this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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You misspelled "capitalists".
Everyone in Europe killing each other every generation predates capitalism. Capitalism did increase the scale though; after the fall of the western roman empire, we didn't see armies of that size until Napoleon managed to draft a million men in a country of 30 million.
Perhaps you would prefer "the ruling class"?
Lmfao, sorry (not sorry), I should have included feudalists too I guess, to avoid bootlicking pedants.. 🙄
The point stands - war is waged for profit by profiteers, not by random civilians trying to live their lives, always was, always will be.
One exception to it : fascists managed to convince people who can only lose stuff to a war that it's good for them too.
Fascism is capitalism in decay, there is no exception.
I'd say facsism is just capitalism when you try to say no.
As in literally, people tried to say no via socialism and then fascism was invented.
don't worry, the soviets joined ww2 as well
If by "joined WW2", do you mean "got refused from any military alliances with England, France and Poland despite a decade of trying in an attempt to unify Europe against Hitler"? Or do you mean "getting invaded by the Nazis and losing 25+mn people in the process of eliminating Nazism from Europe"?
You missed the part in between where they made a deal with the nazis and invaded eastern Europe
I didn't miss that part because there was no "deal with Nazis". Nothing as bad as the Munich Agreement signed the previous year by England, France and Germany among others, allowing Hitler to occupy the Sudetenland, a land with more than 3mn people in Czechoslovakia (to whom the Soviet Union offered assistance but Romania and Poland denied pass to Soviet troops, possibly influenced by the fact that Poland also did a grab of land of Czechoslovakia). The USSR spent the entire 30s trying to push for a military alliance with England, France and Poland to stop Nazism, but they all refused because a good liberal would rather have Nazis first exterminate communists. Stalin went as far as offering to station 1 million troops, together with aviation and artillery, in France, in case Stalin invaded, to which England and France refused. Feel free to study the so-called "collective security policy" pushed by the USSR in Europe against Nazism.
The Soviet Union had been in a civil war until 1921 (right after a devastating WW1/, and before that it was a preindustrial nation. It had a whopping 19 years to rebuild the country from scratch and to industrialise, compared to the 100+ years of German industrialization. They desperately needed every single year of industrialization they could get in order to gain some advantage against the industrially superior Nazis, as evidenced by the 25+ million casualties the USSR suffered against the Nazis despite material help from the US. Making an agreement to postpone the war after every country in Europe refuses to enter a military alliance against Nazis just because you're a communist country, is just the logical action to defend your citizens.
Please stop pushing revisionist nazi propaganda. Without the USSR, the slavic population of Europe, including Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian, as well as many other ethnic groups, would have been genocided in vastly superior numbers than they were.
I thought Romania did?
"Rumania had agreed to permit Russian troops to pass through her territory to the assistance of Czechoslovakia as soon as the League of Nations had pronounced Czechoslovakia to be a victim of aggression" - Munich, Prologue to Tragedy by John W. Wheeler-Bennet, p. 100
So you are straight up denying the existence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact?
To be clear I don't fault them for signing a NAP, I fault them for invading a bunch of eastern European countries with whom they had no quarrel because they wanted to do imperialism.
But I guess the fact that you dodged the question and immediately started spewing whataboutism proves that you're not really interested in a discussion.
No, I'm denying your framing of it
There a whole article about Russian disinformation on this topic here. They certainly did have a pact with the Nazis. Your argument is basically "it didn't happen, but if it did then it the West forced us into it" which is a 100% classic disinformation line. It's like when Putin says there is no war with Ukraine, but if there is it's because the West forced us to do it.
Source: euvsdisinfo
"Your comment is state propaganda! Here's some state propaganda from my side to discredit it!!" Oh I wonder, why would a European state agency directed by Josep Borrell (that guy is a conservative prick from the Christian Conservatives of Spain, the Partido Popular), well-known NATO cocksucker, want to create anti-communist and Russophobic propaganda?
If you read my comment, I'm not denying the existence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, I'm framing it in context. All that the article you sent says, is "Russian nationalists sometimes also put context to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, so everyone who puts context to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is reproducing what Russian nationalists say!!"
