A ten year old poll, that happened before some important recent events, and is mostly from Russian client states in central Asia and the Caucasus because it only encompasses countries that were part of the Soviet Union is disingenuous, at best, in response to this post about eastern Europe.
Try that poll again today in Albania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, former East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Balkans. See how that goes.
Edit: I don’t know how I overlooked the Baltics, I was just in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia for a few weeks this spring. If the museums are anything to go by, their responses to this question would definitely contradict your narrative and they were part of the USSR.
a yes nazi collaborators
Ask Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Hungarians, everyone in former Yogoslavia and Baltics…
A yes Yugoptnik the perfect example lf how happy and content eastern europeanz are
I have read your sentence 4 times and I got no clue what are you trying to say here. Are you really trying to say that Yugoslavia was more stable under communism than it’s individual states today?
The standard of living cratered in many of the former soviet countries. It turns out, while communism as implemented by the USSR had it’s downsides, in general, the populace as a whole were better off.
Every time I see something like OP’s post, I’m reminded that oil companies can’t stop destroying the earth because stonks must go up. But yeah, communism is the boogie man.
The question was not asked in the Baltic states or Uzbekistan. The question was also not asked in Soviet puppet states like Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, etc.
Most of those are also authoritarian. Tossing out one dictator for another is not going to leave people very satisfied.
The least racist westerner has logged on. Fuck what majority of people who lived in USSR think, it’s the people with blond hair and blue eyes whose opinions really matter.
Are you that fucking stupid? There are a ton of Russians, Belorusyans, and Ukrainians who are blond haired and blue eyed. They also did not include 36 million people in Uzbekistan which has very few blond haired blue eyed people. You know who also is not blond haired and blue eyed? Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan who see it as a benefit that the shitty Soviet Union broke up. But I guess you do not give a shit about them. That seems pretty racist of you.
It’s not racist to recognize that ignoring the over 100 million people that live in states that were either Soviet or Soviet puppet states kind of fucking skews the results.
Your argument makes no sense. Go back to summer school, child.
Meanwhile in the real world
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Former Soviet Countries See More Harm From Breakup https://news.gallup.com/poll/166538/former-soviet-countries-harm-breakup.aspx
Oh and finally, this study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
So, take a sit there little buddy.
Nice copy pasta.
That Pew Research poll is 13 years old during a global financial crisis. A much more recent one (2019) shows that 7 in 10 Hungarians approve of the shift to a market economy.
That same poll showed that over 90% of Germans are happy with reunification. The article from Der Spiegel is 14 years old during a global financial crisis. I lived in Berlin around that time. There was a little bit of Ostalgie but honestly a lot of them were little more than neo Nazis and ended up supporting the AfD. If those are the communists you want to hang out with, be my guest.
Not sure why you devote so much space to the blond hair blue eyed Russians. Seems pretty racist.
Yugoslavia was not a Soviet puppet state nor Eastern Europe so not sure why you are bringing it up. There was also a lot more to Yugoslavia than Serbia.
Things haven’t gotten better in these countries in the past 13 years, and current pro western governments are looking pretty shaky as a result. Seethe and cope there child.
Citizens of those countries disagree with you. Seethe and cope, child.
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Comments like this radicalize the right and alienate people on the left, you achive absolutely nothing, just culture war fuel for the right, people from the Warsaw pact are not subumans, you don’t even understand that you support a race biased perspective with a mentality like this
Nah, pointing out racist shit scumbags say here is not radicalizing the right or alienating anybody who is actually on the left. The fact that westerners focus on the opinions of predominantly white people in eastern europe over those in the rest of USSR is racist as fuck.
As I said Warsaw pact people are not subhuman, judging from your comments they are, and even if you want to go into pseudo science race theory, the poles are white slav like the majority, russian and the ukranians, Georgia is another state that is in the poll, yet is a white majority, so why did they left some of the biggest and most populous part of the USSR? You are the perfect example of extreme race ideas, just not the white mainstream ones, race is a social construct, used to divide the people to let them fight against each others, you fit the role perfectly, if you were communist you would say that racial war is a distraction to class war, or am I wrong?
You’re just making a straw man there because nobody said anything about Warsaw pact people being subhuman except you. What was actually said was that the opinions of white people in European parts of USSR are prioritized over those who lived in the rest of USSR in the west. Nobody is talking about any race war here except you. You keep trying to call me a racist for pointing this out shows the depths of your intellectual dishonesty. I’ve got nothing else to say to you.
Define communism.
It’s true that this should not be about communism, but about soviet state, which was an authoritharian state dominated by russian nationalism, but under banner of communism. Their kind of messed up the banner of communism for everybody. If used, it should be discussed with care.
no one can, not even those who advocate for it. (aside from “not that thing that was repeatedly tried and failed”)
Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.
from Principles of Communism by Friedrich Engels.
