The Great Crusade (Reds! Part 3)

[Shevek23]

I can think of quite a few right off the top of my head.

First, pretty much anything related to inequality as long as there is a dangling carrot of social mobility: conspicuous consumption, privileged status of some white collar jobs like doctors or lawyers, even possibility to use some purely servile work that has been eliminated in the UASR.

Second, consumerism. I suppose that the FBU citizens would see the UASR lifestyle as frugal, even spartan.

Third, political apathy. Involvement in the public life is basically a civic duty in the UASR, one wouldn't probably get in trouble by avoiding it, but there will be quite some calling out and peer pressure. FBU always offers its citizens blissful ignorance as an option.

This seems to insightfully sweep the options pretty well.

I question the "spartan" nature of life in the UASR though--obviously it depends on the social class of the FBU resident making the subjective judgement. But the question here is, what prevents the little to lose but their chains working classes from rising up--or less controversially, having such political leverage due to the implied threat they might decide to that the pressure put on the upper classes to share the wealth generously downward is strong. And strictly speaking life in the UASR will more typically be at a common per capita level but there will be some residual more or less class based surplus rich living people; these will have their eyes over their shoulders and be careful not to make waves lest the mob come and equalize them. But the large majority of wealth produced will be distributed pretty evenly per capita. This common bracket of typical outcomes will be richer, in objective terms, than the lowest classes in a parallel universe capitalist USA of the same productivity and tech level--just modestly so perhaps, but perceptibly.

Now note the very lowest classes generally cannot make a revolution all by themselves; we need to rise a little bit on the FBU scale to reach some critical level where the included classes at or below that level are large and diverse enough to pretty much do it, bearing in mind a leavening of people from all classes above--but these can be few in number and derived from individuals who set aside the basic bread and butter question of what's in it for them materially and join the revolution for other reasons.

This crucial index social level is the appropriate class to compare to the prevailing material standard of living in
red America (or the Soviet sphere, but I think most of us will agree the western hemisphere wing of the Comintern will stay broadly ahead of that of the Soviet sphere; at any rate the UASR is going to be gold plated versus other Comintern nations).

That FBU potential revolutionary index layer is going to be more well off than the bottom of the entire class distribution, but not very high up from it. Classes of people richer than that will be substantial in total number and much more so in integrated share of the national total--this is relevant to their political power to maintain the skewed order but not to the political question before the potential revolutionary masses.

Then we consider relative per capita wealth of both systems; for the UASR this is just about equal to the prevailing normal living standard in material terms. A book that introduced me to Marxist economic theory decades ago, Laws of Chaos by Farjoun and Machover, included as something of an aside data that suggested that for substantial periods of time in 20th century developed world capitalist nations, the raw split of national product between working classes (broadly, people hired as wage workers) and the whole gang of exploiting classes (more or less) was actually something like one to one; taking that as a rough guide if UASR and FBU have exactly the same productivity and working hours per worker, the FBU working classes will be half as well off as the Red Yanks.

We need to factor a number of other things of course! Part of Red American wealth is taken in non-labor time--some of this is pure recreation and as noted, a share is taken up by the social obligation to be politically active--some people will enjoy this somewhat or even a lot, others will hate it. But both segments of rest time versus harder worked proletarian FBU citizens will detract from the per capita material product to be consumed of course. If total reduction in working hours were a factor of two, that would put the typical Red Yank and FBU proletarian on the same level--materially.

Also it is insightful to note the form in which Red productivity is realized and distributed is far from identical between the systems! The FBU will be much as the western developed world of OTL, and will involve a lot of consumer goods and separate ownership of things by individuals or families, while among the Reds an increasing share of material production will go to support communal goods and services--free transport systems, parks and communal buildings with lots of services available in them citizens of a capitalist society expect to avail themselves of via consuming commodified goods in private in their homes.

Thus a clever FBU propagandist could disparage a UASR lifestyle versus FBU by focusing on what the capitalist system tends to favor producing and indexing the difference as strictly in terms of just those goods as possible; the more happy the Red Americans are with a rising share of communal stuff (they won't go for it just by ideological moralizing, or not much or enthusiastically anyway--but I do believe communal services, developed in the right way under the incentive of having to compete with the default commodified goods consumption mode of meeting needs and desires inherited from capitalism, can indeed reach a quality that seduces the masses away from commodity fetishization and can be more rational in terms of subjective satisfaction versus resources consumed and useful service work being done) the "poorer" they can be made to look by such manipulative presentation of statistics. Note too this can arise not just as a manipulative conspiracy by state or hired private propagandists (advertising firms essentially) but "naturally" and objectively when FBU statisticians honestly apply the categories they think based on their empirical experience are relevant and either come up with defective attempts to account for American collective services or just overlook their existence completely.

The trouble with this is that, especially if it is done invidiously and manipulatively rather than arise from honest confusion, is that any FBU proletarians who manage to pop over to America and hang out a while will very quickly see that in fact the services offered either for modest fees or gratis as citizen amenities are really subjectively worth quite a lot, and greatly lower the total cost of material commodities they must purchase; this subjective multiplier will thus become known among FBU masses and either the regime there takes it into account in polemics and in almanacs and so forth, or the common people learn to take these with a grain of salt and apply the multiplier themselves--and discount the credibility and good faith of their own leaders as well!

Thus, to justify the suggestion that individual working class people exposed to UASR lifestyles will judge it "spartan" by their own subjective impressions is to suggest a huge disparity of productivity in favor of the capitalists. But in fact the Red Yanks appropriate the most developed and efficient methods of capitalist production in the world, and then apply scientifically guided forms of optimizing and improvement--gross material output might grow only modestly but that would only be because of increasing "diversion" of worker time from productive labor toward politics/education/leisure time. The TL assumes that socialist and communist forms of organization developed are at least as efficient as capitalist ones and certain irrational costs of capitalism (such as the boom bust cycle, and associated misguiding of investment) are sidestepped so there is some wiggle room for laxer efficiency and still coming out ahead overall.

Since we start with the richest country in the world going Red and becoming efficiently Red rather than Stalinist, I don't think there would be any time period whatsoever when the representative and relevantly potentially revolutionary proletarian individuals of the FBU would fairly judge the Americans to be wanting in anything! If anything the Yanks would appear to be swimming in fat and luxury--maybe not to a really ostentatious degree, but rather than tsk tsking over American poverty due to their poor life choice in going Red, propaganda in the FBU probably takes a very different tack and tries to stir up resentment and contempt for the softness of American lives and impute arrogance to them (which given American tendencies to smugness and mindless assumption our ways are best, might not be hard to do at all!)--to try to make the FBU proletarian despise the Reds precisely because of their self-corruption in luxury and laziness (and also of course talk up the oppressive aspects of heavy political engagement and large time commitments given to it).

