Yes 100% the stasi pushing the GDR to support LGBT people would have spread to russia. They'd realize the GDR wasn't collapsing from LGBT rights, similar to Fidel's shift in views
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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Also, the orthodox church would not have had a resurgence and put it's stranglehold on society if the USSR was there to keep it in check.
One of the things that pisses me off the most is when western Christians get big mad about the Soviets dealing with the church. Just completely ignorant of the centuries of oppression that worked hand-in-glove with the tsardom. Were they harsh? Absolutely. Was it justified? Yes. The state atheism of the Soviet union was a reaction to the state theism of the tsars.
Well if Cuba and GDR are anything to go by, yeah.
I think it would have better chances. the revisionists reversed a lot of the early CCCP's gains in women's rights and tolerance for queer people. but given what's happened in Cuba and what happened in the GDR, I think a communist society would have had better odds for learning to normal about sexuality and gender. And I'm certain we wouldn't have seen things like the catholic reactionaries in Poland of all places banning abortion.
Almost definitely. But rights rollback only really happen when conditions are noticeably worse, and people need scapegoats. It shouldn't work in a communist society but these things aren't easy to overcome societally, especially when hostile foreign powers are basically fucking with you non-stop one way or another, often with the dividends paid on having colonized and stolen much of their historical wealth which would have been really useful for implementing reforms.
We would be waaay closer to FALGSC
What you’re talking about with the issues with LGBT is not limited to Russia, but is quite pervasive throughout the Global South who have been victims of Western imperialism over the past century.
No, I am not blaming Western imperialism on every anti-LGBT reaction in the Global South, but the correlation is undeniable.
I will give you one example: Taiwan is in many ways culturally indistinguishable from most of mainland China (for example, in terms of popular culture, Chinese and Taiwanese actors and singers often participate in projects on both sides of the straits, and the famous ones are household names in both China and Taiwan), but Taiwan is still leaps and bounds ahead when it comes to LGBT rights (the first to legalize gay marriage in all of Asia). There is no denying that, and it doesn’t even come close under comparison.
I have given another example the other day that it is no coincidence that the two Global South countries that have made significant progress on LGBT rights recently, Cuba and Vietnam, also happen to be two of the handful of countries that have successfully resisted Western imperialism since the 20th century.
The reason is simple: the vast majority of progressive movements in the Global South had been crushed in the name of anti-communism during the 20th century. The fall of the USSR in the 1990s sealed the fate of most Global South movements in their attempts to attaining economic sovereignty from the globalizing neoliberal order, whose free market ideology forces vulnerable countries (i.e. every country) to “open up” to the intrusion of foreign capital. Right wing governments and bourgeois elites in the Global South collaborate with foreign capital to plunder their own national wealth, leading to even further anti-Western sentiment among the nationalist/patriotic crowd in those countries.
Social progress cannot be isolated from economic progress and national emancipatory projects. Many of the advances on LGBT rights in Western countries occurred only within the past two decades (the struggle is of course much longer than that), and all of them took place under relatively prosperous economic conditions.
So, back to your question, yes, if the USSR could continue to resist Western imperialism, it would have a much better chance of making leaps of progress on social issues. But the opening up to Western liberal ideology destroyed all that, and instead brought poverty and devastation into a country that was on the verge of overtaking the United States as the most prosperous country in the world.
I forget where I read this in regards to Afghanistan, but it was a quote of something like “progress was made in Europe naturally, but in Afghanistan it was brought by gunpoint by outsiders.”
And it’s true, both by the west and the USSR, although the latter’s case is more complicated due to the west’s machinations in the Middle East.
I think this has more weight rather than just economics because China is prospering but still very conservative, and it’s due to historic oppression by the west. In my opinion, Vietnam and Cuba have made progress with LGBT rights is because the US is so focused on China and Russia and the Middle East that they largely leave the two countries alone outside of economic meddling and standard anti communism. They’re able to progress on their own whereas China is paranoid because they’re the focus of a superpower rivalry and everything is thrown at them.
But your point still stands. Imran Khan of Pakistan wanted to normalize relationships with the Taliban. A Vice journalist asked him why he wanted to do this because the Taliban is oppressing girls and women. Khan said, well, look at it now. Afghanistan is isolated from the world and are girls benefitting from it? No. If we start incorporating them into the world stage then they would have no choice but to compromise, even if it’s slightly, to benefit from the world. Almost every isolated country has maintained its powers and ideologies, and it’s no surprise that countries like North Korea and Syria are reactionary since “democracy” is sieging them and they have no global economic connections.
