Huitzilopochtli [they/them]

Hey, at least it’s the good kind of boiler failure and not the steam explosion kind.

Their parliamentary system is also crazy complex with a bunch of different types of members. Elections are first past the post, per-constituency. Some constituencies elect one member, while others elect a team of five or six all from the same party (with some mandatory ethnic representation). There are also (currently two) non-constituency members, from the opposition party, which are basically charity seats. There are also appointed members. The whole system feels knowingly constructed as a one-party system that primarily seeks opposition for the purpose of consultation, more like the États générau in pre-revolution France than a real, competitive parliament in the liberal tradition.

No they shouldn’t have? Why would they participate in weird American flag fucking rituals? It’s bad enough when people in México try to import that shit.

What do you mean? What is an ‘ideological’ dependence in this context?

I mean two things by that. First that the USSR was positively upheld as a the leader of the world revolution (which I don’t think could be avoided) and when it capitulated it did a lot to discredit communism globally. The second, which I think is more important to the argument I’m making is that allies of the USSR were generally expected to accept a level of ideological influence and stay somewhat consistent with the CPSU line. This included de-Stalinization, the implementation of Libermanism, certain geopolitical positions, etc. There was immense pressure to conform to and copy the USSR’s example, and this often led to poor outcomes like the East German NES. The effect this had was to weaken the local party’s own flexibility and ideological development. This, along with other forms of chauvinism and more direct meddling, was the impetus behind Kim Il-Sung developing Juche.

Okay, how else were they to be made independent from the USSR in a world with NATO in it?

It’s hard to say exactly what a post-USSR world would look like were they to have behaved differently, but the socialist world was never even given an opportunity to try. Outside of avoiding direct military conflict with NATO they could at least have been given economies that wouldn’t collapse the instant Soviet policy changed.

Wait, are you talking about the European states that are now engaging in literal colonialism, and not about any of the states/countries from Africa, Asia, or the Americas?

No, I’m talking about a variety of countries, some of them in Europe. I also really don’t think it is fair or a good faith argument to claim that the communist governments of these countries (which made these critiques) should have to answer for the colonialism of the governments that overthrew them. Ultimately China, Albania, Romania, and the DPRK all faced and critiqued these issues, and it was more broadly responsible for the overall unproductivity of comecon. More to the point, this was an issue structurally in socialist countries all over the world. The USSR did not foster effective multilateral trade between socialist countries other than itself, and it’s method of aid through subsidized trade effectively disincentivized it, as well as creating economies that could not even momentarily stand on their own without a benefactor giving them an unreasonably good deal in exchange for their alignment. Cuba is a very simple example of this: it benefited massively from these policies while the USSR still existed, but built up an economy that wholly relied on buying fuel and manufactured goods at way below market value by exchanging them for mostly sugar and tobacco at an absurdly inflated price. This grew Cuba’s economy incredibly quickly, but that growth was structured around an arrangement whose benefit for the USSR was power and strength for its own Communist bloc. When the USSR reduced their trade subsidy in the mid 80s, Cuba entered economic crisis and began defaulting. When the USSR ceased to exist, the special period happened. This is true of pretty much all of the USSR’s allies. They all began to suffer horribly in the Gorbachev-era, followed by economic collapse around 1991. In most cases they were forced into brutal loan terms and economic liberalization to survive.

I am going to suggest that the countries like Korea, Vietnam, Mozambique, Cuba, etc. did not immediately fall back under the same sort of subjugation they were suffering from before their liberation.

No, they certainly didn’t, but they absolutely did suffer and were forced into either isolation and starvation or to accept some level of subjugation to capital. Cuba and the DPRK held out and suffered immensely for it. Every ruling communist party in Africa formally abandoned communism, privatized large swathes of their economies, and entered into deals with imperialist powers. Their economies simply could not function, even briefly, without Soviet subsidy. Mozambique was forced into the Bretton Woods structural adjustment trap starting in 1986, war torn and faced with Gorbachev discontinuing their trade subsidy and cutting their aid. It has been trapped in extreme poverty and imperialist exploitation (with most of the economy being foreign-owned) since then. Đổi Mới also began in 1986 because Vietnam faced a similar crisis. I absolutely think the USSR’s help in their struggles was valuable and important, but the structure of the assistance subordinated them to the USSR, which then abandoned them.

Okay, what things do you think the PRC has been doing in a better way than the USSR regarding their allies?

My answer to that is honestly not much (though they at least aren’t currently repeating this mistake). I hope for more in the future but I can’t say whether that will come to pass. I just think that the way the USSR structured its internationalism isn’t critiqued enough in these discussions, and as a result of their collapse has done more harm to international socialism than China’s weird sectarian realpolitik did. I don’t think that internationally backing communist movements is bad at all, in fact I would point to all it accomplished in spite of the lopsided structure of Soviet aid, but I think it is important to be strategic and avoid their errors in carrying it out.

