The thing is, I have nothing against socialism or communism as a political ideology; trust me, I’m as anti-capitalist as they come. The leftism is really not the problem here.
The problem is when in their leftism, people – Americans, really, and western Europeans – use the ussr as this sort of goal, this complete antithesis to the modern capitalist society, this almost-utopian place to live. They use hammer and sickle symbol, the ussr anthem; sometimes, as a joke, sometimes, not so much.
Not only that clearly shows that they know absolutely nothing about the ussr – it’s also spreading russian propaganda, whether it’s on purpose or not, which is especially insidious now, when russia is literally committing a genocide.
The ussr wasn’t a socialist utopia where everyone is equal. It was a totalitarian dictatorship, responsible for colonisation and genocide of multiple people and cultures. Just like the russian Empire before it. Just like modern russia continues to do now.
For many Eastern European and Central Asian people, hammer and sickle is not just a symbol of a political ideology. It’s the symbol, under which people were starved to death, imprisoned or executed for daring to write in their own language; in which cultures were erased, people – forcefully assimilated, stripped of their own national identity.
It’s the propaganda of being “the same people, the same nation” that russians love to use; that westerners love to believe, for the sole reason of the oppressed daring to look similar to the oppressor; for the sole reason of Americans being unable to look past their own history and realize oppression comes in many shapes and forms.
By using the ussr symbols in your political movement, you’re denying the atrocities commited under that symbol and spreading russian propaganda, whether it’s on purpose or not.
It’s not “progressive” to wave around a hate symbol.
Do your research.
To the people in replies equating the hammer & sickle to the reclamation of ‘queer’:
No.
The word queer was created by queer people, and though it was appropriated as a slur for a while, it has been reclaimed as a self identifier for generations. The only people we hurt by calling ourselves by name is, perhaps, ourselves. Even if the term had originated as a slur, it would have been targetting queer people as victims, meaning we are the people to listen to about its reclamation.
US and W Euro communists did not create the hammer and sickle. It was not used to symbolize genocide against W Europeans and US Americans.
It is a military symbol of an empire that attempted, even occasionally succeeded at, genocide. The survivors of those attempts are the people harmed by its use.
We have no business 'reclaiming’ the hammer and sickle; they aren’t ours. The victims of USSR genocide alone determine who gets to reclaim it.
The rest of us would do well to defer to them, just like so many people deferred about the swastika after it was used as a symbol of genocide, too.
For a full century, use of the symbol was voluntarily deferred by Buddhists, Navajo, and other groups that used it. It is only being slowly re-adopted as the direct survivors of that genocide die of old age.
Meanwhile, the most recent USSR genocides were occurring during my own childhood and I’m a fucking millennial.
The only people who get to have an opinion about 'reclaiming’ this symbol are the survivors of the genocides it represents.
We already have a simple, easy to use symbol for labour rights and equality that came out of our own history as W Euro and American communists. And it wasn’t even used to justify mass murder!!
Shut the fuck up, put on your big kid panties, and use Bread and Roses. 🥖 🌹
Hi, Eastern European leftist here to cosign this.
The USSR was a brutal, genocidal, totalitarian dictatorship. The rest of the Eastern Bloc was no better. In the last century, the second most common cause of death in my family (after Nazis) was “torture and murder by the communist government”.
I have family members whose NAMES I don’t even know, because the government thoroughly unpersoned them. (This is not a TikTok euphemism, btw. It’s from Orwell’s 1984.) Many of my family members were still terrified of speaking out against the government, even twenty years after the communist regime fell, even in private.
I don’t even know what to talk about, really, to get people to see my point. The multiple genocides that the Soviet Union did, in an attempt to leave only the good Russians? The way that Jewish and Muslim communities were targeted far, far more than Christian ones? The mass surveillance and propaganda campaigns that left the populace a nervous and confused wreck? The KGB?
I mean, I get it. Y'all grew up in the West, all you’ve known your whole life is the crushing boot of Christianity and capitalism. You learned the word “propaganda” and you learned how the west lied and subverted and waged war and you decided that if the west was bad then the governments they opposed, such as the USSR, must be good, and that all the horror stories are propaganda.
They’re not. The reality of Eastern European communism, as told to me by my family and by my country’s historians, is WORSE than whatever you learned in history class.
