Ad-hoc museums of a failing utopia: photos of Soviet shop-windows

boing
41

7 hours in line to vote isn’t democratic when the process can be done in your privileged area in 4 minutes.

I’m just sayin’ we in the U.S. don’t have the moral high-ground, and forcing people in poor areas to wait in line and taking away early voting creates the very definition of disenfranchised. We may allow a veneer of free speech, yet we’re the highest per capita in jailed population. Our government may not (generally) disappear dissidents, although it’s show no hesitation in killing her own citizens without due process.

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42

At work you don’t have first amendment protections, you say the wrong thing at work and you can get fired.

The consequences of losing a job can be quite devastating; just as traumatic as being being throw in jail.

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43

“Photographer David Hlynsky – American born, Canadian residing, child of Eastern European emigres – took over 8,000 street photos of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, East Germany and Russia, documenting the last days of ideological anti-consumer shopping, now anthologized in an amazing book.”

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Arguments about whether capitalism or socialism provides an all-round better way of life can be settled with a reasonable certainty by observing which devotes more resources to keeping citizens in, and which to keeping immigrants out.

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It’s a question of scale. We may incarcerate an unacceptable number of our citizens, but we don’t maintain a system of labor camps. Our overmilitarized police forces have issues with the use of deadly force, but we aren’t liquidating the kulaks as a class.

Do you recognize the significant moral difference? I’m not waving pom-poms and saying America is perfect, but we’re better than that.

(Two other things: our “veneer of free speech” is strong enough to allow Nazis to parade peacefully through a town of Holocaust survivors, and I live and vote in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, which is poor as shit and still organized enough to make voting simple and quick.)

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46

If you think losing your job is as traumatic as going to prison, you need to learn more about prison.

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I’m a citizen of the US, and never experienced the worst of the soviet system - my direct family left the Russians influenced area around the pogroms.

My point was comparing our current DHS-ridden country with a USSR thats been gone for 25 years now isn’t apples and oranges, and I just don’t think either side has a flag-waving “we’re better” argument.

The US had a nasty history with accepting recent immigrants (thought its life), wiped out the natives, and actively keeping down part of her inhabitants through policies like institutional slavery, Jim Crow, and voter suppression tactics. If some remember living under with communist control with rose-colored glasses, is it any different than Sean Hannity picturing America as a permanent 1950s leave it to Beaver ideal?

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48

I thought everything was quantifiable in your worldview?

Why not ask your parents if they envied the West before the revolution, and if they thought their kids would be better off if they were in the West and not in a communist country? I mean, I know that there is a fair bit of support and nostalgia for Soviet times in Russia and many CIS and Eastern Bloc countries, but this has more to do with the failure of many countries to transition to functional capitalist democracies and less to do with how great things were under communism.

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I disagree. Even with all our problems (which are deep, systemic, and real), I think it is still safe to say that our form of government is superior to that which existed under the former USSR.

Churchill put it best, as he often did:

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

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50

Suffering is a relative matter.

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Yes. Have you read this book? @goodpasture should check it out, too.

I’m not going to suggest that the Socialist system was ideal or did not involve force and coercion, but much like the west, they had to find consensus, too, right?

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52

No, we just sell prisoner’s labor cheaply to private industry:

[edited to add] also, this…

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53

Those are horrible and should not occur, but as I mentioned earlier, it’s a question of scale: those prisoners aren’t shipped to the Arctic circle and forced to dig copper mines until they die. They aren’t beating each other to death over scraps of bread.

The United States does terrible things; the USSR was worse.

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And the USSR is no more, but the links that I pointed to are happening right now and should concern us all, because it’s happening here and now. Young black men are being shot and cops are getting away with it, right now. We can’t change the past of what happened in the 20th century, we can only understand it and maybe learn something from it - but that means looking at the socialist system, how it actually functioned, and understanding that, not some cartoonish vision of a century of nothing but violence and gulags. And if we had taken the direction of pushing for more openness and working along side the Soviets at the end of the war instead of open hostility that the Truman administration had, who knows how that might have gone. Stalin was a bad actor, no doubt, and I’m generally not in the business of counterhistories, but in this case, we could have gone in a better direction at the end of the war, taken more of a stance that Jeanne Kirkpatrick did under Reagan towards right wing dictatorships (meaning that we assume that they can get better and more democratic and open), and things in the second half of the 20th century might not have been so bad for the people of Russia, especially once Stalin died.

