My expectation is that most people would be productive even if they didnāt have to work. People like making things, itās in our nature. Imagine a society where you had minimal work, but you had things like community workshops, and places where you can get together with people to build whatever you want. Like even public access to labs, factories and so on. I think weād see incredible things getting made because people would get ideas, find like minded people and work on projects together just because they find them interesting. We actually see this happen with software and the whole open source movement already. Plenty of people write large software projects just because they find it interesting, they donāt make any money off them, and the goal is purely to make something interesting. The reason it works for software is because anybody with a laptop can do it, but I think it would work exactly the same for building physical things if tools were readily available.
My expectation is that most people would be productive even if they didnāt have to work. People like making things, itās in our nature. Imagine a society where you had minimal work, but you had things like community workshops, and places where you can get together with people to build whatever you want.
This can only be possible when AI is channeled in the right direction. AI should free people from work, not so they become unemployed, as would happen under capitalism, but so they have more time for creativity.
I think more attention should be paid to childhood education, so that children can be instilled with a passion for something sublime from an early age. How can you instill anything in a child today if all they see is profit?
The education system needs to be completely overhauledāthatās where we need to start.
By the way, Stalin personally edited the first Soviet history textbook for schoolchildren. He also placed great emphasis on educating young people.
As that liberal philosopher who fears work said, it wonāt work! First education, then a creatureānot the other way around. And studying is hard work, so you canāt just slack off and become Lomonosov. We need an educational foundation for that. Therefore, from early childhood, children must work; they must become accustomed to work in order to achieve real results in the future. They also need an incentive to do so, and itās best if itās not money, but high ideals, as was the case in the USSR, the most educated and well-read country in the world. Iāve already experienced this firsthand: the horizons of a Westerner are much narrower than those of someone raised in the USSR. In the USSR, creative people were trained from school, while in the West, they produce narrow specialists who donāt need anything beyond their specialty. They donāt need critical thinking, for whom life is a chain of simple algorithms.
Plenty of people write large software projects just because they find it interesting, they donāt make any money off them, and the goal is purely to make something interesting.
I understand everything here because I experienced it myself, with my son.
The attraction to computer programs lies in the fact that a child, as soon as they begin to understand, immediately becomes passionately fascinated with computers. There comes a time when the child gets bored with computer games and wants to get something more from the computer, but the computer still fascinates them as much as ever. If your father is a millionaire, at this point you can turn into Bill Gates or Elon Musk.
The reason it works for software is because anybody with a laptop can do it, but I think it would work exactly the same for building physical things if tools were readily available.
But I would slightly modify your concept of the new world. Itās not about people having free access to production facilities or laboratories, but about computer simulators of various processes in schools.
Every form of automation is turned against the worker under capitalism. AI will be no different here, and it might accelerate the collapse of the whole system.
And agree that education needs to change significantly at this point. A lot of education focuses on rote memorization, but whatās really important now is the ability to integrate the available information, evaluate it, and make decisions. Basically, applying dialectical thinking to the world. Also very much agree that USSR education was far better and broader. Becoming an intellectual was basically seen as the way to move up in society. In the west itās just about making money which creates a very narrow and selfish horizon for people.
Teaching kids to experiment using computers in school is actually a really good idea. Once they develop the mindset itās applicable everywhere, and easily transfers to working with the physical world too.
I do think weāll need to restructure society in significant ways in the near future because technology is outpacing our existing social norms. Unfortunately these kinds of upheavals tend to be highly volatile socially.
Every form of automation is turned against the worker under capitalism.
Comrade, you know a thing or two about economicsāplease take a look at this video; itās short. At the end, there are formulas he uses to prove the opposite.
Thatās Comrade Semin; Semin promoted him on YouTube. Heās a socialist, too.
Itās really gratifying to see young people in Russia starting to think so progressively. And most importantly, they base their arguments on science rather than Solzhenitsynās tall tales or fairy tales about God.
Iām convinced that the politics of common sense and scienceāwhich Musk championed beforeāfor some reasonāgoing quietāwill sooner or later prevail over the politics of obscurantism or āpopcorn and Coke,ā both in Russia and the US.
I listened to Semin recently; he attended an international communist congress in Britain a few years back. He represented the Russian Communist Party there (not the CPRF).
