Usually what western people have to be instructed with is current/former socialist countries are legitimate places and not cartoonish dictatorships.

To reinforce your point here, I cannot stress enough how important a step learning actual details about the USSR and China was for me. Because as you say, people don’t think of these as real places where countless real people had mundane, normal lives, they just imagine literal cartoon caricatures they passively absorbed from pop culture. Like one that stands out to me is reading a thorough description of the Soviet court system, where even though it took pains to stress how dysfunctional this feature or that feature was all I could think was “I’ve had family go through the courts in the US, I’ve seen firsthand what a completely mad and not at all functional system the US has, and by comparison what the Soviets were doing over half a century ago was meaningfully less dysfunctional than what we have now.”

And for China, ironically it was something from anti-CPC ultras (Sorghum and Steel) that helped me realize what China had even been doing at all, because even if they stressed this systemic failure or that one they still went into detail about what the policies in question were, what the material situation on the ground was, and why those decisions were being made, leading to a clear picture of China struggling against an impossible material situation and eventually succeeding. Like every western history is just “grr arrg mean devious celestials tricked the peasants and then Mao ate all the sparrows cause they’re dumb, grrr” but in the actual context even the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forwards starts to make sense in terms of the model emerging from rural communes that had implemented it successfully (or were claiming to have done so, at least) and the model of highly decentralized rural industry that’s far from the coast being extremely appealing given how vulnerable centralized coastal industry would be in the event of a war with the US; the Great Leap Forward didn’t work in practice, obviously, but there were clear reasons and pressures behind it instead of just the “lol gommunism dumb no food where iphone” bullshit that makes up the sum total of what liberals believe.

Yeah I agree with this totally, it’s why I try to hammer home that people focus on breaking down nationalism first and foremost, it is the primary issue.

I don’t claim to be an authority, but I have spent the last couple years trying to learn about the DPRK as much as I can from more independent sources (like from people from China who go there as tourists).

From a material perspective… very broadly it seems like it’s better to live in the DPRK than to be poor in the United States, but someone in the US who isn’t poor is probably better off than most DPRK citizens. That of course should not be a surprise, given how heavily the DPRK is sanctioned and how restricted their trade is. Interestingly from the time shortly after the Korean War (after the DPRK was able to recover from having every bit of its industrial capacity destroyed and ~20% of its people killed) up through the 80s, the DPRK was seen as the wealthier of the two countries on the Korean Peninsula.

Honestly, the only way to deny that the people of the DPRK are doing ok materially is to use the line about how whenever you see videos of people having fun a water park or whatever, they’re all just actors. For that, idk I think any application of critical thinking would tell you how ridiculous that is.

That said, there’s some truth to the famine thing, but that’s more an artifact of recent history. There really were famine conditions and suffering in the 90s. But that was more a function of some unique weather/climatic conditions plus the collapse of the USSR. The environmental and terrain conditions in the DPRK are not ideal for farming (cold and mountainous), so there’s a lot less margin for when things go bad. The famines could have been alleviated if the DPRK was allowed to have normal relations with other countries, but at the time the US and their allies used that suffering to try and put the screws to the DPRK instead.

I don’t know enough about the political situation to be able to speak to it with confidence.

I’ve known people who’ve been there. I’ve known an Indonesian guy for instance who used to go on vacations to the DPRK to go skiing. Apparently it’s a fairly normal vacation destination for Indonesians because they can get into the country easily.

From what’s described to me, day to day life is pretty comparable to any other poor country in Asia. Life out in the countryside is probably the hardest. It seems like the worst aspects of living in the DPRK all relate to poverty rather than the cartoonish goofy dictatorship that westerners claim the country is like. They don’t have great internet access, but from what I’m told nearly every person in the DPRK buys USB drives full of pirated stuff anyway.

Other than their media, the DPRK is pretty normal, and in fact doing quite well considering their decades of sanctions and international aggression. They haven’t had widespread food insecurity in a while. Their healthcare system seems stable. They had energy instability for a while in the 90s they seem to have managed.

This is a fascinating documentary called My Brothers and Sisters in the North by a South Korean woman who had dual citizenship in Germany and then used that German Citizenship to visit the DPRK.

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=nSd48emp0lI

She goes to a number of different places in the DPRK and visits people living much different lifestyles.

