Incentives under communism?

[Farm Boy]

I did. Several times. Direct responses to specific posters. And frankly, you're right here, not imaginary.

 

[Lexicus]

I did. Several times. Direct responses to specific posters. And frankly, you're right here, not imaginary.

If you're the only one who knows what you meant, did you really say what you meant tho? I have absolutely no idea what your two previous posts mean.

 

[Gorbles]

I did. Several times. Direct responses to specific posters. And frankly, you're right here, not imaginary.

From the grown man who got so mad at fictional "race baiting" he told someone to choke on something.

 

[Farm Boy]

I aim to please, you were <female dogging> about "civility." So go choke on it, and I'll sit weird for a while too, if you read the whole thing. Which I don't think I can assume.

Lex, I think your responses in this particular exchange have basically been racist in nature, lacking any other meaningful substance.

 

[Crezth]

Those jobs aren't exactly drudge work and have a certain degree of noble calling and are generally paid.

Go to a port and load 75000kg into containers and then repeat it next day or go work on a farm for 14 days straight and get back to us.

Or visit an abbatoir I know a kiwi guy in Perth who runs one. Need a job?

yeah dude the point of socialism is that the guys doing the work call the shots. We keep going over this and you keep responding with “but then why would people work, clearly you’ve never worked a dirty job??” Well as someone with an enormous amount of experience as an electrician I have to say, stop that.

Anyway let’s do this again: I mean the main reason I can think of is that people will still live in a society and desire to be seen and reflected upon well by others. They will work and work harder not necessarily for the opportunity to become a capitalist owner-grifter who can idly profit on the order of billions, but to advance their own standing within a worker’s collective and still get paid a good rate for it. And exactly because they will have seized the state and established the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat,” they won’t have to pretend all the scammers and grifters in the free market provide any value and will either kill those worthless jobs outright or move them over to the tasks of socialist organization and administration.

Every need - ounces of fertilizer, pounds of grain - can be planned and anticipated exactly as the large corporate powers already do. They anticipate sales on the orders of hundreds of millions or billions and see to the needs of entire countries purely for their own profit. The socialists object to the arrangement where a parasite class that not only profits the most from this situation also wields the most unaccountable power, and call it unsustainable on the basis that the capitalists will never let a good thing last and will rip the guts out of the planet until every last resource has been processed, consumed, and spent. The sheer amounts of demand generated by the capitalist world order call for the annihilation of the Amazon and the continuing usage of fossil fuels despite repeated warnings from what we are always told are “propagandists” or “activist scientists,” and actually everything is fine and we absolutely must keep consuming and keep increasing production in everything. They will not stop destroying the planet to make office desk mini billiards tables and under capitalism they only have the most feeble motivations cobbled together by the most anemic of opposing interests to put a little money on the side into school lunches or whatever. But what we actually do see, especially in America (who underwrites the security of all Europe), is that every single one of those trickle down benefits are being rescinded and drawn back, and the population is being trapped under ever increasing layers of financial separation.

There is no good reason for any of this and the only real incentive making the vast bulk of the planet work and grow your food Zard, and build every single thing within industrial civilization including the amenities of the cities you love so much, is that they have to do so, because they are forced, because they have to to make ends meet.

We reckon even under socialism they will still grow food to feed themselves, if not because of the wage pressure then because of the social pressure. We honestly do think a much greater portion of the population should be employed in “gardening” which will provide no capitalist value, but is good work that can actually contribute to the general good and which will feed people.

 

[Lexicus]

Lex, I think your responses in this particular exchange have basically been racist in nature, lacking any other meaningful substance.

Racist against who?

 

[Gorbles]

Which I don't think I can assume.

Oh, no, I did. That doesn't change what's what. You got mad at something you made up, and stayed mad at it even when I explicitly described that it wasn't the thing.

 

[Farm Boy]

It's a worldview, Lex.

I think you are lying, G.

 

[Gorbles]

I think you are lying, G.

