this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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So when the communist party came into power after the Bolshevik revolution, Wilson went to the League of Nations to negotiate a common embargo of the Soviet project, essentially sanctioning Russia the way we might sanction a nation for humanitarian wrongdoing.
This is to say Wilson was afraid of it actually working, which would jeopardize the industrial moguls who were already running the US.
This is also to say, the Soviet Union was doing a communism in hostile circumstances, much the way European monarchs pressured France to raise a new king after the revolution (leading to Napoleon's rise to power, the Levée en masse (general conscription) and the War of the First Coalition (or as is modernly known, Napoleon Kicks European Butt For A While ).
Historians can't really say, but the fact the red scare started with Wilson (and not after WWII) might have influenced events, including the corruption of the party and the rise of Stalin as an autocrat.
Also according to Prof. Larry Lessig, Boss Tweed in the 1850s worked to make sure the ownership class called all the shots in the United States, eventually driving us to Hoover and the Great Depression. FDR's New Deal (very much resented by the industrialists) was a last chance for Capitalism, which then got a boost because WWII commanded high levels of production and distracted us with a foreign enemy. Then the cold war.
So communism was really unlucky and didn't get a fair shake in the Soviet Union, and US free market capitalism got especially lucky in the 20th century, and we don't really know if either one can be held together for more than a century or two. EU capitalism is wavering, thanks to pressure from the far right, and neoliberalism failing to serve the public.
In the meantime, check out what's going on in Cuba, which isn't perfect, but is interesting.
FYI, in the fifties the CIA wrote a memo where they stated that claims that Stalin was autocratic were largely exaggerated and the USSR largely had collective leadership.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf
On one hand, i don't trust the cia on anything. I dont even trust them to know what those words mean.
On the other; this us hilarious.
This was an internal memo not meant for the public eye, so it probably contains accurate information.
My trust is not greatly increased, and they could be manipulating released documents to form a narrative.
If, again, they know what any of those words mean.
< nerd-moment rant >
CIA is a big institution, and gathered a lot of very useful data, which it shares in the World Factbook. (At least those things that can be attained by open research, which is a lot) CIA also engages in espionage not only to gain hidden and secret information but to serve state interests, typically how the state department (under the executive) defines interests of the state.
And as with most espionage organizations, CIA is not above engaging in cruel, sometimes violent shenanigans. During the cold war, CIA secured the Americas from influence of the Soviet Union (containment) but also arranged exploitation rights to US centered companies, and were often messy about it. To be fair KGB was also about trying to influence countries to sell to USSR, so there was incentive to act aggressively and escalate towards brutality.
( Incidentally, all those American interest companies are now multi-national corporations, which means they have no real allegiance to the US, and evade paying taxes anyway. )
Also during the cold war, CIA was big on SIGINT (intercepting communications and listening in) where KGB was big on HUMINT (infiltrating offices and coercing officials to report to KGB). This is not to say these are the only methods they respectively used (CIA liked finding officials in need and bribing them, often arranging for goods and services they'd otherwise not have access to), so when KGB captured (and brutally killed) a spy, it was usually the informant, not the CIA employed handler that turned them.
Also of note, the Most Brutal Spy Agency award (probably a dagger-shaped trophy) would go to... Deuxième Bureau of the French Republic, who liked exotic James-Bond-style cinematic deaths, like throwing people out of a helicopter over a body of water. KGB did feed Oleg Penkovsky into a blast furnace, but he was a mole in KGB feeding information to the US. Moles are embarrassing when uncovered and no one likes them.
Anyhow, CIA = incompetent is a mostly 21st century trope, when George W. Bush and his administration replaced all the top management with cronies at a time post-USSR Russia (and the entire Baltic region) was undergoing a lot of political upheaval. The US needed a robust intelligence sector managing foreign affairs at the time. But that was just not meant to be.
The whole Valerie Plame incident (in which the administration burned a CIA employee for political revenge -- she escaped and made it home) demonstrated the meager level of respect Bush and crew had for the intelligence sector. After that, CIA, now a subdivision of DHS became reputed for torture and drone strike campaigns (which massacred fifty civilians for every killed POI), and worked with NSA to spy on Americans, under the color of looking for Terrorists.
Shit only gets worse from there. CIA would use the NSA mass surveillance program intel to create dossiers on Americans. Despite its conflicts with fourth-amendment protections, these files are used by secret courts -- FISA -- for secret trials, violating fifth- and sixth-amendment protections. These trials putting convicts on the Disposition Matrix (id est, Obama's kill list ) for abduction and rendition or straight execution.
And all these resources were available for Trump when he came into office. Fortunately he got in a spat with the CIA directorate in 2017, so they weren't as chummy with the White House early on as they were during the Obama administration. But now he has all those resources (though the upper echelons are MAGA loyalists and consequently double-plus-inept)
In the 1980s I wanted to be a spy... CIA researcher at Langley, actually, but I couldn't handle the language requirements. Also being a field operative is really, really hard on the soul, and it's no wonder James Bond drinks like Ian Flemming.