Things to remember when watching vids regarding inside DPRK is that they are basically under siege by Western Powers for almost a century now. So when they’re being interviewed, they’re basically talking to extensions of their oppressors and they’re very aware of that.

There’s also The Haircut by BoyBoy. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=2BO83Ig-E8E

You’ll probably recognize some of the locations they went to from the documentary as there’s a basic tour every tourist goes on and then people who visit as part of the DPRK’s cultural exchange program get to visit more relevant locations to their project in addition.

Speaking of. If you can find a torrent of Aim High in Creation you’ll get to see a much more behind the scenes look of people in DPRK just doing their job and living their life. The facade of stiffness falls to the wayside and you get to see Filmmakers who aren’t typically dealing with tourists just being themselves and shooting the shit. See if you can tell when the Australian director is being inadvertently rude to them.

Trailer https://yewtu.be/watch?v=CvrWdj79aT4

Keep in mind that the DPRK had 20% of its people killed off in a matter of 3 years and much of its land destroyed.

So, while there have been a famine in recent memory (during the 1990s), this has been a result of the economic embargo and sanctions on the country.

I’m trying to be as honest as I can with you here.

Oh, also regarding defectors. Most that you hear about are monetizing their story through USA backed Libertarian think tanks. Atlas Network being the big one. Freedom Factory is another if I remember correctly.

Yeah, NK’s state media has always had a very off and somewhat idealist view of the DPRK. Most information you find on the nation doesn’t pass the sniff test. They also seem to be the oddball of the socialist countries.

This is one that made me question the western narrative on NK. An article about a stoner getting some North Korean weed and smoking in a restaurant like it was no big deal.. Very good read

I don’t think anyone here really knows. The only people who know are defectors, and not only are defectors themselves not always reliable (Yeonmi Park being the obvious example), documentaries and interviews where defectors tell their experiences will often be edited to fit certain narratives. Not even necessarily for nefarious purposes, but for the same reason that spooky, ominous music plays when a documentary shows a lion sneak up to a gazelle. Telling scary stories about how kim jong-un will execute your family for wearing a tie he finds ugly will keep audiences more interested than “it really isn’t all that special over there, you guys” and since there’s 0 consequences for making up outrageous lies (since nobody is able or willing to fact check you), that’s what we get.

I’m more inclined to believe what I hear from the DPRK itself, but I don’t think anyone here can truly tell you what life over there is like.

I’m by no means an expert but some factors to consider are that there’s a very extensive economic sanctions regime in place against the DPRK.

What that looks like on the ground is that there’s very little oil because it’s hard to import, meaning that there are few cars and a heavy reliance upon mass transit and electricity instead (e.g. trolleybuses).

It also means that they don’t have as much access to things like cutting edge medical technology.

For farming, as manufacturing modern agrochemicals is often very energy intensive and reliant upon oil (do we even use the term petrochemicals? Lol. It feels like all of our chemicals are derived from oil these days…), they tend to be much more low-input chemical-wise and this affects yield as well as the environment (e.g. less chemical runoff in the waterways, all things being equal.)

There’s the focus on militarisation of the DPRK in the western media and this is a response to the Korean war and the very obvious attempts to destabilise and destroy their political system. Their recent advances in nuclear arms and ICBM technology has given them a degree of breathing room as it’s a pretty well established fact that this creates military deterrence that was otherwise being maintained through a very strong focus on a conventional military with a large financial investment in that. These days it’s not as high a priority to have such a strong army, for example, and they don’t need as much artillery aimed at Seoul to feel some degree of security knowing that nuclear missiles are going to fulfil the same purpose. (Am I cribbing my notes from Stephen Gowans here? You bet I am!) I would expect to see the DPRK gradually scaling down their investment in conventional military and reorienting their economic priorities towards infrastructure and other civilian purposes but I’d expect to see just as much military pageantry because they won’t want to expose their flank to the rest of the world unnecessarily. This means we should see better outcomes for the average citizen of the DPRK.

The west is preoccupied with the notion of Potemkin village narratives in the media. Everyone and their dog will point out how some building with no lights on is proof that an entire residential block is just for show or how the passengers on trains in the DPRK all appear to be actors or whatever. This is largely nonsense and a product of westerner tourists coming down with diagnosable cases of Main Character Syndrome and I wouldn’t give much credence to these stories. I mean, I’ve been hearing that China is on the cusp of collapsing for about 25 years now and that it’s going to happen within this year for real this time so I’m a bit reticent towards sensationalism in the media. When the media focus on the DPRK, one of the biggest names is Yeonmi Park who talks absolute rubbish. Plenty of what she says is either absurd, contrary to basic science, or easily fact-checked and disproven. Often her stories are not even internally-consistent.