Further evidence in the box of "me actually bothering to read up on the Hutterites at all" being completely wasted time. That'll learn me.

 

[Farm Boy]

Oh mine too, mine too.

 

[Senethro]

Cryptic!

 

[Ajidica]

The socialists object to the arrangement where a parasite class that not only profits the most from this situation also wields the most unaccountable power,

Which is clearly why you object to the Chinese, Russian, Soviet, and Best Korean parasite classes profiting from their position of unaccountable power.

 

[Lexicus]

Cryptic!

That one means his time would be wasted too.

 

[Akka]

To take the example of a medieval kingdom invading another. There's a whole lot of mess in determining nations throughout antiquity into medieval, and some of that is "we don't have the records" and the other is "it's really messy". But the short version is that, basically, murder was allowed so long as you were smart about it. That's why you could depose your brother by kidnapping his wife and blinding his children.

Do we accept this kind of behaviour anymore? If not, does that not also mean that said attempts at conquering rival countries (or cities, regions, states, whatever) also won't happen anymore? The way in which people competed changed (for example, across Europe, we went from classical republics into feudal monarchies, over a number of centuries).

All of this demonstrates a) that these listed examples of behaviour can't define us as a species, because they were predominantly allowed by the laws and statutes of their times (which we moved beyond, and thus abandoned), and b) it's still a poor attempt at disagreeing with a future communist state. It's like disagreeing with atheism because people were predominantly deist (or theist) two thousand years ago. They were, does that make it a part of human nature?

My point listing all the violence going on at different time, was to point that it happened while not being about "necessities". Conquest, power struggle, religious war, all are mainly about, well, "not necessities".
What you are describing here seems to me to be rather about what kind of violence were commonly happening because they were considered more acceptable at the time than today. I'm not really seeing the link here.

Answering both of these together:

Nor does wanting more than base necessities make us greedy, either. Greed is excess, greed isn't "wanting a toaster when you have bread". You can want more than you "need", just like you can in today's society. Why are you assuming that that would change?

I never claimed it would "stop" it. But would it reduce it? Most definitely.

Oh I do agree it would reduce it. I mean, half the point of social welfare is precisely about giving people enough resources so that they don't find themselves forced to go violent to survive. I would even say that in Western Europe, the violence due to necessities is already pretty small - a much larger violence is about not was is "necessary" but what would be considered "normal", as in the feeling of injustice when you have very little and other have much more, and THAT part would be massively improved in a more egalitarian society, like ideal communism, or welfare state capitalism (like nordic countries). But we're here already outside "violence because necessity" and in the domain of "violence because desire for something you don't need" (might be greed, or ressentment, or whatever).

Again, the point here isn't magical utopia. It's about improving what we have. A better system doesn't have to be a perfect system, or so I'm told all the time when I'm lectured on letting "perfect be the enemy of good". Strangely, any ideal communist (or even socialist) system apparently has to be perfect in every way, shape and form to even be considered as a valid hypothetical reality.

Which is a bit tedious.

I was disputing your argument about necessity-driven violence. I have serious doubts about communism, but that wasn't the point here.

I did? Where?

Here :

You don't seem to understand the concept that you're calling impossible. Violent conflict (when not imposed by imperialist ambitions, e.g. oil in the Middle East) is driven by competition over something you need to live.

I simply dispute this assertion. Violent conflict is driven by "someone wanting something enough", but I'd say that the part of "something needed to live" is not only not the main reason for, but might even not even be the majority of cases.

 

[Crezth]

Which is clearly why you object to the Chinese, Russian, Soviet, and Best Korean parasite classes profiting from their position of unaccountable power.

