i go out of my way to experience different cultures and it seems like the immigrant communities in the united states originating from communist countries tend to be some of the chuddiest people imaginable. chinese, russian, cuban, vietnamese. literally every person who i ever talked to that has lived in a communist country and then moved to the united states, or is like second or third generation from that, tends to be incredibly reactionary and anti communist. i feel like i am a more well versed communist when talking to people that lived in a communist country.
its like that everyone that comes to the united states from a communist country forgets the values of marxism, socialism, and communism. i have been too polite to ask what really made these people move to this fucking shithole and if i had to guess they have something severely wrong with them and they want to participate in some small business tyrany and become capitalists. like all these assholes be chasing the dollar and they bring great shame on their own nationality even being here.
i have had much better discussions with people from countries that are still being exploited by capitalists since they already have an understanding of what colonialism and capitalism even is and they arent here to try to become small business owners or worse. people from puerto rico dont got the brain worms that cuban expats do for example.
and i should mention, they all state, they love their country but they blame everything bad with their country on communists. It infuriates me hearing these people, who were born in a nation with socialized healthcare, state controlled industry, basic welfare for citizens, just trash talk the system that make them so successful in the first place and gave them the resources they probably didn’t deserve to open up a shitty restaurant selling borscht. they would know exactly why these social programs cant meet demand if they just took the blindfold off and realized that america, the great fucking satan, is the reason why the global economy is so unequal ITS ALL BECAUSE OF FUCKING AMERICA NOT COMMUNISM YOU STUPID FUCK!
ive been told not to view myself as more communist than others, but i fucking am around these parts with expats who are not communist whatsoever, that makes me more communist than them. if i was to draw a hundred mile radius around myself odds are there probably wouldnt be someone more communist than me. nobody in my life reads theory, every fucking time i tried reaching out with dsa or the bernie shit i have only met shitlibs, i have found no comrades in bipoc communities, the lgbt, religion, or labor. just having someone say to me face to face they are a communist would help me anchor my belief system to something real and not entirely made up and on the internet.
idk, communism is basically what i use to fill my god hole and its fucking hard to find communists irl and its real shitty that people from communist countries arent oftentimes communists. i just want some validation in my belief in communism by someone who is fucking real.
selection bias?
One factor is that people who have the means to move to a different country have some amount of privilege (specifically money or connections) relative to the average person in their home country, even if it’s not necessarily oligarch levels of wealth
That is to say the people who are like “I came here with nothing but $10 in my pocket and created a life for myself with hard work and immigrant grindset!” might be telling the truth about arriving with such meager wealth, but are conveniently leaving out that they somehow were able to afford the thousands of dollars it costs to complete the immigration process (over a years worth of full time work in some countries), and likely have a sponsor in their destination country they could rely on for food and shelter while starting out
not all people who move to the us are privileged though. its just that people that move from communist countries tend to be. like mexican people specifically are sort of an underclass that are exploited for cheap labor. you can find leftist sentiment in immigrants, just not immigrants from places that have actually achieved socialism.
I’ve seen anticommunist sentiment from immigrants from global south countries that have never been ruled by any sort of communists, such as India, The Philippines, and even Mexico. I think there does tend to be more leftist sentiment among immigrants in the US from Mexico since compared to many other countries, the physical proximity allows for more undocumented immigration, which for better or worse is more accessible to the working class (people who don’t have the privilege I was talking about), but which also has a dynamic that keeps them in an underclass in the US.
Because they actually experienced life in both worlds and know what they prefer based on actual experience.
The majority of people living in post-soviet countries say life got worse under capitalism.
People who actively want to leave socialist countries are a very specific subset of “people who actually experienced both” and aren’t the norm.
Yet that is what this post was complaining about. People who have lived both.
Some people who have lived both. Not even fuckin’ close to all or even a majority of them.
When someone is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression
That is the universal mindset of most exiles from communist countries who lost their feudal “rights”
Except these people are not accustomed to privilege. Hence, they have a unique perspective you and I have never had.
It’s like saying “I like meat more than vegetables”, but never having had meat.
I’d give weight to someone who’s experienced both systems in real life.
You think that because you have no actual knowledge of those countries and the history of class struggle that defined them
Murderous feudal landlords who owned serfs were privileged, colonial compradors who staffed the ranks of the native colonial police and bureaucracy of European empires were privileged, the criminal plantation owners whose labor force were defined by indentured servitude that was at constsnt risk of being disappeared, were privileged
That’s the problem with liberals, history and class doesn’t exist, instead we have to accept at face value the sob stories of people who were lucky they weren’t torn apart by their victims for the crimes they committed in their home country
Comparing across space but not time is misleading. Ask if they preferred life before the revolution to after. The imperial core countries are propped up by centuries of colonial plunder and slavery, of course they seem preferable to someone who is on the side that benefits.
Exactly. They aren’t moving to capitalist imperial periphery countries, those that have been ravaged and left poor after decades of exploitation, but rather the imperial core itself where the wealth is flocking and where someone with an education and not under the boot of debt can have a comfy life. I can see why someone would defect from East to West Germany for economic reasons alone. It’s good to point out when people bring up fleeing from these countries that they aren’t exactly moving to Nigeria or El Salvador or India.
China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese
In fact, most Chinese people live in China
The joke is that people opting to leave a country are self-selecting. If you are leaving a left wing country chances are it’s because you are a right winger and want to live somewhere that lets you be right-wing.
You want to own a small business in a place without unions, or be a landlord in an area without tenants rights.
Or you want to be on the opposite end of the American foreign policy apparatus; sanctions, death squads and drones.
And lastly. English is the most common second language in the world. It is easiest to move to the anglosphere.
what i do know is people that left countries during/after a revolution, for example cubans moving to florida, is because many of them were wealthy and fled to preserve their fortune/lives in some cases. as to why they do it now, i’m not too sure but i suspect a lot of it has to do with the idolization that some people in socialist countries tend to have with capitalist ones - michael parenti’s blackshirts and reds has a good write-up about the latter in chapter 7. that, and the ones who have the means to leave are also probably wealthy and want to gain more wealth
There’s the matter of them having enough means to make it to the US, and in addition to that, they’re the ones who picked the US out of anywhere in the world as where they wanted to go. It’d be like a westerner going to live in a communist country, they would not be a typical westerner.