She claimed that she was so propagandised that she didn’t recognise that Kim Jong-Un was fat. Like, she couldn’t conceptually grasp that he was fat. Not that she wasn’t allowed to talk about it or that there was propaganda explaining why but that she would look at a picture of him and she would be unable to see it.

I mean, come on…

Obviously there’s the famous Joe Rogan interview where she said that there was one train that ran in the DPRK (completely false), that it would only come once a month (again, completely false), and that people would often have to get off the train and push it (I’m sorry, what??). This is directly after saying that people would hang around the train station starving to death and there would be children who were so starved that all their organs fell out (???) and that rats would eat the corpses of victims of starvation and that people starving at the train station would hunt the rats for food.

If that were true we would have satellite images of it. If that were true people wouldn’t stand around starving to death at a train station, they’d be hunting and foraging elsewhere. If everyone was starving so badly then nobody would have the strength to walk, let alone to push a train (which is an absurd amount of weight to try and push regardless of how well nourished you and your fellow passengers are).

I have to admit that I don’t follow Yeonmi Park’s appearances in the media closely but if she’s the leading voice in the western media for what things are like in the DPRK and, at least to my knowledge, no journalist has confronted her about her inconsistencies, her outright fabrications, and her ridiculous claims let alone challenged her on any of them then I’d say that it’s a safe bet that the standard for journalism on the DPRK is abysmally low and it should be regarded with deep skepticism.

There are other things like how there’s an effective blockade on people from the DPRK leaving to go to other countries. This is something which was passed by the UN Security Council as a part of sanctions on the country, although the received wisdom is usually that it’s the DPRK government who imposes this on its citizens.

Same goes for starvation or lack of food. If you look at Security Council resolutions (not that I expect people to do this but…) you’ll find the US pushing for outrageous sanctions on things like oil and food imports and you’ll have China threatening to veto the resolution because this would cause destabilisation of the DPRK due to the measures being so extremely punitive, meaning that often before the final resolution passes it gets watered down enough that the average citizen of the DPRK isn’t facing abject starvation conditions but only because China is curtailing the US’ designs. I’d need to dig back into old resolutions to get a clear picture of this but there was the Deng Xiaoping era onwards where China pivoted and began playing ball with the west, in a dramatic departure from the Mao era, and they were not nearly as strong militarily, politically, or economically so I would venture a guess that China being firmer in its negotiations at the Security Council with regards to stuff like the DPRK is a relatively recent shift. But basically any country which is cut off from the rest of the world’s agriculture is only one environmental disaster away from starvation. Modern agricultural practices ameliorate this to a certain extent but if your country is cut off from them as well then you’re in a precarious position.

But yeah, it’s extremely hard to distinguish fact from fiction when it comes to the DPRK and you’re not alone in feeling that way. My default position for anything about the DPRK is false until proven true and to be wary of the interpretation of the facts, for example what I mentioned above where it’s a function of the UN Security Council resolution that prevents DPRK citizens from travelling abroad rather than some cynical plot by the DPRK government to control the movement of its citizens.

imgur album with almost 400 pictures of life outside of pyongyang: https://imgur.com/a/BybJ7DQ

jaka parker has videos of this on youtube https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=e6STm0seel8

indonesian diplomat, has no real commentary, no handlers. just shows daily life in the country. its not a rich place, it is severely lacking in industry due to western sanctions, but there are some interesting things going on, particularly in regards to housing and food distribution. a lot of places in asia look a lot like north korea, there is new development that is very good, and there is dilapidated rural areas. its important to understand that this region used to be worse off than africa. china has many similar issues, but have been able to rapidly advance due to deng’s reforms.

Removed by mod

on Netflix there is a Series “Crash landing on you” , watch it ! Its great and this way you will understand "how south Korea " sees it… and this way you will then get to a more hollistic view.

on Netflix there is a Series “Crash landing on you” , watch it ! Its great and this way you will understand "how south Korea " sees it… and this way you will then get to a more hollistic view.