And what would be those conditions?
common ownership and control of the means of production in a classless moneyless stateless society governed via collective mutual determination or similar horizontal system of power.
oh, i see, makes sense then why it was never tried. how are we going to have a society without a state to govern it? (i mean not to concern troll here, if a solution can be created for this that would be genuinely interesting, but for example that council the soviets created a century ago was clearly a state)
I love how you just keep flaunting your ignorance here. Communists aren’t imbeciles who think that you can simply snap your fingers and abolish the state, they recognize the need for a transitional socialist period from the current system to a communist one.
and how do you wish to avoid that the leaders of said transitional socialist period just cling to power?
as someone who has to live in the aftermath of one of those “transitional socialist periods” that predictably went nowhere and just broke the country’s spirit completely, i’m really damn curious. we are not talking about hypotheticals here.
how? abolish the standing beaurocratic heirarchy which perpetuates and expends its own power and the interest of the ruling class by inflicting violence on the working class. what that looks like depends on how the people who make up a community choose to govern themselves.
realistically I don’t expect a revolution of the proletariat to take place, so I promote the institution of robust mutual aid networks, radical solidarity (organized labor, intersectional liberatory philosophy), and resilient autonomous communities, to compete with the prevailing system of power.
attempts at anarchist-adjacent organizing have existed, and continue to in some communities, though of course execution varies, as does identity.
the USSR was not an attempt towards a stateless society, being a state-capitalist imperialist kleptocracy.
though most brainwashed USAians seem to think having basic shit like Sweden/UK/Australian style healthcare system is some kind of evil communism.
I am from Eastern Europe and I share this sentiment when I see anyone from the West defending communism. The issue is complicated but, to put it bluntly:
No, Timothy, communism didn’t fail in Eastern Europe because it was implemented wrongly. This is a very complicated topic but the tldr summary is “It is a broken idea, it did not work and it will never work. The natural and logical outcome of any attempt at Marxism is a bloodbath followed by autocracy.”
That being said, communism isn’t the only way to achieve a more equitable society. You have social democracy (in Lennin’s words - communism’s greatest adversary); organized labour movements; collectivist anarchism; communitariasm, etc.
Communism, as applied in the 20th century, violently fought against or oppressed all of these movements and is incompatible with any of them.
Not to mention that in most countries nowadays orthodox communists have been hugely discredited for excusing the Russian war of annihilation against the Ukrainian people.
In conclusion, if you live in the USA or Western Europe and you are unhappy with how corporate greed has ruined society, don’t look to communism for answers. There are many other proposed solutions out there - go and research these. Communism is very well known, which makes it easily accessible to people who want change - but it is never, ever the solution.
Yeah, in the West, we are suffering from unregulated capitalism and it’s hurting us badly. But that certainly doesn’t mean communism is good, especially authoritarian communism (which is exactly what we have historical examples of). We need social safety nets, better taxation, and fucking choices in the west.
Communism is authoritarian by nature. If everyone doesn’t subscribe to the communist ideology, then the model simply doesn’t work. This means you literally have no choice in a communist society but to be subjected to it. You also need some sort of authority to enforce the redistribution. Who decides who does that, and who gets what? My opinion is that the only way it’d work is maybe with AI, but even then, those in power will likely just manipulate the technology to continue to benefit themselves.
On the same hand, even if you don’t subscribe to capitalist ideology you’re forced to participate.
We (at least in the U.S.) have no real safety net for people who are unable to provide for themselves for whatever reason. Capitalism is great if you’re the one with the capital but if not the world can be a brutal, uncaring place and you can quite literally die on the street.
Crime is endemic to capitalism and I feel like better social safety nets would pay huge dividends in a lot of ways.
That may be accurate, but we were discussing communism, not capitalism.
Luckily this is a forum and we can all contribute to the discussion. If you read the comment you replied to you’ll see they mentioned living under unregulated capitalism; I was adding to what they’d said.
At the same time I had a colleague that had to immigrate to Canada from Yugoslavia in her 40s and she told me life there even as a Serb + Catholic couple was the best she has ever experienced until things started to go bad in the 80s…
Nostalgia is huge in the eastern block. That’s a separate topic of discussion, all on its own.
The type of “communism” you accuse some people to be praising is probably rather the democratic and social system of the Scandinavian countries that works super well in Europe.
I don’t know basically anyone actually saying UdSSR was good (except tankies but fuck them), because it was obviously not; it was a horrible and oppressive dictatorship. Funny enough, the only people I kind of hear this from are rather the people who actually lived in the DDR and say stuff like “Not everything was bad back there” and having it rather positive in their memory.More like: People on the internet being critical of the current system, Americans on the internet saying “COMMUNISM BAD” as if USSR style state capitalism is the only other possible option.