I honestly think that no matter how they slice it, FBU propagandists will be doing a fancy sabre dance with double edged sabres; their choices will be self-contradictory. It is a mess!

 

[Crunch Buttsteak]

There are aspects of life in the USAR that from a capitalist perspective would seem poorer but it’s just a different way of doing things.

For example, television has a much slower rate of adoption in the UASR compared to the FBU or OTL USA. Propagandists would read that as proof positive of people in the UASR being impoverished.

But in actuality, the housing communes that were built after the revolution had screening rooms with a film library, and these were later upgraded to include TV projectors, and so it takes longer for TVs to be in every household.

So from a standard of “UASR Citizens are poor because they don’t have a tv in every house unlike the FBU” you’d be right, but if you point that out to a UASR citizen in the 1950’s, you’d get a blank stare and they’d shoot back “why would you need to have a TV in every living room?”

 

[Kammada]

There are aspects of life in the USAR that from a capitalist perspective would seem poorer but it’s just a different way of doing things.

That's what I meant pretty much. It's like the assumption some uneducated Americans are making about Europe being poor because Europeans generally prefer compact cars to SUVs.

 

[Bookmark1995]

This seems to insightfully sweep the options pretty well.

I question the "spartan" nature of life in the UASR though--obviously it depends on the social class of the FBU resident making the subjective judgement. But the question here is, what prevents the little to lose but their chains working classes from rising up--or less controversially, having such political leverage due to the implied threat they might decide to that the pressure put on the upper classes to share the wealth generously downward is strong. And strictly speaking life in the UASR will more typically be at a common per capita level but there will be some residual more or less class based surplus rich living people; these will have their eyes over their shoulders and be careful not to make waves lest the mob come and equalize them. But the large majority of wealth produced will be distributed pretty evenly per capita. This common bracket of typical outcomes will be richer, in objective terms, than the lowest classes in a parallel universe capitalist USA of the same productivity and tech level--just modestly so perhaps, but perceptibly.

Now note the very lowest classes generally cannot make a revolution all by themselves; we need to rise a little bit on the FBU scale to reach some critical level where the included classes at or below that level are large and diverse enough to pretty much do it, bearing in mind a leavening of people from all classes above--but these can be few in number and derived from individuals who set aside the basic bread and butter question of what's in it for them materially and join the revolution for other reasons.

This crucial index social level is the appropriate class to compare to the prevailing material standard of living in
red America (or the Soviet sphere, but I think most of us will agree the western hemisphere wing of the Comintern will stay broadly ahead of that of the Soviet sphere; at any rate the UASR is going to be gold plated versus other Comintern nations).

That FBU potential revolutionary index layer is going to be more well off than the bottom of the entire class distribution, but not very high up from it. Classes of people richer than that will be substantial in total number and much more so in integrated share of the national total--this is relevant to their political power to maintain the skewed order but not to the political question before the potential revolutionary masses.

Then we consider relative per capita wealth of both systems; for the UASR this is just about equal to the prevailing normal living standard in material terms. A book that introduced me to Marxist economic theory decades ago, Laws of Chaos by Farjoun and Machover, included as something of an aside data that suggested that for substantial periods of time in 20th century developed world capitalist nations, the raw split of national product between working classes (broadly, people hired as wage workers) and the whole gang of exploiting classes (more or less) was actually something like one to one; taking that as a rough guide if UASR and FBU have exactly the same productivity and working hours per worker, the FBU working classes will be half as well off as the Red Yanks.

We need to factor a number of other things of course! Part of Red American wealth is taken in non-labor time--some of this is pure recreation and as noted, a share is taken up by the social obligation to be politically active--some people will enjoy this somewhat or even a lot, others will hate it. But both segments of rest time versus harder worked proletarian FBU citizens will detract from the per capita material product to be consumed of course. If total reduction in working hours were a factor of two, that would put the typical Red Yank and FBU proletarian on the same level--materially.

Also it is insightful to note the form in which Red productivity is realized and distributed is far from identical between the systems! The FBU will be much as the western developed world of OTL, and will involve a lot of consumer goods and separate ownership of things by individuals or families, while among the Reds an increasing share of material production will go to support communal goods and services--free transport systems, parks and communal buildings with lots of services available in them citizens of a capitalist society expect to avail themselves of via consuming commodified goods in private in their homes.

Thus a clever FBU propagandist could disparage a UASR lifestyle versus FBU by focusing on what the capitalist system tends to favor producing and indexing the difference as strictly in terms of just those goods as possible; the more happy the Red Americans are with a rising share of communal stuff (they won't go for it just by ideological moralizing, or not much or enthusiastically anyway--but I do believe communal services, developed in the right way under the incentive of having to compete with the default commodified goods consumption mode of meeting needs and desires inherited from capitalism, can indeed reach a quality that seduces the masses away from commodity fetishization and can be more rational in terms of subjective satisfaction versus resources consumed and useful service work being done) the "poorer" they can be made to look by such manipulative presentation of statistics. Note too this can arise not just as a manipulative conspiracy by state or hired private propagandists (advertising firms essentially) but "naturally" and objectively when FBU statisticians honestly apply the categories they think based on their empirical experience are relevant and either come up with defective attempts to account for American collective services or just overlook their existence completely.

The trouble with this is that, especially if it is done invidiously and manipulatively rather than arise from honest confusion, is that any FBU proletarians who manage to pop over to America and hang out a while will very quickly see that in fact the services offered either for modest fees or gratis as citizen amenities are really subjectively worth quite a lot, and greatly lower the total cost of material commodities they must purchase; this subjective multiplier will thus become known among FBU masses and either the regime there takes it into account in polemics and in almanacs and so forth, or the common people learn to take these with a grain of salt and apply the multiplier themselves--and discount the credibility and good faith of their own leaders as well!

Thus, to justify the suggestion that individual working class people exposed to UASR lifestyles will judge it "spartan" by their own subjective impressions is to suggest a huge disparity of productivity in favor of the capitalists. But in fact the Red Yanks appropriate the most developed and efficient methods of capitalist production in the world, and then apply scientifically guided forms of optimizing and improvement--gross material output might grow only modestly but that would only be because of increasing "diversion" of worker time from productive labor toward politics/education/leisure time. The TL assumes that socialist and communist forms of organization developed are at least as efficient as capitalist ones and certain irrational costs of capitalism (such as the boom bust cycle, and associated misguiding of investment) are sidestepped so there is some wiggle room for laxer efficiency and still coming out ahead overall.