There’s a Chinese communist from the early days of the CPC - and I feel bad that I’ve forgotten his name - who I have read some of his thoughts on this. He said the first generation after the revolution will still have brains full of worms, even among the best and most upstanding comrades. This will get better over time, but you’re talking many generations. Because we are all products of our environment. We cannot escape the social conditions we grew up in. Being a communist doesn’t mean you are now some new person completely cleaved from any connection to the world around us and our personal histories. The Soviet Union did make attempts to fight sexism, racism, nationalism et al within their borders, but thinking you can just propagandize people into right thinking is idealism. The USSR had to start with the social conditions they inherited - and that society, which was part feudalist part capitalist - had a lot of sexism, racism, nationalism, etc (and of course cruelty to animals).

I’ll make a confession: I still sometimes have reactionary thoughts and ideals pop into my head. And it takes active, conscious thought to tell myself “what the fuck dude, cut that shit out”. If I was not actively engaged in checking myself on that, it is possible that the brainworms could come back. It’s something we are all susceptible to in some form, I think.

I think reading Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti would be helpful. He doesn’t make excuses and acknowledges the racism in the USSR. I think laying bare the actual shortcomings of the project places it in reality instead of the cartoonish evil depicted by mainstream Western history. It allows for a clearer understanding of the good alongside the bad and shows where we can improve in the next iteration of a socialist project

We’re all human and need to see where we can do better, and despite the issues of past socialist experiments, it seems to many here that this form of government is the most likely way for humanity to do the most good for all

I think it really is a generational thing, especially with people who grew up during the liberalization era. Plus people wrongly try to make sense of the collapse of their lives, so they may fondly remember Communism, but associate their new shitty conditions with stuff like LGBTQ rights instead of everything else the west brought. This is why a cultural revolution was a necessary idea, even if not executed well. People didn’t retain the materialism of the ideology even if they are nostalgic for the world it created.

I always think about this conversation @kristina@hexbear.net and @BeamBrain@hexbear.net about her family and how her grandmother so quickly became pro-LGBTQ, while her more liberal parents are not as quick to change. https://hexbear.net/comment/3310448

This has more to do with the 1990s to 2010s than it does with the Soviet days.

I do get caught up on the fact that the people among our relatives who are most nostalgic for the Soviet Union are also VERY racist, homophobic, terrible to animals and just generally mean to everyone around them.

i’ve noticed this when talking to my cousins abroad but have no answer, because it’s kind of true and disturbing, but at the same time in the US, mean american people wander into my life all the time. I think that the US is just slightly ahead of Russia in what you might call the less-economic types of a cultural revolution (specifically, LGBT rights, animal rights, etc.).

Creating a socialist world is the only chance we have at eliminating that kind of bigotry. People are the products of the societies that created them. We can’t simply tell people to stop being bigoted. Education only goes so far. We have to completely destroy the conditions that lead to bigotry in the first place.

I used to have that same bias you had and that’s how I got through it

It might be pertinent to question how when they left and why factor into it, though that is probably a doxxing risk to share here.

Both my husband and I are children of expats from former Soviet countries

you mean “immigrants” right?

I think one of the most important things to keep in mind is that there are Soviet nostalgics and there are socialists (anarchists and communists).

Most people who are socialist out of politics and not out of a desire to see the old country relive its glory days are going to be very progressive on matters of race, gender and sexuality, animal rights etc.

Not all of them by any stretch of the imagination and, as an example, I’m in discussion with an anarchist outside of this platform who is saying really ableist and borderline eugenicist things so there’s absolutely a whole lot more work to be done and I’ll be the first to admit it. But generally I expect to see a fairly high standard of being progressive on these sorts of matters and I expect to see big, ugly intraleft slapfights that occur when someone is really backwards on these things (especially if it’s an organisation.)

For example, you could ask most socialists what word springs to mind when they hear the phrase Communist Party of Great Britain/CPGB and they’ll probably wrinkle their nose and say “TERF” lol.

For someone who is a communist, I’d expect that Soviet nostalgics and I would be 50/50 on finding common ground and on being in such disagreement that we’d butt heads and get into heated arguments over it. But it’s also worth mentioning that I feel that would be the case for most people around the grandparent age.

