Would you like to revise your testimony to explain this contradiction?

And in return, Hamas will continue to prepare the 'voluntary departure' of IOF goons from this mortal coil.

The communists had taken a firmly anti-war stance, or more precisely a 'revolutionary defeatist' stance: their position was that WW1 was an inter-imperialist war between capitalist powers (over who would win control of the European colonies in Africa, Asia and to a lesser extent South America) with the only real loser being the members of the working class sent to the slaughter at the front lines. Therefore, instead of fighting each other, the workers of each nation should fight against their own government, bringing the war between countries to an end by turning it to a civil war within each participating country, to overthrow the capitalist states and create new workers' states - or, failing that, to at least stop the slaughter of working people for the capitalists' benefit as soon as possible. As part of this, they firmly and vocally opposed Imperial Russia's part in WW1 and made it the leading part of their slogan, "Peace, land and bread".

This being the Bolshevik position would have been widely known throughout Russia, especially among the working-class conscript soldiers sent to die in the trenches, so when they were ordered back to Russia in order to crush the communist uprising, just so they could then be sent back into WW1 again without any further distractions, a large part of them naturally rebelled.

This is also why the October revolution happened just months after the February revolution that deposed the Tsar - the "social democratic" bourgeoise government that took control of the country, having promised to end Russia's part in the war as soon as possible, quickly started drafting plans to send more troops to the frontline. This was completely intolerable to the Bolsheviks, who had previously been content with the overthrow of absolute monarchy, but now having been immediately betrayed by the liberals (many such cases) instead overthrew them too and made certain Russia withdrew from WW1, even at the cost of a deeply unfavorable peace settlement.

Indeed, the brainworms over how Russia needed to stay in the war and keep throwing workers to their deaths to eke out a little more inter-imperialist gain were so ingrained that it was the motivation for the assassination attempt against Lenin, complications of which almost certainly led to the series of strokes a few years later that led to his death.

The Imperial Russian state had also almost completely disintegrated in large parts of the country. The disastrous campaigns on the Eastern Front resulted in the mobilization of large numbers of able-bodied men from the rural state security forces, while also producing massive waves of deserters, many of whom dispersed into the countryside and became bandits preying on travellers and the peasantry. When the revolutionaries stepped up, and especially when the Bolsheviks took power, they returned state control and infrastructure to these areas, solidifying them as the only legitimate state power. Meanwhile in Germany, although losing WW1 shook up the state and got the Kaiser deposed, the state never lost control over its territory in the same way. And as OrnluWolfjarl says, when the Imperial Army recalled units from the front line to crush the communists, by the time they'd marched all the way back to the heartlands a majority of the soldiers had changed allegiance and just joined the Red Army instead.

The term brainwashing was first used by the US military during the Korean war (a calque from Chinese 洗脑 (xǐnǎo), literally "to wash the brain") in order to discredit their own pilots who claimed - correctly - that they'd been engaged in biological warfare, specifically dropping bomb cases full of pathogens, infected fleas and crop pests, all over the north Korean cities and countryside.

When the pilots, who had been shot down and captured by the Koreans, made these public confessions, it was easy to dismiss them by saying they were under duress or threat of torture. But when those pilots returned home and kept making the same claims, the idea of "brainwashing" was invented to explain how actually, the evil communists had taken over their minds through spooky psychological conditioning and persuasion techniques, to make them continue believing lies even without the immediate threat of torture.

Bring back the Heptarchy but with socialist republics

Damn bro that's a straight skill issue, if several commandos burst into my house and asked me if I support their team I would probably lie and say yes.

Then when they were sleeping, I would go and rouse the people's militia to prepare an ambush. Oh, your side didn't have one of those? Curious.

Ah, my bad!

No, it was extremely successful and boasted the fasted rate of economic growth in human history while also defeating the most devastating invasion of all time, until it was illegally dissolved against the wishes of its people in a violent CIA-backed coup, leading to the worst humanitarian disaster since the second world war.

Damn, kinda seems safer to be living in the occupied territories

::: spoiler Furthermore, here's a very interesting series of maps:

Percentage of the population that are native Russian speakers.

Support for Yanukovich, the president overthrown in 2014 and replaced by a government that immediately banned the use of Russian in offical documents and schools.

Support for Volodomir Zelenski - or Vladimir Zelensky, as he would have been known in his first language, Russian - who ran against the coup leader on a platform of reconciliation with the separatist areas, right up until he won and someone with Hitler tattoos and a big gun explained his situation to him.

And last but not least, a map of Russia's early warning RADAR system, which you may notice a slice of eastern Ukraine sits neatly under, making it the ideal launch point for a decapitation strike against Moscow.