Since we start with the richest country in the world going Red and becoming efficiently Red rather than Stalinist, I don't think there would be any time period whatsoever when the representative and relevantly potentially revolutionary proletarian individuals of the FBU would fairly judge the Americans to be wanting in anything! If anything the Yanks would appear to be swimming in fat and luxury--maybe not to a really ostentatious degree, but rather than tsk tsking over American poverty due to their poor life choice in going Red, propaganda in the FBU probably takes a very different tack and tries to stir up resentment and contempt for the softness of American lives and impute arrogance to them (which given American tendencies to smugness and mindless assumption our ways are best, might not be hard to do at all!)--to try to make the FBU proletarian despise the Reds precisely because of their self-corruption in luxury and laziness (and also of course talk up the oppressive aspects of heavy political engagement and large time commitments given to it).

I honestly think that no matter how they slice it, FBU propagandists will be doing a fancy sabre dance with double edged sabres; their choices will be self-contradictory. It is a mess!

I love your analyses. I believe you ITTL would've made an excellent Marxist theory teacher.

There are aspects of life in the USAR that from a capitalist perspective would seem poorer but it’s just a different way of doing things.

For example, television has a much slower rate of adoption in the UASR compared to the FBU or OTL USA. Propagandists would read that as proof positive of people in the UASR being impoverished.

But in actuality, the housing communes that were built after the revolution had screening rooms with a film library, and these were later upgraded to include TV projectors, and so it takes longer for TVs to be in every household.

So from a standard of “UASR Citizens are poor because they don’t have a tv in every house unlike the FBU” you’d be right, but if you point that out to a UASR citizen in the 1950’s, you’d get a blank stare and they’d shoot back “why would you need to have a TV in every living room?”

OTL politicians do the same thing: using certain statistics do defend themselves without looking at the whole picture.

Almost all American politicians (both Red and Blue) who prioritize "economic growth" over government intervention in the economy. To many politicians, the rising GDP, the rising NASDAQ, the rising per capita income and the dropping unemployment rate as a sign that capitalism works, at that the likes of Bernie Sanders (ITTL he would be considered very pro-capitalist) and AOC are just talking socialist drivel.

But in reality, these statistics have stop really meaning anything. The OTL unemployment rate ignores people who've stopped finding a job, are working lower wage part-time jobs, or even prisoners who've been removed from society. The wealth of corporations is increasingly disconnected with the wages of the American, so rising stocks prices doesn't really reflect the common good. GDP may go up, but much of that GDP has been given to wealthy individuals who hide their money in secret, tropical bank accounts.

Let's not even get into soaring government debt at the hands of a fiscally conservative politician, and growing consumer debt by people eager to keep up with the Joneses.

These politicians also ignore other signs of societal distress that go well beyond dollars and job numbers: growing stresses of working people, mass shootings, people being denied the most basic treatment, sexual misconduct by so many public officials, obesity, the opioid epidemic, suicide rates, police killing unarmed people, racist protests.

An outsider who saw American society for the first time would see mass shootings and our increasing nonchalance toward them as a sign that our society is deeply broken, and I am starting to feel that way too.

That's what I meant pretty much. It's like the assumption some uneducated Americans are making about Europe being poor because Europeans generally prefer compact cars to SUVs.

ITTL, I imagine it is the people of Britain and France who live large like OTL America, and they will castigate the ITTL Americans for their "rustic" existence.

But I can imagine a person who grows up in the UASR will simply throw back

"Ah yes, you have your oversized car that burns up 15 liters of fuel every millisecond, your wife wears expensive dresses made some abused Indian seamstress, and your children have 300 toys. But I don't have to get up at 5 in the morning to beat traffic, I don't envy your wife who is forced to suppress her carnal desires under fabric while being brutally harassed by other men, and my kids' may have only a few toys, but they've learned to share them with their comrades. You may think you are rich sir, but I feel I am richer then you."

 

[Shevek23]

There are aspects of life in the USAR that from a capitalist perspective would seem poorer but it’s just a different way of doing things.

For example, television has a much slower rate of adoption in the UASR compared to the FBU or OTL USA. Propagandists would read that as proof positive of people in the UASR being impoverished.

But in actuality, the housing communes that were built after the revolution had screening rooms with a film library, and these were later upgraded to include TV projectors, and so it takes longer for TVs to be in every household.

So from a standard of “UASR Citizens are poor because they don’t have a tv in every house unlike the FBU” you’d be right, but if you point that out to a UASR citizen in the 1950’s, you’d get a blank stare and they’d shoot back “why would you need to have a TV in every living room?”

In addition to (or perhaps in some communities instead of, to an extent) more or less communal housing having these screening rooms, we could also have standalone community centers and also workplace based centers--and of course affiliation club centers.

Parties, particularly minority "out" parties in a particular bailiwick, might be an example, as might also religious communities--these lack the tax breaks and so forth, but the burden of providing religious charity is just about totally relieved. Unless we have a corrupt bailiwick as we might in say the more de facto Jim Crowy parts of the South, or to throw some red meat to the anti-Red skeptics, perhaps overzealous WP regions might discriminate against various "antisocial deviant groups" though I think the combination of effective governmental checks and balances and the basically humanistic ideology of the Red factions would strongly act to prevent such gross unfairness--if someone is a real enemy of the people, proposing to do real violence of some kind, they will of course be hunted down and dealt with by police and courts presumably with a lot of citizen assistance; by default everyone is presumed to have basic rights entitling them to decent treatment even if quite unpopular and courts in particular, as well as again the basically humane and individual-dignity respecting dominant party ideologies will tend to enforce. So the churches, though stripped of special privilege and standing, also are freed up to focus on purely spiritual missions as they define them--which might of course overlap advocating for particular partisan initiatives and outcomes.

OTOH, I think it is plain that perhaps people will, despite cultivation of communal spirit, often indeed seek individual opportunity to watch something alone or with a very handpicked small audience of friends or lovers.

We are all familiar with the concept of "fighting over the remote" after all. With large enough community centers of whatever type, we just have separate rooms where the screen and audio is switched to one channel and people wander in or out to watch the shows they like together; it forms a nice shared experience after all provided people are decent about not talking over the sound track.