I mean, I live in a racist shithole and when I meet people (especially white people) I kinda just brace for the racism. I present as masculine so I’m also bracing for the misogyny, mostly coming from other men. This tends to intensify the further back you go by birth year. I know that certain politics definitely attracts types of people (you’re going to find more homophobes in a conservative party and you’re going to find more vegans in a professive party, obviously) but I think a lot of your experiences with Soviet nostalgics could probably be attributed to a generational thing as well as the fact that in some countries Soviet nostalgia is, in a sense, a “conservative” or pseudo-conservative position.

Oh shit oh fuck

it’s more of a waiting list/lottery situation than a “schedule”

The most efficient toothbrush use will be optimized with linear programming.

I put tokthburhs in my buthol

This depends on just how efficient the Toothbrush Snatching Squads will be, a raging debate in leftism is whether we’ll get 30% or 90% of all toothbrushes, but nobody knows for sure

sometimes i wonder if we would even need toothbrushes if our food wasn’t full of processed sugar because corpos want to get us addicted to their slop (they put more sugar in than you can even consciously taste in some foods, to make your body crave more of it instinctually)

Subsistence farming is very different from owning means of production and exploiting workers. Unless your two cows are a metaphor for owning land and cattle that are worked by peasants while you keep the surplus value literally nothing happens.

I hire a furry to draw them as smokin hot babes

They will die, as will we all.

As pets?

they are cut into cubes and portioned out to everyone throughout the country

YOU have 2 cows? No no, WE have 2 cows.

They become best friends

Uhhh, I guess there’s a CW on that article for having a homophobic term/a term that could be interpreted as homophobia.

The editor really dropped the ball by not adding an editor’s note to explain that clanger.

they’ll probably moo once or twice

EDIT: Serious Answer -

Its Part of the Psyop is that they dont tell you about “Personal Property” , they only give you Private Property a word that includes Multinational Corporations and your Toothhbrush. To the cows will happen what you choose for them …

Uh, the people that milk them, slaughter them, cut them up, etc. now own them if they go to market. If you’re doing subsistence farming + a little bit to market that you yourself do, you own them. If it’s decided during wartime that cow production is a strategic necessity that has additional considerations for the purposes of defence, the state now owns them until it is no longer a strategic necessity (this largely applies to weapons production, and certain resource sectors. Cows are unlikely, but wheat and oil are very likely. Basically, you don’t want the entire socialist system to be held hostage by a tiny minority who happen to be providing a very broad necessary good. For instance, the amount of wheat a single wheat farmer provides is absolutely massive, meaning that a consortium of wheat farmers have a chain to yank to extort everyone else. In the case of wheat during non-wartime periods, I’d probably want a rotating cast of wheat farmers, maybe as a vocational “this is where our food comes from” school thing with a small core of permanent wheat farmers for institutional knowledge? Depends on the circumstances)

(this may also depend on the vegan-ness of your revolution, but I think generally meat should be seen as a luxury or limited good. It’s unlikely that American meat consumption would continue for particularly long regardless of the revolution though)

(this was a semi-serious meandering answer. Sorry.)

(tldr: it depends on the interaction of the cows with the rest of society)

GRAB YOUR GEAR AND GET IN THE TEACHING TRENCHES!

real

Shitposting is praxis.

counterpoint, why not marxism?

This is probably not an answer, and certainly not a defense of atrocities, but I’d like to provoke you a little by putting you in the shoes of the 1930s USSR:

It hasn’t even been a decade since the end of a brutal Civil War, during which the world’s first newly formed socialist state was invaded by a dozen of Western imperialist powers, and ended with a heavy toll on human lives and the destruction of huge parts of the economy.

A new form of reactionary force - fascism, embodying the most brutal form of reactionary violence, had just crushed the revolutionary movement in Italy, and is spreading across Europe. Hitler had just been made the leader of Germany, and is heavily militarizing and preparing to execute an expansionist doctrine.

War is coming. An imperialist war that threatens to be far bloodier than the Great War itself not even two decades ago, is now painting the world’s first socialist state as its target. You pleaded with the European powers to take this fascist threat seriously, but was turned down by every single one of them, who then proceeded to form military and economic alliance with Nazi Germany. It became clear to you that the anti-communist imperialist powers are dead set on destroying the Soviet Union. It should have been obvious.

A war is coming, and your country is still 50-100 years behind the Western capitalist powers. It was barely industrialized, and there simply isn’t enough productive capacity to match the output of the Western powers. The fate of the world’s first socialist state is in peril - if the Soviet Union is crushed, then all hopes would be lost. Reactionary forces would have won. This has gone beyond the survival of the nation - this is the ultimate clash between ideologies, and the survival of socialist ideas hinges upon the survival of the Soviet Union itself.