I understand the real history of those countries a whole lot better than you, including the way they struggle to deal with problems like "red money" and "party princes." It does not make capitalism any more just let alone sustainable, however. If anything it's all a mark towards Orwell and this is indeed all that humanity has to look forward to. What are you going to do? The more the capitalists insist on tightening the screws on the workers, the more the workers won't shed a single tear when they bring the whole thing to flame. And then you can bemoan the "new bosses, same as the old bosses" from six feet under the ground. None of these decisions are made based on a rational calculation of the number of deaths to be expected. They happen because the market forces it to happen because money talks louder than anything else; because money, capital, is the driving force of history right now. It's only people who are blinded by the comforts capitalism has granted them, personally, who don't understand that this means nobody is at the helm and that we are steaming towards oblivion. This has created the most perverse incentive in all of human history whereby one class of mindless consumers gorge themselves until nothing is left while the vast bulk of humanity struggle and toil in misery.

From my view, pointing to what miserable places Russia and China are has nothing really to do with communism and everything to do with gloating about the destruction those countries suffered during WW2. They became radical places where anyone who thought that "oh I dunno maybe the fascists have a point" got shot or sent to prison pretty much sight unseen. Is it possible this has nothing to do with material communism really and is actually just the same human nature that always leads to extreme solutions? And if that is the case, is the solution to allow the capitalists to continue pillaging the unpiloted ship while these disasters keep happening - or is the solution to force the system to heel and to take command of the helm?

And you might say, "Well, if socialism doesn't make people better than the Russians or Chinese, why bother with it?" Well maybe neither socialism nor capitalism can change human nature, like y'all are so fond of saying - and which I essentially agree with. But maybe since human nature cannot be changed, it can only be controlled, we should think about how to structure society in a way that people's natural human inclinations towards greed, thievery, abuse, and exploitation, cannot endanger the whole society and will not allow the strong to harm the weak. As it stands, they clearly are, and "socialism" or a system that explicitly places the social collective above the individual pride is the only antidote.

 

[Narz]

I simply dispute this assertion. Violent conflict is driven by "someone wanting something enough", but I'd say that the part of "something needed to live" is not only not the main reason for, but might even not even be the majority of cases.

Isn't the whole commie argument that the capitalist classes (who have well more than they need) perpetuate violence and theft upon the lower classes.

The poor commit most of the violence on the other hand seems like more of a right wing talking point.

 

[Ajidica]

From my view, pointing to what miserable places Russia and China are has nothing really to do with communism and everything to do with gloating about the destruction those countries suffered during WW2. They became radical places where anyone who thought that "oh I dunno maybe the fascists have a point" got shot or sent to prison pretty much sight unseen. Is it possible this has nothing to do with material communism really and is actually just the same human nature that always leads to extreme solutions? And if that is the case, is the solution to allow the capitalists to continue pillaging the unpiloted ship while these disasters keep happening - or is the solution to force the system to heel and to take command of the helm?

Germany was also destroyed in WW2 and I don't know about you, but on every conceivable metric starting in the early 60's I'd prefer to live in West Germany than anywhere in the eastern bloc.
Nothing required the Soviet Union plough money into its tank fleet which was only used to invade Hungary and Czechoslovakia for daring to suggest they might prefer not to be subject to Soviet Control. Perhaps then the RSFSR would have been in a place where they were envious of the standard of living in Communist Hungary.
The Soviet Union in terms of economic development after WW2, environmental policy, and social policy, was largely an unmitigated disaster.
Sure, we talk about how the Cuyahoga River was set on fire, but at least the Cuyahoga River is still there. I can only point to where the Aral Sea was.

We don't excuse France's abuses in Indochina and Algeria after WW2 as having to do with the abuse and trauma France suffered from Nazi occupation; if I tried that you all would quite rightly laugh at me. So why excuse the continuation of the Soviet Union as an authoritarian one-party state as a result of the trauma of WW2?

And you might say, "Well, if socialism doesn't make people better than the Russians or Chinese, why bother with it?" Well maybe neither socialism nor capitalism can change human nature, like y'all are so fond of saying - and which I essentially agree with. But maybe since human nature cannot be changed, it can only be controlled, we should think about how to structure society in a way that people's natural human inclinations towards greed, thievery, abuse, and exploitation, cannot endanger the whole society and will not allow the strong to harm the weak. As it stands, they clearly are, and "socialism" or a system that explicitly places the social collective above the individual pride is the only antidote.