Also, I should point out that not much changed in regards to oppression under the shift to an open market in Russia - and one could also point to the incorporation of capitalism into the Chinese system, too. Maybe there is something more complex going on here than “capitalism, good, communism, bad”. We really shouldn’t confuse an market system with democracy and freedom, because they really aren’t the same thing. We’ve backed plenty of right wing dictators simply because they allow American corporations to operate in their countries (often using state backed slave labor forces which you seem to despise - which we all should despise, absolutely right).

Plus, you have people who actually lived within these systems telling you something different… maybe how it looked depended on who you were and where you were positioned within the system. The case I know best from my research is Yugoslavia - if you were Serbian, Slovenian, Bosniak, or Croatian, living in the northern part of the country, things were far better than if you living in the Albanian lands prior to the 1960s, which saw Kosova get some autonomy from Belgrade. But the south was rather underdeveloped, while the north did see an increasingly higher standard of living over the long haul of the Socialist period. Does that mean that there wasn’t oppression, not at all, but Yugo-nostalgia isn’t based on some myth of socialist paradise. It does indeed have a basis in reality for many former Yugoslavs. That is probably heightened by the way the country broke up, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real all the same.

[edited to add link] Again, this is right here, right now:

I want to stress that I’m (nor, do I think others such as @shaddack) are not necessarily defending the Socalist system outright, especially under Stalin - what we ARE arguing is that the reality was more complicated than just outright oppression for the whole of the thing.

[edited to add link] Again, right here, right now:

http://www.kansascity.com/news/government-politics/article11212511.html

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55

The violence and gulags were part of how that system “actually functioned,” no matter how “cartoonish” you find it. My point from the beginning is that calling such a system “humane” simply because it wasn’t consumerist ignores the incredibly inhumane violence necessary to make it that way.

Russia doesn’t really have an open market; for as often as the United States is called a plutocracy, Russia fits the description much better. They currently operate under a weird sort of neo-tsarism, not anything that could be charitably called free.

And plenty of people argue that the introduction of capitalism in China has lead to less authoritarianism:

Back in 1996, Asia scholar Henry Rowen of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University noted that when countries reach a per capita income level of $8,000 (unless the money comes mostly from oil), they invariably become freer.
…
Because of the rise of capitalism in China, the country’s people have gained a large measure of freedom—in such critical matters as where they work, where they live, and where they may travel. The sphere of personal autonomy is vastly larger than it was in the dark days of Mao Zedong.

You don’t think the free, voluntary exchange of goods and services is an aspect of democracy and freedom?

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And you are glossing over the people who lived within the system who are saying it’s more complicated than that. And yes, I think the view that the entire experience of living under the Soviet system was one big gray, scary, boring gulag is indeed cartoonish. I am not arguing that the gulags were “cartoonish”, because they were obviously horrible. For the record, I never called the system “humane”, that was @shaddack’s language. Not mine.

Sure, now they don’t. However, the 90s were indeed an opening of the market and part of the reason that Putin is so popular now is because he put a halt to much of the kleptocracy that the end of the Soviet Union opened. Read up on the 90s wild west in books like Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine.

Not necessarily, no. It can be, certainly. But you can have a more socialist leaning economy, and have democratic practices. Do you really imagine that large corporations dominate the market place is free economic exchange?

Is this the guy you’re talking about, Rowen - a member of the project for a new American century?

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Thankfully, I never argued that the “entire experience” was “one big, gray, scary, boring gulag,” simply that the gulags, the terrors, etc., were part of the system.

Go ahead and check that record; I never wrote or implied that it was your language.

I hope you’re joking. That book is full of shitty research and deep distortions.

The dude’s asinine opinion on Iraq doesn’t negate his work as an economist. Don’t you think Chinese citizens’ newfound choices about where to work, travel, and live represent a widening of Chinese freedoms?

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Putin is powerful, not popular, and the idea that he “put a halt to much of the kleptocracy” is laughable.

Large corporations often dominate the marketplace by colluding with the government to exclude competition. Cronyism is not free economic exchange, and free market advocates oppose it.

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Oh, I dunno, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to point to systemic horrors from 70 years ago as unimpeachable condemnations, but current examples from America as unimportant.

I ought to know, I am a dispassionate observer, an American.

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60

At no point have I said that America’s current problems are unimportant.

What I keep saying is that scale matters: America’s incarceration system is horrific; the Soviet gulags were nightmares.