So "annexing a neighbour" is trivially not what Russia wants, or is even capable of achieving. They want a demilitarized, denazified zone encompassing their most vulnerable border, a totally reasonable desire for any state, especially one facing down the lying, bloodthirsty savages of NATO. It will grab the areas of Russian speakers that it's actually possible to assimilate, bringing the territory under their internal security arrangements, and leave the majority-Ukrainian-speaking areas that would be impossible to control to some sort of Kiev-run rump state.

Wait a minute, Biden's jawline - zoom and enhance...

In addition to the answers already here, Southern slave plantation owners controlled the largest swathes of prime agricultural and cotton growing farmland. Almost the only cost of maintaining a slave is food and a little clothing, so as an industry the plantations were essentially self-sufficient just from their own produce. This meant that, as they were not paying money for food and clothing, they could keep prices for food and clothing high, draining money out of the industrializing North.

Capitalists, slightly contrary to other answers here, do actually need to pay their workers - at minimum - enough to reproduce their labor (at least until the extreme short-termism of neoliberalism arises) so high prices for food and clothing means paying workers more, which means setting higher prices for goods to keep the same profit margin, which means being outcompeted in the world commodities market by countries in which food is cheaper.

It's also impossible to mechanize farming on a slave plantation, for the obvious reason that people forced into slavery will gladly sabotage your expensive machines. So, unlike capitalist firms, plantations are not in a race for automation to cut labor costs and outcompete each other - each plantation simply produces as much food as it has land available, which has the effect of preventing the rate of profit for farming as a whole from falling.

To explain: in each particular capitalist field of industry, each firm within it is trying to undercut the others by lowering its prices, which (if it wants to also make profit to spend on future expansion) it can only do by lowering its costs. And as all the firms are buying their input materials on the same market for the same price, the only way to lower costs is to spend less on paying workers - whether by reducing their wages, making them work more for the same wage, or, most significantly for the long term development of capitalism, by replacing them with machines.

Each firm is therefore in a race against the others to automate away as much of the workforce as they possibly can, with steam engines, spinning jennies and every other form of industrial machine - but as we know, profit can only come from the surplus value created by workers, meaning that, as the number of workers in an industry undergoing automation falls, so does the overall rate of profit for that industry.

However, in contrast, farming as a slave-based industry is able to maintain 'ownership' (in every sense) of a far larger fraction of the total number of workers in society - and therefore a much larger fraction of the total surplus value created by society - than farming under capitalism, meaning plantation owners as a class have much greater wealth, relative to industrialists, than they would as owners of farms under capitalism.

But of course, this situation harms the Northern industrialists, because high food prices mean they can't compete on the world market. The logic of capitalism - the logic of the current level of development of the means of production - demands that farming be subject to mechanization. Slavery is outmoded, not because society has reached a higher level of moral and ethical development, but because it interferes with the seeking of maximum profit.

For as long as industries were competing with each other on the same continent, all suffering under the same prices for food, slavery as the primary basis for agriculture could carry on - but as soon as capitalist firms have eaten their local competition and started seeking out new markets on foreign shores, slave-agriculture becomes a fetter on accumulation that Capital must abolish. Under other circumstances, capitalist farms would simply appear and undercut the prices demanded by the plantation owners, but in the US the monopoly that the Southern slavers had over huge tracts of much higher quality farmland in a much better climate made this impossible. So, in the face of these totally incompatible material interests, the only possible outcome was the violent overthrow of the regressive class and the dissolution of their obsolete mode of production.

Guy with a Churchill profile picture yelling at the guy with a Stalin profile picture for idolizing someone who killed millions in a famine.

No way, I also invented that guy to get mad at and I gotta say, FUCK HIM

'Building socialism' and 'actually existing socialism' are pretty much synonyms, because the terms for the transition stage between capitalism and communism are vaguely defined.

Some call the end point of a "classless, moneyless society" communism, some call it socialism - and some call the transition period, where a society still has features of capitalism alongside features of communism, socialism.

Ultimately it comes down to: who holds political power in a given society, how strong is their grip on it, and how forcefully are they pushing in the direction of communism?

For myself, I would use the word 'socialist' for any country that's somewhere along the transition stage, with whatever features are peculiar to that particular country's history, as long as it's controlled by a Dictatorship of the Proletariat led by committed communists.

So for instance, I would call the USSR, China, the DPRK, Cuba etc. "Actually Existing Socialism" whereas countries with 'socialist policies' (basically, pro-welfare and pro-development) but no DOTP like Venezuela are less clear. Conversely, imperialist nations with big welfare states, like Norway for example, despite being called 'socialist' all the time in the capitalist media are very certainly not.

It was a joke...