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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
Why were there so many rebellions in Eastern Bloc countries and why did the USSR had to suppress them with tanks and violence?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Primitive Accumulation: The Collapse of Feudalism
Primitive Accumulation: The Great European Witch Hunts
These two hefty videos from Red Pen lay out Federici's analysis updated with modern scholarship since Caliban's publication to demonstrate this process in an extremely coherent way. It's a masterpiece of historical dialectics education on Red Pen's part and a phenomenal way to understand the deep historical roots of capitalism and the horrifying brutality of how women were violently domesticated as perhaps the most foundational piece of capitalism's birth.
I swear, one more time I hear about this shithole being called a good example of a communist country
it was a pretty good first attempt
I'm gonna obliterate someone's crotch.
It was a fucking earth shattering dictaroship without an ounce of actual communal care and cooperation.
nah it actually had pretty sick vibes and legit community, lots of bureaucracy doesn't wipe that out of existence. If you could give me a time machine and a passport fabricator it's hard to imagine a better time and place to live than this place newly built: The Crowning Gem of Soviet Urban Planning (Lazdynai, Lithuania)
We should anticipate that she will not just be Obama 2.0. She's going to have legitimately more progressive domestic and foreign policy than he did. She's not going to be FDR 2.0 either, but some kind of middle ground that legitimately undercuts a lot of revolutionary organizing and energy that's on the upswell in this country. The bourgeoisie, I think, will be willing to accept the compromise if the next two years feature escalating unrest. It's worked out for them before, after all.
Petro and De la Espriella teams suspend talks as Colombia’s political tensions deepen
Petro reiterated claims of electoral fraud and promised to resist “peacefully and actively” the incoming government of De la Espriella, who has already vowed to initiate legal proceedings against several members of the outgoing progressive administration.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has once again raised the claim that vote counts in the runoff election held on June 21 were manipulated through the use of certain algorithms, proprietary software, and the alleged involvement of Israeli intelligence firms in the recent presidential election.
According to the highest electoral authority, in the runoff election, far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella won with 49.66% of the vote, compared to 48.7% for the progressive and left-wing candidate, Senator Iván Cepeda, who sought to continue Petro’s government plan to strengthen the state and implement social reforms.
Despite this, Petro announced that he does not recognize the legitimacy of the incoming government because, as he claimed, there was electoral fraud orchestrated from abroad: “We have all the information showing that, starting with an IP server located in Los Angeles, California – owned by the Bautista brothers and integrated into the vote-counting operation – algorithms were used that substantially skewed the vote in favor of Abelardo, the algorithms that rigged the election results were applied to the voter rolls by replacing those who never vote with voters who could vote multiple times or with empty seats at polling stations staffed by homogeneous juries.”
In light of this situation, Petro called for a popular mobilization to reject the incoming government: “We have suffered the harshest blow to national sovereignty since the Spanish reconquest during the years of the ‘Patria Boba’ … The president of Colombia does not recognize the legitimacy of the incoming government. Abelardo did not win the election. The national majority is called upon this July 20 to raise the cry for national independence in all public squares.”
Regarding the rally, the President said: “I invite you on July 20 to join the security forces and, after their parade, to hear my farewell address as Colombia’s head of state. We will not do this on August 6 or 7 – those are tragic dates. We will do it on July 20 in all of Colombia’s public squares,” in response to threats from a future government he has labeled “fascist.”
In recent days, Cepeda announced that, in light of De la Espriella’s alleged threats of possible politically motivated legal persecution – known as “lawfare” – he will launch a campaign of civil resistance. In recent statements, Petro affirmed that he would join the peaceful and active resistance against the incoming government: “We won’t threaten anyone here, but they’re going to threaten us – and they’re already threatening me – with arresting me and taking me to the United States or assassinating me.”
In response to these statements, the president-elect announced on July 7 that he was suspending talks with Petro’s cabinet regarding the handover of information, citing what he described as an “attempted coup d’état.” “I have just instructed the vice president-elect of the Republic to immediately suspend the transition process with the corrupt government that is ending its term – a government that, through its decisions and conduct, seeks to destroy Colombia,” De la Espriella stated via X.