The article vaguely points to a few dubious claims of "USSR sending Jews to Germany" (USSR being the most progressive country against antisemitism back in its time, eliminating former pogroms in the former Russian Empire, and with overrepresentation of Jewish people in government and science, and even going as far as creating a Jewish Autonomous Oblast for Jewish people who might have felt like moving to a region with higher Jewish representation). It also makes a few claims of "tech transfer" between Nazi Germany and the USSR (ignoring why the USSR would want technology to defend itself from Germany and ignoring that the US had plenty of factories in Nazi Germany for example). And it completely ignores the existence of the Collective Security attempted for the 10 prior years by the USSR.
You're just choosing to ignore everything I said in my comment because "Russian nationalists sometimes try to put context to Molotov-Ribbentrop". I'm literally a communist, I'm the first and foremost hater of fascist Putin. The fact that Russian nationalists stoke the USSR occasionally for nationalist purposes (while removing any socialist ideology from their claims to keep it nice and capitalist), doesn't mean they can't sometimes make a better historical claim to some events by pure chance.
Lol, you mean the state capitalists? You're not making the (weak, "whatabout") point you think you are, but hey, your confidence in your wilful ignorance in defence of those exploiting you for profit* is almost impressive! (but not really) 🙄😂
*E: and guess what, I don't even need to know where you live to say this, because every working class person on the planet is currently being exploited for profit through both labour and war, but don't let that get in the way of the bootlicking you've come here to do in self-destructive defence of your beloved capitalism (I threw up in my mouth a little)...
Calling something state capitalist when capitalism heavily relies on the state by default shows you need to hit the books on how capitalism actually functions.
Pretending something that was never stateless, classless, and moneyless but rather quite the fucking opposite (E: and was never going to end up there, either) was communism, shows you need to hit the books on how communism is actually intended to function.
I didn't call it communism, and neither did the ruling communist parties. Transitional socialism is the proper word.
The USSR never pretended it was Stateless, Classless, or Moneyless.
You have no clue what you're talking about, how Communism is "supposed" to function, how Marx, Engels, Lenin, and so forth believed it to come into function, or how the USSR functioned.
If you want basics on how the USSR functioned, I can recommend some books, or if you want a basic intro of Marxism I can recommend some works as well.
Yep, and beat the Nazis.
He already said capitalists, state capitalism is still capitalism, no matter if you call it communism.
Calling something state capitalist when capitalism heavily relies on the state by default shows you need to hit the books on how capitalism actually functions.
I have no idea what you are trying to say with this, but perhaps you should look things up before pompously trying to diss people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
Perhaps you should read theory. The USSR was State Capitalist with respect to the NEP, but was Socialist for its entire existence
People's theory is just fine. The problem for you is that they kept reading theory that was written after thr 1970s.
https://brill.com/display/book/edcoll/9789004194748/Bej.9789004194458.i-234_003.xml
I can only read 2 pages from what you linked, and am not paying 40 dollars to read the rest, certainly not when they already display a gross oversimplification and anti-Marxist definition of Capitalism (critically leaving out competition, Capital accumulation, and so forth), and therefore take a vulgar revisionist stance. There's no analysis of class dynamics, just an over-reliance on the presense of Wage Labor.
Please read theory, I can make recommendations for the basics if you'd like.
emphasis mine, their entire argument is based on the fact that the USSR lacked the class dynamics of communism, thus weren't communist.
Nobody, not even the USSR, claims they reached upper-stage Communism. They were Communist in ideology, and Socialist in structure. Their argument is a left-anticommunist argument against a claim nobody made.
The USSR was Socialist, what on Earth are you talking about?
and North Korea is democratic, it's in the name after all.
When did I say names determine structures? Even then, the DPRK is fairly democratic in actuality.
oh you are a fucking tankie, makes sense.
I'm a Marxist-Leninist, if you equate taking theory seriously to whatever caricature of a tankie you hold in your mind-palace then I don't know what to tell you.