And you, Western leftists, are not the inheritors of that trauma, and you don’t get to claim it’s symbols.
Stop using the hammer and sickle. Stop calling people “comrade”. Stop talking about the glory of the Soviet Union. And for fuck’s sake STOP PLASTERING IMAGES OF LENIN AND STALIN EVERYWHERE, my god, why the fuck is this even a thing I need to say.
When I went on a research trip to Central Asia a few years ago, the PI provided a list of literature you were not allowed to bring into the country. No pornography, OK, pretty much expected that one; no extremist religious literature, not too surprised by that, either; and the last category was absolutely no Marxist or Communist works of any kind. I wasn’t expecting that but it took me all of 2 seconds to realize why: I was going to a place where the USSR had destroyed families, broken traditional kinship groups apart, almost eradicated the traditional way of life and landraces of domestic animals – so many, many things. And the damage done was still visible in the landscape, if you knew what you were looking at (and our guide and the PI did, and made sure we did, too).
It’s not clever or witty or reclaiming anything to use symbols that hurt the millions of people still recovering from Soviet rule, who are still rebuilding systems and being threatened by the current Russian activities or can no longer speak their own languages. It’s fucked up. don’t do it.
Seriously, the rose has been a socialist symbol since the 1880s, please use that symbol.
Here’s the Wiki article on rose symbolism, which has a good section dedicated to the socialist usage.
Then, there’s also the Fist and Rose; to quote the Wiki article: “It depicts a rose, symbolizing the promises of better life under a socialist government, and a clenched fist holding it, symbolizing the activist commitment and solidarity necessary to achieve it. The rose is displayed in the red colour associated with left-wing politics; recent variants display the leafs in green, reflecting the rise of environmental concerns.“
And, specifically, bread and roses? 🍞🌹 Y’all know about that song, right? (Here’s one relatively recent rendition, with a direct link to the youtube channel I got it from:)
Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Y’all, I’m over here DYING cuz Google suggested me this article about the crisis of backyard chicken keepers– which is that they love having chickens so much that they keep getting more, and then don’t know what to do with all the eggs.
Which I can see how this would be a problem, but it’s just so funny to me because they had interviewed this one guy who started off with 3 chickens, and then kept adding more and more, and eventually started donating the eggs to a local food bank, and at the end of the year when they wrote him a tax receipt, he discovered he’d donated over 400 dozen eggs.
Seriously, it was a whole article talking very seriously about how people are so into chickens that they just keep collecting them like pokemon and then have to “scramble” (their words not mine) to get rid of the eggs, because they weren’t even thinking of egg production, they just loved having chickens.
And while I may be over here laughing a bit too hard, honestly? Big Mood.
“but without the profit motive people won’t work”
heres a cool idea: what if in 2017 tumblr commie kids gave up the creepy romanticization of the soviet union thing in favor of the aesthetics of american labor history–the haymarket riot, the pullman strike, the great railroad strike, emma goldman & yiddish socialism, woody guthrie, pete seeger, paul robeson, the iww and the 1912 textile workers’ strike, the ladies’ garment workers’ union, wpa murals, the american communist party, bread and roses, the union maid. that’s the Good Shit if yr looking for historical leftist culture imo
Seriously tho, kids.
The USSR was a blood-soaked mess. A racist, anti-semitic, sexist blood-soaked mess at that. Do not repeat the sins of the Left of the 60s/etc by ignoring that. (Same goes for Maoist China, etc.) To ignore that is to literally piss on a truly appalling number of graves As an allegory, Animal Farm’s inaccuracies were that it’s not grim and horrific enough. The most conservative and hesitant and “well we don’t want to be hysterical about this” count of Stalin’s death toll, not including famine-victims, is 4 million; the one which, after various amounts of research, I find most convincing is about 20 million. Mao’s Great Leap Forward killed anywhere from 18 to 50 million, and we have literal footage of Tienamen, guys.
This is not the good example you are looking for. Do not romanticise them.
100% go back, as OP says, to the things that actually had good results (like a 40 hour work-week and basic human worker’s rights and shite) and did not do them over mountains of corpses. We have lots! They even included (gosh!) women! and queers! and people of colour/different ethnicities! They do all the things you want.
These are your models. Not those bloody handed bastards over there.
@dadhoc I can hear your socialist heart growing three sizes