Sorry bro, I place living in a democracy as pretty important. Democracy lets us vote out wannabe tyrants, people like you, without needing to suffer decades of hardship first.

In the course of my life I have developed five little democratic questions. If one meets a powerful person--Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates--ask them five questions: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?” If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.

Rather than noting unaccountable power is bad, you embark on what-about ism, apologia for the Soviet, Chinese, Russian, and Best Korean unaccountable authority, and end with what certainly sounds like a call that you and your kind should be giving unaccountable power because people just need to do as they are told.

 

[Crezth]

Germany was also destroyed in WW2 and I don't know about you, but on every conceivable metric starting in the early 60's I'd prefer to live in West Germany than anywhere in the eastern bloc.

I'd think you'd be able to tell the difference between the post-war recovery of a major industrial power (especially one that started the war in question, started and maintained a program of industrial genocide, and plunged another nation into 30 million deaths) and the post-war recovery of, you know, not a major industrial power, which was the target of that same war, and which also had a campaign of extermination waged against it. For that matter, post-war West Germany did not even exist on its own terms, it was an outpost of the west. So what you're really saying is that you want the U.S. to rule the world. Just come out and say it next time, mm'kay?

Nothing required the Soviet Union plough money into its tank fleet which was only used to invade Hungary and Czechoslovakia for daring to suggest they might prefer not to be subject to Soviet Control. Perhaps then the RSFSR would have been in a place where they were envious of the standard of living in Communist Hungary.

But from their perspective, it did. It was called for for the same reason the U.S. and NATO called for the stay-behind armies and operation Gladio in Italy. They were securing their periphery against their rivals. Come on, dude! This is basic stuff!

The Soviet Union in terms of economic development after WW2, environmental policy, and social policy, was largely an unmitigated disaster.
Sure, we talk about how the Cuyahoga River was set on fire, but at least the Cuyahoga River is still there. I can only point to where the Aral Sea was.

What are you even trying to say, man? Do you have any idea the amount of irreversible damage that has been dealt in the capitalist world? And you think the Aral Sea is a special case? The Thames was toxic for decades and only recently has had stuff living in it again. This is all byproducts of industrialism! As we keep going over again and again! Now how do you want to solve those problems? You have two choices: A. let the capitalists do what they want and withdraw from climate accords, or B. make the system so that the capitalists are not in charge.

We don't excuse France's abuses in Indochina and Algeria after WW2 as having to do with the abuse and trauma France suffered from Nazi occupation; if I tried that you all would quite rightly laugh at me.

Yes, because it's idiotic. Why do you think that what the Chinese did to secure and unite their own country after the war is anything remotely comparable to what French bourgeoisie did continuing to exploit the colonized world? They're two completely different situations.

And by the way, the French were barely traumatized by that occupation. The entire time Nazis were faffing about in Paris the French were continuing to extract oodles of wealth from their own imperial periphery. Actually you might say Petain's France is fully demonstrative of the willingness of the French capitalists to simply cooperate and work with the Nazis rather than try anything cute. Now the populace of France might not have felt the same way, but the Republic doesn't really exist for them anyway, it exists for the bosses, and the bosses had their hands full killing Viet farmers.

So why excuse the continuation of the Soviet Union as an authoritarian one-party state as a result of the trauma of WW2?

It's not an excuse, it's an explanation that reframes the begging the question nonsense about Soviet tyranny. And for all the whining you can do about Stalinism, Stalin did die and the post-Stalin Soviet Union was measurably and realistically a freer and wealthier place. But people don't seem to know as much about that, but they love talking about the excesses of a state that was under siege by determined exterminators. Very very convenient, if you ask me!

Sorry bro, I place living in a democracy as pretty important. Democracy lets us vote out wannabe tyrants, people like you, without needing to suffer decades of hardship first.

