The people before us weren't perfect. Their mistakes are blueprints to learn from and build a better world
this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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I'm leftist but I am the first to admit that Stalin wasn't a good leader at all. For heaven's sake, his own guards were scared of him. In fact, he died because he instilled so much fear into them. Personally, I'm more of a collectivist who doesn't believe in authoritarianism.
Authoritarian is a meaningless pejorative. All states/countries/political groups etc. must be authoritarian by necessity in class society.
Major citation needed.
I don't even believe in a class society. I have several articles I can cite, but I'll use this one because it jumps straight to the point.
Lemmy.ml users are such obvious Russia/USSR propagandists. Y'all are so quick to suck up to sketchy leaders when you could be hoping for someone more classy like Thomas Sankara.
Sankara is just as "tankie" as Stalin, Castro, Mao, Huey P. Newton, etc. The difference is that he was killed before Burkina Faso really had a chance to develop socialism, and as such his name hasn't been dragged through the mud. Regarding Stalin, there are several books I can recommend, but I'll pick just one. Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo.
Also not sure what you mean by saying you don't "believe in class society." What does this mean? Do you deny the existence of wage laborers and capitalists, or do you deny that classes have similar interests and philosophies that come more naturally based on how we live?
Either way, we all love Sankara. Just because we disagree with bourgeois historiography on socialist leaders does not mean we don't also appreciate the ones that bourgeois historiography has largely left alone.
You may not believe in classes, but that doesn't negate their existence.
We will continue to support AES states (current and those sadly no longer extant). Go advocate for utopianism somewhere else.
Aka someone who dies before they can be effectively vilified
Western Marxism, the Fetish for Defeat, and Christian Culture (2020):
https://redsails.org/western-marxism-and-christianity/
How can you not "believe" in class society when it is a fact? Also, Sankara was a Marxist-Leninist, the very ideology you despise.
You don't think classes exist? Or you think it's possible to abolish classes at the press of a button without any transitionary phase? Either way this is idiotic.
Leader who believes the things I believe (Marxism Leninism) but was assassinated before the consolidation of the workers state began. You should probably investigate subjects before you speak on them.
This site won't load but from dealing with them previously I vaguely remember them as a liberal nonsense publisher however if you can provide an archive link or equivalent I can give my proper views on this article in particular.
You just posted a meme and said leftists fight too much and here you are, fighting.
Dictator defenders can kiss my arse, whether they defend Hitler or Stalin. There are far cooler leftists to learn from than f**king Stalin. For example, Thomas Sankara was an actual decent person. Not to mention, the fact that former colonies of the USSR flinch at the word "communism" indicates that he wasn't doing it correctly.
The majority of people who lived in Eastern European socialism regret its fall. The USSR had no colonies, it was an anti-imperialist, de-colonial federation. Sankara learned from Stalin, and was a Marxist-Leninist. Finally, equating Hitler and Stalin equates fascism with socialism, which originated as a form of Holocaust trivialization called Double Genocide Theory. I recommend reading Domenico Losurdo's Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism.
That's cool that being nice is the ceiling of revolutionary possibility in your brutally constrained mind, but the Chinese Communists did this:
Capitalist apologists: see how we reduced world poverty? /s