You don’t know when the war would come. Would it be in 5 years? 10 years? There is no time to waste. There is only one way out: brutal industrialization. “We are 50-100 years behind the capitalist powers, and we must make do of that in 10 years” - Stalin in 1930. This proved to be prophetic, because in exactly 10 years, Nazi Germany would launch its invasion against the Soviet Union that would end with the perishing of 27 million lives of the Soviet people.

A brutal industrialization must take place before the worst comes for us! It must not be derailed! Anyone who threatens to derail the industrialization process also threatens the survival of the nation itself. It is a time of confusion and uncertainty. You cannot know for sure who might be the saboteurs, the naysayers, the delinquents who will drag us down and set us back. There is no time for that. Would you risk having millions of lives killed in a war because you’re not sure if a few managers are innocent? There is no time to tell, and no way to know for certain.

You have to make the choice. Now. And your choice will determine whether fascism destroys an entire nation and leads to the final victory of the reactionary forces.

What would you do?

There is certainly survivorship bias because all the socialist states that had perished have merely become a footnote, that leftists lament over: “how unfortunate”. Allende in Chile tried to be democratic with his socialism, and what he invited instead was the most brutal form of fascist violence that murdered hundreds of thousands of people, and the most brutal form of economic exploitation known as neoliberalism, the effects of which had destroyed millions of families and its devastation still lingers to this day in Latin America.

It is easy to say, “if I had been in charge, I would certainly have done it better.” But that’s with the power of hindsight. But let’s say you have just achieved a socialist revolution in your country, how would you act and prepare for the coming onslaught of the counter-revolutionaries? How far are you willing to go to defend the survival of the revolution?

In a time of confusion, uncertainty, social upheaval, radical transformation of the society, the emotions, with all the flux of information that may or may not be trustworthy, if you were to make decisions which will determine the survival or the demise of an entire nation, could you really have done better?

I’d recommend “Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend” by Domenico Losurdo.

In it, Losudro brings up the ‘thornier’ parts of Stalin’s history and contextualizes those moments in history. To me, he does a convincing job of explaining all of the ‘Great Man’ myths we hear about Stalin, and that so much of these unexamined anecdotes just lived on as myths/legends about the man.

I believe he has a few chapters about work camps and explains and contextualizes them in a nuanced way. Really enlightening book and I think it would answer some of the questions you might have about Stalin.

I will say this, I get frustrated by most any anti-Stalin slander, but I also get really depressed when i look into a figure in soviet history and see “died 1938-9” because so so often it is needless. So many comrades lives wasted and in many cases indefensibly, however what is worth considering is these are the exception not the rule. Most people who got tried didn’t get executed, most purged just got reassigned or kicked from the party, and the vast majority of citizens faced none of this. That doesn’t make a great deal of it any less of a mistake, but it becomes a mistake among triumphs.

There is a reason so many people who got purged and executed have wiki articles, and it is not just western propaganda, it is because people in prominent and noteworthy positions were more likely to be killed or become relevant in hindsight, whereas random worker who got his pension and retired happily and voted in his soviet is not “worth” making an entry for, and for understandable reasons.

So many dissidents or executed people who get attention are artists, creatives, and this seems to imply that the purges went so deep into harmless things, but really it shows us that a great deal of the purges are part of an almost culture war or battle within an agency, a disproportionate number of those purged are public individuals. So you naturally will see more info on them.

Another part of it is that there are for sure bad actors and people operating out of malice, plenty involved in the ethnic expulsions did so with cruelty and while there are reasons for why at the highest levels say Stalin would approve of deporting so many Chinese and Korean communists from the Far East out of concerns that Japan would claim that made it legitimate territory for Manchuria to claim (as they had elsewhere), another case like that of the Ingush is far less reasonable even compared to the incorrect logic of the prior example, and carried out even more harshly often in an openly racist manner by officials. Sometimes this was ignored or approved of by higher officials, but often local powerbases protected themselves until dismantled.

We see this with Ukraine and Stalin bringing the hammer down on officials who did discriminate and mistreat people intentionally

I think Blackshirts and Reds was a very accessible USSR book.

Most leftist books, I’ve found, are very well sourced.

