askchapo

23055 readers

92 users here now

Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.

Rules:

Posts must ask a question.
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
Try [email protected] if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

is "soviet nostalgia" an actually viable tool for socialist agitation in former eastern bloc states, what are your thoughts on it and the organisations which rely on it? (hexbear.net)

submitted 17 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

21 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 0 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

Soviet nostalgia and ostalgie are both popular with people who could be nostalgic for that era, which is people who were at least young adults more than 30 years ago. This is a demographic that the European right has very much bought off. It's something to play on, but it's not something you rely on.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 14 hours ago

I mean, I catch myself falling for Soviet nostalgia crap that ends up in the West a lot, despite having been born long after the dissolution, but like, the Western left as a whole has a Soviet obsession and Eastern Bloc nostalgia problem. Lot of Western communists who didn't live through the Cold War but miss it anyway, along with those who did live through it and miss when just being a communist was in and of itself revolutionary and dangerous and Doing Something. People who love Soviet aesthetics and still want Red Dawn to actually happen, instead of having to lead a local revolution and take local culture and material conditions into account.

So, this might not work that well in the actual former Warsaw Pact... but it sure as hell works in countries that were on the other side of the Cold War.