< /nmr >
Lol no. They woukd drug each other with lsd while on assignment through the whole later half of the cold war. Which, based, very cool, but not the best for winning cold wars.
Do we include their proxies and 'school of the americas' grads as theirs? Because some of them also liked the helicopter trick. And worse things.
Sure thing sen. Mcarthy.
Really though. They said that's what they were doing. But they're kind of professional liars.
Fire is often thought of as warm
Sure, before you learn what it really is. Try being a labor organizer; all the danger and intrigue, less language requirement and pay, plus it's easy on the conscience.
They were always streaked with incompetent shit heads. There's huge swathes of culture they just cant get people into, because they can't hire anyone from those cultures, and to work there your ability to understand shit has to wear serious horse blinders.
You lost me at "the Soviet Union was doing a communism". Hard to see a dictatorship as the workers owning the means of production.
“The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated.”
— The CIA
(https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf)
And you think that describes the Soviets and isnt just a statement about the red scare?
The document linked specifically is talking about the Soviet system and Stalin.
This is such a weird thing people believe in, no?
"USSR was communist!" everyone says, when there was nothing communist about how the country was governed. But, somehow, these same people don't consider North Korea a democratic country, even though they even have that in their name.
And every time I mention that "we don't know if communism works, nobody has tried it yet", I'm getting downvoted to oblivion...
it's almost like there's a concept of political communism and then there's the Communist Party and they're different things but they're purposely conflated at least here in Statesia
I think it's funny that the same people who will mock us with "no true socialism/communism" are the same people who will blame all our problems on "crony capitalism"...
The reason is simple: we KNOW that the issues we currently suffered are enabled by capitalism. Because capitalism's core is "money equals power" and "more money equals more power". This incentivises behaviour like Shell's/BP's/Exxon's to do climate change research, learn that they're fucking the planet over, and then proceed to bury that research under a sleuth of fake, corporate-sponsored "research" stating otherwise.
People like me say "no true socialism/capitalism" because it's true. It's also true that we don't know what issues that system would cause. Maybe Universal Basic Income does collapse a society because laziness ultimately wins over all other values? We don't know!
What we do know is that every time a country/society tried implementing socialist/communist solutions to capitalism-induced problems, the results were exceptional. Look at Finland's homelessness statistics. Look at Baltimore and it's crime rates. Every single time a 4-day work week was tested anywhere on the planet, it was touted a massive success that boosted productivity and happiness of employees. Etc., etc., etc.
It's easy to get good results with capital from capitalist system and throw it into welfare. But you are taking about communism as a core system.
We don't see good examples of it because it fails incredibly fast, and then leaders who tried to build communism understand it, but aren't willing to acknowledge mistake because they will lose power. Thus, they continue to build autocracy.
If communism as economic system works, we first need to prove it as successful PLC of a smaller scale, such as a company that produces something being fully community led from the inside using communist principles, and for such company to be able to compete on the market.
I'll link to my other reply somewhere in here so as to not repeat myself: CLICK.
TL;DR: nobody has yet tried to actually build communism. Every single major instance (USSR, China, NK) where - regardless of beginnings - ultimately turned into totalitarianisms/authoritarianisms before any communist principles could take root.
Oh but they did try. You just prefer to ignore it, but soviet union did attempt different tricks from the communist rulebook - moneyless society was tried and failed, so they had to fall back to working practices from capitalist rulebook and promise the people "communism in the brighter future".
Same way communism was tried in Makhnovschina, Gulyay Pole (south-eastern Ukraine). Stateless, anarchy driven flavour of such. USSR killed all of them and then killed everyone who visited the funeral, btw, so they were afraid of them A LOT. What can we learn from anarchy? That Ukrainian farmers who were not forced into communist state preferred to have monetary relationships :-)
What are you talking about? They always had money. The reform you mention was the return to basing the value of their currency on gold to stabilise it against inflation.
(something, btw, most capitalist states have moved away from nowadays)
Check out Mondragon and similar companies.
Yes, but how they compare to the rest of the market competitively?
Command-economy communism is an absolute joke and a terrible idea.
I agree, but very large corporations (like WalMart and Amazon with high levels of vertical integration and revenue greater than the GDP of many countries) are kind of like a command-economies and "work" (for the shareholders). So, I think command-economies can work, but the question is for whom.
It really depends. China is winning the race on sustainable energy because it's treating it the way the US treated the Space Race after Sputnik.
And we are seeing how market economies go, the the outcome is dire.
I don't know what works, but obviously neither do you. Neither do our elected representatives who are captured by interests to return to monarchy (which can command the economy).
So that's, just, like, your opinion, man.