Colombia is thus heading toward an uncertain future under a far-right government that is taking office. This government promises to dismantle the peace processes initiated by Petro and his predecessors, to radicalize neoliberalism, and to align Bogotá with Washington’s hemispheric policies, while also promising to initiate legal proceedings against various members of the outgoing administration. In the face of this adversity, leaders of the outgoing administration have vowed to resist through peaceful methods, social mobilization, and the creation of a strong opposition bloc that, although the new administration has not yet taken office, is already taking shape.
Petro and Cepeda are wasting no time. While their tones are slightly different, with Petro willing to say outright that De la Espriella did not legitimately win while Cepeda is a bit more vague, both of them are in alignment on a national popular movement to reject the incoming government. This is the right move, I think. They could go the legal route, challenge the election through the courts and blah blah blah, but all that shit is designed for the right to win. The left's strength is in the masses and the ability to exert popular power on the ground. In Bolivia, the movement waited until the right wing government put forward an especially egregious set of policies and protested those, then escalating to a demand to step down. But when a lot of those policies were retracted or stalled out in the legislative process, that undercut some of the momentum for the whole movement and made the more radical demands harder to maintain. Bolivia now has to wait for the next flashpoint to act. In Colombia, however, they're challenging the basic legitimacy of the incoming government on its own grounds. This is a much more radical and revolutionary starting point that will be harder to defuse if the masses are in support.
Shit is really gonna hit the fan
No, which is exactly why it will continue under greater profit margins and deeper degrees of debt until the whole thing crumbles
This country is about to be a giant ghost town once this dries up lol
There will always be old people and proportionally there are only going to be more
cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5842507
At the entrance of the memorial, built on the very site where the revolutionary leader was executed, and where he had renamed the country from the colonial “Upper Volta” to Burkina Faso, the “Land of Upright People”, a retired man helps others lay stones on the sidewalk.
He is Valentin Sankara, Thomas Sankara’s younger brother. But when welcoming BdF, he offers his gratitude to another captain, the man responsible for inaugurating the space he now works on.
The connection to the country’s revolutionary past is unmistakable. As in the 1980s, Traoré has re-nationalized gold reserves, Burkina Faso is the world’s fourth-largest gold producer, and is implementing measures to break from the French-backed CFA franc. He has launched an ambitious plan for industrialization and agricultural expansion. Over the last two years, portraits and iconic quotes from Thomas Sankara have accompanied Traoré’s speeches and public appearances.
Valentin Sankara sees today’s Burkina Faso as a continuation of the Democratic and Popular Revolution (RDP) initiated by his brother on August 4, 1983.
World Bank data published in mid-July shows Burkina Faso’s economy grew from 3% in 2023 to 4.9% in 2024. Improved security across multiple regions and a strong push for food self-sufficiency are among the key drivers of the increase, according to the institution.
If you had any skepticism about Traore, this should do away with it:
According to the Bank, more than 700,000 people escaped extreme poverty in the past 12 months alone. “All the work we’re doing is a contribution from the Burkinabé people as a whole,” Valentin summarizes.
Much much more in the article, go read it!
At the entrance of the memorial, built on the very site where the revolutionary leader was executed, and where he had renamed the country from the colonial “Upper Volta” to Burkina Faso, the “Land of Upright People”, a retired man helps others lay stones on the sidewalk.
He is Valentin Sankara, Thomas Sankara’s younger brother. But when welcoming BdF, he offers his gratitude to another captain, the man responsible for inaugurating the space he now works on.
The connection to the country’s revolutionary past is unmistakable. As in the 1980s, Traoré has re-nationalized gold reserves, Burkina Faso is the world’s fourth-largest gold producer, and is implementing measures to break from the French-backed CFA franc. He has launched an ambitious plan for industrialization and agricultural expansion. Over the last two years, portraits and iconic quotes from Thomas Sankara have accompanied Traoré’s speeches and public appearances.
Valentin Sankara sees today’s Burkina Faso as a continuation of the Democratic and Popular Revolution (RDP) initiated by his brother on August 4, 1983.