And the main thing isāhonestly, Comradeāhe used the exact same words Iāve been using for a long time. Their concept of socialism is somewhat abstract; every speaker at the forum said something differentāthereās no unified concept, no single clear idea; itās all very unrefined.
But on the other hand, progressive youth thereānot just those with socialist viewsāare starting to realize that capitalism has outlived its usefulness, that itās a hollow sham. So, theyāre beginning to look for an alternative. Meanwhile, in Russia, the so-called progressive youth are only just starting to soak up the joys of capitalist life, because they didnāt get a chance to enjoy it for 40 yearsā¦ ))) Thereās a lag and some gaps here, too.
It turns out thereās a Marx Library in London; I didnāt know thatā¦ ))))
āMarx remains relevant as long as capitalism exists.ā
And agree that education needs to change significantly at this point. A lot of education focuses on rote memorization, but whatās really important now is the ability to integrate the available information, evaluate it, and make decisions. Basically, applying dialectical thinking to the world. Also very much agree that USSR education was far better and broader. Becoming an intellectual was basically seen as the way to move up in society. In the west itās just about making money which creates a very narrow and selfish horizon for people.
A quick side note: In the USSR, children were made to grow up early and shed their illusions, not the other way around.
As for Hollywood moviesāif you strip away the sex, violence, and drugs, the vast majority of them are essentially childrenās films.
When I got to know American culture better, I was really surprised to learn that adults read comic booksā¦ In the USSR, the closest thing to comics was produced only for children who were just learning to read (before starting school). Personally, I was already reading Pushkin and had memorized several poems before I even started schoolāthough I read comics, too.
Comic books, for crying out loudā¦ )))) At age seven, I read H.G. Wellsā The War of the Worlds. I remember staying up all night in fear after reading The Time Machine.
And Iād borrowed the book from a classmateāa friend who had highly recommended it to meā¦
But why am I telling you this, Comrade? You were just like that yourself onceā¦ )))) You saw it all firsthand!
Teaching kids to experiment using computers in school is actually a really good idea. Once they develop the mindset itās applicable everywhere, and easily transfers to working with the physical world too.
Iāll join Marx and add this: as long as capitalism exists, education will be crap! Because they arenāt raising intellectualsātheyāre raising docile workers for their factories. Intellectuals donāt serve their interests; intellectuals think too much and notice too muchā¦ and then they say things that are highly inconvenient for the powers that beā¦
I do think weāll need to restructure society in significant ways
This is basically what Marx explains in the first volume of The Capital. Itās good to see young people still read Marx in Russia. :)
And heās right that full automation is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism because the whole system is based around consumption. You need wage workers who produce value, and then pay the capital owner to consume goods. If you eliminate wage workers from the system thereās nobody left to consume the goods. And once you have the majority of population become useless within the system it can no longer function.
But on the other hand, progressive youth thereānot just those with socialist viewsāare starting to realize that capitalism has outlived its usefulness, that itās a hollow sham
Basically what happened was that the US sat out the second world war and developed its economy while the rest of the world burned. Then they used their head start to prop up their ideological bloc during the Cold War and created the whole mythology that capitalism was a superior system and the standard of living in the west wasnāt because the US had a huge head start, but because capitalism is a superior system. Now that China has caught up and capitalism has destroyed all the material benefits western public enjoyed, weāre seeing the new generation sobering up.
And Iām still shocked how nobody actually reads books here. It is absolutely incomprehensible to me. Just like you, I was reading from the young age, cause there really wasnāt much other type of entertainment. And reading really opened up your imagination, Iām incredibly grateful for growing up in USSR and having developed this habit. Reading a good book is still by far the most enjoyable experience for me.
Itās good to see young people still read Marx in Russia. :)
In Russia, Marx is inseparable from Lenin.
By the way, listen to the story of how Russian officials, together with their Chinese counterparts, are selling a massive Soviet factory to China for scrap metal. Itās a disgrace!
When Platoshkin exposed this criminal scheme, a local official simply blew up the factory to cover his tracksā¦
And heās right that full automation is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism because the whole system is based around consumption. You need wage workers who produce value, and then pay the capital owner to consume goods. If you eliminate wage workers from the system thereās nobody left to consume the goods. And once you have the majority of population become useless within the system it can no longer function.