I’m not sure why you think I’m arguing that helping these movements was bad? I’m arguing that the USSR was chauvinistic and deliberately set up its allies as dependants ideologically and economically. I would never suggest that they should be made magically as strong as the USSR, but that it simply not deliberately subordinate them to itself. If it were just one ally of the USSR that accused them of that it would be one thing, but it was visibly structurally true and was a major fracture point for their relations with several other socialist countries.

Are you really going to suggest that the socialist bloc didn’t disintegrate almost immediately in the late 80s-early 90s? Post-colonial states typically fared better, but very firmly regressed and were almost all forced to re-enter the imperialists economic sphere.

Also, I’m not saying any of the things about China that you are claiming. If you’re going to argue entirely past me at some strawman I’m going to ask to disengage.

Helping socialist and anti-colonial movements largely benefitted the Soviet Union and it was in a perfect place to do so. The problem is that, especially post-Stalin, it did not treat them as equal partners or set them up for independent success. It created dependants, and this was great for its own position in the cold war game, but left the whole socialist world in shambles without it. This was an issue with most of their allies, and caused a number of major geopolitical rifts.

Internationalism doesn’t mean shit if you build it in a manner where it all falls apart almost instantaneously, and in fact I think the way the USSR lost pretty much all the ground gained in the biggest decolonial moment in modern history is an unforgivable sin.

I do wish the PRC would do more, and I think that most of its post-split policy can be summed up as stupid anti-soviet realpolitik, but I also don’t think there’s really been many viable moments (outside of Palestine) where the PRC’s support would leave a lasting impact since before the fall of the USSR. I want more, but resources shouldn’t be wasted on hopeless projects that turn China into a pariah in the meantime.

The USSR itself was also extremely sparing and strategic with its international efforts prior to the second world war, because it was in a vulnerable position. This was the basis for the concept of socialism in one country. Time will tell if the opportunity arises again.

The Soviet Union’s colossal fuckup created the world we’re in now. China’s efforts one way or the other have been tiny, and while I’m largely not a fan it is absolutely nothing compared to the way the Soviet Union squandered the strongest position socialism has ever been in globally, and ushered in a period of utterly unchallengeable American dominance.

I can only pray that we get another revolutionary moment as big as postwar decolonization and that whatever exists at that time doesn’t waste it again.

The CPSU is the one that built a world where all socialism revolved around and depended on their support and then just sort of gave up. It was a catastrophic error on the part of the Soviets to place themselves incontestably at the helm, and the fruit of that error is the near-instant collapse of the entire second world. If China had remained aligned with the USSR, it wouldn’t have stopped the party’s internal issues. China would most likely end up just like Vietnam, forced to implement market reforms.

The USSR built a socialist world around and wholly dependent on itself, and then capitulated internally (due to the utter decay of the party as a revolutionary institution), destroying that order almost all at once. I don’t know what China could have done to prevent that. An unsplit China would have been significantly more dependent on the USSR and at best would most likely have been forced into a similar position to Vietnam after the collapse anyway.

I think the chauvinism is ultimately much, much more important and frankly deserves more blame for the collapse of the Soviet Bloc than it is given in discussions. The USSR was the lynch pin of the socialist world. Every other country leaned on it intensely, and they were all burned horribly by it when the CPSU internally capitulated (which happened before the USSR actually fell). What are you supposed to do in the face of the USSR just abandoning their mission if you’re an aligned socialist government that depends on them? Both economically and politically, the USSR’s allies were leaned precariously against what they thought was a stable base, a superpower that held itself up as the headquarters of the revolution and an alternative to the west.

The post-WW2 European socialist states followed Gorbachev’s lead in capitulating. Parties in post-colonial states with actual revolutions were faced with economic devastation, ideological abandonment by the superpower that was their beacon, and inevitably had to liberalize and integrate with the global system since there was no longer a Soviet-led alternative.

I would also say that the post-Stalin Soviet union’s unequal attitude towards its allies was in part a result of the party losing ideological focus and getting too deep into the realpolitik of the cold war, but engaging in similar realpolitik after splitting didn’t do Mao any favors. I would actually put forward a sort of “two revisionisms” theory, that post-split China, Albania, and other “anti-revisionists” are fundamentally a second type of revisionist, who has retooled the ideology to center defeating revisionism.

They really do. The only Salvadorans I can stand are indigenous, and they are treated like shit.

In a just world someone would do something to stop the perfidious Poles, but we do not live in a just world