Yes, you would, because your "democracy" is designed for you, so that the classes you've tied your wagon to can continue oppressing the workers who do all manner of things for you. Can they ever "vote out" the unfair labor regime imposed on them? Not in your "democracy."

Rather than noting unaccountable power is bad, you embark on what-about ism, apologia for the Soviet, Chinese, Russian, and Best Korean unaccountable authority, and end with what certainly sounds like a call that you and your kind should be giving unaccountable power because people just need to do as they are told.

What on Earth is served by bleating out a meaningless line like "Unaccountable power is bad?" Everyone knows you want someone who has power over you to be accountable to you. That's a no brainer. And yet we almost never really exist in that situation, even and especially in bourgeois democracy with "checks" and "balances." I mean you can be "accountable" to a small band of industrial interests and still pretty much unaccountable to the vast bulk of the masses. Who is a democratically elected Congressperson or Parliament member or City Councilor or this or that really accountable to? Not the masses, their constituencies; and not all constituencies are created equal, and so long as you insist on your "free" markets, your strong constituencies will warp the entire system to serve their own interests, as they have already done.

 

[Ajidica]

I'd think you'd be able to tell the difference between the post-war recovery of a major industrial power (especially one that started the war in question, started and maintained a program of industrial genocide, and plunged another nation into 30 million deaths) and the post-war recovery of, you know, not a major industrial power, which was the target of that same war, and which also had a campaign of extermination waged against it. For that matter, post-war West Germany did not even exist on its own terms, it was an outpost of the west. So what you're really saying is that you want the U.S. to rule the world. Just come out and say it next time, mm'kay?

The Soviet Union was a modern, major industrial country going into WW2. They were building sophisticated capital warships, modern fighter planes, one of the best tanks of WW2, and millions of miles of railways.
Under Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Union was playing a role in European collective security as a major power. The Soviet Union left WW2 as a confirmed major military power and within a decade of the end of the war was clearly the second great power in the world, with the has-beens like France and Britain trailing far behind. The Soviet Union could have completely ceased spending on every single piece of conventional military equipment in 1962 and I genuinely don't see an existential threat to them. They would have probably lost their grip on their imperial possessions in Europe, but that is hardly a something I expect a staunch anti-imperialist like yourself to lose sleep about!

But from their perspective, it did. It was called for for the same reason the U.S. and NATO called for the stay-behind armies and operation Gladio in Italy. They were securing their periphery against their rivals. Come on, dude! This is basic stuff!

Securing peripheries against rivals? Which rivals? The Soviet armed forces spent more time shooting Czech and Slovak protestors who wished to leave Soviet dominion than any NATO force; and NATO forces spent more time shooting people who would prefer to not be colonial subjects than at any Warsaw Pact force.
Once the Soviets got a large nuclear arsenal every honest military planner on either side of the Iron Curtain knew there wasn't going to be a winnable conventional war between NATO and the Soviet Union. The moment either side approached a breakthrough, out come the nuclear weapons resolving the question in a very final way.
The Soviet Union needed tanks to shoot Czech protestors because otherwise the Czechs would try and leave Soviet control I hear you say? Let the the Czechs leave. Down with the Soviet Empire in Europe!

What are you even trying to say, man? Do you have any idea the amount of irreversible damage that has been dealt in the capitalist world? And you think the Aral Sea is a special case? The Thames was toxic for decades and only recently has had stuff living in it again. This is all byproducts of industrialism! As we keep going over again and again! Now how do you want to solve those problems? You have two choices: A. let the capitalists do what they want and withdraw from climate accords, or B. make the system so that the capitalists are not in charge.

The capitalists were not in charge of the Soviet Union, and their record on environmental damage is, put mildly, not great.
The Thames has recovered, but unless I am sadly mistaken the Tories are not Communists, or even anything approaching leftists, particularly given their current enthusiasm for pumping raw sewage into rivers.
Blaming environmental damage on industrialism, sure, that's fair and accurate; but neither 'capitalists' nor 'socialists' handled industrialism particularly well in the long run.
(Though I've also seen argued one of the biggest instances of environmental damage was the deforestation of North Africa and the Red Sea coast in the classical and early medieval period, prompting some very nasty desertification.)