And once again, capitalism is doing harmāthis time, to the advancement of progress.
Basically what happened was that the US sat out the second world war and developed its economy while the rest of the world burned. Then they used their head start to prop up their ideological bloc during the Cold War and created the whole mythology that capitalism was a superior system and the standard of living in the west wasnāt because the US had a huge head start, but because capitalism is a superior system. Now that China has caught up and capitalism has destroyed all the material benefits western public enjoyed, weāre seeing the new generation sobering up.
As I understand it, during the Iron Curtain era, the only information that reached us from the other side was propaganda. And as Iāve come to realize decades later: Soviet propaganda told 90% the truth about the West, whereas Western propaganda told 90% lies about the USSR.
That is why people in the West are only now beginning to understand what socialism actually isānow that advanced Western capitalism has gone into a tailspin. I remember when I first joined Western forums back in 2015; peopleās jaws would drop at the stories I told. At first, they didnāt believe meāthey thought I was making it all up! I became very popular very quickly on that first Western forum.
cause there really wasnāt much other type of entertainment.
Comrade, those are just Western tall talesā¦ )))) ŠŠµŃŠµŠ²ŃŠ½Š½ŃŠµ ŠøŠ³ŃŃŃŠŗŠø, ŃŠŗŠ¾Š»ŃŠ·ŠŗŠøŠ¹ ŠæŠ¾Š“Š¾ŠŗŠ¾Š½Š½ŠøŠŗ, ŠŗŠ°Š»ŃŃŠŗŠ° Š±ŠµŠ· Š“Š½Š°)))
I was never a homebody as a child. There was a sports ground in every courtyard; we played soccer there every dayāit was impossible to get me to come home. In the winter, theyād flood the area to make an ice rink, and weād play hockey. When my parents bought me a computerāa ZX SpectrumāI went wild and started skipping school, but even so, there was always a book on my nightstand; I read every day before bed.
Yeah, thatās the ironic part, it turns out that Soviets didnāt really have to make stuff up about the west while the west had to spin tall tales about evils of communism. I do think that it was a failure of Soviet education system that it failed to make people really understand the problem with capitalism. I remember when I was a kid at school, there was no discussion about it, nobody really gave it any thought. But you look in the west, and indoctrination starts very early on. Not just in schools too, itās in TV shows, comic books, everything. And we see now just how effective this type of indoctrination is.
And yeah, thatās fair, I meant specifically in terms of media entertainment. I did spend a lot of time outside with my friends as a kid. This is, incidentally, another thing you canāt do in the west. My parents would just let me go out by myself when I was 8 years old without a single worry. Iād go out in the morning, come back lunch, and hang out with friends the rest of the day. Thatās how safe things were. That sort of thing would be unthinkable in Canada today.
Yeah, thatās the ironic part, it turns out that Soviets didnāt really have to make stuff up about the west while the west had to spin tall tales about evils of communism. I do think that it was a failure of Soviet education system that it failed to make people really understand the problem with capitalism.
One mistake made in the late USSR was that the public did not take the propaganda seriously.
There were economic problems, yet reports spoke of incredible achievements in socialist construction; in reality, everything was stagnating. The leaders could barely articulate their wordsā¦ Brezhnevās final speeches were completely unintelligible; people laughed at him back then just as they laughed at Biden when he rambled. The party leadership had become ossified; the country definitely needed a breath of fresh air at that time. That was precisely what Andropov envisioned when he tasked Ryzhkov and Gorbachevāwho were the āyoung guardā of the party back then, full of fresh thoughts and ideasāwith developing the project.
Unfortunately, however, Andropov didnāt live long enough to see it through, and Gorbachev later ruined everything.
By the way, Iāve finally fully grasped the reason why Europe was, until recently, a Garden of Eden.
The EU projectāconceived long before the USSR collapsedāwas aimed at preventing the emergence of socialism in individual European states. To achieve this, capitalists were forced to spend vast sums out of their own pockets to ensure social well-being for all their citizens. After all, there were very strong socialist movements in France, Italy, and elsewhere at the time. If the people had been living in hardship, they would have elected socialists. Consequently, capitalists were compelled to share with the publicāas should happen in a genuine democratic capitalist state.