Conceivably, with the normalization and respectful inclusion in society of Deaf people--not "mainstreaming" them so much as accommodating them as respected members of the community--versions of ASL or other regional Sign "dialects" might spread to people with quite normal hearing, both to communicate with neighbors and because Sign can come in handy in various circumstances--conceivably militia training includes some basic immersion in a Stavka standardized version of ASL specialized to battlefield conditions, a fine example of a case where maintaining silence might be quite important, not only for stealth but also because noise can interfere with verbal communications.

Thus, Sign might become pretty widespread and ubiquitous and ongoing life practice make people with normally acute hearing reasonably fluent.

Then the polite thing to do in a screening would be to Sign crosstalk to one another--and any reasonably popular show would include some fluent hearing volunteer stationing themselves near the screen but off to the side signing the sound track for the Deaf in the audience. Eventually all transmitted video might come to include a parallel screen with a studio professional Signer conveying the definitive scripted version for maximum fidelity of artistic/rhetorical intention.

I had a lot more stuff about Sign and speculations on a greater role for general knowledge of it in the Western Hemispheric branch of the Comintern, and perhaps via intrabloc international standardization and global cultural hegemony even a grandiose development of a standardized global Sign Language as the ubiquitous "universal second language, but have moved it to another post.

Anyway, granting that much viewing will in fact be more pleasant to most people most of the time shared communally... still, how many screening rooms would a decent sized communal center have? Maybe a dozen or two? Still, someone is going to want to watch stuff no one else does; these someones could rack up considerable numbers at various times in the day and week. If in fact a certain percentage of what people want to view turns out to be not shared, either out of lack of interest or need among others or because of positive privacy desires for viewing some things, it might make a lot more sense than one might guess for communal centers to be supplemented by screens at home, picking up first broadcasts, then cable as infrastructure develops.

I think we can all readily imagine a category of viewing that might be desired to be seen by individuals only, or couples, or small groups with strong mutual trust...getting squelchy on the screen! Subject of next post!

 

[Bookmark1995]

-snip-

I'm guessing there will be, in the first few decades, one screening room per communal unit, because movies aren't really a priority.

Remember, the UASR is a highly militaristic society. Outdoor training and activities will most likely take priority over vegging out.

In this environment, all ages entertainment, something everybody in the flat can enjoy, will become prominent.

Only when the tech gets cheaper, but I think one viewing room will be enough.

 

[generalurist]

I wonder if the UASR's model of having communal rather than personal appliances will cause them to have a slow start when the computer era comes along: If there's say one computer per apartment block floor with owning their own personal PC being out of the price range for the average person, the population as a whole might be slower to gain familiarity with them.

 

[Shevek23]

What becomes of such ubiquitous OTL facts on the ground as prostitution and pornography for instance in the ATL American branch of the Comintern is both a tender subject and I think still a bit up in the air.

Personally I think both will largely melt away fast, at least in largely Red zones, as the culture of sexual freedom will enable actual sex with real and enthusiastically freely consenting partners; the economic compulsions driving people to become sex workers have pretty much entirely evaporated and only a positive choice to seek to offer sexual favors on a market basis (or individual sexual slavery, as some pimp or criminal gang seeks to intimidate and manipulate people into submission, might happen, but of course the law and society will regard that as gross criminality indeed, along with any clients, and vigorously root it out and suppress it pretty straightforwardly) which would be quite peculiar and probably seen as a sign of some kind of mental illness--here is one place it gets a little wooly, depending on one's OTL sexual politics or speculative projection of what we think people would do.

I've suggested that a final and perhaps persisting, if I would think small, niche of a kind of sex work might survive in part via the development of the notion that a sex worker is actually a kind of trained psychotherapist, and under that rubric perhaps communities or workplace soviets might pitch in to support them--quite possibly without any money changing hands, the sex workers are just supported as important community service providers along with teachers, doctors, artists, and so forth--it might also segue over from therapy to performing art too. I'd expect some controversy, with some accusing these of being pretenders and doing more harm than good, but also there will be people who just are kind of luckless, clueless, or somehow injured or developmentally impaired whom the community comes to recognize just won't have much luck getting casual sex partners and so people who are cheerfully and freely willing to take it on as a charitable community service for these poor souls, and perhaps indeed provide them some guidance and tips so that they do better on their own, finding partners more normally, might indeed come to be recognized as doing something necessary and important and anyway definitely not antisocial at all.

Presumably porn as such largely vanishes away, for the most part...again depending on one's sexual politics; I am pretty agnostic about it! I think most of what is "mainstream" OTL is pretty creepy in messaging and very very dubious in its recruitment of performers and it would be legitimate to police this kind of thing--which also might leave a residual and definitely antisocial counterculture lurking in borderline to definitely criminal activity.

Without seeking to start a firestorm or solicit a poll here, I believe a fair number of people will say something along the lines of "you know, provided the sources of imagery are known to be clean of exploitive origins--and we can legitimately repurpose stuff we know is creepy in origin if we know we have taken steps to clean up the mess for the real people involved today--and does not tend to hammer in a dangerously antisocial subtext, imagery and other stuff we call 'porn' are in the category of sex aids and can be fair fun for all involved, so back off, censors! Make your case for each item being tainted and unacceptable perhaps and criminalize those things but no general rules provided sources are compliant with legitimate practices."

This is one context where we can well imagine perfectly decent people who are well adjusted to Red communalism might legitimately and reasonably want to be very private--solo, in pairs, or select groups. We would expect they'd often if not always want privacy. The society would be more open to more or less public sexuality in some contexts anyway, but still a lot of it would desire privacy--and most other people also prefer it happen not in their plain sight too!

So here too, individual screens in private rooms would probably still be a pretty widely desired thing.

 

[Shevek23]

Indeed in early days of television, we'd have far more home projectors for film, with or without sound, then TVs in the home. Early TVs would produce a pretty small and snowy image and yet be quite rare; perhaps the basic technology languishes across the whole Western hemisphere sub-bloc, even in extra rich UASR, and for some time it will make more sense, for the kind of viewing (not all sexy of course! lots of obscure art films, or dull to the uninterested documentary-instructional films too) favored in small groups or individual perusing, to stick to film, particularly if the tech involves developing a superior strong and scratch and break resistant substrate, packaging in cassette canisters that snap on to the projectors; such standardized home projectors are going to be lower tech and cheaper to turn out, and will project a notably superior image until general global standards match OTL 1970s US broadcast TV standards (or of course some equivalent system in Europe). TV will make a first leap into a relative handful of communal viewing rooms with UASR tech focusing on making a big screen lots of people can gather to see clearly at one viewing, so the broadcast signals might have much higher bandwith--fewer "channels" being relayed locally at higher frequencies. Putting movies and the like on broadcasts might never take off; the advantage of TV, until anyway cable or satellite broadcast multiplies the useful channels, might seem entirely a matter of getting current events and political communications. Entertainment equivalent to the kinds of TV shows that dominate commercial and even public TV would be better served with mass production of film reels in protective canister systems making them more foolproof to display, shipped physically in truckloads to millions of community centers, where popular and recent ones are screened on a large scale by schedule and "reruns" and aficionado reviewings are borrowed from the old archives of these centers for home projector viewings--I figure the standard home projector would quickly include a film-recorded sound track.

