Which Russia was better?

[PSOL]

Cath’s points are why so many socialists were alienated by the Soviet Union and eventually find a home in pro-global solidarity tendencies like the anti-revisionist movement of the 1950s/1960s or the older Left Communist movement, it’s why reformists like Trotsky also adopt left critiques to cast themselves in a better light. This is also why the SU was doomed to fail, as it was supportive of regimes that butchered their native nominal communists like the Republican Arab states and even the likes of Indonesia. It’s why most of their neighbors absolutely loathed them, some more privately than others even within the Warsaw Pact.

This is also a reason why there are so many splits, following the line of an international state to the T and accepting most changes until issues arise or reformism and rejection of Marxism led to vicious factional battles. The CPUSA broke apart in numerous waves often taking key sections and interest groups with them—from major left communists, to anti-revisionists in the 1960s, to the Right clique that developed from CPUSA simping in the late 80s/90s, to the last communists who stayed for the social function and the youth league to form PCUSA—all skewing young, poor, and black and brown. Other groups like the RCP, SWP, and the current WWP had this factor be one of the reasons for why they broke apart. Oddly, the WWP survived in a more shrunken form from the fact that they valued nonsectarianism™️ and developed a primarily American branding, only really breaking apart in 2004 over endorsing Gore.

Of course, the Soviet Union was much better to live in than if we let a Tsarist or bourgeois Republic survive for as long as they did for the utmost majority of the population, and was instrumental in getting others to be pressured into using policy to improve quality of life else risk a revolution. The Soviet Union was much, much better than today’s Russia which is worse in every conceivable metric. TheReckoning continues with his fascist apologia.