How else would it work? You need some power structure that actively forbids a free market and private ownership. And that power will sooner or later be abused.
You can’t just imagine some utopia where nobody has to work, and everything is free, and call that communism.
But nobody does that?
You can’t just imagine some utopia where nobody has to work, and everything is free, and call that communism.
Those are the anarchists (usually, definitions get fuzzy)
Most communists recognize the need for a transition state, we call that Socialism.
This isn’t a utopia we’re pitching, it’s hard work, and there will always be controversy, and people will have to work, we will just work less, and we will strive toward working even less over time.
And that power will sooner or later be abused
There’s LOTS of evidence that, right now, under capitalism, that abuse is veeeeery bad. We can learn the lessons of previous socialist attempts, but capitalism? That’s shown to be corrupt and beyond repair.
As well, right now, under capitalism, your politicians are bought and paid for by capitalists. Power is already being abused beyond control. Under a socialist system, it would be illegal to donate to politicians. Political campaigns would run within a short, standardized window of time, with equal funding, and commercials would be illegal, it would just be a platform of ideas and opinions. The people would vote for the person who best represents them, normal people.
This exist in Cuba, right now. It’s SO much harder to take power from a system that actually represents regular citizens, instead of a system that is bought and paid for by the highest bidder.
Careful now buddy, the internet is no place for common sense acknowledgement of reality.
Sad life you must live if your common sense is this…
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The core tenant of every form of Communism, regardless of if said party or organisation follows it, is as follows: that the means of production should belong to the workers who work them. If the means of production are not in the hands of the workers, then they are not communist. If they are in the hands of a CEO or a corporation, you have private capitalism or market capitalis like the US. If you put them in the hands of a state, they are in the state, you get state capitalism ala China or the USSR.
The power structure of the state protects an upper class, be it billionaires or “the party”. If you abolish the state, but not capitalism, capitalism will rebuild the state (which is why Anarcho capitalism fails every time) and vice versa (which is what happens with Marxist Leninism).
For a Communist or communalist society to work it needs to be Anarchist or classically Libertarian (aka like Bakunin or Kropotkin proposed, not “money first”). It needs to have a horizontal and democratic decision making process that is decentralised, federated, and involves all the members of the community or communities effected. If there is to be a state, it should be to facilitate the colaboration of communities in a bottom up manner. These are the features of almost every single effective or successful Anarchist or Socialist movements from Rojava or the Zapatistas, as well as non-political movements like the Open Source Movement, railway preservatiion movement, and even the early RNLI.
The power structure thant would forbid a free market would be the collective weight of everyone else rather than a state that, sooner or later, becomes the jackboot of capital.
how would such an anarchist/liberal stateless communist organization defend itself from invasion?
So the first thing to consider is that anarchy is a very diverse field of thought, so there isn’t one answer to questions about it.
An anarchist society faced with violence from outsiders could:
- Form militias on a voluntary basis. Transitive hierarchical structure can be voluntary and compatible with anarchism (think of a volunteer fire department). Remember, the key is such efforts are not coercive in an anarchist community, they are voluntary and collaborative so they require the community having the will to organize for its own defense.
- Employ decentralized resistance / guerilla warfare. This can be extremely effective.
- If allies and neighbors are watching, engage in nonviolent resistance. This is difficult and requires getting the message out to other groups and the attacker’s constituency to pressure them.
- Diplomacy. Anarchists generally don’t support representationalism and prefer consensus, but communities can choose to empower diplomats and make deals with others when the time calls for it. This could be with other anarchist communities, other states to ask for aid, or even with the attacker. Building solidarity with like minded and compassionate communities can endanger the attacking group’s reputation and resources, and can be a powerful deterrent to an aggressor.
Remember that an attacker wants something. If they aren’t getting what they want out of a conflict, or if the costs are greater than what is gained, they are likely to stop pursuing it. Anarchist communities likely have different values, and resource extraction is the most likely reason to attack such a community; making it extremely difficult or impossible to do that is something an organized community can achieve.
Think about Vietnam; while Vietnam was and is not anarchist or non-hierarchical, a decentralized military strategy with deep support from the population led to victory over a technologically superior invader. For an example closer to anarchy, you can read up on the Zapatistas, who employed decentralized resistance to the Mexican government and won.
Last, I want to add that the above is more or less true of any community or country that is attacked by a larger force, whether they are communist, or capitalist, or stateless. Economic and social structure are not going to protect any group from being attacked, and doesn’t guarantee victory no matter how organized the defense may be.