After the USSR collapsed, there was no longer a need to maintain a high standard of living for the European populace. And so, almost without realizing it, Europe began to slide into the abyss! Capitalists now have a free hand; they can do whatever they please.
And now we come to the main point. It turns out that the collapse of the USSR turned Europe into a garbage dump.
Not just in schools too, itās in TV shows, comic books, everything. And we see now just how effective this type of indoctrination is.
This is a caricature from a Soviet newspaper from 1955. Absolutely nothing has changed.
And yeah, thatās fair, I meant specifically in terms of media entertainment.
Yes, it was done intentionally to give the child more time for beneficial activities. It was the right approach for the upbringing of young people.
This is, incidentally, another thing you canāt do in the west.
I remember once being in the countryside with my parents, but I had a soccer match on Sunday morning, so I headed back to town in the evening to be ready for the game the next day. My parents stayed behind in the village. When I arrived in town, I realized I had left my apartment keys back in the villageābut I had taken the last bus of the day. It was a 15-kilometer trip, and I was only 13 years old. I lived on the edge of town, so I walked out to the main roadāit was 10 p.m.āand managed to catch a ride. Strangers drove me all the way back to the village; even though it wasnāt on their way, they dropped me right at my house and wouldnāt take a single penny. I had a few rubles in my pocket and tried to offer them the money, but they flatly refused.
It never even crossed my mind that someone might try to harm me. And my parents didnāt scold me for coming back to the village in the middle of the night instead of staying over at a friendās place in townāto them, that sort of thing was perfectly normal.
Even nowābefore the warāI donāt recall any instances of anyone being abducted; children roam the streets freely. But thatās before the war; I donāt know what will happen afterwardsāthe world has changed.
We talked about this before, lack of a good selection process that allowed people of low competence to get into positions of power and created a bureaucracy which was largely concerned with preserving itself rather than solving problems was the ultimate cause of the decline. Simply telling people everything is great while youāre unable to produce substantive change they can see tangibly deligitimizes the system. And thatās precisely what we see happening in the west today, and why thereās now public disillusionment with liberal democracy.
And youāre absolutely right that Europe has been propped up to prevent genuine socialism from taking hold. The US didnāt pour billions upon billions into rebuilding western Europe after WW2 out of sheer altruism. They used it as a way to deligitimize communism in the east. Look how great Europeans are living, look how much faster things develop under capitalism. That was the whole narrative. This is a great read on the subject incidentally, confirms everything you said http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27c/046.html
This is a caricature from a Soviet newspaper from 1955. Absolutely nothing has changed.
Yup, that cartoon is ever green, and just as true as the day it was made.
It never even crossed my mind that someone might try to harm me.
Exactly, there were just not thoughts people had back in USSR. Itās destruction was the biggest crime of the 20th century.
That American professor said that lately, a great many supporters of socialism have been emergingāamong young people in the US and elsewhere. But this isnāt because they are committed socialists; rather, they are protesting against capitalism, and since there is no alternative to socialism, and people want changeā¦
My expectation is that most people would be productive even if they didnāt have to work. People like making things, itās in our nature. Imagine a society where you had minimal work, but you had things like community workshops, and places where you can get together with people to build whatever you want. Like even public access to labs, factories and so on. I think weād see incredible things getting made because people would get ideas, find like minded people and work on projects together just because they find them interesting. We actually see this happen with software and the whole open source movement already. Plenty of people write large software projects just because they find it interesting, they donāt make any money off them, and the goal is purely to make something interesting. The reason it works for software is because anybody with a laptop can do it, but I think it would work exactly the same for building physical things if tools were readily available.
This can only be possible when AI is channeled in the right direction. AI should free people from work, not so they become unemployed, as would happen under capitalism, but so they have more time for creativity.
I think more attention should be paid to childhood education, so that children can be instilled with a passion for something sublime from an early age. How can you instill anything in a child today if all they see is profit?
The education system needs to be completely overhauledāthatās where we need to start.
By the way, Stalin personally edited the first Soviet history textbook for schoolchildren. He also placed great emphasis on educating young people.