Given parallel technology to OTL, there might be little reason for UASR industry to develop VCRs or other videotape tech; film recording and subsequent development of cassette-sealed film might totally displace it since the home viewing equipment remains a relatively simple and robust and ubiquitous film projector, in small low power home versions and bigger higher powered large screen projectors, both projecting the same film sources. As vacuum tube electronics give way to solid state and microelectronics, CRT type TV might take its place in some niche alongside the home projector, but again there would seem little point in recording anything seen on it, the purpose of a now-inexpensive and mass produced personal home TV would be to follow the type of news/current events/immediate political discourse feed that the original big screens each with a niche theatre in the centers permanently fixed on one channel were added for. Someone somewhere records it, probably using technology mainly developed in the FBU where mass markets of first elites and gradually the proletarian masses would get TV more similar to radio formats that never take off at all across the Atlantic.

Development of CDs and DVDs or something equivalent might at long last threaten to retire the old film projectors, but quite possibly instead these will just be upgraded more--using suitably tinted and filtered high intensity LED light sources instead of old fashioned light bulbs for instance would cut their power consumption, quell cooling fan noise, and vastly reduce fire hazards allowing for skimpier construction. The advantage of the new digital media would be in random access to tracks instantly instead of having to fast forward and back, but to take advantage we would need to develop suitable screens--again the UASR mass tech might be to develop projectors instead and set them side by side with the old film projector that is still good for watching movies from the old archives and so forth, using the same screen for viewing either and the same sound system, and getting rid of the home CRT that might have been there between say the mid-1970s and 1990 or so. At last the old film projectors would start gathering dust as the video projector takes over the roles flat screen tech does, and just maybe the advantages of actual flat screen tech parallel to OTL, around the mid 2010s, might become cost effective enough to junk both projectors (or anyway junk the video projector, lovingly keeping the old film projector which ought to be pretty durable in a case in a closet for taking out for old time's sake for some obscure old film archive that has not been transferred to digital storage yet, and beaming its light on the shut down flat screen). It would only be by contemporary times that UASR video usage merges with OTL patterns and in the UASR it would still be usual to view popular and current shows and movies in the communal centers with other people, though gradually more people would watch more of them alone at times of their choosing. As data transmission methods speed up and gain in bandwidth, it would become practical to order and stream centrally stored video at chosen times, pausing and rewinding and so forth at will, in the home, but still, just for the accustomed community a lot of viewing will remain communal.

It might be that I grossly overestimate the durability of film even stored in foolproof sealed canisters. Over time the medium weakens and fades and generally suffers. But this is a problem for chemical engineers to develop suitable advanced forms of materials for film, and the mass demand I am speculatively assuming for community centers and loaning out to home projection would light a fire under such tech and possibly put UASR synthetic film materials decades ahead of OTL; spinoffs would have many other uses. I suppose that the old risky reel to reel methods will prevail until say the mid 1950s--which is to say, that the canister standard would probably emerge on a mass scale of a projector in every separate dwelling apartment by about the same time that OTL a TV was the marker of "normal" affluence in the USA, and there would be no reason these canisters would not be color as often as black and white...it is more hassle to develop color of course, and more expense to make the original negative film, and to make the output positive print, but it can be a simple economic choice--color for when you want it, B&W when that will do, the same projector puts out both. Movies I suppose will go to color somewhat earlier but B&W persist as a choice, for economy or aesthetic sake, considerably longer.

Once again then--as we agree, on paper it would be easy for an FBU propagandist to denounce the secret backwardness and bankruptcy of vaunted UASR Communist culture in a superficial manner. But let some trade union official from Lyons or Manchester visit the UASR and watch the latest comedy-drama installment in a communal room, then get invited to a compact but nice private bedroom-apartment for an intimate (no sex here...well, less...mind out of the gutter, just the usual raunchiness of a normal audience UASR comedy-drama or art cartoon or something the local host and gang want to share with this foreign guest--or he could be quite keen to see an art-porn, or home movies, whatever) viewing on the "old fashioned" but bright, clear, crisp and big vibrant color projector screen dwarfing the most magnificent posh telly they ever saw back home, and realizing one can call up the 24/7 staffed archive center to arrange to pick up any of thousands or many tens of thousands of canisters of--everything, classic old movies, the hits of last week, esoteric advanced particle physics lectures from MIT, proceedings of the District Soviet, or the host could pull out home movies and snap them in with full stereo sound and color...and this setup is mature and operational a decade or more before OTL Americans generally had color TV, and two decades before we started to have VCRs, and will operate the same way but with computerized handling of the archive orders in the 1980s and still be going strong in the 1990s--the actual advantages outweigh the perceived drawbacks, superior outcomes for greater personal satisfaction lie freely at hand for all; when you want to enjoy a show for watching in company the company is there, and when you want it private for any reason, you can do that too for everything but the most recently in demand newest stuff...

Once again the FBU propagandist must judiciously balance desire for downplaying UASR quality of life versus being gainsaid and discredited by the people who actually go there.

 

[Shevek23]

I'm guessing there will be, in the first few decades, one screening room per communal unit, because movies aren't really a priority.

Remember, the UASR is a highly militaristic society. Outdoor training and activities will most likely take priority over vegging out.

In this environment, all ages entertainment, something everybody in the flat can enjoy, will become prominent.

Only when the tech gets cheaper, but I think one viewing room will be enough.

Years yes, decades... no. Remember that cinema is more than entertainment; it is for education, and for news. Indeed up to say 1945 first war prep then the war itself takes priority but this makes for demands as well as diversions.
Post war the pent up desire to enjoy the fruits of shared labor will be indulged. Cold War balance of terror militarism is quite consistent with affluence!

