6 ms·

I was born in the USSR, and I have read a great deal about this period (and have read works of all writers mentioned), so i think i have a very clear pictire of

• varjag 6y ago
  I was also born in USSR and old enough for Komsomol when it disintegrated. Nope, it wasn't much similar to woke culture, mainly because it was rather rigid top-down command hierarchy of values. The current brands of values and socialist morals were rationalized in the Central Committee, then propagated through Republics committees, then oblasts and regions down to town administrations into individual organizations, factories and schools (and sometimes police stations). In other words it was very much the opposite direction. Now you can liken woke culture to mob rule (tho I think that'd be exaggerating) or whatever, point is it's nothing like the Soviet system.
  • Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
    I wasn't talking about how did these two systems come up with their values, but about how similar they are in enforcing them.
    • dhoe 6y ago
      Gulag? Forced psychiatric internment?
      • TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Advancing in society by demonstrating your commitment to the proclaimed values, through ratting out your less committed neighbors, or even falsely accusing them of being less committed.
        • strogonoff 6y ago
          Do you think it makes a difference, though, if in one case the system was installed and enforced by a minority in a top-down fashion without general population having a say in it, whereas in the other it appears to be organically arising in society?
          • JasonFruit 6y ago
            It may appear to you to be organically arising in society, but to many people, it seems to be actively encouraged by propaganda efforts — "anti-extremism training", "diversity training", and the like — and the embrace of those in power, whether governmental or private, even extending to asymmetrical enforcement of laws based on the wokeness of the violators.
            • Kye 6y ago
              These are mostly coming from the same demographics that imposed the systems of power in the first place. Don't confuse well-meaning but misguided efforts by people trying to do better than people they share identities with for efforts from the people they're trying to be better for.
          • TeMPOraL 6y ago
            What I recall from my history lessons is that the top-down system you refer to was the end stage of a revolution that arose organically across the population just a few decades earlier. Well, "organically". As all such things go, there were real problems affecting a lot of people, but once the movement to fix those problems gained steam, it got quickly leveraged and taken over by various political and economic groups around the world. In the turmoil that followed, one of the groups that co-opted the banner of the initial movement managed to take over Russia, and give birth to USSR. The point being, USSR did not come out of the blue. What you want to compare the current social trends to is what Russia looked like in the decade prior to the October Revolution.
            • strogonoff 6y ago
      • Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
        I wouldn't rule out the possibility.
      • neartheplain 6y ago
        Remember the PBS lawyer who said Republican voters should have their children put in re-education camps? https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-entertainment-coronavirus-pandemic-8f586d687ab332777a7a059457ff818e https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-entertainment-corona...
        • toiletfuneral 6y ago
          I grew up in an extremely conservative family and they watch tucker Carlson and openly fantasize about shooing black protestors. So I dunno man, be as mad at a shitty lib PBS lawyer as you want I guess, but only 1 side is gearing up
        • dhoe 6y ago
          I agree that this guy losing his job over something he says at a bar is a prime example of right wing cancel culture.
          • neartheplain 6y ago
            “This is Wesley Yang’s “Dexter rule,” named for the TV serial killer who kills only other killers: Cancel only the cancelers.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/america-has-lost-ability-forgive/618336/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/america-ha...
          • rufus_foreman 6y ago
            He lost his job at PBS. PBS is right wing now?
    • varjag 6y ago
      Any grassroots attempt to challenge the system values (what you would call "woke") was met with the full repressive force of the system. It only softened in the last 3-4 years of decay but even then was still sporadically enforced.
      • brokenkebab 6y ago
        Wokeness is certainly among the strongest movements in developed Anglophone countries, having a huge discoursive power, and embedded in structures of authority for quite a long time. Last 7-8 yrs it became more visible simply because its demands are growing more radical, and it started to fight a wider circles of opponents.
        • varjag 6y ago
          It can be a powerful movement on its own without being anything at all like Soviet authoritarianism. I seriously fail to see the point in this comparison except as a cheap rhetorical device. Let's find parallels to the crusades or Inca human sacrifice, am sure it's just as relevant.
          • brokenkebab 6y ago
            Well, you probably didn't read the text. There are very fine-defined points to compare, nobody draws any wild parallels.
    • TulliusCicero 6y ago
      Yes, I too remember the many people executed by overeager woke committees on Twitter. Like, seriously? People being shamed into getting fired or quitting is the same thing as death to you?
      • A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
        I was going to respond with a joke and quickly realized that the joke is very accurate in US. For a good portion of the population, being out of work is akin to death. Joblessness is a quick way to homelessness and the homeless do not tend to have a long life..
