The thing is, you can “not call it socialism” all you like. The fact is that it is socialism, you have to respect people’s intelligence enough to know that they will figure that out (or be easily convinced of it, if you really need an argument that doesn’t respect their intelligence). When this happens, and even moreso when you inevitably reveal yourself to be socialist, it will make you look deeply insincere and subversive, because you yourself will have fed into this taboo and not done the work of separating the term from its negative stigma or generating positive media for it.
Socialism is simply the fact of the matter and being socialist means caring about material reality enough to not just lie and gaslight as a means of convincing people. When you get attacked for being socialist, you will not be able to backpedal without sabotaging your own movement, because there will be a litany of evidence that you are socialist. As there should be, or you would not have the support of actual ideological socialists (remember that whole material reality thing I just mentioned).
The material reason why socialism is a “no-no” word is because when the right attacks it, the liberal establishment does what they always do; they backpedal. Not only does this make the right’s criticism look reasonable, because it confirms there is real reason to fear being associated with socialism; but it ensures that the people only ever hear the arguments against socialism, never the arguments for it. All of the arguments which are intrinsically associated with socialism; which you have done all this work to propagate; are never connected to it optically, and the people never learn what it actually is, leaving all of your policy open to attack.
What you are suggesting here is not the solution but exactly the issue that has brought us to this point.
The only way that you will ever launder the term “socialism” is by openly advocating for socialism and calling it what it is when you do. You just aren’t going to beat the establishment at their own game; rather, we must show the people what it is to be respected and hear policy based in material reality that will actually address their needs, and you will win support from across the spectrum.
I disagree. And I don’t mean to preach, but there is a power in words and using them (or not using them). The fight over the word and meaning of socialism is not what “the people” need right now, that can come later. This has been happening in the US closing in on a century. It’s not those tolerant of material reality (as you say) you need to convince, it’s those that would benefit from “the peoples” agenda that don’t acknowledge material reality. Ride the wave of making billionaires pay.
Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.
Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security.
Socialism is what they called farm price supports.
Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.
Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.
When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan “Down With Socialism” on the banner of his “great crusade,” that is really not what he means at all.
What he really means is “Down with Progress–down with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal,” and “down with Harry Truman’s fair Deal.” That’s all he means.
Harry Truman
Don’t swim against this right now. These programs from the new deal and fair deal are not even called socialist by American standards anymore.
This quote is an example of what I am talking about though. Roosevelt had to take great strides to ease the great depression, because of mass protest movements at the time openly led by socialist/communist parties, but he could not go so far as to address the economic system that created the great depression. Nor could the capitalist class allow these policies to be associated with the socialists that visibly fought for them. Doing so would threaten the power of capital; this is not long after the bolshevik revolution that created the USSR, so there was major fears of similar movements taking root in the US.
This is not Truman defending the new deal, this is him distancing the new deal from socialism.
The new deal was not socialist, which is by design, but it was made up of things that socialists would have certainly fought for and taken even further if their effort was sincerely meant to achieve socialism.
It’s time to stop letting socialism be used as a scare word. Sure, the loudest ones will continue to bury their heads in the sand, but those people weren’t going to be won over anyways. Furthermore, you aren’t going to win people over by talking down to them, and you cannot address their needs in a sincere manner if your base assumption is that they aren’t intelligent enough to understand their own lives.
edit: I’m also not suggesting that we should be fighting over “the word and meaning of socialism”; precisely the opposite, in fact. I’m saying that we should be living examples of what a socialist is and what socialists advocate for. We should be seen in our communities doing the ground work of organizing and being role models for what we believe in.
The difference between what we are accused of and what we are actually doing is stark, which can’t be pointed out if we’re constantly distancing ourselves from anyone that calls themselves socialist simply because we’re afraid of the word. There is so much present day and past evidence; from the rich history that was erased in the red scare and all of this anti-socialist sentiment; for us to draw on instead of trying to distance ourselves from the reality that what we advocate for is anti-capitalist in nature.
Buddy half of American voters voted for trump. We are well past “insulting their intelligence”. The reality is that the majority of American voters are stupid, lazy, or both.
Separately I don’t think you know what socialism is if you think progressive policies are socialist. Just because “social programs” and socialism share a common word doesn’t mean they are the same thing.