 

[Bookmark1995]

Years yes, decades... no. Remember that cinema is more than entertainment; it is for education, and for news. Indeed up to say 1945 first war prep then the war itself takes priority but this makes for demands as well as diversions.
Post war the pent up desire to enjoy the fruits of shared labor will be indulged. Cold War balance of terror militarism is quite consistent with affluence!

But remember, the television is still a somewhat costly commodity.

So I imagined the norm will be one big TV and a few projectors, at least until integrated circuits helps bring the price down.

-snip-

Once again the FBU propagandist must judiciously balance desire for downplaying UASR quality of life versus being gainsaid and discredited by the people who actually go there.

Well...remember OTL American politicians can still bash "socialism" despite the obvious prosperity of places like Norway and Sweden. So...I doubt the FBU propagandist gives a damn about such things as...well...facts.

That's what propagandists try and destroy.

 

[Kammada]

I wonder if the UASR's model of having communal rather than personal appliances will cause them to have a slow start when the computer era comes along: If there's say one computer per apartment block floor with owning their own personal PC being out of the price range for the average person, the population as a whole might be slower to gain familiarity with them.

I would expect something like that, too. That's what made me take the culture snippets (mostly in the official fan fiction thread) about the UASR video games that sound more or less on a par with OTL in terms of production value with a pinch of salt. Even if personal appliances become as common in UASR by the 2000s as in the developed parts of the world OTL, they are supposed to last and not become morally obsolete every few years. On the other hand, computers in general might be more advanced in the Red America because their need for the central planning is understood early enough to provide for a headstart.

 

[Yama951]

All this talk on communal sharing of video and tapes makes me wonder if Intellectual Copyright and the ITTL version of the DMCA would even develop and if so, I can imagine a lively black market of illegal-on-the-capitalist-side torrents and downloads being a thing.

 

[Nyvis]

All this talk on communal sharing of video and tapes makes me wonder if Intellectual Copyright and the ITTL version of the DMCA would even develop and if so, I can imagine a lively black market of illegal-on-the-capitalist-side torrents and downloads being a thing.

I doubt the red sphere bothers moderating capitalist intellectual property for copyright violation yeah.

 

[Richard Osborne]

Goddamn do I love schizo-tech.

 

[Shevek23]

But remember, the television is still a somewhat costly commodity.

So I imagined the norm will be one big TV and a few projectors, at least until integrated circuits helps bring the price down.

You did not read what I wrote it seems. I suggested that the alternate conditions would tend to favor concentrating on making copies of film reels pretty freely available on a shared basis, and that individual dwellings would tend to acquire access to (by de facto "ownership" or by borrowing a large number of shared) film projectors while the communal centers would project the same films on larger screens with larger projector; now the medium is standardized and I judged maybe semi-foolproof film cassettes could become as ubiquitous as video cassettes did in the 1980s, but several decades earlier. Given the relative ease with which improving film tech could stay well ahead of TV video quality, electronic video media only gain a real advantage when random access on digital recordings of some kind becomes possible--basically not until the 1990s benchmarked to OTL! By then video projection options include flat screen displays of various kinds, and if I am right that the UASR populace goes all in for movie projectors, advanced digital display devices might opt for projection systems instead of CRT screens. Mind, the CRT TV clearly has a place, but it is just mainly useful for broadcasting news feeds, not a medium of entertainment or even education--for that there is time to print, encase and distribute hard canisters of film and movie projectors are by my presumption widely available to everyone.

TV in every home is a low priority because it is low utility; it makes more sense for the community centers to share a big screen since news is something citizens ought to be expected to talk about among themselves. This in turn means that there isn't much pressure to devote bandwidth to many TV channels, and we would not need more TVs in a center than there are channels. For urgent announcements that need to reach as many citizens as possible ASAP one would stick to radio, also quite cheap and ubiquitous. (Per my speculations of Deaf culture evolutions, an early application of TV would be "radio for the Deaf" as it were, a Sign newsfeed channel--such channels would of course tend to displace channels otherwise available to the general public. But a Deaf person cannot use radio, so they take some priority I would hope).

Entertainment and educational programs, which tend to put more of a premium on crisp presentation and have no time-related urgency, seem like poor uses of broadcast TV bandwidth to me. It made sense, to the degree that it dominated broadcast bandwidth completely, in the commodified advertising market funded commercial TV industry of OTL, but would make none in a socialist and rich nation like the UASR with ample film infrastructure.

So we agree about the TVs being few and specialized--but it does not follow there is no video culture, just that it seems likely there will be an ATL major investment in film as the dominant medium, and culture much like the 1980s videotape rental markets, but "free" in the sense that citizens just borrow canisters of film from various libraries instead of having to rent them, seems likely to arise far earlier than affordable VCRs were available OTL, using cheap and ubiquitous film projectors which could include mini-projection range versions in most dwellings for individual viewings.

I could be underestimating the drawbacks of film as a medium of course--perhaps the wear and tear of frequent projections would make the lifetime of even film cassettes short; the OTL baseline material tech means it discolors, fades and becomes brittle in storage, so I assumed an ATL diversion of chemical engineering effort to make a suitable advanced substitute. I suppose that at a certain state of the art videotape can store superior image quality with less weight and bulk, so I have been imagining a film "cassette" would be quite large, both bulky and heavy, people would have to use two hands to handle them and might need to change them out frequently, say every 20 minutes or so--but note that with time set aside for ads, American half hour sitcoms and the like don't run much over that time! If technical hurdles like that limit film utility to being cost-effective only for mass audiences, where an investment in several coordinated projectors with each reel cued up to take over from the prior one as in classic American movie houses is required, and the total weight and bulk of a movie is pretty large I might need to give this notion up.

But if technological constraints tend to force UASR populations to have the same options as OTL or in the FBU, then there would be no reason other than cultural for UASR populations not to be as well served or better. If community center viewing is preferred for these kinds of reasons, economic constraints would hardly stand in the way of most centers acquiring a TV dedicated to each broadcast channel, and while making little screens for individual dwelling use (these of course would have to have channel tuners to switch from one to another) is not a priority, neither is it a major diversion of resources, especially if the decision is made to develop the broadcast stations.

If people don't have a TV in their bedroom it is because they don't see why they should want one, not because they can't afford one.

 

[Shevek23]

I doubt the red sphere bothers moderating capitalist intellectual property for copyright violation yeah.

I think it would depend on the state of diplomatic relations.

If seeking to mollify and placate stubbornly capitalist regimes, it would be feasible for the Comintern bloc to appear in these nations' markets as the copyright/patent owner of "proprietary" Comintern cultural resources, and to agree to pay capitalist bloc copyright and patent owners reasonable royalties on net Red Bloc usage of their "creations." If relations go south, then the bloc stops the royalty payments and of course stops getting royalties on capitalist bloc uses of cultural goods the Reds claim to own collectively.