      • NoOneNew 6y ago
        Folks get fired online in a public fashion over this stuff. That's the mob's power play. Companies research a person's online activities to see if this person is going to be dangerous for their brand image. This person can no longer find work. Sure, it's not an execution, but how about you don't have a job for a few years. Lets see how cheery you'll be about it. In dialogues where lack of complete inclusion and split second micro-aggressions are enough to cause catastrophic mental harm to someone... being jobless is considered a backrub?
  • fgsunx 6y ago
    There are bottom-up movements like BLM, but mostly the woke culture is corporate and "elite" endorsed and therefore top-down. What the academic "elites" are trying to achieve is clear: The topics create work for the soft sciences and even after a potential revolution their jobs would be safe. What the corporations are expecting is less clear. They are doing well under a model of capitalism with a woke branding. A bit of what China is doing with its curious capitalism/nepotism branded as communism model, though I don't think that is exactly the goal of U.S. corporations. They are doing fine with the current political theater. If the lower classes in the U.S. wake up to actual class warfare, they may find that they overplayed their hand though.
    • varjag 6y ago
      From what I gather it starts as grassroots and then the invisible hand reacts anticipating the social landscape change. You may lament this unprincipled capitalism but it was entirely not like that in USSR.
    • TeMPOraL 6y ago
      > What the corporations are expecting is less clear. They are doing well under a model of capitalism with a woke branding. The market isn't unlike a heat engine - if there is a heat difference somewhere, it means there's energy to be extracted equilibrizing that difference. Corporations don't really care about what ideologies are in conflict in the society - they align themselves along the best value gradient and pump it for all it's worth. In this particular case: lots of people respond to woke ideas, and those people tend to control important marketing amplifiers (Internet media), so being seen as woke is a profitable strategy. For the same reason, you also see a lot of environmental awareness undertones in marketing these days - people who care about it respond to it positively, people who don't care just ignore it, so it's a profitable move to be seen as environmentally conscious.
  • brokenkebab 6y ago
    Wokeness is built on networked flexible leadership (which was not possible before the internet) therefore certainly is not as rigid, centralized, or bureaucratic as CSPU. But OP obviously didn't mean structural similarity. It still values ideological higher truth of social justice over empirical truth, and strives to silence those who don't howl in unison.
    • varjag 6y ago
      The structure, motivation, means of execution and persecution were entirely different. But sure, in the super general sense of "things people do about other people" everything is alike.
    • orbital-decay 6y ago
      >which was not possible before the internet The same game was practiced since French Revolution, it's nothing new and I'm sure as hell it wasn't invented on the net. Following OP's analogies with Russosphere, it's much more like RSDLP (i.e. the pre-revolutionary loosely organized umbrella socialist party with a bunch of very different movements) than the late USSR they are talking about. Many people from RSDLP like Alexandra Kollontai would feel right at home today, for example.
  • PicassoCTs 6y ago
    Yeah, its more the chinese red-guard sort of mob-rule, directed barely by the system-provider.
• mc32 6y ago
  To me one of the scariest things is Twitter wokeism. It echoes Honeckers DDR. Neighbors and friends denouncing each other for minor transgressions. Some of it due to personal revenge, some of it to provide cover for their own shortcomings, some true believers. Honecker did it for power and oppression. These people gleefully enlist voluntarily, attacking enemy and friends and each other to prove who the better dehumanized human is. Goddamit, it’s sad.
  • jancsika 6y ago
    > Neighbors and friends denouncing each other for minor transgressions. Does this happen often on Twitter? Literally every example I've ever read about on Twitter is one of the following: 1. some poster completely unknown to the person in question-- either revealing content of old Tweets or aggressively responding to a recent utterance. Then that goes viral. 2. some victim of assault makes an accusation as a last ditch effort to stop a monster from continuing to assault victims. I know plenty of examples of Facebook's instigation algo ripping at the seams of otherwise close-knit communities. But those are cases of a nasty divorce spilling out into public posts, or a political disagreement suddenly turning into, "Someone should burn so-and-so's house down!" Weird shit. I've never witnessed any people who are friends or neighbors with each other attempt police each other's minor transgressions on Twitter.
    • AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      There have been several cases of exactly this, e.g. students ratting out their professors for some kind of ideological heresy, or journalists agitating for coworkers to be fired based on what they publish. But even when the first finder is a stranger, it's the people you know who have to do the damage. Some Twitter mob gets after your company to fire you. Only works if your boss, i.e. someone you know, folds to the mob. So in the end it's always friends and neighbors turning on each other.
    • Rebelgecko 6y ago
      For a recent example, a woman in her 30s was asked to resign from Teen Vogue because her colleagues weren't comfortable with a joke about East Asian eyelids that she tweeted as a teenager. Even though her coworkers weren't the one who uncovered the tweet, if they didn't take the bait she'd still be working there
• Kye 6y ago
  It's ironic that you're misusing a term that came out of a community often accused of being filled with communist infiltrators any time they speak up for themselves.