my opinion

when you look at the political scene in eastern europe, the primary way communist parties try to gain support is to appeal to disaffected 40-60’ish people with some form or another of “ostalgie” or “soviet nostalgia”. there’s nothing principally wrong with it, but i feel it is way too oriented towards the past instead of the future. “look what we had” is good for some but ultimately it isn’t enough to build movements. you see communist parties who still refuse to recognise the collapse of the ussr.

my gripe with this isn’t that i disagree with them ideologically or morally, as the liberals do, the problem is the union is definitively gone. there is no hope of restoring it, there hasn’t been for nearly 40 years. we need to start from the beginning again, the old structures have been fully dismantled and the union will not return, not in the next few decades.

this is ignoring the fact that this is really only appealing to… well… 50 to 70 year olds. we should focus our agitprop and work towards the youth of our countries instead of a group of people who ultimately will go “extinct” soon.

  • Cimbazarov [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    19·
    4 days ago

    Socialism is inherently materialist. With other movements you’ll see a reverence to some mythological past which is used to try to unify people (e.g. Italy and the Roman empire, Germany and the Volk, America and the 50s) which are all idealist. Socialism is about unifying people based on class. I think we need to move on from the soviet union and not try to romanticize it to try to make it some goal society should strive for. If the goal is becoming the soviet union, then we lose sight of dialectical materialism, why the soviet union developed the way it did, and how to learn from it as social scientists.

    • MizuTama [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      10·
      4 days ago

      But is reverence the same as nostalgia? Sure, often nostalgia is an unclear yearning for the past, but it can have direct intent, and sometimes that yearning is related to the possibilities of the past had and that particular aspect still has merit for agitation, no? For this, I mean the possibilities of development provided by socialism. It is a fact that the situation for modern Eastern European countries is different, and the tactics should have differences, but if you’re trying to argue for moving towards a socialist system, most would consider it a “return” due to having history with it. I’m not Eastern European, so I’m mostly speculating, but trying to detach from the soviet union and move on, to many laymen is the same as detaching from socialism, no? The goal wouldn’t be returning to the USSR but returning to socialism.

      • Cimbazarov [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        9·
        4 days ago

        The goal wouldn’t be returning to the USSR but returning to socialism.

        Yea that would be the challenge in using nostalgia of the past. That being said I think it has some use in agitation, but it’s more important to follow class dynamics and unify people based on class.

        I also missed that the question was specific to Eastern Europe, so idk how strongly the Soviet Union affects the culture

    • Collatz_problem [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      6·
      4 days ago

      You still can’t rid of reverence of the past. USSR revered the Paris Commune, the Paris Commune revered the Jacobins, the Jacobins revered the Roman Republic and Ancient Athens.

      Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95.

      marx-hi

      • Cimbazarov [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        4 days ago

        There is a difference between revering it and using it as an example to learn from. Lenin was objective when it came to analyzing and learning from the Paris Commune. He may have had warm feelings towards it but his argument in state and revolution was to learn from it rather than try to acheive exactly as it did.