Within the Red bloc, it might happen that access to this or that thing is restricted to show compliance with cranky capitalist bloc owners enjoining against such use...but the bloc is in a strong negotiating position. "Friend citizen, we are going to use your invention whether you like it or not, wouldn't you rather be paid for it?"

Note that actual collection of royalties from the various capitalist nations might be offset as it were; Comintern agents (open not secret--obviously spies could supplement these surveys) inventory how much use of Red sourced intellectual "property" there is, make a case for how large the lump sum of all royalties would be, and deduct that from what the Red sphere owes to this nation's copyright and patent holders, and either pays or collects the difference, and if the latter is small, waives it for better relations.

It is not hypocritical to do this, it is being scrupulously fair. If the capitalist world creaks along on capitalist rules, the bloc is as it were the agent and syndicate of its free peoples in that strange land of weird rules.

Of course breaking the rules works both ways; if the Comintern arbitrarily stops offering payment for no particular reason other than "we can," then we can expect capitalist nation courts or legislatures to rule that culture with a Red origin is public domain. A later thaw in relations might seek to reconcile everything retroactively, or might treat it as water under the bridge and make a fresh start, depending on what is at stake diplomatically.

But I think within the Red bloc, there is no restriction in general--in particular security concerns will apply, and as mentioned special cases for smoothing relations with uptight foreigners might be applied too, but the general rule is, ideas are free for the taking. People who have donated really good ideas--whose creative works are popular, or whose inventions are of great use and extensively used--get rewarded in recognition of that, but aside from security or diplomatic concerns, anyone can use anything as they see fit.

 

[Richard Osborne]

The USAR is a dystopia for religious people. The author stated in another thread that the USAR is majority atheist and religion is going extinct in the Comintern and socially discouraged. Thus since all of eastern Europe is communist it seems inevitable that Eastern Orthodox Christianity will die killing one of the oldest Christian denominations. Chinese traditional culture and spirituality and Japanese culture and Korean culture are likely dead. Wiped out for being "regressive". Russian Culture has likely been replaced by a Soviet Culture. Other minority cultures and art in the Soviet Union. Religion is one so quintessential to many traditional cultures that removing religion likely kills the culture. I love all the social and economic and freedom progress made by the reds and I am a Marxist-syndicalist but the fact that the leftist utopia includes the death of religion as a positive.....I wonder if I can trust my fellow leftist or if a knife is aimed at my peoples back. I hope not but hearing how my fellow leftist talk about religion....I just don't know.

 

[Shevek23]

The USAR is a dystopia for religious people. The author stated in another thread that the USAR is majority atheist and religion is going extinct in the Comintern and socially discouraged. Thus since all of eastern Europe is communist it seems inevitable that Eastern Orthodox Christianity will die killing one of the oldest Christian denominations. Chinese traditional culture and spirituality and Japanese culture and Korean culture are likely dead. Wiped out for being "regressive". Russian Culture has likely been replaced by a Soviet Culture. Other minority cultures and art in the Soviet Union. Religion is one so quintessential to many traditional cultures that removing religion likely kills the culture. I love all the social and economic and freedom progress made by the reds and I am a Marxist-syndicalist but the fact that the leftist utopia includes the death of religion as a positive.....I wonder if I can trust my fellow leftist or if a knife is aimed at my peoples back. I hope not but hearing how my fellow leftist talk about religion....I just don't know.

Clearly if a person believes religion persists either because it is true and necessary for human life, or because anyway it satisfies some vital function or is just plain nice, so that free people will always choose to adhere to it, being told "it largely goes away" can only be read to mean "because some wicked fanatics beat it to death and drove the more steadfast faithful into martyrdom or underground." But here you are doing that thing that people who bring these ideological assumptions to the TL as unquestionable, universal facts everyone had better believe or (what, exactly?)...always do, inferring events that actually are not stated in canon to have happened, and actually can be and are somewhat contradicted by canon. You are reading in what you want to read, and not what is written. Please take note of this!

I don't know whether you write as someone who believes religion is necessary and universal, or just as someone who observes it to seem to be so. Certainly in OTL reality, Marxist atheist regimes have indulged in quite cruel repression of religion--though if you take a closer look, they typically also have conciliatory phases in which at least some handpicked creeds, represented by suitably submissive handpicked clerics, are tolerated and even cultivated. An ugly thing I know about Vietnam for instance is that there are people undergoing persecution there as we speak...but not for being religious generically, rather for having the wrong religion; the Vietnamese state supports a patriotic form of Buddhism, and the persecuted include Catholics and various other sects. Meanwhile if you study Soviet history, even Stalin (in quite a cynical manner obviously) came to a rapprochement with the Russian Orthodox Church. Pope John Paul II visited Cuba toward the end of his life, quite obviously something he could hardly do if the Cuban regime were hellbent on suppressing Cuban Roman Catholicism.

Indeed the author-collective has told us that in canon, lots of America Reds are quite atheistic. But it does not follow that they go around terrorizing people just for being religious. I feel safe in asserting that while being openly religious counts against oneself in Red inner circles, marks oneself as of dubious reliability, nonetheless there would be religious comrades who have offset and overcome that heavy mark against themselves with demonstrated fidelity and acumen, who check their more conventionally atheist comrades from taking foolhardy actions, where the humanist consciences of these committed atheists might perhaps fail.

There is nothing compelling Reds to try to root out religion aggressively. Believing as they mostly do that religion is a big mistake at best, and more likely a systematic manipulation--a pack of wicked lies--they can also assume that when they take action to break the chains of oppression, that people will snap out of it on their own. Indeed religion can be a cover and aid in organizing reactionary counterrevolution--but if the police and citizens supporting police vigilance against enemies of the people can do their jobs, the grounds to bust and punish these are inherent in the actual counterrevolutionary activities, not in their religious beliefs.

Post revolution, religion is stripped of its special hegemonic privileges the previous society granted it. Churches are not tax exempt. There are no prayers before sessions of the various legislatures. @Aelita has called it atheism, but it looks to me more like actual and consistent secularism. It is just not the government's damn business what religious beliefs someone might hold.

