>>7432>western capitalism won the first cold warYes but it's also loosing the second cold war. Might makes right philosophies are retarded and self defeating in the long term because nobody has superior strength all the time. Ultimately the only thing the cold war proves, is that western capitalism could not compete against Soviet socialism on peaceful terms.
>gulagedRemember that the US imprisons roughly 5 times as many people as the USSR did, the level of hypocrisy is earth-shattering. If you are complaining about the political repression in the soviet union, that did exist, but you have to consider how utterly brutal the repression against communists was before the revolution. They did not retaliate in kind, if they had done that… It would have been something else.
>a phone or computer reliant completely on a capitalist supply chainThis argument isn't coherent because all the stuff gets made by workers, not the capitalists that own the means of production. But it's still funny because most gadgets have
Made in China written on it. So their made by a bunch of workers in a communist country.
>a manifest statement of Dunning Kruger syndrome.insult =/= argument
>Literally every country got materially better off during the 20th century.That's probably not entirely true, but even if it was, the meteoric rise of socialist countries that managed to double their life expectancy within one generation during the process of industrialization, is something no capitalist country got even close to realizing.
>The USSR needed the American lend lease programI know that American distortion of history teaches this but lend lease represented a minuscule fraction of the USSR war machine. The US can't claim the USSR's victory over Fascism in WW2.
>Had Hitler not been such a schizo retard and didn't invade the Soviet Union in the first place, Stalin would have maintained his literal alliance with Nazi Germany.Stalin tried to create an anti fascist alliance with the western liberal democracies, they declined and made Hitler-pacts, so as far as "literal alliance with Nazi Germany" goes that's not something you can pin on Stalin, since he was backstabbed trying to build an anti-fascist alliance.
Also in your hypothetical example where Hitler wasn't a Nazi doing fascism, fighting the Soviet Union to the last German on behalf of the imperial bourgeoisie, there would not have been a reason for the Soviets to destroy Germany. If you delete Nazism from Germany's history they would become reformist social democrats, that's perfectly acceptable.
>The USSR had tons of freedomscompared to the absolute monarchy that preceded it, Yes absolutely.
>Ah yes, you could just decide where to live, where you wanted to work, could take a vacation whenever you wanted.WTF are you talking about ? Social mobility of labor in the Soviet Union was higher than in any other country ever, by an absolutely enormous margin. Compared to the preceding monarchy where it was basically none, that was one of their biggest social achievements and probably their greatest appeal-factor regarding ideological export. The Soviet Union was gigantic and had loads of tourism too, which also was more affordable compared to tourism in capitalism.
You suck at this, i'll give you a hint, the Soviets had a austere selection of consumer goods, that were durable and good value but not much else.
>What percentage of the Bolshevik party leadership in 1921 was still alive by 1940 btw?No idea, it's kinda hard to track down data about Bolshevik party carders, given the turmoil of that era they probably didn't keep good records.
>I say all this as a defender of the Soviet Union as wellI defend the Soviet Union because it was a massive improvement. Ideologically Marxists do not believe in an end of history, so there only is the development level of the productive forces that allows you to have the next step of improved social relations. Also the Soviet Union has to be upheld because it refutes the totalizing neo-liberal ideological concept that there is no alternative to them.
>but from a perspective that it was the least worst possible system in Russia at the time, not from the perspective that it was great or the best possible.Given the chance for a do-over, one would probably pick a sortition democracy instead of a leadership democracy. Because sortition has really good interest-representation and does not need any purges. And later on one would push harder for cybernetics.