Incorrect. Only 63.7% of eligible voters turned out to vote in the 2024 US General Election.
That comes out to around 155 million voters, of which around 77 million voted for Trump or ~49.8%. Democrats on the other hand got around 75 million or ~48.3%. of the vote.
This comes out to ~31.7% of eligible voters voting Republican with ~30.8% voting Democrat.
Less than a third of Americans wanted Trump in office, not half. Let’s get the facts straight.
The reality is that the majority of American voters
Have you considered that the actions of Republicans gerrymandering voting districts to hell and passing anti-voting laws and policies, that the actions of Democrats failing to represent their constituents by veering more and more Right, and that the pressures of capitalism, rising inflation, stagnating wages, and a lack of a national holiday where people take off work to go exercise their civic duties are reasons for why more people don’t go out and vote?
Noooooooo, that can’t be. Voters are stupid. Voters are racist. Voters are lazy. And it isn’t the system that has stripped away their material needs that is the problem.
I find these types of comments funny because it shows how far in denial some people are. You arguing semantics with a random person on the internet doesn’t change reality. Trump won. Fair and square. Stop making excuses for people. No one works a 24 shift for 2 weeks straight. Considering the bullshit Trump is putting us through I think it’s safe to say that missing an hour or 2 from work every 4 years to make sure a piece of shit like him never holds office is worth the $30-$60 dollars you’ll lose for the day.
People need to wake the fuck up and stop expecting the world to work around their needs. Once every 4 years they have to vote. That is the bare minimum and people like you want to blame it on not having a voting holiday or some other excuse. In my eyes I can’t afford NOT to vote on this year shows why.
nobody disagrees lil bro, the difference is that we know it’s because people on the left simply didn’t vote. The turnout is obvious compared to 2020. The election that mattered, 2024, people simply didn’t vote.
I find your comment funny because the person you’re responding to is not the one in denial. They gave you the statistical facts of the situation. I know you want to cynically point the finger at everyone around you being dumber and lazier than you, that you have it as hard as anyone could possibly have it and you managed to do it so why don’t they. I know you want to believe America is a democracy just because we hold elections and the votes that come in are counted.
When you have a third of the population that doesn’t vote for one reason or another, when you have some voters with several times the voting power of others, and the two candidates we get to vote for are donald fucking trump or the person that somehow lost to D.F.T.; it’s time to start thinking about the systems that produced those results instead of passing the blame off on bootstraps and personal responsibility. This is the classic reactionary rhetoric that never leads to anything being fixed, because it exists so you have something to be angry at without challenging anything fundamental to the system. Because you can change systems, you cannot change people except by giving them what they need to change themselves.
The good thing is that human behavior at that scale is actually reasonably predictable, again, given the material conditions that those people are subjected to. Which is why systems are so important.
A system does what it is designed to do, and benefits who it is designed to benefit. Everything else is just noise. Stop pointing the finger at everyone around you and start pointing it up at the people who actually have a direct hand in those systems and profound power to change them. Elected or otherwise. That is the only way that change has ever been wrought in this country, even in the most dire of circumstances.
the defining trait of the Trump voters is that they’re so scared that they will vote for whoever makes them feel safe while asking absolutely nothing of them except cowed obedience
that’s the hard part. That’s why trump is so effective at winning, he somehow figured out how to make the vote for him. That’s the fundamentally difficult problem to solve, and trump is the only one who seems to have a good solution right now.
The problem is that some of them are in a cult that tells them everyone is a filthy lying criminal that wants you dead. The ones that aren’t cultists are usually just looking for the easy solution. Personal responsibility and grassroots efforts are difficult. Being angry at boogeymen and believing that one day you’ll be a billionaire or even just a millionaire is a lot easier. So believing the lies the GOP tells them, which often validate preexisting beliefs, is a lot easier and more convenient. Plus, many republicans think of the left as stuck up “intellectuals,” college educated people that get paid to do nothing but look down on them, the real working class
Plus, many republicans think of the left as stuck up “intellectuals,” college educated people that get paid to do nothing but look down on them, the real working class.
I believe this perception has the possibility to be altered.
