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If your first instinct as a westerner is to criticize and lecture 3rd world communist movements, instead of learning from their successes, then you have internalized the patronizing arrogance of the colonial system you claim to oppose.
this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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Dang I didn't know there were successful communist nations in developing countries.
Funnily enough, two started off as developing and ended up as world superpowers.
I'm assuming your talking about Russia and China I think it very fare to criticise them, considering they are both totalitarian nations which don't respect the needs of there citizens.
The USSR (Soviet Union) and the PRC (China). The USSR is not Russia, and it doesn't exist anymore.
And of course it's fair, and in fact important to criticize them. We have the benefit of hindsight and can see how some of their decisions were serious mistakes. On the other hand, it's also important to analyze what they did good and learn from that too. Neither was perfect, both were improvements, and the terrible fates of Russia and Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union is proof of how much good the SU was for its citizens.
They both inherited countries plagued with regular famine and have both eliminated it. In fact, in 1983 the CIA documented the SU as having a better typical diet than the USA. Clearly they respected the food security of their citizens.
The SU managed to rapidly build low-cost housing after repelling a HUGE invasion of extermination from Nazi Germany. The "commieblocks" were critical in housing people after war. China has also made huge strides in home ownership and elimination of poverty. Meanwhile, poverty and homelessness is increasing under capitalist countries, with them doing little to resolve their housing crises. Clearly they respected the need for shelter of their citizens.
Keep in mind, that both these countries were devastated by world wars and civil wars. Their countries started off in serious crisis and had already had revolutions. If they didn't respect the needs of their citizens, they would have ended up failed states overthrown by their desperate population or quickly collapsing to invasions.
As for China, the government, despite censorship and political repression, still remains popular among its citizens, according to censorship-resistant US studies^[https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/]. It's largely avoided war, hugely reduced poverty, and has become a world leader in technology.
There are many valid reasons to criticize these countries and it's important we do that. But they clearly respected the basic needs of their citizens. There are few other countries which have done more to reduce poverty and homelessness than them.
What do you call Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, the former Burkina Fasso under Sankara, or the former USSR? Do you sincerely believe those countries had a better standard of living for all people, especially workers and peasants, under capitalism? Isn't the great fall from grace of the USSR proof that the benefits their people had received were indeed the fruits of socialism and not the "rising tide" of global capitalist development (which was actually exacerbating poverty in the global South outside of the socialist countries)?
Maybe it's just capitalist propaganda but from what I've heard, China is a mass surveillance state which doesn't protect any of the citizens rights for privacy and has lacklustre working environments which is why everything is so cheap to be made there. Cuba is stuck with a poor economy, but I guess that's all developing nations so i don't know much other than that. For Vietnam my source is a friend who's family mostly live in Vietnam, he says people in Vietnam dislike communism but can't say it out loud. And I don't know much about Laos or Burkina fasso.
To be clear I do consider myself a leftist and anti capitalist but I don't believe there have been many properly successful socialist nations outside of Europe really.
It is a mass surveillance state, but it's definitely not any more mass surveillance than any developed country. Maybe one important difference is that in China the government has fewer restrictions for how they will spy on you, but in the US for example the NSA will do blatantly illegal things that aren't even allowed under the Patriot Act and no one can do anything about it, so the extent to which surveillance is legal or not is irrelevant IMO. I would understand your criticism if China was actually a very repressive country where dissent wasn't allowed and a huge portion of the population was jailed, but I think the quick response to the anti-lockdown protests and the fact they jail far fewer people than the US (while having 4x the population) means that it's not a very reasonable criticism. Especially not when you consider the Western countries built up their stability while exploiting others, and China had to go through a hard process of occupation, civil war, and then many mistakes during the Cultural Revolution which still breed resentment at the state, even if things have gotten better.
As for the working environments, you'll always see the worst of the worst in negative coverage of China (the suicide nets in Foxconn factories, for example, which to my knowledge have been debunked). Still, it is undeniable that China has had pretty bad working conditions. I think the key element to understand why working conditions are poor, yet more than 80% of Chinese people approve of their government, is that Chinese people understand that their government is committed to improving things and they consistently see those improvements. They also have a much more responsive political system that listens to their individual concerns very well, so whatever problems they have are more likely to be dealt with than if they had a situation in a western liberal democracy, where you write a letter to your representative and your representative has been paid off by 3 different lobby groups to ignore your concerns.
That's a huge understatement. Cuba faces a horrible, economy-stifling blockade from the US that essentially shuts them off from the entire global economy because they can't access the global banking system or buy a huge number of basic goods. Despite that, they're a global leader in medicine, have a far better education system than the US at all levels, have sent revolutionaries to assist in decolonizing countries in Africa, and were leaders of the NAM.
Laos is honestly quite similar to Vietnam.
Burkina Fasso had a very successful few years of developing infrastructure and improving living conditions for the people under Sankara. It's a very tragic story because he was assassinated and replaced by a regime that reversed much of the good he had accomplished. Nowadays, Ibrahim Traore is essentially just playing it back with many of the same ideas Sankara had, and he has been massively popular and successful for it (look no further than the fact his security team have had to stop many assassination attempts already, much like Castro).
What has been successful in Europe? Yugoslavia and the Warsaw Pact countries were great, but could only exist because of the pressure of the USSR on the capitalist bloc. All the social democracies are only social democracies, they have never put the workers in charge of their own destiny and are therefore not socialist at all.
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