• Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com
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    23 hours ago

    liberation getting co-opted by selfish assholes and becoming the thing they swore to destroy

    Totally, like the USSR. They started out with a good idea of redistributing and communalizing the means of production, but ended up creating a new ruling class of politicians that exploited people just as much. Just look at modern evidence of income inequality in the USSR compared to Tsarism (pre-1917) and capitalism (post-1990):

    See? By looking at factual evidence… wait… hold up… Income inequality actually maintained itself at the historical lowest in the region during communism’s entire existence… Well, time to disregard my comment because I’m a tankie and a Ruzzian bot, amirite?

    • LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net
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      21 hours ago

      The hierarchies present in the USSR didn’t take the form of income inequality. You’re taking a metric that is very useful for analyzing capitalist countries and using it in a context where it doesn’t make much sense.

      Anyway, the comparison with the west isn’t really relevant to the comparison I would make in that case, which would be between the initial revolutionary movement and where it ended up.

      • Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com
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        20 hours ago

        The hierarchies present in the USSR didn’t take the form of income inequality

        Wonderful, do you have any numeric data to present?

        Non-income sources of access to goods and services perhaps? Such as the universal access to jobs, and universal access to housing mostly through the work union? Universal access to education to the highest level for free? Widely available, high quality, dense, affordable, high frequency public transit? High quantity of public sport facilities, art centres and so-called “culture houses”? Which of those was, numerically and with data, less egalitarian in the USSR?

        the comparison I would make in that case, which would be between the initial revolutionary movement and where it ended up

        The graph goes from pre-revolution, to Bolshevism, and to capitalism. You can see that income inequality remained somewhat stable during Socialism, and was much lower than before or after.

    • Natanael@infosec.pub
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      21 hours ago

      What somebody formally owns and gets in income isn’t the same as the wealth they actually control in authoritarian systems.

      Also, wealth equality through being poor isn’t that brilliant

      • Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com
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        20 hours ago

        What somebody formally owns and gets in income isn’t the same as the wealth they actually control in authoritarian systems

        Great, why don’t you provide us with some numerical metrics of that in the Soviet Union vs. modern Russia or USA? Or are you possibly just making it up without evidence?

        wealth equality through being poor isn’t that brilliant

        I agree. So did the soviets, and that’s why they took a backwards feudal nation in Europe with 85% of the population composed of exploited peasants with an average life expectancy of 28 years, and industrialized the country until it was the second world power, the majority of the population were city dwellers with modern lives and amenities, and rose life expectancy to 70+ years.