As that liberal philosopher who fears work said, it wonāt work! First education, then a creatureānot the other way around. And studying is hard work, so you canāt just slack off and become Lomonosov. We need an educational foundation for that. Therefore, from early childhood, children must work; they must become accustomed to work in order to achieve real results in the future. They also need an incentive to do so, and itās best if itās not money, but high ideals, as was the case in the USSR, the most educated and well-read country in the world. Iāve already experienced this firsthand: the horizons of a Westerner are much narrower than those of someone raised in the USSR. In the USSR, creative people were trained from school, while in the West, they produce narrow specialists who donāt need anything beyond their specialty. They donāt need critical thinking, for whom life is a chain of simple algorithms.
I understand everything here because I experienced it myself, with my son.
The attraction to computer programs lies in the fact that a child, as soon as they begin to understand, immediately becomes passionately fascinated with computers. There comes a time when the child gets bored with computer games and wants to get something more from the computer, but the computer still fascinates them as much as ever. If your father is a millionaire, at this point you can turn into Bill Gates or Elon Musk.
But I would slightly modify your concept of the new world. Itās not about people having free access to production facilities or laboratories, but about computer simulators of various processes in schools.
A cultural revolution in society is needed.
Every form of automation is turned against the worker under capitalism. AI will be no different here, and it might accelerate the collapse of the whole system.
And agree that education needs to change significantly at this point. A lot of education focuses on rote memorization, but whatās really important now is the ability to integrate the available information, evaluate it, and make decisions. Basically, applying dialectical thinking to the world. Also very much agree that USSR education was far better and broader. Becoming an intellectual was basically seen as the way to move up in society. In the west itās just about making money which creates a very narrow and selfish horizon for people.
Teaching kids to experiment using computers in school is actually a really good idea. Once they develop the mindset itās applicable everywhere, and easily transfers to working with the physical world too.
I do think weāll need to restructure society in significant ways in the near future because technology is outpacing our existing social norms. Unfortunately these kinds of upheavals tend to be highly volatile socially.
Comrade, you know a thing or two about economicsāplease take a look at this video; itās short. At the end, there are formulas he uses to prove the opposite.
Do you agree with this?
https://youtu.be/LfRdDwgky0A
Thatās Comrade Semin; Semin promoted him on YouTube. Heās a socialist, too.
Itās really gratifying to see young people in Russia starting to think so progressively. And most importantly, they base their arguments on science rather than Solzhenitsynās tall tales or fairy tales about God.
Iām convinced that the politics of common sense and scienceāwhich Musk championed beforeāfor some reasonāgoing quietāwill sooner or later prevail over the politics of obscurantism or āpopcorn and Coke,ā both in Russia and the US.
I listened to Semin recently; he attended an international communist congress in Britain a few years back. He represented the Russian Communist Party there (not the CPRF).
And the main thing isāhonestly, Comradeāhe used the exact same words Iāve been using for a long time. Their concept of socialism is somewhat abstract; every speaker at the forum said something differentāthereās no unified concept, no single clear idea; itās all very unrefined.
But on the other hand, progressive youth thereānot just those with socialist viewsāare starting to realize that capitalism has outlived its usefulness, that itās a hollow sham. So, theyāre beginning to look for an alternative. Meanwhile, in Russia, the so-called progressive youth are only just starting to soak up the joys of capitalist life, because they didnāt get a chance to enjoy it for 40 yearsā¦ ))) Thereās a lag and some gaps here, too.
It turns out thereās a Marx Library in London; I didnāt know thatā¦ ))))
āMarx remains relevant as long as capitalism exists.ā
https://youtu.be/am-D1MtZ7Xg
A quick side note: In the USSR, children were made to grow up early and shed their illusions, not the other way around.
As for Hollywood moviesāif you strip away the sex, violence, and drugs, the vast majority of them are essentially childrenās films.
When I got to know American culture better, I was really surprised to learn that adults read comic booksā¦ In the USSR, the closest thing to comics was produced only for children who were just learning to read (before starting school). Personally, I was already reading Pushkin and had memorized several poems before I even started schoolāthough I read comics, too.
Comic books, for crying out loudā¦ )))) At age seven, I read H.G. Wellsā The War of the Worlds. I remember staying up all night in fear after reading The Time Machine.