🥰

It is!

reddit tier comment

Are you ok with fiction? Ursula K LeGuin’s The Dispossessed is a fictional account of an anarchist society. It’s also a very very good book as I know more than one person who is neither an anarchist nor a communist and they loved it, since LeGuin is such a gifted writer.

As for bureaucracy under anarchism, that’s a contentious topic.

For anarcho-communists, it’s probably going to be very similar to the examples that a communist will give you.

For syndicalists, the level of organisation or coordination would occur between “workplaces” (I can’t use the term factory here for obvious reasons and “unions” can blur some lines that are less than ideal because a syndicalist understanding of their ideal system is not a “unions sitting on top of the political economy/unions sitting at the side” sort of deal like we see today.) There should be larger all-sector unions which represent each industry in a syndicalist society that would coordinate and collaborate with other all-sector unions, so let’s say that there’s new medical technology which is being implemented in hospitals but it places significant demand on electricity or telecommunications - the all-sector healthcare union would need to communicate this increased demand with the all-sector energy union or all-sector telecommunications union to coordinate building more infrastructure or increasing energy production etc.

For anarcho-primitivists - it’s basically going to be tribal. As for healthcare, guess I’ll die 🤷

This gets contentious because it’s not really considered to be orthodox anarchism but some of the more comprehensive theory on anarchist/anarchist-adjacent bureaucracy is found in Murray Bookchin’s Libertarian Municipalism and, by extension, Abdullah Ocalan’s Democratic Confederalism (which is what the YPJ and PKK are striving to achieve in Rojava in Syria currently.)

I think the reason why you can ask 10 anarchists what bureaucracy will look like under anarchism and you’ll get 11 answers is because in terms of ideology, anarchism is very heterogeneous.

You gotta start reading about modes of production and shit I’m sorry. Debt the first 5,000 years isn’t good enough, but it has some stuff about how ancient indigenous people of Brazil & Australia lived

I’m an anarchist, but not well versed on theory (yet), so take what I say with a grain of salt.

there appear to be various instances where there is bo common answer [on how things should function], even within anarchist circles

Anarchism is a large group of similar ideas, randing from individualists, to collectivists/communists, to egoists, to syndicalists, to nihilists, and more. Ancaps are not anarchists, however (you cannot oppose all unjust hierarchies while deep-throating a capitalist’s boot). Anarchist movements are based on core ideals about hierarchy, the state, power, and anti-capitalism, there is a large diversity of thought within it.

Anarchists in the circles I’m in usually in propose using federations based on consensus-based direct democracy, and creating bottom-up horizontal structures, and using delegation to organize on a larger scale, such as “state-wide” regional, “national” or global. Note that when I say “state-wide” or “national” there will be no nations or states under anarchism, but I’m moreso loosely talking about geographic and demographic scales.

Some past societies include: CNT/FAI, Ukrainian Free Territories, and KPA Manchuria. Some current ones include Rojava and the Zapatistas.

Graeber and Wengrow go into detail about some anarchist-like societes that existed in the americas before they were genocided by colonists in their book “The Dawn of Everything”, which is the only book I’ve (partially) read on the topic at the moment.

There are tiny regions/communes that practice anarchist ideas, at a small scale within capitalist states. Jackson Rising, community responses to Hurricane Katrina, Stop Cop City/forest defender encampments, and the paris commune had/have anarchist principles at their core.

How does healthcare look under anarchism, especially on an industrial scale?

I’ve not read theory on this, but I know Margaret Killjoy talks about this in her podcast “Live Like the World is Dying”, though I haven’t listened to the episode

Although I haven’t read theory on it, I’d assume the general argument relies on the fact that there are plenty of people who understand how drugs are manufactured, and how those supply chains work, and plenty of others capable of designing new supply chains. Through delegation and federation, knowledgable delegates can work with other federations to organize the supply chains to manufacture and distribute the medication. If a component is lacking, people would need to organize within their federation, or with other communities to get it done, rather than having a state give the directive to do XYZ to fix the problem.

are there any reading materials on concrete ways on how anarchist societies could function in modern times?

Zoe Baker and Anark are both authors/youtubers who have videos on anarchist organization, and both have extensive reading lists with old and new books on organization among many other topics. A lot of those books can be found for free on the anarchist library in various formats :)

I wish I could give a better explanation and more examples, but my ADHD brainworms get mad at me when I read, watch video essays or listen to podcasts.

Sorry for not linking, I’m on my phone