World Bank data published in mid-July shows Burkina Faso’s economy grew from 3% in 2023 to 4.9% in 2024. Improved security across multiple regions and a strong push for food self-sufficiency are among the key drivers of the increase, according to the institution.
If you had any skepticism about Traore, this should do away with it:
According to the Bank, more than 700,000 people escaped extreme poverty in the past 12 months alone. “All the work we’re doing is a contribution from the Burkinabé people as a whole,” Valentin summarizes.
Much much more in the article, go read it!
cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/13426
This past weekend, hundreds of activists gathered at the inaugural “People’s Summit for Korea”, held from July 25 to July 26 in New York City. The summit, which brought together people from across the United States and from South Korea and Hawai’i, sought to deepen debates on topics such as Korean national liberation, the DPRK’s ongoing revolutionary process, resistance to US militarism, and more.
The historic conference was convened by Nodutdol, alongside other groups including Koreans for Anti-Imperialism and Sovereignty, Korea Peace Now Grassroots Network, Koreans 4 Decolonization, Korea Policy Institute, The People’s Forum, ANSWER Coalition, Anti-War Action Network, Dissenters, and the United National AntiWar Coalition).
Read more: People’s Summit for Korea unites struggles for national liberation to fight the drive towards “World War III”
The Summit ended with a march of hundreds through the streets of New York City to decry US imperialism and the drive towards major power confrontation in the Pacific region.
On July 28, Nodutdol member Miyeon Jang, an organizer in New York City, opened the Summit with a bold call to action: that Korean diaspora activists like herself not “sit quietly in the empire’s belly.”
“Our ancestors did not fight Japanese colonizers just for the United States to raise their flag instead,” Jang declared.
Miyeon Jang (Photo: Jaylen Strong)
Read her full speech below:
Comrades, thank you for being here at this historic moment. My name is Miyeon, and I’m a member of Nodutdol. I’m a proud daughter of a Korean adoptee and the granddaughter of a woman I’ve never met but whose life and survival carved the path that brought me to this stage today.
As the daughter of an adoptee, I used to feel estranged from a language I never knew and a history that my mother never had the chance to pass down to me. But through revolutionary organizing, I came to understand that being Korean isn’t just about birth place or blood, but about joining our people’s legacy of resistance and the fight for true sovereignty. To be Korean is to join the ranks of those who struggle for true sovereignty and dignity in our homeland and across the diaspora.
And maybe, like me, you’ve also questioned your place in this legacy, too. If so, know this. Your connection to Korea is not defined by miles or by blood, but in your commitment to its future.
Today is a day 26 years in the making. In the 1990s, Nodutdol’s origins were seeded by diaspora organizers who traveled to South Korea to learn directly from the people rising against US backed military dictatorships, laying the foundation for Nodutdol’s formal founding in 1999. And while organizing delegations to Korea, Nodutdol is also deeply rooted to Korean communities in Queens, offering English classes, and organizing to connect to the Korean diaspora with the international struggle.
In the post-911 era, when Islamophobic nationalism swept the country, Nodutdol stood firm against the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. That moment forged us, and we focused on delegation work and sharpened our identity as an unapologetically anti-imperialist organization.
Through trips to North and South Korea, members met with militant labor unions, farmers, factory workers and youth, all of whom affirmed a clear truth: The US military presence presents neither security nor peace. And across the peninsula, the shared desire was for reunification and independence and national liberation.
These delegations bridged Nodutdol to the Korean diaspora across the US, Canada and Japan, who shared a hunger for anti-imperialist Korean movement grounded in the centuries-long resistance of our people. Today, Nodutdol’s presence has grown beyond New York, and we are steadily building towards becoming a national organization that can act as a vehicle for our diaspora wherever we can be found.
Since 1999, 200,000 Koreans have immigrated to the US, including over 20,000 adoptees. Many of these immigrants left Korea not by true choice, under the illusion of choice, or were sold by the adoption industry. Many fled economic devastation engineered by the US-backed IMF crisis. Others were drawn in by false promises of opportunity, and many simply struggled to survive the chaos and instability manufactured by the United States.
