If you actually live in America, then I’m guessing you haven’t been poor in America. It’s extremely difficult, without the opiate of capitalist realism and liberal ideology, to believe that you have rights in any real world sense when you are dirt-poor in America.
It’s interesting, in your justification for the supposed superiority of the US, that you are only citing your anecdotal case that you have found your life subjectively better. What actually matters, especially if you’d like to play the game of which country has more democratic policy in the limited sense of in which country were the massive conditions of life most securely guaranteed as per the interests and desires of the populace, then it is very difficult to hand the medal to the US, especially if you have even the slightest knowledge of US economic, social and political history, to say nothing of its imperialist geopolitics. Your justification is a purely selfish, narcisistically egoist one. I don’t blame anyone for trying to get out of a shitty economic situation, but that isn’t really as absolutely relevant as you seem to think at the end of the day when we are discussing whether or not the US’s material effects on the rest of world justify us qualifying it as deeply reactionary, in fact perhaps the main impediment to a progressive future for humanity.
The social, political and economic collapse of the USSR is directly linked, directly caused, by the US (and the West). Capitalistic reforms had already begun under Khruschev, which allowed for the further development of black-market enriched criminal classes who would form the social base of the mafiosi who would start to devore the Russian economy in the late 80s and throughout the 90s. The traumatic experience of Russia in the last 30-40 years, with the literal mass death and one of the largest drops in living standards in any modern country’s history (and starting from a period of great development), was the blindingly, unequivocally, undeniable consequence of deeping capitalist reforms and political liberalization during the 80s, notably under Gorbachev. The advice was American. The advisors were American. The model was American. The pressures that had brought the USSR to this point were American. Modern Russia is a creation of America.
If we want to talk about quality of life, then the best time to be a Russia, was without a doubt, the 50s-70s. It is not a coincidence that a very high number of Russians, especially older ones who actually lived in the USSR, and even more so if they lived during the 50s-70s, are deeply nostaghic for it, even if this nostalgia is born out of a sense of relatively greater economic security that they were ensured during this period.
You do not seem to be grasping immuredanchorite’s point though, which is that if we even want to get into a discussion over which of these two political powers is ‘better’, morally or ethnically (to the extent that this even makes sense), you are not going to be able to do so coherently without looking at how the political entity we call the US has acted, and what it’s real, material effects and consequences have been. I.e., not only can you not answer those questions without considering politics (which is literally one of the most incoherent yet common assumptions of liberal ideology), but that you also cannot escape the essential importance of geopolitics. By any geopolitical measure, the US is the most reactionary and viciously imperialist power in the contemporary era.
I’d add that, reactionary as some aspects of the USSR or the PRC have unfortunately been (inevitable, because we are talking about history, not your abstract moral ideal, the purvue of ultra-‘leftists’ and reformists and social democrats everywhere), there is no evidence, at any point in these states’ histories, of genocide in the sense of planned destruction of a racial or ethnic group. You’re also going to have to be clearer about what you mean by ‘atrocity’, though yes, these happened.
Also, you need to make clear what you understand by the term ‘right’, because if you are using it in a liberal sense, you are going to find that communists do not understand it in that way, i.e. in a purely abstract, negative sense. Although even if we did just want to understand it in the latter sense, the existence of money as such as institution is an immense restriction on the negative freedom of the vast majority of people.
If you actually live in America, then I’m guessing you haven’t been poor in America. It’s extremely difficult, without the opiate of capitalist realism and liberal ideology, to believe that you have rights in any real world sense when you are dirt-poor in America.
It’s interesting, in your justification for the supposed superiority of the US, that you are only citing your anecdotal case that you have found your life subjectively better. What actually matters, especially if you’d like to play the game of which country has more democratic policy in the limited sense of in which country were the massive conditions of life most securely guaranteed as per the interests and desires of the populace, then it is very difficult to hand the medal to the US, especially if you have even the slightest knowledge of US economic, social and political history, to say nothing of its imperialist geopolitics. Your justification is a purely selfish, narcisistically egoist one. I don’t blame anyone for trying to get out of a shitty economic situation, but that isn’t really as absolutely relevant as you seem to think at the end of the day when we are discussing whether or not the US’s material effects on the rest of world justify us qualifying it as deeply reactionary, in fact perhaps the main impediment to a progressive future for humanity.
The social, political and economic collapse of the USSR is directly linked, directly caused, by the US (and the West). Capitalistic reforms had already begun under Khruschev, which allowed for the further development of black-market enriched criminal classes who would form the social base of the mafiosi who would start to devore the Russian economy in the late 80s and throughout the 90s. The traumatic experience of Russia in the last 30-40 years, with the literal mass death and one of the largest drops in living standards in any modern country’s history (and starting from a period of great development), was the blindingly, unequivocally, undeniable consequence of deeping capitalist reforms and political liberalization during the 80s, notably under Gorbachev. The advice was American. The advisors were American. The model was American. The pressures that had brought the USSR to this point were American. Modern Russia is a creation of America.
If we want to talk about quality of life, then the best time to be a Russia, was without a doubt, the 50s-70s. It is not a coincidence that a very high number of Russians, especially older ones who actually lived in the USSR, and even more so if they lived during the 50s-70s, are deeply nostaghic for it, even if this nostalgia is born out of a sense of relatively greater economic security that they were ensured during this period.
You do not seem to be grasping immuredanchorite’s point though, which is that if we even want to get into a discussion over which of these two political powers is ‘better’, morally or ethnically (to the extent that this even makes sense), you are not going to be able to do so coherently without looking at how the political entity we call the US has acted, and what it’s real, material effects and consequences have been. I.e., not only can you not answer those questions without considering politics (which is literally one of the most incoherent yet common assumptions of liberal ideology), but that you also cannot escape the essential importance of geopolitics. By any geopolitical measure, the US is the most reactionary and viciously imperialist power in the contemporary era.
I’d add that, reactionary as some aspects of the USSR or the PRC have unfortunately been (inevitable, because we are talking about history, not your abstract moral ideal, the purvue of ultra-‘leftists’ and reformists and social democrats everywhere), there is no evidence, at any point in these states’ histories, of genocide in the sense of planned destruction of a racial or ethnic group. You’re also going to have to be clearer about what you mean by ‘atrocity’, though yes, these happened.
Also, you need to make clear what you understand by the term ‘right’, because if you are using it in a liberal sense, you are going to find that communists do not understand it in that way, i.e. in a purely abstract, negative sense. Although even if we did just want to understand it in the latter sense, the existence of money as such as institution is an immense restriction on the negative freedom of the vast majority of people.