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Freedom
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2026
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Valid criticism, but let's not pretend socialism leads to better outcomes for freedom of speech or press either.
Newspapers in the USSR had the legal obligation of responding to letters from readers in the span of 2 weeks. Every workplace had its own announcement board and journal/newspaper written by workers in the worker's union. Imagine being able to publish an article to all your coworkers criticising the administration of the company and not getting fired for it.
There was freedom of press to a larger degree than in any western society because people literally made and consumed their own press.
Didn't they ban factions (perhaps this was Stalin's time)?
We can move the conversation there if you want, but I don't see how that's related to worker-owned press
It's related to the subject of fascism and censorship
Censorship, we can argue about it. Fascism, no.
The USSR had free universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, equality under the law for everyone, respect for ethnic minorities and promotion of their languages and their representation in society, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed housing at 3% of the monthly salary on average, heavy subsidization of basics like foodstuffs, affordable and high quality public transit, guaranteed pension plans, abolition of private companies and landlordism, and the highest rates of unionization in the world at the time.
I happen to be a Spaniard, and my ancestors had to endure fascism for 40 years. There was no universal free education, no universal healthcare, no guaranteed jobs, no guaranteed housing, no right to unionization, militarized police defending landlords and private companies, extreme racism and ethno-nationalist-catholic propaganda, colonialism in Morocco, repression of minority languages and ethnicities without a right to an education in them (see Basque and Catalan, compare them to Kazakh or Uzbek), no guaranteed pensions...
The two systems were the polar opposite, it's the reason why the first thing fascists will do is executing every communist.
Ok so the points coming to mind areas follows: The censorship in the USSR.
This doesn't seem to align with my understanding of the USSR. Didn't the USSR fail horribly, leading to its collapse? Bureaucratic corruption, inefficiency, not being able to compete internationally, and the oppression of marginalized populations (such as queer people ) had been my impression of the USSR's legacy.
As for the last point, that comes off as hypocritical since communist countries do the same thing. North Korea has executions and Cuba throws journalists in jail.
Killing and repressing fascists and other reactionary forces is good actually. Progressive forces being killed and the masses oppressed is bad.
Comrade @Cowbee@lemmy.ml has already responded better than I possibly could, so I'll just point you to their comment instead. I can only add: I suggest you to look at the population over time (you can find this on the respective Wikipedia "demographics of X" articles) for: Ukraine, Russia, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Belarus and the exceptions of Poland and Estonia, and see what happened to their populations after 1990. Literal tens of millions of demographic losses.
Equally important, is the fact that socialism literally saved Eastern Europe from slavery and extermination at the hands of Nazism. If it weren't for the socialist industrial revolution kickstarted in 1929 in the USSR, there is absolute certainty that the Nazis would have blitzkrieged their way to the Urals and genocided all non-German peoples in a similar way (but scaled up in speed due to the industrial development of Germany) to what the US did to native Americans.
Freedom of press only applies to the wealthy, how do I benefit from it as a worker when all media in my country perpetuates comprador propaganda and I'm too poor to make my own press?
For sure— I'm not saying freedom of press actually exists under capitalism.
My point is that socialism doesn't have freedom of press either. Censorship and surveillance by the vanguard state (see China, Cuba, historical USSR) is routine.
"Dictatorship of the proletariat". Unfortunately, dictatorships do not have a tendency to allow for freedom of press.
The proletariat is the majority in most if not all societies, arguing the dictatorship of the proletariat is undemocratic merely because the word "dictatorship" doesn't make sense. Democracy is [ideally, not what it is in practice] is a dictatorship of the majority, and the proletariat are the majority, surely you see how saying democracy is undemocratic makes no sense.
States are instruments of oppression weilded by classes, they are all "dictatorships" in the sense that a class oppresses the other; the question in state is, is it the capitalists oppressing the working class, or the other way around
Except in practice it's not proletarians doing these things, it's bureaucrats who end up forming their own class and class interests in the name of the proletariat. The average proletariat isn't actually the one who makes these rules or checks or applies censorships. See China, USSR, Cuba.
There shouldn't be classes to begin with. Eliminating hierarchies in lieu of anarchism deals with the issue without it being "another dictatorship"
That's not how class works, it's not like starting a new club. Class is defined by your relationship to production, not some nebulous title like "beauraucrats"
Genuinely, what is your suggested approach to rectifying this and what real world data is it based on? How do you expect to abolish class without a clear understanding of what creates it? How would a scientist expect to cure a disease without understanding what it is?
That's the socialist definition of class, that is not how I understand class.
I didn't say it's like "starting a new club".
Calling bureaucracy "nebulous" doesn't invalidate any of the reasoning I provided.
Suggested approach: anarchism.
I didn't disregard the importance of understanding class, merely that I disagreed with the reductive socialist definition of class.
I can decide to understand gravity as a color if I want to, but it doesn't make me right.
I'm calling the term you're using (beauraucrats) nebulous, because it is, because you haven't defined it. You haven't provided any "reasoning", you've just said "I think this happens" with nothing at all to back it up.
That's cool, but some of us feel like living in a society that doesn't get rolled over by a capitalist military whenever they feel like it. Some of us enjoy functional supply chains, too.
Yeah I'm not saying you don't think it's important, I'm saying you don't understand it. Please tell me what you think is reductive about the definition of class used by the people who have radically transformed multiple feudal societies into world powers, because your own track record does not make a compelling case for abandoning it.