Yes, because it's idiotic. Why do you think that what the Chinese did to secure and unite their own country after the war is anything remotely comparable to what French bourgeoisie did continuing to exploit the colonized world? They're two completely different situations.

That rests on the assumption there is and should be only One China, that "China" should naturally be one country; which is a line straight out of Chinese Imperial propaganda.

And by the way, the French were barely traumatized by that occupation. The entire time Nazis were faffing about in Paris the French were continuing to extract oodles of wealth from their own imperial periphery. Actually you might say Petain's France is fully demonstrative of the willingness of the French capitalists to simply cooperate and work with the Nazis rather than try anything cute. Now the populace of France might not have felt the same way, but the Republic doesn't really exist for them anyway, it exists for the bosses, and the bosses had their hands full killing Viet farmers.

How convenient, "trauma" only applies when convenient for you!

It's not an excuse, it's an explanation that reframes the begging the question nonsense about Soviet tyranny. And for all the whining you can do about Stalinism, Stalin did die and the post-Stalin Soviet Union was measurably and realistically a freer and wealthier place. But people don't seem to know as much about that, but they love talking about the excesses of a state that was under siege by determined exterminators. Very very convenient, if you ask me!

So the Soviet Union wasn't a tyranny, but the only way to get rid of Great Comrade Stalin was to wait for him to join the great Soviet in the sky.
And people don't know about it? Cut the crap broseph; I'm not some red-baiting cold warrior. Life in the Soviet Union after Stalin died improved quite a bit under Khruschev, Brezhnev, and the others, but that does nothing to address the fact the Soviet Union was an authoritarian single-party military state. They gave the people bread and circuses. We provide you decent living standards, and you don't make a fuss about things like "free speech" or "human rights". When the Soviet leadership couldn't keep providing bread and circuses, that social compact fell apart.

What on Earth is served by bleating out a meaningless line like "Unaccountable power is bad?" Everyone knows you want someone who has power over you to be accountable to you. That's a no brainer. And yet we almost never really exist in that situation, even and especially in bourgeois democracy with "checks" and "balances." I mean you can be "accountable" to a small band of industrial interests and still pretty much unaccountable to the vast bulk of the masses. Who is a democratically elected Congressperson or Parliament member or City Councilor or this or that really accountable to? Not the masses, their constituencies; and not all constituencies are created equal, and so long as you insist on your "free" markets, your strong constituencies will warp the entire system to serve their own interests, as they have already done.

You know, I'm not actually hearing any condemnation of the Soviet Union, China, Russia, or North Korea for being authoritarian single party states with no democratic accountability.
Just a retort that "yeah, well, your democracy is that of a capitalist bootlicker"; which definitely misses the point Tony Benn was trying to make.

You do know who Tony Benn is, right? As you would say, "Come on, dude! This is basic stuff!"

 

[Crezth]

The Soviet Union was a modern, major industrial country going into WW2. They were building sophisticated capital warships, modern fighter planes, one of the best tanks of WW2, and millions of miles of railways.

Achieved under socialism and not at all to their own standards. Despite allowing them to build those weapons, Soviet economic planners would greatly bemoan the negative effects of the rapid industrialization for the next 20 years and this was the fuel in Khrushchev's reformist tank. To put it simply: they bootstrapped a war economy from almost nothing and it was barely enough to resist being exterminated and colonized by Germany.

Under Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Union was playing a role in European collective security as a major power. The Soviet Union left WW2 as a confirmed major military power and within a decade of the end of the war was clearly the second great power in the world, with the has-beens like France and Britain trailing far behind. The Soviet Union could have completely ceased spending on every single piece of conventional military equipment in 1962 and I genuinely don't see an existential threat to them. They would have probably lost their grip on their imperial possessions in Europe, but that is hardly a something I expect a staunch anti-imperialist like yourself to lose sleep about!