Oh it definitely can be. I was just pointing out that it’s an additional hurdle to either tricking or actually changing the minds of Americans that are dumb enough to vote against their own interests
Simultaneously, American voters are “stupid, lazy, or both”, but intelligent and well-read enough to understand what you mean when you explain the difference between social welfare and outright socialism as you are backpedaling on being a socialist.
That being said; I’m not talking about progressive policies, I’m talking about socialism. There might be plenty of progressive policies between here and socialism, but the end of that side of the spectrum is socialism.
but 90% of these people do not care, would not care, and have no reason to care. It doesn’t matter, what matters is what appeals to them, and unfortunately it’s dumbass idiots on the internet.
Socialism? Americans would be happy to have health care, better workers‘ rights, affordable education. Just like most other advanced economies in Europe, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and so on. That’s not socialism, that’s capitalism with regulations and social programs. Nobody really wants socialism, which was as utter failure everywhere it was tried.
Anywhere socialism has existed, it has done so under the threat of global capitalism which is led by the United States. The countries you listed are only able to maintain their wealth and relative comfort by taking advantage of the global south. They benefit from obscuring that relationship so that the people who see that benefit, don’t have to reckon with the extent of it and how it enables the oppression of all of us and holds us back as a whole.
Today, the global North drains from the South commodities worth $2.2 trillion per year, in Northern prices. For perspective, that amount of money would be enough to end extreme poverty, globally, fifteen times over.
Over the whole period from 1960 to today, the drain totalled $62 trillion in real terms. If this value had been retained by the South and contributed to Southern growth, tracking with the South’s growth rates over this period, it would be worth $152 trillion today.
These are extraordinary sums. For the global North (and here we mean the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Korea, and the rich economies of Europe), the gains are so large that, for the past couple of decades, they have outstripped the rate of economic growth. In other words, net growth in the North relies on appropriation from the rest of the world.
Let me give you the quick and dirty, oversimplified rundown of how that relationship plays out:
Power, under capitalism, resides in capital, which isn’t just money but also resources and property. In order to maintain power, capitalism requires infinite and continuous growth, which of course requires more and more resources to sustain.
Say a given country decides it would like to own its resources nationally and use the wealth generated by those resources to support the growth and welfare of their own people. Capitalist nations are able to wield state power against those countries whenever they encounter this sort of difficulty. This includes leveraging state and capitalist media to run propaganda campaigns, which sour public perception of that country’s national leadership; funding coups and covert operations against them; giving money and training to militant minority resistance groups; and when all else fails, all out war, while messy, is a very lucrative means to the end of converting the resources of global south nations into private capital for the global north.
This capital is then wielded within the capitalist world to manipulate political outcomes in favor of the private owners of capital and to prevent the working class from gaining the consciousness that would enable them to struggle for the things you mentioned; health care, worker’s rights, affordable education; as they slowly strip away what was won from past struggles.
I believe this lovely quote by Ella Baker, a major activist and leader behind the civil rights movement, is relevant to the conversation;
A nice gathering like today is not enough. You have to go back and reach out to your neighbors who don’t speak to you. And you have to reach out to your friends who think they are making it good. And get them to understand that they–as well as you and I–cannot be free in America or anywhere else where there is capitalism and imperialism. Until we can get people to recognize that they themselves have to make the struggle and have to make the fight for freedom every day in the year, every year until they win it.
Your wall of text is ahistorical. Yugoslavia is a counter example. They received American aid after WW2 to rebuild.
Half of Europe lived under real socialism and it was a fucking terrible time for many reasons.
During the Cold War the Soviet led block and the non aligned movement together had sufficient resources, knowledge, and people to get their shit together independently of the US.
Forgive me for actually caring about the subject. Clearly you have other priorities.
You mean this aid to Yugoslavia?
Omar Bradley was also an outspoken supporter of providing aid and improving relations with Yugoslavia, stating in an address to Congress on 30 November 1950 that “In the first place, if we could even take them out of the hostile camp and make them neutral, that is one step. If you can get them to act as a threat, that’s a second step. if you can get them to actively participate on your side, that is an even further step and then, of course, if you had a commitment, where their efforts were integrated with those of ours on the defence, that would still be a further step.” This marked the beginning of US military aid to a communist nation in order to counter Soviet ambitions in the region, leading to greater strives in United States–Yugoslavia relations.
