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Cake day: June 3rd, 2024

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  • If the USSR had dissolved due to issues like the ones you’re talking about (Gulags being basically entirely dismantled after WW2 so 45 years before the dissolution, and breadlines being nonexistent until the 1980s liberalisation during Perestroika), it would have been dissolved with the popular consensus. There was a referendum in 1990 that asked the citizens of the Soviet Union if they wanted to maintain their country under communism and 70% of voters (admittedly a few republics didn’t participate) voted yes, so the USSR was extremely popular and people didn’t want it dissolved. The reasons for the illegal and antidemocratic dissolution of the USSR are much more complex than that.


  • Lmao, Germany has guaranteed housing?! Germany has Vonovia, a company that hoards real estate and rents it in terrible conditions, and own about 500k+ houses. In what universe does Germany have guaranteed housing when Berlin tried to implement a directly democratically voted rent cap on housing and it got repelled by the tribunals a year after it began?

    Free healthcare in Germany is absolute bullshit. Yes, it’s free, but the quality of healthcare is astonishingly low. I’ve had the misfortune of living there for a few years, and the whole system is horrendous, especially for how ludicrously expensive it is compared to other European countries. In Germany, you have sick senior people queuing at 7AM in frosty winter mornings STANDING ON THE STREETS to be able to see the family doctor, you can consider yourself lucky if you can wait sitting in a stairwell indoors while waiting for the doctor. It’s beyond me how German people aren’t constantly on the street complaining about this bullshit, again especially given the absurdly high costs of public healthcare there.

    Funny that you also mention freedom of speech, when in Germany they are literally arresting Jewish people for expressing antizionist and pro-Palestinian points of view. The actual Nazis run rampant though, friends of the police if not outright members of it, with an extreme rise of the far right.


  • There’s an ideological ocean between utopian socialism and actually-existing socialism, yes. There’s a reason why there’s not been a successful historical instance of socialism in which workers collectivised without taking the power of the state in their hands.

    Calling it “authoritarian state” kinda portrays lack of knowledge at democratic power structures and mechanisms in former socialist countries. Examples for the USSR: highest unionisation rates in the world, announcement/news boarboards in every workplace administered by the union, free education to the highest level for everyone, free healthcare, guaranteed employment and housing (how do the supposedly “authoritarian leaders” benefit from that?), neighbour commissions legally overviewing the activity and transparency of local administration, neighbour tribunals dealing with most petty crime, millions of members of the party, women’s rights, local ethnicities in different republics having an option to education in their language and widespread availability of reading material and newspapers in their language… Please tell me one country that does that better nowadays