It's a dialectical process, like all things are. I don't lose sleep about what's already happened, but I do lose it about what's about to happen. And I just don't see the point persisting in these delusional narratives about how specially evil the Soviets or the communists were. It's clear they had a revolution where the leading ideologue was highly motivated by Marx's comments about the Paris Commune needing to move faster and harder, and who reacted to the situations of the Russian revolution with suitable verve. Once in control, they became at war with western interlopers and anti-revolutions at home, and the process forged a state capable of surpassing those pressures. Then the leadership of that state spiraled into paranoia and started seeing enemies everywhere. Then the Nazis invaded and started trying to literally kill all of them; the Commissar Order required that any captured communist be immediately shot. Then Stalin died and the next government said "We have to do better."

Where in all that is "the Soviet system is fundamentally evil?" You roll your eyes when people say the American system was fundamentally evil for putting a bullet in Malcolm X, MLK Jr., and Fred Hampton. But at least those guys can point out how and why capitalism makes it all happen; how and why capitalism dehumanized Blacks and sought to subjugate and profit off of them bodily. Americans still struggle to get past this problem today, despite democracy, despite representation, the problem has persisted. So why in your mind did communism create Khrushchev or Deng Xiaoping?

Securing peripheries against rivals? Which rivals? The Soviet armed forces spent more time shooting Czech and Slovak protestors who wished to leave Soviet dominion than any NATO force; and NATO forces spent more time shooting people who would prefer to not be colonial subjects than at any Warsaw Pact force.

So you're just going to pretend you've never heard of the Cold War, or what is this? What the hell do you think was going on in Korea by the way? Oh, let me guess... the evil North Koreans tried to take democracy away from everyone, and the good noble South (which was filled with Japanese and American officers BUT NEVERMIND THAT) was forced to Save them. Yes! What a great story!

Once the Soviets got a large nuclear arsenal every honest military planner on either side of the Iron Curtain knew there wasn't going to be a winnable conventional war between NATO and the Soviet Union. The moment either side approached a breakthrough, out come the nuclear weapons resolving the question in a very final way.

every "honest" military planner oooh, I can tell you're a pro at the ol' weasel words my friend!

The Soviet Union needed tanks to shoot Czech protestors because otherwise the Czechs would try and leave Soviet control I hear you say? Let the the Czechs leave. Down with the Soviet Empire in Europe!

Great! You can go back in time and stand on the right side of history with this one!

The capitalists were not in charge of the Soviet Union, and their record on environmental damage is, put mildly, not great.
The Thames has recovered, but unless I am sadly mistaken the Tories are not Communists, or even anything approaching leftists, particularly given their current enthusiasm for pumping raw sewage into rivers.
Blaming environmental damage on industrialism, sure, that's fair and accurate; but neither 'capitalists' nor 'socialists' handled industrialism particularly well in the long run.
(Though I've also seen argued one of the biggest instances of environmental damage was the deforestation of North Africa and the Red Sea coast in the classical and early medieval period, prompting some very nasty desertification.)

The capitalists were in charge of the world, and had invaded the Soviet Union numerous times in the 20's. The conditions of capitalism still dominated everything. The origin of the term "state capitalist" arises from the fact that the Soviet Union was forced to interact with the global market on capitalistic terms, to negotiate on behalf of the Soviet economy with the global, capitalist one. There was no possible escaping the profit motive which continued to drive the chains of industrialism. However the Soviets did endeavor to and were successful in bringing a great many new industrial comforts equitably to their own masses, on terms they do not believe the western capitalists would have offered them without that organization.

That rests on the assumption there is and should be only One China, that "China" should naturally be one country; which is a line straight out of Chinese Imperial propaganda.

