this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme. Please post agitprop here)
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When writing stuff like "lol" and "iirc", it's a good idea to try and replace those with their all caps counterpart
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- etc.
Why? Because otherwise (AFAIK), screen readers will try to read them out as actually words instead of spelling them
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Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
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Things being extremely bad when socialism is defeated is only evidence that the structure was not strong enough to last, not that it was bad at delivering for the people. The numbers are endless and clear, but summarized best by one fact: the collapse of the USSR was followed by the worst mortality crisis in human history outside of war time.
The horrors of the post-Soviet world are the horrors of the post-Soviet world. The Soviet union deserves blame for being weak enough to fall and allow therefore allow these things to happen, which is the result of deep structural problems in the USSR and rest of the socialist bloc. The USSR, obviously, was not a perfect utopia or it would not have died and millions of innocent people along with it. It was the first ever large scale attempt to build socialism, under impossibly hostile circumstances, and still achieved enormous, world-historic strides in the improvement of human life and community. To say "there's nothing to learn, it was the devil's work, the most evil system of all time" when you, right now, are living under its way worse successor seems ridiculous. There's nothing contradictory about appreciating the enormous achievements of the USSR and the smaller socialist states around it while carefully studying to avoid its enormous flaws.
If it was so prosperous then please do explain to me how is it that regions that were prosperous before communism, such as Czechia or East Germany, Western Poland etc, ended up being just so extremely under the water compared to The West when the Iron Curtain has fallen?
Why do the older generations keep saying that the communism was a reign of terror with extreme poverty and that right now we're living in times of great prosperity? Ah, but you probably don't know those people anyways, the ones that survived the communism.
Why were there so many rebellions in Eastern Bloc countries and why did the USSR had to suppress them with tanks and violence?
I'm a democratic socialist myself (demsoc, not socdem!), and the only thing I genuinely miss from the times of Polish Socialist Republic is the fact that we were able to develop heavy industry and grand projects that are now impossible to go through with the post-soviet libertarian boiling pot politics.
Because they got plundered by the West during liberalization. They were not economically behind under socialism, but they are under capitalism. The West was never interested in bringing freedom to these places but dominating them economically and politically, and that's exactly what happened when socialism fell in Europe. They massively economically developed under socialism, obviously far, far beyond whatever state they were in beforehand.
They generally do not say that. In the post-USSR proper, only the Baltic republics, who got fully integrated into Europe socially and economically, generally say things got better post-dissolution, excluding Ukraine since Russia's invasion, which caused a huge inversion in opinion there that had been super pro-Soviet. In the non-USSR post-socialist states of the Warsaw Pact, answers are more mixed, but it's rarely strongly negative and often mildly positive towards socialism.
Oustide of Hungary in the 50s, what are you referring to? The USSR and the socialist states pretty much all came apart peacefully with no meaningful state violence in reverse, even in places where the dissolution had little to no popular support.
It's worth asking why the socialist states were able to do that. I would argue it's because there was a serious effort to investment in economic independence under socialism while today, the post-socialist states have largely been completely subordinated to the US's economic interests, with industry sold out to foreign capitalists and eventually deindustrialized to concentrate profits in the imperial core, which would literally never have happened under socialism because of fundamentally different economic objectives.
Fuck that, I'm not doing this, this is some fucking load of bullshit I can't handle anymore. What are your sources???
Well I provided a well sourced link for the polling. What else do you want sources for? I'll see what I can do. (Not that you've provided any sources)
What specifically that I said do you disagree with?