Yes, I agree with you, but it bears reminding that China despite its explosive growth and poverty eradication still has a lot of regional inequalities. The coastal cities with their export manufacturing base have flourished for decades, but the more interior, poorer rural regions are still catching up. Even within the coastal cities, tens of millions of migrant workers (the total number of migrant workers is about 300 million, pretty much the entire population of the US) are still nowhere near approaching the living standards of a middle class household, for example. We’re talking about workers who still in shared bunk beds hostel-like environment.
China is so large and its population so huge that it is very difficult to progress rapidly, though the government is trying.
Perhaps emigrants in the 90s skewed more “progressive,” leaving a more religious/reactionary population in Russia. Not sure where to find data on this though.
That's just a constant function of brain drain, though. One of the benefits for the imperialist countries that receive said emigrants is that it's much harder for a country whose educated professionals have left it to progress past the conditions that cause the exodus, it's a self perpetuating problem.
Very hard to say, because the conditions necessary for economic collapse were the same conditions that incentived white chauvinism and nationalism.
Should be noted how the Reagan Era gave us a fresh wave of revanchist race and sex attitudes right alongside our own downturn. And the LGBT civil rights boom of the 90s paralleled the Clinton Era boom that the Soviets never got to enjoy. The UK economic downtown happening right now and holy shit are they going through some bigoted shit.
I guess a good litmus test for this theory is to observe how Eastern block states - China and India, particularly, but Russia as well going into the 2030s - come around during their own regional boom.
Yeah, I’ve always seen the 90s neoliberal harvest era (harvest of the collapsed USSR industries that were yet to be financialized) and the easy credit (financial deregulation) fueling the economic boom as temporary. Now that the economic boom has run its course, we are also starting to see a regression in LGBT and other civil rights in Western countries as well.
I don't understand the link here between economic prosperity and attitudes toward LGBT people, bigotry, etc. Is the idea that as economic conditions get worse people look for scapegoats?
The problem that I have with social progress under neoliberal capitalism is that it is too closely tied to capital, which means that it is built on shaky foundations to begin with.
After the collapse of the USSR, neoliberal capitalism was able to gain access to the free market pretty much on the entire globe, but what happens when you have secured the global market while still needing to sustain an indefinite growth?
The 1990s also saw the digitalization of society and rise of internet, opening the door to a “big data” era where consumer information such as their preferences and habits can be conveniently gathered and sold among corporations. This allowed corporations to target demographics in very specific manners, such that instead of a generic product that appeals to only cis white male, for example, as was the case in the previous eras, now capital can also boost their sales numbers by targeting not only marginalized groups, but sub-groups (e.g. a sub-culture) within the same demographics.
As the market for the traditionally defined demographics became exhausted themselves, how do you keep the profits flowing? This is where the emancipatory project of gender, sexual orientation and sub-culture identification came to align with the interests of neoliberal capitalism. Yes, if we can create an infinite number of sub-demographics, you can in principle perform a very personalized, targeted sales tailored to the taste and preference of a very specific individual.
However, as the Western credit-fueled economy has started to run its course, with a deep recession on the horizon, this model of growth is no longer viable. So, as the LGBT groups no longer serve their purpose as consumers for capital, it is ready abandon whatever progress that had been made under neoliberalism.
A similar parallel can be seen with Western social democracy under the Fordist-Keynesian model during the post-war era (1945-1970s). As Europe was devastated after WWII, the capitalists saw a temporary truce with the working class to rebuild the war-torn Europe. Also acting as a bulwark against the Soviet communism, the working class living under the Western social democratic states was able to benefit from a partial power-sharing with capital and enjoyed an exponential rise in living standards. However, as the contradictions under the Keynesian model also became intensified and its failures inevitable, capital was ready to abandon the high wage, high living standards model for the working class, and these workers who had enjoyed a few decades of progress in living standards became abandoned in a process that began in the 1970s, as neoliberalism came to the forefront and began transitioning into rentier/financial capitalism.
Yes, worsening conditions mean people need scapegoats. The people in charge of the political machine may not even necessarily be scapegoating (though they often are). Sometimes there’s just a cultural search for explanations and the reactionary reasons happen to win out by the time they reach the ears of someone who can do something about it. Also, improving conditions make it easier for activists to operate. More resources, more hope, more free time, less death. It’s not a 1-to-1 link and there are other factors, but there’s a connection. You can also look at things like unequal distribution of prosperity. The success of the black suffrage movement in the US followed a boom where white Americans came into tremendous wealth which wasn’t shared among the black population. And where black communities were able to get some for themselves and develop their own prosperity, towns were bulldozed, flooded, or otherwise destroyed. And of course we already know about things like red lining. Prosperity plays a major part in that story.
yes.
absolutely would be more tolerant of gsm in general would not be ideal world though right now we'd still be in a backsliding stage so to say globally