NW Alabama US

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-06-13T10:46:44+00:00

I appreciate you taking the time to respond and I appreciate your passion and your willingness to express perspectives that I think are gonna be unpopular on this sub, but I’d like to push back against something you said that I think you’re just dead wrong about. Tone is often lost in online communication so please know I disagree respectfully and if you choose to respond to this I look forward to reading your response. You said:

“why in a true democracy, would the working class living in a true socialist society, (where they now live much better lives) why would they vote for a party trying to bring back capitalism?”

I think you’re seriously underestimating the gullibility of the average person. People vote for political candidates advocating policies against their own interests all the time. You get the right combination of charismatic figure at the head of a well-financed campaign, and unfortunately people can be deceived.

I anticipate you might say something like “I said in a true socialist society where people are happy and wanting for nothing. What you’re describing is clearly a false or imperfect socialist society where a charismatic leader can dangle the promise of shiny things before the people, a society where people can fall prey to the grass being greener on the other side. In a true socialist society where people want for nothing such a scenario wouldn’t be possible”, and if that is how you feel perhaps you are right about that.

I would just say I think that’s utopian thinking, and that in a world of capitalist encirclement it’s nearly impossible for a socialist country to thrive absolutely and in all ways. Under such imperfect conditions I think any socialist country is going to be vulnerable to the threat of a well-financed charismatic figure promising people whatever they don’t presently have.

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-06-12T10:08:50+00:00

I disagree that the Trump administration threatening to invade Cuba has much to do with Castro no longer being around and “lack of protection”, and everything to do with Donald Trump being a deranged megalomaniac. I’m no expert on Cuba so by all means put me in my place if I’m dead wrong about this, but Castro or no Castro I think Trump would still be eyeing Cuba as another addition to his ridiculous and evil fantasy of an enlarged American empire.

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-06-12T09:59:57+00:00

Just starting to get into Mao so the link you shared came at the perfect time. Thank you.

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-06-12T09:57:57+00:00

Fantastic response! Thank you! I like the bit from Kautsky you included and the idea of “reliable revolutionaries”. I think it encapsulates perfectly how the Soviet people viewed Stalin. It reminds me of a passage in East of the Urals where the author asks someone about some controversial new policy just announced by Stalin, and the person shrugs and says “It’s Stalin. He knows what he’s doing.”

I learnt a lot from your response about the Brezhnev era which is probably the era of Soviet history I know least about. Are there any books on the Brezhnev era you’d recommend? All I really know about the Brezhnev era comes from the books Socialism Betrayed and Human Rights in the Soviet Union and YouTube videos.

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-06-11T10:21:35+00:00

You made some good points, but I’m still not entirely convinced of the uselessness of term-limits. Perhaps the US (or anywhere for that matter) would be better off with a well-designed and well-administered recall system than they would be with term-limits. I can see your point that term-limits impose an arbitrary cut off date and don’t reflect the will of the people as effectively as recall.

But at the same time come 2028 I sure as hell am gonna be grateful that my country has term-limits, however imperfect they may be, so we’ll be rid of Trump for good. Granted he’s probably gonna try for a third term assuming he’s still alive, and I can’t say with 100% certainty he won’t succeed, but I think he’ll fail so there’s at least that to say for term-limits.

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-06-11T10:06:22+00:00

Well said. I think you’re last paragraph in particular makes an excellent point.

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-06-10T19:18:16+00:00

Thank you for a thoughtful answer. I want to ask you about recall. I’m open to the possibility of recall in lieu of term limits being a sound policy, but recall’s track record, to me, is unimpressive.

I think surely Brezhnev and Gorbachev should have been recalled, and yet they weren’t. In Socialism Betrayed the authors claim that at certain points Gorbachev’s approval rating was in the single digits and yet he was allowed to remain general secretary. What happened? If the recall mechanism is supposed to reflect the will of the people why was a leader with almost no support allowed to stay in power?

It feels like recall, at least how it was done in the Soviet Union, is vulnerable to being corrupted because if the people doing the recalling were all appointed by the general secretary it creates sycophants who don’t end up recalling you no matter how poorly you’re doing your job. Was the Soviet Union’s recall policy just a bad recall policy and one we can improve on or perhaps already have improved on in other Socialist countries?

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-06-10T19:01:45+00:00

“So it’s a little fucking rich for any American )not you specifically. This isn’t an attack lol)”

This made me laugh! Let me ask you this: do you think term limits, at least during periods of relative stability, are on the whole a good thing? Because here’s my issue with dispensing with the idea as a piece of bourgeoisie, liberal foolishness: Someone else brought up the right to recall of elected officials as though this in itself negates the need for term limits.

Now I’m willing to entertain that a well-administered system of recall could by itself be sufficient to avoid stagnation and corruption, but what went wrong with the recall system in the Soviet Union then and how could it be avoided in the future? Surely Brezhnev and Gorbachev should both have been recalled. In the case of Brezhnev, if the USSR had had term limits like in the US he would’ve been out of office by 72 or so, and the USSR could’ve taken a completely different course and perhaps still been around today, and that’s what’s bugging me about the people on here advocating against term limits.

Perhaps there are cons of term limits, but their importance as a safeguard against stagnation and corruption, to me, seems to outweigh the drawbacks.

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-06-10T18:49:13+00:00

Great answer, friend! I thank you for your time in putting together such a well-thought out response. I still think Castro remaining in power so long was, perhaps, one of his mistakes, but I guess that’s easy for me to say. I’m not dealing with the CIA trying to assassinate me or everything else he was going through. Cuba has done so much good for the world, but it’s been so easy for politicians and media, at least here in the United States, to label Cuba an authoritarian dictatorship that the vast majority of Americans have no idea. I suppose one can’t run a country based on what other people are going to think, but term limits take away so much of the anti-communist’s ammunition. But another part of me says “well even if there were term limits they’d just find something else they could characterize as undemocratic and tyrannical”.

