Let’s step back and contextualize. The Russian Revolution, for all its flaws and tragic outcomes, was not a singular, isolated event floating in a vacuum of historical inevitability. It emerged out of unimaginable conditions: the ruins of Tsarist autocracy, a regime that was arguably one of the most backwards and repressive in Europe, compounded by the catastrophic toll of World War I, which had already thrown the region back decades in terms of development. The Bolsheviks inherited a situation of near-total collapse: famine, mass illiteracy, civil war, and an international blockade that strangled the new state at its infancy. To blame the USSR’s trajectory solely on Bolshevism or communism is to ignore this harrowing historical reality.

But there’s more to this story. Ask yourself why we don’t have multiple socialist success stories from the early 20th century. Why does history offer us no alternative points of reference? Let us turn to Germany, Austria, Italy, or Poland, where proletarian revolutions flickered between 1918 and 1924. The harsh truth is that the social democrats of the time, ideological forebears of today’s reformists, drowned these revolutions in blood. In Germany, the SPD actively collaborated with the Freikorps—proto-fascists, no less—to crush revolutionary uprisings like those of the Spartacists. The betrayal in Poland was no less devastating: under the leadership of a reactionary regime tied to German imperialism, Poland waged war against the fledgling Soviet state, attempting to reimpose the draconian terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

These betrayals left the Soviet Union in complete isolation, surrounded by hostile capitalist powers eager for its destruction. Without the support of an international revolution, the USSR faced an impossible dilemma: build socialism in one country or perish. The resulting “Stalinist caricature” of socialism was as much a product of this isolation as it was of internal contradictions.

From the ashes of Tsarist oppression, the Soviet Union undertook a massive and unprecedented experiment in societal transformation. This was no small feat. Lenin himself repeatedly warned of the dangers of bureaucratization and made efforts to curtail the growth of the party and state apparatus. However, his health declined rapidly after 1922, and contrary to the reactionary trope of Lenin as a dictator, his influence waned with his incapacitation. By the time Stalin rose to power, the bureaucracy had grown into a powerful force that would shape the course of Soviet history.

Nonetheless, for nearly a decade, the USSR remained one of the most progressive societies in the world, even under unimaginably difficult circumstances. Consider this: while half of the so-called “land of the free” still languished under Jim Crow apartheid, the Soviet Union was rapidly urbanizing, eradicating illiteracy, and introducing women’s suffrage and workers’ rights in ways that were unprecedented for the time. This was a country transitioning from a predominantly peasant society to an industrial power in record time.

Yes, concessions were made to private property owners. Yes, the Stalinist obsession with quantity over quality—manifested in the chaotic implementation of the Five-Year Plans—led to inefficiencies and waste. But here’s the rub: even with its deformations, the Soviet economy achieved staggering feats. It not only survived but outpaced many capitalist economies during the Great Depression. By the late 1930s, it had transformed a feudal backwater into an industrialized powerhouse capable of withstanding and defeating the Wehrmacht, the most formidable military machine of its time. And this was after enduring one of the most devastating invasions in human history.

And let’s not ignore the strides made in education, healthcare, and gender equality. The USSR turned an overwhelmingly illiterate population into one of the most educated in the world. Women gained access to professions and education in ways that far outpaced their counterparts in the West. And while Stalin’s purges and bureaucratic authoritarianism gutted much of the early revolutionary spirit, the foundations laid by the October Revolution persisted in remarkable ways. Even amid the Stalinist counterrevolution, the USSR managed to rebuild itself at an astonishing rate after the destruction of World War II, without relying on the Marshall Plan.

In conclusion, the failure of the USSR was not an inherent failure of socialism but a tragedy born of historical contingency: isolation, betrayal, and the crushing weight of imperialist opposition. The same forces that scoff at the USSR today—bourgeois ideologues and their reformist allies—bear responsibility for sabotaging the international revolutions that might have prevented the Stalinist degeneration. To use the USSR as a strawman against socialism is intellectually lazy and historically dishonest. The real question isn’t whether the USSR “worked out” but whether the world’s workers were ever given a fair chance to build a socialist alternative in the first place. The answer, dear reformist, is no—because your ideological ancestors made damn sure of it.

The only real solution is to change laws and pass sweeping reforms of the system,

Right. So what’s your plan for doing this then?

…

Oh, right, you can’t do it because $200 Billion are leveraged against you being able to do this.

Violence is the authority from which all other authority is derived. We respect laws and governments because we have ceded them the right of violence to maintain and enforce those laws. Governments and corporations do not respect us because governments (and by America’s extension, corporations) hold the monopoly on violence.

Therefore, the credible threat of violence is required for a fair and equal negotiation. We don’t need to go in and gun down every C-level executive in the country, the same way the cops don’t need to arrest every single person in the country to impress upon the rest of us what they are capable of. The opponent merely needs to think that you might do it in order to fear and respect the prospect appropriately.

This assassination hasn’t solved any problems directly, not in the least, but what it has done is hand us a bargaining chip that is now ours to squander. We have proven that we, citizens as a block, are capable and perhaps willing to exercise the authority of violence, and the corpostate no longer holds the monopoly. This has the corpostate immediately scared, and puts us in a position to negotiate to prevent more of these, or even for someone else to wield us in their own negotiations (think some politician in a back rooms talk with insurance reps, “look do you want the citizens to keep taking pot shots at you forever or do you want to actually do something about it?”)

We, the people, don’t want violence. It isn’t ours to wield. We gave it up intentionally when we wrote the laws of our lands. But it is the last tool left to us when all others are taken away. The lesson that should be learned here and the real solution we should be looking for is to return to us the other tools we had for negotiation, so that violence isn’t the only remaining way for us to voice ourselves. When corporations were busy union busting and warping tax code and shrinkflating and lobbying down the minimum wage, they forgot that the reason all those things existed was to keep the people happy so they don’t rise up. We already had a corpo hellstate in America once before, and by the end of it, companies gladly instated all these worker benefits after mass general strikes and the third or so time all their corporate offices were firebombed. Skip a few generations and they’ve either forgotten why those policies existed, or they’ve ignored it completely in some show of demented grandeur.

But if I’m being honest I fully expect this opportunity to be thoroughly wasted and for us as a whole to generally learn nothing. It is possible that I will be pleasantly surprised. But I’m not really holding my breath for anything these days.

capitalism can not be reformed. the core value system of it and it’s prevalent iteration of neoliberalism is based solely on exploitation, individualism, differential advantage and monetary profit and is antithetical to life and thriving of life. you can’t fix this system with minor tweaks and reforms

the structural violence the plutocrats participate in and reinforce through myriad means like advertising and economic coercion is exponentially more devastating and deadly than someone venting like with this ceo shooting

edit2: the “real solution” is mutual aid, community building and dual power movements with an emphasis on anarchist ideas. to partially quote Buckminster fuller To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. but unfortunately sometimes the only language these monsters understand is violence, which is ironically what their colonial projects always claim about the oppressed

Buddy, we are just animals trying to survive. The wealthy lack every transcendental value that makes humans special. They’re more like orcs. You want me to say please and thank you as they destroy my world and poison my family?