vovchik_ilich [he/him]

  • 14 Posts
  • 614 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2024

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  • They’re only really “massive floods” when there’s, you know, stuff you care about into the flooded areas. Eastern Spain is known for having this phenomenon called “gota fría”, in which at random, you’ll get in a day or two rainfall equivalent to that of an entire year otherwise. Mapping of the terrain and the “floodable areas” is already finished since more than half a century ago, and yet they won’t stop building fucking towns in such floodable áreas (source: am Spanish).

    Spain’s relief is FAR from that of floodplains, if they just avoided building in such areas, floods would stop being a problem. But capital corrupts the entire institutions that are supposed to prevent that, and nothing changes even when floods (admittedly not this big) are basically a yearly thing.


  • All of those are interesting hypotheticals, and whether they would have brought more plurality within socialism than danger against the institutions and the socialist project, is up for anyone to guess.

    What I can tell you is one thing: these hard decisions weren’t made by “power hungry individuals”, or by “authoritarianism”. They were the consequence of the historical and material realities of the time, and carried out by a party composed of people wanting the best for the future of socialism in the RSFSR/Soviet Union. The reality is that the early USSR survived insurmountable odds: decomposed economy after pulling out from WW1 (which happened after a war with Japan), Russian civil war, the massive problems within dekulakization and agricultural collectivisation, and the looming threat and eventually invasion of Nazi Germany that murdered more than 20 million people in the Soviet Union. The fact alone that it was capable of doing so, tells me enough about the necessity of the decisions taken.

    That does not mean that everything is perfect. Of course the Great Purge went way beyond too far, of course socialists don’t ideally want to oppress working class revolutionaries like in the Kronstadt rebellion, but what should we attribute those to then? Mustache man bad? Lenin bad? Marxism-Leninism bad? Or to extremely difficult time periods which create extreme necessities?

    Moreover: why, if all of this is supposedly embedded in the nature of the Soviet Union or Marxism-Leninism, such things stopped happening after the 1960s for the most part? There was no great purge, there was no rebellion like Kronstadt or Hungary with their subsequent repressions