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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 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

The issue you have with soviet nostalgia in eastern europe is that it appeals to the 40+ who are culturally backwards on social issues. In order to keep their 40+ audiences the communists lean into some of that, in part because a good chunk of their groups are filled with older people with that nostalgia.

The problem with this is that the young are significantly less culturally and socially backwards. Many younger people end up being attracted to pro-europe groups and liberal social/cultural policy because of this.

You can not appeal to both audiences simultaneously. Either you appeal to the old with their socially backwards views and nostalgia, or you appeal to the young with their socially progressive views and lose the old. The problem is that the old won't just go on to stop existing, they will organise among themselves as communists and continue to cause an association between socially backwards views and communism. This in turn will continue to make attracting younger people hard.

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.

I personally think the old probably need to go extinct first before the pendulum will swing hard towards attracting the young. Their very existence is a barrier because you can't stop them continuing to do the work they do that currently keeps communists in that space of only appealing to older people in these countries.