otherwise maintained themselves, giving only reports to the central government so as to make decisions and accumulate votes for them. This is explained by Yuri Muhin as he worked as an engineer and a manager of various industrial centers.

departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/1977toc.html

departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/1936toc.html

londonprogressivejournal.com/article/view/2185/the-ussr-the-democracy-you-didnt-know-about

Stepehn Kotkin - Magnetic Mountain (good overview of the party/state tensions during industrialisation, has a big section of the later purges, policing, the NKVD etc.)

J. Arch Getty - The Origins of the Great Purge (very much about structures, a bit outdated and contested, but I think a good overview of the administrative purges and what local party politics could be like - the later book The Road to Terror with Getty and Naumov is better in terms of the origins of the terror etc… but less specific about local power politics.)

Sheila Fitzpatrick - Everyday Stalinism (this is more so about what it was like to live in the era than about structures and such but does a good job of explaining the role of the party in everyday life and how people felt about it all)

Patrick Sloan Soviet Democracy: docs.google.com/file/d/0B1ZP6ZurgOg-R1pjc2NVQkQxYmM/edit

youtube.com/watch?v=9PoYzPfguJc

youtube.com/watch?v=Okz2YMW1AwY

gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=c22e40075143d321a449a15690f82720

marxism.halkcephesi.net/Grover Furr/index.htm

gowans.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/democracy-east-germany-and-the-berlin-wall/

Reforms are what destroyed the USSR, and this is proven by the drop in growth across all boards caused by Corn-man and more importantly Gorby.

Cybernetics that only began developement in the 1960s and only came to usable development in the 70s. The USSR had such programs, or do you think that a country that pioneered a major portion of the innovations across all spheres in the 20th century didn't think of that? You do realize that a large portion of silicon valley is made up of ex-soviet computer-scientists who lost their jobs with the fall of the USSR.

I could go on and on, point is you're striding in here making suggestions on things you have a surface understanding of.

At what point did I endorse bourgeois democracy?

Democratic on paper doesn’t mean democratic in practice, socialists and critics of liberalism should know this better tham anybody. According to the US constitution America is a democracy, and yet we know that to h a lie. There were multiple means by which the party elite suppressed Soviet democracy, including the single party system, press censorship, the ban on factions, and the fact that the party congresses (the only time rank and file CPSU members had any chance to influence party policy directly) were held only once every five years. Not to mention all the unofficial ways in which dissent could be suppressed such as temporary arrest of sitting legislators ahead of an important vote, the limiting of job prospects outside of government, etc. All of these combined allowed for a quite limited spectrum of acceptable opinion and what could be called a deeply flawed democracy at best.

Again, I never endorsed Cornman or Gorby’s reforms, I simply said that the system required reforms in order to improve its function. To deny this is to claim that the Soviet system under Stalin was literally infallible, since only a perfect system would be in no need of reform.

And yet they never implemented them, or even experimented with them on the same scale that much smaller counties like Chile did.

I’m not trying to trash the Soviet Union here, I think it was an admirable project that achieved many great things, it’s flag is hanging beside me right now. However it was in the long run, an undeniable failure, and claiming it had no structural flaws is just willful ignorance that will only result in the failure of any future socialist project.