The aid to Yugoslavia that is an example of the US being hostile towards socialist states and cynically providing support to anyone that would align with it against its enemies? The same US whose loans are notoriously difficult to pay back, leaving the recipients permanently indebted to the US? Surely we are talking about different aid Yugoslavia, that couldn’t be your single counter example.
During the Cold War the Soviet led block and the non aligned movement together had sufficient resources, knowledge, and people to get their shit together independently of the US.
Yes, and for the most part they did. Let’s not for get that in 1917 the Russian Empire was still a medieval state with similar technology. After the USSR was founded; their last famine would be in 1947, which happened as a result of WWII; and I’m not sure if you remember this but they would be the only other world power than the US at the time. In the 1970s, the average soviet had higher caloric intake than the average American. They beat the US to space, fought through several invasions and international boycotts, though with a much lower GDP than the US. They had to spend 15% of their GDP to the US’s 5-7% to compete with the US militarily. This was of course reasonable to do as the US had set itself out to be a hostile threat to the very idea of socialism, but was a major sacrifice nonetheless.
Standards of living in across the Soviet bloc dropped substantially in the 90s after the fall of the USSR as corrupt governments and wealthy elite privatized the USSR’s resources. Even today, Russians earn under $10,000 per capita, about the same as the Soviet Union in the 80s. There is a lot more depth and complexity to this history than you would like to make it seem.
The thing is, you can “not call it socialism” all you like. The fact is that it is socialism, you have to respect people’s intelligence enough to know that they will figure that out (or be easily convinced of it, if you really need an argument that doesn’t respect their intelligence). When this happens, and even moreso when you inevitably reveal yourself to be socialist, it will make you look deeply insincere and subversive, because you yourself will have fed into this taboo and not done the work of separating the term from its negative stigma or generating positive media for it.
Socialism is simply the fact of the matter and being socialist means caring about material reality enough to not just lie and gaslight as a means of convincing people. When you get attacked for being socialist, you will not be able to backpedal without sabotaging your own movement, because there will be a litany of evidence that you are socialist. As there should be, or you would not have the support of actual ideological socialists (remember that whole material reality thing I just mentioned).
The material reason why socialism is a “no-no” word is because when the right attacks it, the liberal establishment does what they always do; they backpedal. Not only does this make the right’s criticism look reasonable, because it confirms there is real reason to fear being associated with socialism; but it ensures that the people only ever hear the arguments against socialism, never the arguments for it. All of the arguments which are intrinsically associated with socialism; which you have done all this work to propagate; are never connected to it optically, and the people never learn what it actually is, leaving all of your policy open to attack.
What you are suggesting here is not the solution but exactly the issue that has brought us to this point.
The only way that you will ever launder the term “socialism” is by openly advocating for socialism and calling it what it is when you do. You just aren’t going to beat the establishment at their own game; rather, we must show the people what it is to be respected and hear policy based in material reality that will actually address their needs, and you will win support from across the spectrum.
I disagree. And I don’t mean to preach, but there is a power in words and using them (or not using them). The fight over the word and meaning of socialism is not what “the people” need right now, that can come later. This has been happening in the US closing in on a century. It’s not those tolerant of material reality (as you say) you need to convince, it’s those that would benefit from “the peoples” agenda that don’t acknowledge material reality. Ride the wave of making billionaires pay.
Don’t swim against this right now. These programs from the new deal and fair deal are not even called socialist by American standards anymore.
This quote is an example of what I am talking about though. Roosevelt had to take great strides to ease the great depression, because of mass protest movements at the time openly led by socialist/communist parties, but he could not go so far as to address the economic system that created the great depression. Nor could the capitalist class allow these policies to be associated with the socialists that visibly fought for them. Doing so would threaten the power of capital; this is not long after the bolshevik revolution that created the USSR, so there was major fears of similar movements taking root in the US.
This is not Truman defending the new deal, this is him distancing the new deal from socialism.
The new deal was not socialist, which is by design, but it was made up of things that socialists would have certainly fought for and taken even further if their effort was sincerely meant to achieve socialism.
It’s time to stop letting socialism be used as a scare word. Sure, the loudest ones will continue to bury their heads in the sand, but those people weren’t going to be won over anyways. Furthermore, you aren’t going to win people over by talking down to them, and you cannot address their needs in a sincere manner if your base assumption is that they aren’t intelligent enough to understand their own lives.