And Iād borrowed the book from a classmateāa friend who had highly recommended it to meā¦
But why am I telling you this, Comrade? You were just like that yourself onceā¦ )))) You saw it all firsthand!
Iāll join Marx and add this: as long as capitalism exists, education will be crap! Because they arenāt raising intellectualsātheyāre raising docile workers for their factories. Intellectuals donāt serve their interests; intellectuals think too much and notice too muchā¦ and then they say things that are highly inconvenient for the powers that beā¦
Iām afraid restructuring wonāt be enough.
This is basically what Marx explains in the first volume of The Capital. Itās good to see young people still read Marx in Russia. :)
And heās right that full automation is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism because the whole system is based around consumption. You need wage workers who produce value, and then pay the capital owner to consume goods. If you eliminate wage workers from the system thereās nobody left to consume the goods. And once you have the majority of population become useless within the system it can no longer function.
Basically what happened was that the US sat out the second world war and developed its economy while the rest of the world burned. Then they used their head start to prop up their ideological bloc during the Cold War and created the whole mythology that capitalism was a superior system and the standard of living in the west wasnāt because the US had a huge head start, but because capitalism is a superior system. Now that China has caught up and capitalism has destroyed all the material benefits western public enjoyed, weāre seeing the new generation sobering up.
And Iām still shocked how nobody actually reads books here. It is absolutely incomprehensible to me. Just like you, I was reading from the young age, cause there really wasnāt much other type of entertainment. And reading really opened up your imagination, Iām incredibly grateful for growing up in USSR and having developed this habit. Reading a good book is still by far the most enjoyable experience for me.
incidentally https://english.www.gov.cn/policies/latestreleases/202512/17/content_WS6941fa8bc6d00ca5f9a08243.html
In Russia, Marx is inseparable from Lenin.
By the way, listen to the story of how Russian officials, together with their Chinese counterparts, are selling a massive Soviet factory to China for scrap metal. Itās a disgrace!
When Platoshkin exposed this criminal scheme, a local official simply blew up the factory to cover his tracksā¦
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qsA-IegBgcg
And once again, capitalism is doing harmāthis time, to the advancement of progress.
As I understand it, during the Iron Curtain era, the only information that reached us from the other side was propaganda. And as Iāve come to realize decades later: Soviet propaganda told 90% the truth about the West, whereas Western propaganda told 90% lies about the USSR.
That is why people in the West are only now beginning to understand what socialism actually isānow that advanced Western capitalism has gone into a tailspin. I remember when I first joined Western forums back in 2015; peopleās jaws would drop at the stories I told. At first, they didnāt believe meāthey thought I was making it all up! I became very popular very quickly on that first Western forum.
Comrade, those are just Western tall talesā¦ )))) ŠŠµŃŠµŠ²ŃŠ½Š½ŃŠµ ŠøŠ³ŃŃŃŠŗŠø, ŃŠŗŠ¾Š»ŃŠ·ŠŗŠøŠ¹ ŠæŠ¾Š“Š¾ŠŗŠ¾Š½Š½ŠøŠŗ, ŠŗŠ°Š»ŃŃŠŗŠ° Š±ŠµŠ· Š“Š½Š°))) I was never a homebody as a child. There was a sports ground in every courtyard; we played soccer there every dayāit was impossible to get me to come home. In the winter, theyād flood the area to make an ice rink, and weād play hockey. When my parents bought me a computerāa ZX SpectrumāI went wild and started skipping school, but even so, there was always a book on my nightstand; I read every day before bed.
Yeah, thatās the ironic part, it turns out that Soviets didnāt really have to make stuff up about the west while the west had to spin tall tales about evils of communism. I do think that it was a failure of Soviet education system that it failed to make people really understand the problem with capitalism. I remember when I was a kid at school, there was no discussion about it, nobody really gave it any thought. But you look in the west, and indoctrination starts very early on. Not just in schools too, itās in TV shows, comic books, everything. And we see now just how effective this type of indoctrination is.