These might as noted be relevant to police work, and if the police and general public were to slip into the mental shortcut of profiling everyone who held a particular faith with criminal tendencies shared by others of that faith, that would be scary. And I suppose some of that does happen, but the religious comrades and the courts would tend to shake these actors back to their senses. Just because some Catholics, some Episcopals, some Methodists and some Baptists joined with MacArthur or later committed acts of counterrevolutionary sabotage or terrorism, does not prove everyone else who sticks to that faith must also be saboteurs or terrorists--you make the case based on the deeds, not on such cartoonish categories.

If you grant that one can consider at least in a work of fiction the idea that actually maybe people might not require religion, then the mere statement that religion does become rare loses its perceived implication this must be because of persecution or cultural genocide. The authors are taking that position. But even so, they also grant that some people will cling to religion anyway, and have made it clear that these people can in fact live in peace in the UASR.

Eastern Europe is of course in the Soviet dominated wing of the Comintern and we have yet to see just what will happen there--beyond knowing Hitler makes a big mess of everything thereabouts. UASR is only involved insofar as Americans have some moral authority weighing something in Soviet thinking, or actually the Yankees clear their throats and go beyond making suggestions and lay down some hard conditions of ongoing bloc unity. We might or might not see this sort of religious oppression you are projecting in the old World then. Note also the Roman Catholic hierarchy declaring war on the Reds root and branch, leading to the separation of many UASR former Catholics into the Trinitarian movement--but this was a matter of the central religious authority striking first and hard. Theologically I can see why the pope felt he had to do this. But insofar as the UASR authorities do persecute diehard Catholics it will be because of political ties to a political enemy, not because they believe in the Trinity, venerate Mary, and believe in transubstantiation.

 

[Richard Osborne]

Clearly if a person believes religion persists either because it is true and necessary for human life, or because anyway it satisfies some vital function or is just plain nice, so that free people will always choose to adhere to it, being told "it largely goes away" can only be read to mean "because some wicked fanatics beat it to death and drove the more steadfast faithful into martyrdom or underground." But here you are doing that thing that people who bring these ideological assumptions to the TL as unquestionable, universal facts everyone had better believe or (what, exactly?)...always do, inferring events that actually are not stated in canon to have happened, and actually can be and are somewhat contradicted by canon. You are reading in what you want to read, and not what is written. Please take note of this!

I don't know whether you write as someone who believes religion is necessary and universal, or just as someone who observes it to seem to be so. Certainly in OTL reality, Marxist atheist regimes have indulged in quite cruel repression of religion--though if you take a closer look, they typically also have conciliatory phases in which at least some handpicked creeds, represented by suitably submissive handpicked clerics, are tolerated and even cultivated. An ugly thing I know about Vietnam for instance is that there are people undergoing persecution there as we speak...but not for being religious generically, rather for having the wrong religion; the Vietnamese state supports a patriotic form of Buddhism, and the persecuted include Catholics and various other sects. Meanwhile if you study Soviet history, even Stalin (in quite a cynical manner obviously) came to a rapprochement with the Russian Orthodox Church. Pope John Paul II visited Cuba toward the end of his life, quite obviously something he could hardly do if the Cuban regime were hellbent on suppressing Cuban Roman Catholicism.

Indeed the author-collective has told us that in canon, lots of America Reds are quite atheistic. But it does not follow that they go around terrorizing people just for being religious. I feel safe in asserting that while being openly religious counts against oneself in Red inner circles, marks oneself as of dubious reliability, nonetheless there would be religious comrades who have offset and overcome that heavy mark against themselves with demonstrated fidelity and acumen, who check their more conventionally atheist comrades from taking foolhardy actions, where the humanist consciences of these committed atheists might perhaps fail.

There is nothing compelling Reds to try to root out religion aggressively. Believing as they mostly do that religion is a big mistake at best, and more likely a systematic manipulation--a pack of wicked lies--they can also assume that when they take action to break the chains of oppression, that people will snap out of it on their own. Indeed religion can be a cover and aid in organizing reactionary counterrevolution--but if the police and citizens supporting police vigilance against enemies of the people can do their jobs, the grounds to bust and punish these are inherent in the actual counterrevolutionary activities, not in their religious beliefs.

Post revolution, religion is stripped of its special hegemonic privileges the previous society granted it. Churches are not tax exempt. There are no prayers before sessions of the various legislatures. @Aelita has called it atheism, but it looks to me more like actual and consistent secularism. It is just not the government's damn business what religious beliefs someone might hold.

These might as noted be relevant to police work, and if the police and general public were to slip into the mental shortcut of profiling everyone who held a particular faith with criminal tendencies shared by others of that faith, that would be scary. And I suppose some of that does happen, but the religious comrades and the courts would tend to shake these actors back to their senses. Just because some Catholics, some Episcopals, some Methodists and some Baptists joined with MacArthur or later committed acts of counterrevolutionary sabotage or terrorism, does not prove everyone else who sticks to that faith must also be saboteurs or terrorists--you make the case based on the deeds, not on such cartoonish categories.

If you grant that one can consider at least in a work of fiction the idea that actually maybe people might not require religion, then the mere statement that religion does become rare loses its perceived implication this must be because of persecution or cultural genocide. The authors are taking that position. But even so, they also grant that some people will cling to religion anyway, and have made it clear that these people can in fact live in peace in the UASR.

Eastern Europe is of course in the Soviet dominated wing of the Comintern and we have yet to see just what will happen there--beyond knowing Hitler makes a big mess of everything thereabouts. UASR is only involved insofar as Americans have some moral authority weighing something in Soviet thinking, or actually the Yankees clear their throats and go beyond making suggestions and lay down some hard conditions of ongoing bloc unity. We might or might not see this sort of religious oppression you are projecting in the old World then. Note also the Roman Catholic hierarchy declaring war on the Reds root and branch, leading to the separation of many UASR former Catholics into the Trinitarian movement--but this was a matter of the central religious authority striking first and hard. Theologically I can see why the pope felt he had to do this. But insofar as the UASR authorities do persecute diehard Catholics it will be because of political ties to a political enemy, not because they believe in the Trinity, venerate Mary, and believe in transubstantiation.

The fact that you a fellow communist (as I am.) Say that religion is an oppressive pack of lies and is best left in the dustbin of history makes me question if my political beliefs are akin to a rich black chieftain supporting Aparthied. Why must communism consider religion superstition and a enemy reactionary force? Did we not end infanticide, the colosseum, and lead the Abolition movement? Did the Buddhist not end human sacrifice in China and Japan. I wondered if my comrades in Marxism would stab religious progressives in the back. I am sickened that the answer may be yes. Certainly there are religious reactionaries. But is not saying all religion is reactionary akin to saying all ethnic group x are a bunch of x?