Buddy half of American voters voted for trump. We are well past “insulting their intelligence”. The reality is that the majority of American voters are stupid, lazy, or both.
Separately I don’t think you know what socialism is if you think progressive policies are socialist. Just because “social programs” and socialism share a common word doesn’t mean they are the same thing.
Incorrect. Only 63.7% of eligible voters turned out to vote in the 2024 US General Election.
That comes out to around 155 million voters, of which around 77 million voted for Trump or ~49.8%. Democrats on the other hand got around 75 million or ~48.3%. of the vote.
This comes out to ~31.7% of eligible voters voting Republican with ~30.8% voting Democrat.
Less than a third of Americans wanted Trump in office, not half. Let’s get the facts straight.
~31.7% of Americans is not a majority, according to the American Heritage Dictionary.
Have you considered that the actions of Republicans gerrymandering voting districts to hell and passing anti-voting laws and policies, that the actions of Democrats failing to represent their constituents by veering more and more Right, and that the pressures of capitalism, rising inflation, stagnating wages, and a lack of a national holiday where people take off work to go exercise their civic duties are reasons for why more people don’t go out and vote?
Noooooooo, that can’t be. Voters are stupid. Voters are racist. Voters are lazy. And it isn’t the system that has stripped away their material needs that is the problem.
based and chad the numbers comment, we love the numbers, they dont lie.
I find these types of comments funny because it shows how far in denial some people are. You arguing semantics with a random person on the internet doesn’t change reality. Trump won. Fair and square. Stop making excuses for people. No one works a 24 shift for 2 weeks straight. Considering the bullshit Trump is putting us through I think it’s safe to say that missing an hour or 2 from work every 4 years to make sure a piece of shit like him never holds office is worth the $30-$60 dollars you’ll lose for the day.
People need to wake the fuck up and stop expecting the world to work around their needs. Once every 4 years they have to vote. That is the bare minimum and people like you want to blame it on not having a voting holiday or some other excuse. In my eyes I can’t afford NOT to vote on this year shows why.
nobody disagrees lil bro, the difference is that we know it’s because people on the left simply didn’t vote. The turnout is obvious compared to 2020. The election that mattered, 2024, people simply didn’t vote.
I find your comment funny because the person you’re responding to is not the one in denial. They gave you the statistical facts of the situation. I know you want to cynically point the finger at everyone around you being dumber and lazier than you, that you have it as hard as anyone could possibly have it and you managed to do it so why don’t they. I know you want to believe America is a democracy just because we hold elections and the votes that come in are counted.
When you have a third of the population that doesn’t vote for one reason or another, when you have some voters with several times the voting power of others, and the two candidates we get to vote for are donald fucking trump or the person that somehow lost to D.F.T.; it’s time to start thinking about the systems that produced those results instead of passing the blame off on bootstraps and personal responsibility. This is the classic reactionary rhetoric that never leads to anything being fixed, because it exists so you have something to be angry at without challenging anything fundamental to the system. Because you can change systems, you cannot change people except by giving them what they need to change themselves.
The good thing is that human behavior at that scale is actually reasonably predictable, again, given the material conditions that those people are subjected to. Which is why systems are so important.
A system does what it is designed to do, and benefits who it is designed to benefit. Everything else is just noise. Stop pointing the finger at everyone around you and start pointing it up at the people who actually have a direct hand in those systems and profound power to change them. Elected or otherwise. That is the only way that change has ever been wrought in this country, even in the most dire of circumstances.
the defining trait of the Trump voters is that they’re so scared that they will vote for whoever makes them feel safe while asking absolutely nothing of them except cowed obedience
If American voters are as stupid as you claim then it shouldn’t be hard to trick them into changing their vote.
that’s the hard part. That’s why trump is so effective at winning, he somehow figured out how to make the vote for him. That’s the fundamentally difficult problem to solve, and trump is the only one who seems to have a good solution right now.
The problem is that some of them are in a cult that tells them everyone is a filthy lying criminal that wants you dead. The ones that aren’t cultists are usually just looking for the easy solution. Personal responsibility and grassroots efforts are difficult. Being angry at boogeymen and believing that one day you’ll be a billionaire or even just a millionaire is a lot easier. So believing the lies the GOP tells them, which often validate preexisting beliefs, is a lot easier and more convenient. Plus, many republicans think of the left as stuck up “intellectuals,” college educated people that get paid to do nothing but look down on them, the real working class
I believe this perception has the possibility to be altered.