Well there was a great deal of sensitivity on this topic considering that the perception was that China, as a whole, "one" country or not, had been divided and was being pillaged by foreign imperialists. And really the vast numbers of Chinese slain by western industrializing capitalists and their police and the Japanese occupation only prove that point. So whether or not One China is a policy you personally find distasteful, it came together for a reason. How do you explain the huge numbers of KMT soldiers and officers defecting to the Communists? Maybe they were all brainwashed?

How convenient, "trauma" only applies when convenient for you!

You can use the word "convenient" a few more times in a sentence, I think? You continuously fail to grasp this point that the "trauma" is not a matter of emotional distress or like, the memory of a little girl having her teddy taken away, but it is a political as well as economic process that did not allow a system you consider better to thrive there.

So the Soviet Union wasn't a tyranny, but the only way to get rid of Great Comrade Stalin was to wait for him to join the great Soviet in the sky.
And people don't know about it? Cut the crap broseph; I'm not some red-baiting cold warrior. Life in the Soviet Union after Stalin died improved quite a bit under Khruschev, Brezhnev, and the others, but that does nothing to address the fact the Soviet Union was an authoritarian single-party military state. They gave the people bread and circuses. We provide you decent living standards, and you don't make a fuss about things like "free speech" or "human rights". When the Soviet leadership couldn't keep providing bread and circuses, that social compact fell apart.

And so what? Decent living standards are all most people in the entire world have any right to hope for. They certainly can't expect free speech or human rights unless they're white and come from one of the nations plundering the planet. Those terms are just privileges - and really, not even that, but the ideas of privileges - that the middle class retainer-guards have been granted by the capitalist elite; really most "free speech" is people saying "i love my country except for the minorities and i hate a foreign nation because i was told to by the newspaper owned by an industrialist who wants some natural resources stored in that nation."

Now you are essentially right that the Soviet leadership fell apart anyway, but it wasn't because they couldn't keep the grift going, it was because they didn't want to cooperate with the rest of the Union; the cries for increased representation and plurality echoing from the smaller member republics would all go unheeded when, against popular vote of the country to maintain the Union, the Russian Soviet defected and declared itself independent. Now it is ruled by capitalist robber-barons of such untouchable power and irresponsible excess that it makes the Soviets look really good. So we do have a direct comparison to when Russia went from being a member state of the Soviet Union to being an independent free democracy with free markets and free minds and free people and all that jazz, and somehow all the ex-Soviet states either became colonies of western capital that purged the rights of women excoriatingly, or resource-gathering tinpots whose only purpose and only mandate is to export resources to the west. No more nonsense about the "happiness of all mankind," now they're just like the West!

It's clear that the fall of the Soviet Union was a catastrophe for its people and is an ill omen for the future of the entire world.

You know, I'm not actually hearing any condemnation of the Soviet Union, China, Russia, or North Korea for being authoritarian single party states with no democratic accountability.
Just a retort that "yeah, well, your democracy is that of a capitalist bootlicker"; which definitely misses the point Tony Benn was trying to make.

Again, begging the question. I'm familiar with how Soviet democracy and Chinese democracy work. Calling them "authoritarian single party states" with no "democratic accountability" is just a slogan! No, they're not accountable to particular interest groups. They're accountable to their own democratic systems. And party membership is designed to be all-consuming to put everyone on the same page. It's the equivalent of getting a degree in government before you're allowed to participate in it. Oh, gee, is that "authoritarian?" Well there's a system of rules and a process that you have to follow. So just like any bureaucracy designed to administrate fairness, really.

Again I think that your whole idea of democratic accountability is rhetorically and rationally impoverished and the point of your own bootlicker hero was some self-congratulatory nonsense about public participation in a system that was still working its hardest to drain the planet of everything. And in the end the UK got Margaret Thatcher, and now it's the most depressed country ever to exist on the face of the planet. Great work, guys!

You do know who Tony Benn is, right? As you would say, "Come on, dude! This is basic stuff!"

I do not give a crap about your Labour heroes who sold out the periphery for a dole, and then lost the country to the Thatcherites anyway.