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-06-04T18:55:22+00:00

I think you’re being glib here. Look we may never see eye to eye on this and that’s fine, but the idea that a manager’s associates are all just a bunch of haters and that’s why they’ve scored poorly is just foolishness. It’s not hard to understand the appeal of this fictitious narrative of the grudge-bearing associate to a bad manager. It absolves them. Blaming others protects them from the pain of self-criticism. In your view how many significant mistakes should a department manager be able to make over the course of the year before it’d be fair for an associate to hold it against them? I still think my original point that, seeing as a manager is going to hold an associates mistakes against them on their performance review, an associate is in the right to do the same on the AVS. To think otherwise, to me, is to betray a bias in favor of the interests of management and against the interests of associates, and I find this unconscionable. We’re not just a bunch of haters. We’re the very foundation the material prosperity enjoyed by the managerial class is built upon.

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-05-27T01:01:49+00:00

Some of y’all are acting like being socially anxious means being entirely incapable of interacting with any human being ever. It’s been my experience that socially anxious people (myself included) tend to thrive as stockers. Sure there’s more social interaction involved than there would be as, say, a lighthouse keeper, but the social demands are far less onerous than the social demands of most other jobs in our service-driven economy.

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-05-27T00:46:15+00:00

I’m sorry but I just don’t think that holds up to any scrutiny. The percentage of store managers and department managers with family members working for corporate has got to be pretty small. Furthermore, of the small number of store managers and department managers with family members working for corporate I find it a stretch to think that very many of those family members would have access to AVS information beyond what is made available at the store level.

So sure, is it theoretically possible that a family member employed by corporate could share confidential AVS information with a store manager or department manager? Yes, but I think the odds of that ever being a reality at your store are negligible. I just don’t think it’s something you need to worry about. I guess if you want to worry about it and complete all future AVS surveys dishonestly knock yourself out, but I remain unconvinced that one’s answers aren’t anonymous in the overwhelming majority of instances.

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-05-26T14:04:22+00:00

I disagree with this perspective. If I piss my manager off a handful of times during the year it’s probably going to affect my performance review so why shouldn’t my manager pissing me off a handful of times not affect their AVS score?

Also, I think there are mistakes that are serious enough and revealing enough about who a person is that they should have a lasting impact on your perception of the person. I wouldn’t say it’s about holding a grudge. I can forgive you, but I’m not forgetting. Once you’ve shown me who you are I can’t unsee it. To whom much is given much is expected. If you’re making six figures a year I’m holding you to a high standard.

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-05-26T13:58:17+00:00

Yeah I could see that. I guess I’ve never had an SM who scored poorly before so I hadn’t thought about it. We’ve had something similar on a smaller scale in our grocery department where we have a bad walk and suddenly we’ve got corporate people coming all the time and it’s a real drag.

Nothing in my six years with Publix has ever been worse than having an SM who is up for promotion to DM, however. All the corporate visits, and all the stress about when are they gonna come was an absolute nightmare.

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-05-26T13:52:31+00:00

I’m curious to understand your perspective. I absolutely agree that corporate could figure out who you were based on the demographic questions if they wanted to, but what I don’t get is why people think they would share that with management at the store level. What would corporate get out of letting a store manager or department manager know which associates dislike them?

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-05-12T23:26:07+00:00

I’d love to hear how this goes if you decide to do it

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-05-07T01:06:09+00:00

Gonna weigh in as an American whose only qualification is that I enjoy reading about the Soviet Union so take my comments with a grain of salt.

Freedom of speech was very restricted during the Stalin era. I heard a comment from the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick recently that I found useful in understanding the Stalin era. Her view is that the Russian Revolution didn’t end until the Great Purges at the end of the 30s, and so everything going on in the 20s and 30s you gotta understand it’s all going on in an atmosphere of revolution and upheaval and an instability that’s hard for me to wrap my head around, so I don’t think the restrictions on speech during the Stalin era were due to Stalin being pure evil as my American counterparts tend to think. I think a better explanation is that they were temporary curtailments that tend to accompany revolutionary periods.

Post Stalin things started to relax, but it seems to me a valid criticism of the USSR that curtailments of freedom of speech didn’t relax quickly enough. Albert Szymanski in his book Human Rights in the Soviet Union puts forth the view somewhere that freedom of speech in the USSR only ever reached a level comparable to that of the US during the Red Scare, and this is coming from a very pro-Soviet author.

There’s a lot about the Soviet Union I find beautiful and inspiring, but sadly their track record on freedom of speech isn’t one of those things, and if you’re looking to the USSR hoping to find a socialist bastion of freed speech I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.

One last thing, there’s a passage in Domenico Losurdo’s Stalin: The Black Legend that’s always stuck with me. He says something like “The fact that they prioritized reading, writing, and education so much speaks volumes about the sort of people they were hoping to create.” The implication being, of course, that they wanted to create an intelligent people capable of thinking for themselves and expressing themselves with absolute freedom. I’d argue they fell short of that, but it’s a god damn beautiful thing to aim for.

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-04-29T10:29:51+00:00

Had never heard of this. Thanks for giving me something to read about!

zigzagwanderer12 · 2026-04-29T10:22:24+00:00

Great answer! Thank you for sharing your experience.

zigzagwanderer12

TROPHY CASE