Oh it definitely can be. I was just pointing out that it’s an additional hurdle to either tricking or actually changing the minds of Americans that are dumb enough to vote against their own interests
Simultaneously, American voters are “stupid, lazy, or both”, but intelligent and well-read enough to understand what you mean when you explain the difference between social welfare and outright socialism as you are backpedaling on being a socialist.
That being said; I’m not talking about progressive policies, I’m talking about socialism. There might be plenty of progressive policies between here and socialism, but the end of that side of the spectrum is socialism.
but 90% of these people do not care, would not care, and have no reason to care. It doesn’t matter, what matters is what appeals to them, and unfortunately it’s dumbass idiots on the internet.
Socialism? Americans would be happy to have health care, better workers‘ rights, affordable education. Just like most other advanced economies in Europe, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and so on. That’s not socialism, that’s capitalism with regulations and social programs. Nobody really wants socialism, which was as utter failure everywhere it was tried.
Anywhere socialism has existed, it has done so under the threat of global capitalism which is led by the United States. The countries you listed are only able to maintain their wealth and relative comfort by taking advantage of the global south. They benefit from obscuring that relationship so that the people who see that benefit, don’t have to reckon with the extent of it and how it enables the oppression of all of us and holds us back as a whole.
Let me give you the quick and dirty, oversimplified rundown of how that relationship plays out:
Power, under capitalism, resides in capital, which isn’t just money but also resources and property. In order to maintain power, capitalism requires infinite and continuous growth, which of course requires more and more resources to sustain.
Say a given country decides it would like to own its resources nationally and use the wealth generated by those resources to support the growth and welfare of their own people. Capitalist nations are able to wield state power against those countries whenever they encounter this sort of difficulty. This includes leveraging state and capitalist media to run propaganda campaigns, which sour public perception of that country’s national leadership; funding coups and covert operations against them; giving money and training to militant minority resistance groups; and when all else fails, all out war, while messy, is a very lucrative means to the end of converting the resources of global south nations into private capital for the global north.
This capital is then wielded within the capitalist world to manipulate political outcomes in favor of the private owners of capital and to prevent the working class from gaining the consciousness that would enable them to struggle for the things you mentioned; health care, worker’s rights, affordable education; as they slowly strip away what was won from past struggles.
I believe this lovely quote by Ella Baker, a major activist and leader behind the civil rights movement, is relevant to the conversation;
Your wall of text is ahistorical. Yugoslavia is a counter example. They received American aid after WW2 to rebuild.
Half of Europe lived under real socialism and it was a fucking terrible time for many reasons.
During the Cold War the Soviet led block and the non aligned movement together had sufficient resources, knowledge, and people to get their shit together independently of the US.
Forgive me for actually caring about the subject. Clearly you have other priorities.
You mean this aid to Yugoslavia?
The aid to Yugoslavia that is an example of the US being hostile towards socialist states and cynically providing support to anyone that would align with it against its enemies? The same US whose loans are notoriously difficult to pay back, leaving the recipients permanently indebted to the US? Surely we are talking about different aid Yugoslavia, that couldn’t be your single counter example.
Yes, and for the most part they did. Let’s not for get that in 1917 the Russian Empire was still a medieval state with similar technology. After the USSR was founded; their last famine would be in 1947, which happened as a result of WWII; and I’m not sure if you remember this but they would be the only other world power than the US at the time. In the 1970s, the average soviet had higher caloric intake than the average American. They beat the US to space, fought through several invasions and international boycotts, though with a much lower GDP than the US. They had to spend 15% of their GDP to the US’s 5-7% to compete with the US militarily. This was of course reasonable to do as the US had set itself out to be a hostile threat to the very idea of socialism, but was a major sacrifice nonetheless.
Standards of living in across the Soviet bloc dropped substantially in the 90s after the fall of the USSR as corrupt governments and wealthy elite privatized the USSR’s resources. Even today, Russians earn under $10,000 per capita, about the same as the Soviet Union in the 80s. There is a lot more depth and complexity to this history than you would like to make it seem.