Migration has never meant true escape. It simply drew a new front line in the war against the Korean people. How many of us grew up reconciling fragments of stories our families couldn’t finish telling, stories of our divided families, disappeared relatives, or stolen roots?
We were told to be grateful for life in America, even as our parents were broken by overwork, even as our elders died without care, and even as our communities are torn apart by threats of deportation.
US imperialism requires our elders to age in poverty and be denied life-saving health care. US imperialism requires our mothers to work multiple jobs while raising a household. US imperialism requires our communities to face disproportionate rates of addiction and alcoholism. US imperialism requires our students, Yunseo Chung, be threatened with deportation for speaking out against genocide in Palestine. These are the costs of keeping the empire churning.
This weekend marks 72 years since the signing of the Korean War armistice, yet the Korean people have yet to know true peace. The US remains the primary obstacle to formally ending the war.
They call it the Forgotten War. But for us, nothing has been forgotten. We are reminded daily of the injustice and the indignity of a peninsula divided not by our own choice. A homeland under US military occupation, and a diaspora exploited to serve the very empire who dares to treat our homeland as a launchpad for their next war on China. 72 years later, can we honestly say the war is over now?
This weekend also marks one year in the one year anniversary of the launch of our US Out of Korea campaign. We know that the US hides behind the rhetoric of democracy and humanitarianism when it comes to their occupation of the Korean peninsula. We launched this campaign to also build a movement to contest imperialism within the US.
The United States’s South Korean puppet soldiers will beat grandmothers until they need surgery simply for defending their farmland, and call it protection against North Korea. They impose lethal sanctions against pregnant mothers and children, and call it diplomacy. They staged war exercises that dropped bombs on villages like Nogok-ri, and call it peacekeeping.
We are not fooled. Our ancestors did not fight Japanese colonizers just for the United States to raise their flag instead. They weren’t massacred in the caves of Jeju. They did not bleed out in the streets of Gwangju, and they sure as hell did not topple four US-backed presidents for us to sit quietly in the empire’s belly.
We honor those who have walked the road of people’s struggle before us and gave everything for the cause of liberation. Martyrs like Yang Hoe-Dong, a district leader with the Korean Construction Workers Union who was killed in 2023 by the Yoon Suk-Yeol regime in a campaign of brutal repression and intimidation against workers.
The people did not let Yoon Suk-Yeol forget. Less than two years later, last December, the Korean Construction Workers’ Union embodied the spirit of the martyr, as they, alongside so many other organizations, mobilized millions to impeach Yoon Suk-Yeol and make him answer for his lethal repression of the working people.
We are armed with the clarity, the discipline and the revolutionary lessons of our elders and martyrs. As diaspora, we organize with confidence, and in the legacy of the Minjung, the people whose struggle shapes history. We move with conviction towards the scientific and inevitable truth. The people bend the arc of history.
And we are not alone. We are grounding our movement and the legacy of national liberation and socialist anti-imperialism through this summit. We are strengthening our political consciousness, building the relationships needed to wage the working class struggle and to strengthen our commitment. We are joined by millions of our siblings and kin in Korea who continue the fight against occupation, division and the exploitation of workers.
The era of US impunity and waging war without consequence is over. Across the US, we are organizing the working people to create consequences for the US empire and building towards our inevitable socialist future.
To all of you here today, we say thank you for standing shoulder to shoulder with us, advancing internationalist solidarity, and fortifying our movement as a global front against imperialism. The fight for Korean liberation and against imperialism and Korea is bound with people’s struggles everywhere.
We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, who rose up with the defiant call of toojeng, or struggle. From resistance against colonial rule to today’s organized labor struggle against US-backed repression, toojeng has echoed through the movement for Korean liberation and sovereignty.
When I call out toojeng, I want you to shout it back with fire in your lungs and your fist in the air. With all the conviction you carry for our people and for our struggle. After I say to toojeng, you say it back.
Korean Liberation! Toojeng!
Students! Toojeng!
Workers. Toojeng!
Internationalism! Toojeng!
The post Miyeon Jang: Korean diaspora must honor legacy of national struggle, not “sit quietly in the empire’s belly” appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.
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For once the better situation actually seems more likely