And yeah, thatās fair, I meant specifically in terms of media entertainment. I did spend a lot of time outside with my friends as a kid. This is, incidentally, another thing you canāt do in the west. My parents would just let me go out by myself when I was 8 years old without a single worry. Iād go out in the morning, come back lunch, and hang out with friends the rest of the day. Thatās how safe things were. That sort of thing would be unthinkable in Canada today.
One mistake made in the late USSR was that the public did not take the propaganda seriously.
There were economic problems, yet reports spoke of incredible achievements in socialist construction; in reality, everything was stagnating. The leaders could barely articulate their wordsā¦ Brezhnevās final speeches were completely unintelligible; people laughed at him back then just as they laughed at Biden when he rambled. The party leadership had become ossified; the country definitely needed a breath of fresh air at that time. That was precisely what Andropov envisioned when he tasked Ryzhkov and Gorbachevāwho were the āyoung guardā of the party back then, full of fresh thoughts and ideasāwith developing the project.
Unfortunately, however, Andropov didnāt live long enough to see it through, and Gorbachev later ruined everything.
By the way, Iāve finally fully grasped the reason why Europe was, until recently, a Garden of Eden.
The EU projectāconceived long before the USSR collapsedāwas aimed at preventing the emergence of socialism in individual European states. To achieve this, capitalists were forced to spend vast sums out of their own pockets to ensure social well-being for all their citizens. After all, there were very strong socialist movements in France, Italy, and elsewhere at the time. If the people had been living in hardship, they would have elected socialists. Consequently, capitalists were compelled to share with the publicāas should happen in a genuine democratic capitalist state.
After the USSR collapsed, there was no longer a need to maintain a high standard of living for the European populace. And so, almost without realizing it, Europe began to slide into the abyss! Capitalists now have a free hand; they can do whatever they please.
And now we come to the main point. It turns out that the collapse of the USSR turned Europe into a garbage dump.
This is a caricature from a Soviet newspaper from 1955. Absolutely nothing has changed.
Yes, it was done intentionally to give the child more time for beneficial activities. It was the right approach for the upbringing of young people.
I remember once being in the countryside with my parents, but I had a soccer match on Sunday morning, so I headed back to town in the evening to be ready for the game the next day. My parents stayed behind in the village. When I arrived in town, I realized I had left my apartment keys back in the villageābut I had taken the last bus of the day. It was a 15-kilometer trip, and I was only 13 years old. I lived on the edge of town, so I walked out to the main roadāit was 10 p.m.āand managed to catch a ride. Strangers drove me all the way back to the village; even though it wasnāt on their way, they dropped me right at my house and wouldnāt take a single penny. I had a few rubles in my pocket and tried to offer them the money, but they flatly refused.
It never even crossed my mind that someone might try to harm me. And my parents didnāt scold me for coming back to the village in the middle of the night instead of staying over at a friendās place in townāto them, that sort of thing was perfectly normal.
Even nowābefore the warāI donāt recall any instances of anyone being abducted; children roam the streets freely. But thatās before the war; I donāt know what will happen afterwardsāthe world has changed.
We talked about this before, lack of a good selection process that allowed people of low competence to get into positions of power and created a bureaucracy which was largely concerned with preserving itself rather than solving problems was the ultimate cause of the decline. Simply telling people everything is great while youāre unable to produce substantive change they can see tangibly deligitimizes the system. And thatās precisely what we see happening in the west today, and why thereās now public disillusionment with liberal democracy.
And youāre absolutely right that Europe has been propped up to prevent genuine socialism from taking hold. The US didnāt pour billions upon billions into rebuilding western Europe after WW2 out of sheer altruism. They used it as a way to deligitimize communism in the east. Look how great Europeans are living, look how much faster things develop under capitalism. That was the whole narrative. This is a great read on the subject incidentally, confirms everything you said http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27c/046.html
Yup, that cartoon is ever green, and just as true as the day it was made.
Exactly, there were just not thoughts people had back in USSR. Itās destruction was the biggest crime of the 20th century.
That American professor said that lately, a great many supporters of socialism have been emergingāamong young people in the US and elsewhere. But this isnāt because they are committed socialists; rather, they are protesting against capitalism, and since there is no alternative to socialism, and people want changeā¦
Itās a result of changing material conditions. People see they have no future within the system.
https://youtu.be/jnaI-UzWVs4