this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
618 points (92.2% liked)
Socialism
6893 readers
887 users here now
Rules TBD.
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Yeah I like the sentiment, but no Chernobyl absolutely did not have such a small effect. Minimizing these things, especially when so well known, just fucks up our position. Reality denial isn't an effective way to advocate or to make people aware of the horrors of capitalism. All it does is train the average person to assume left wing points are childishly exaggerated. This is, in part, why capitalist propaganda is so easy.
Here we just accept the official number and ignore all other effects. If we took the same path with the Bhopaal disaster, we'd have to ignore all the non-fatal poisonings and believe uncritically the official instant death count of just over 2,200 ignoring any deaths to come afterwards. That would be stupid
Chernobyl was a terrible disaster that harmed an absurd amount of people, de-homed thousands, and damaged the ecosystem of the wider area. Its effects and danger are still present to this day and could have been much, much worse if not for the work of those who fixed the massive fuck up.
Both the Bhopal disaster and the Chernobyl disaster were bred by incompetence, corruption, and a general failure to care for the worker and the general population.
Now, if we were to keep a leaderboard, capitalism wins by many miles in the awfulness department. That's the note we should take, that's the drum we should beat.
It wasn't socialism that caused Chernobyl. If the workers, those who built and conceived of the soviet nuclear reactors, were in charge they would have put in the safe guards they advocated for well before this disaster. They were not allowed to and the consequence was a meltdown. That's why we should give the power to the worker. The Bhopal disaster? Capital was the determiner for who had power, and those in power caused the disaster. It was the fault of capitalism as capitalism was allowed to build Union Carbide with little in its way.
Edit: Changed Russian to soviet, re-aranged paragraphs, added clarity
The chernobyl disaster also had the chance to be much, much worse than it was. The only reason it wasn't worse was the sacrifices of the people.
Critically, the working classes were in charge of Chernobyl. Their mistakes were mistakes made by workers. The worker is not infallible.
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife
Also even if you take the most exaggerated numbers about Chernobyl and Fukushima combined, it's still just something we should just ignore. It was a small blip. Per megawatthour produced, nuclear energy is still by far the safest energy, safer than solar (because people fall off of roofs).
Instead you're not just resisting, you're actually angrily rebuking and scolding OP's attempt to put these two catastrophes into perspective. You apply a double standard to how factually accurate a shitpost has to be vs the global capitalist propaganda machine.
Capitalist propaganda is effective.
Board representation for workers needs to be a universal rallying cry
EVERY WORKER A MEMBER OF THE BOARD!
Hey its the guy helping me find my gun
My dad had just gotten me a hamster and we fed it lettuce that was affected. Fuckers killed my hamster. I'm just glad I didn't eat it I guess. Poor little guy, I was heartbroken.
if this can't happen in a communist nation, what hope is there for any other worker?
Russia was never communist. They were a dictatorship dressed up in communist clothing. If the workers ever controlled the means of production in a nation, I'd love to hear about it.
The working classes were the dictators of production and distribution in the USSR, production was collectively owned and democratically planned.
that's a fascinating take; what makes you believe this?
Probably because communism means that the means of production, property and society is owned and operated by 'the people', in the case of Stalinist USSR everything was owned by uncle Joe and if you upset him he sent you to a fucking gulag.
Somehow, I think if the workers were in charge and it was actually communist or socialist they wouldn't have been sending themselves to the gulag.
The USSR during Stalins time was a dictatorship masquerading as communism.
Moldy cold war propaganda is moldy.
I don't want to be the guy arguing on the Internet, but just read the Wikipedia article on communism here. When the Russian people toppled their last monarch, they never actually went full communism.
this explains a lot about why you believe this.
would you still believe wikipedia if i shared freedom of information act releases that directly contradict wikipedia? (the releases also contradict npr, cnn, cbs, bbc, etc.)
I am always open to the truth. Please, do share.
go read wikipedia's page about north korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea
and then read the foia releases about north korea (or ateast the ones you can still access online): https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11749952/8255268
The truth is only what they want. Facts are anti communist!
If you think Wikipedia is biased, then I have nothing further to say to you. Enjoy OAN, News Max, Fox News, and all that other right wing horse shit. Wikipedia is community consensus. It's the only place I get my "news" from.
yes, wikipedia is community consensus and community consensus once was that iraq had wmd's -- the foia proved otherwise. consensus isn't truth; it's just the most popular opinion at the time.
the foia gives you what the us government tries to hide. it is literally the us government itself being legally forced to share its secrets to the american public because of a law that was passed decades before the us gov't became fully captured by corporate interests and the epstein class.
It really wasn't.
here's wikipedia's consensus still framing the government's wmd claims as 'assertions' while uncritically repeating them years after the iraqi invasion: https://wayback.qa-archive-it.org/all/20080911173302/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction
The foia showed the government had doubts before the invasion -- wikipedia didn't.
Wikipedia is biased by nature as a secondary source, just towards the political paradigm so you don't recognize it as easily. In fact, here's a Wikipedia page you might want to check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia
Hey does ProleWiki have a page talking about its own issues?
I wouldn't know, I've barely used it.
Just checked and it doesn't seem to, but considering it's a much smaller and newer project than Wikipedia that would make sense.
Fair enough. Thank you for responding.
You mean the workers that control the means of production in socialist China??
The billionaires are working class there too?
The billionaires that don't control the means of production?
Tesseract vibes
Im afraid of people i disagree with
Yet here you are. Rent free lad
Yet here you are
👋