Just sharing something silly that I decided to put together. Try to see how many of them you can recognize. Optional video essay background music to go along the post.
Tier 1: The big three. On top of the iceberg due to the enormous impact that they have had in the world’s history and popular culture, being known by even the most politically illiterate. It is very likely you have been told more than once to move here by angry people during political discussions.
Tier 2: Smaller socialist states that stand out more than the rest in their respective regions. Still well known and recognized, but most people have a weaker grasp on them than on the ones listed on the tier above.
Tier 3: More unlikely to pop up in debates about communism, this likelihood increases drastically if the person you are talking with had a grandmother whose castle, servants and favourite pony were taken away by one of these states.
Tier 4: This tier marks a barrier: an average Jane and Joe is most likely not able to recognize these. However, they do not suppose a very deep level of knowledge for a ML, who should already know about their existence and point one or two facts about them at the very least.
Tier 5: Many people are unable to even point on a map where these countries are located, and much less to even know that they were once socialist states. If you know in depth about them, it is very likely that you put a desproportionately large focus on anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism in your theory journey. It is also equally as likely that you haven’t seen the sun in years.
Tier 6: The bottom of the iceberg. These states are almost never mentioned even by the people who are well read on the states on the tier above, despite the very unique and interesting challenges that they had to face as socialist projects. Venturing into these shows a willingness to search for knowledge further away than anything that you will ever need in practice.
Tier 7: The dark depths of socialist history. Some are states that lasted for several years flying under the radar of even the most dedicated MLs, but most of these are ephemeral projects, having lasted as much as the elements at the bottom of the periodic table, or what is the same, about two or three times longer than the average anarchist project. If you know about these, you either live in the place where they existed or you most likely learnt about them not in the pursue of anything practical, but searching for knowledge purely for the sake of it.
Tier 8: Have you ever had a dream that that you um you had you’d you would you could you’d do you wi you wants you you could do so you you’d do you could you you want you want him to do you so much you could do anything?
no spanish republic
no mexican liberal party
Funny you say that, because I had the same complaint from a person who made the role of test audience. The 2SR is the best period of Spanish history, but it was no socialist state and CEDA’s rule from 1934 to 36 is proof of that.
That learns more towards the side of anarcho-communism, and I decided to not include those (even if they also have their little hidden projects that have been forgotten by history).
nah we talking about the Caballero government not the dang CEDA! its “underground” in the sense reds were running an ostensibly bourgois republic with a liberal president for 2 years or so
mexican liberal party is great because it’s called liberal, lol the magónistas are a footnote at best in the grand scheme of the revolution
You see, “bourgeois state run secretly by reds” would make a lot of countries get into the list and it was somewhere that I had to put the line to decide which states are in and which ones are out. At first I even considered putting inside every country that ever made a reference to socialism in their constitution, but that would put Portugal in, despite having been nowhere close to work socialist state the likes of the USSR. I even had to discard countries that ran on arab socialism like Lybia.
fair