Thread by @Itmechr3

Under-discussed aspect of the failure of socialist revolutions in the 20th century is that like if you're a worker in the first "socialist" state your life is still literally just you go to work in a factory, get paid, and go home except also

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you get reported to the secret police and get sent to a gulag because you pissed off your neighbor. Like literally a majority of the BOLSHEVIKS on the original central committee ended up getting put in front of firing squads by Stalin and like

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lord help you if you were part of any other faction during or after the revolution. Meanwhile the secret police is run by one of history's greatest pedophiles and every other communist party has to take their political lines from Moscow, which

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change every 4 months according to the whims of Russian foreign policy and got entire wings of communist parties killed off through their raw arrogance and stupidity. Meanwhile the parties themselves have to maintain the pathetic delusion that

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Stalin isn't just randomly massacring anyone who even vaguely opposes him based on random made up bullshit and that life in the USSR is actually great and not literally all of the violence of capitalist original accumulation condensed into 10

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years. The fact that ANYONE was actually still a socialist after the Secret Speech is a testament to the power of the idea itself but Lenin's counter-revolution and Stalin's consolidation of power did irreparable damage to the socialist movement

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and any account of the failure of 20th century socialism that doesn't include the consequences of the decay of socialism itself is going to utterly miss the point.

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