Transitive hierarchical structure
What do you mean by “transitive”?
Note that one of the merits behind an effective modern army is its ability to maintain regular troops that are trained, equipped, drilled and rotated with a reserve on a regular basis - something that’s usually achieved with a centralized form of organization and is backed by resources that in the current day are provided by a state. What’s the plan on providing modern weaponry, persistent intelligence, as well as infrastructures for logistic, communication, ordinance etc’ for a militia that’s “transitive” by nature? who’s going to keep an eye on those resources and make sure they don’t breed power tripping warlords, terrorists or even simple crime organizations? what’s the plan on keeping track of munitions and deadly weapons after the militia is disbanded?
Employ decentralized resistance / guerilla warfare. This can be extremely effective.
Highly effective to a degree and can still be bleed-out, toppled or at the very least kept under control with a more organized army. Also decentralization can easily turn to feudalism with armed groups if they start going against each other for whatever reason, such as in the case of political subversion exploiting inherit weaknesses in a non-centralized structure (divide and conquer, etc’).
If allies and neighbors are watching, engage in nonviolent resistance. This is difficult and requires getting the message out to other groups and the attacker’s constituency to pressure them.
What’s a nonviolent resistance going to do to a threat actor who’s eventual plan is political subversion and/or an incursion? why would they give a s*it as long as the war-effort on their side goes uninterrupted by the target or their allies until they decide to escalate?
The system you describe cannot exist. An anarchist or libertarian state in the real world can neither regulate nor defend itself from other states. It’s a fantasy that would collapse immediately upon implementation in all possible real world circumstances.
@MostlyBirds @abbiistabbii, anarchy is the system to which a mature and sovereign society automatically converges, but for this current humanity is still too young as specie, the evolutionary state can be compared with that of a child in puberty, regarding behavior. An anarchic system would necessarily lead to a collapse total of the current society (Lord of the Flies effect). A long way still to go.
anarchy is the system to which a mature and sovereign society automatically converges, but for this current humanity is still too young as specie, the evolutionary state can be compared with that of a child in puberty, regarding behavior.
This is completely made up nonsense. There’s a reason no one takes anarchists seriously.
If we’re following Marx’s historical materialism (that society has transitions has a society, roughly being feudalism -> capitalism -> socialism -> communism), I think the next best step is a transition from capitalism to socialism is union ownership. Personally, I think worker co-ops and general syndicalism with a competing in a market for the worker owned businesses would be a great in between step that would not involve a crushingly oppressive state. The goal should be to keep it decentralized so one power structure being consumed by corruption doesn’t sink the fleet
Achieving communism thru the state (called vanguard parties) isn’t all that well liked by many types of socialists and communists, especially those of us in the west. A lot of us prefer to take inspiration from mid-1900s labor groups who, while not achieving socialism that we want, created infinitely better working conditions and power dynamics for working class people. Most of the people who ran those organizations were socialists/communists in and of themselves, and they often times relied more upon collective direct action than just electoralism.
Uhm… who exactly is doing that last part, other than bad-faith actors?
People that don’t see any problem with communism? Where the first and obvious problem is that it’s inherently (and ironically) a fascist system…
Well capitalism is about making a selfish choice. We have no significant capital, so maybe they cut us in or don’t be surprised when some don’t care for the system.
- Universal access to healthcare, food, water, shelter, electricity, and education without cost.
- Prohibit the operation of businesses or investments in basic necessities mentioned in previous point.
- Non-essential amenities such as entertainment, fashion, travel, luxury goods etc continue to be available for purchase.
- A reasonable tax structure that ensures higher taxes for the rich.
Is that Communism? Is that too much to ask for?
That’s more like socialism though, where capitalism coexist with worker/government run corporations.
Reading arguments about these concepts while many people completely disagree what their definitions are feels like treading water waiting to exhaust myself and drown.
Maybe the point is the policies and anyone who argues about words is part of the problem.
Well the definitions are pretty clear, some people might just be uninformed because mixing the two has been very common in the right’s communication for decades.
Its more of a social democracy but no it is not too much to ask for. It should be the baseline
Your very first point list out 99% of what’s there is to life. Yeah, it is too much to ask.
Your first and second point combined basically means that everybody has to live in some government designed and funded flat. If you don’t like that, there’s nothing to be done. Same with food and everything. Oh you don’t like the government mandated 1500kcal protein slurry per day? Sucks to be you then… Of course it doesn’t have to be bad, but you are enabling a system where it could be bad and nobody could do anything about it.
Yeah, I don’t see why #2 is necessary. Make the government have to compete with the free market. If you’re poor, you get a government-funded apartment, but if you’re wealthy, you can afford a luxury condo.
There are food banks in my city, and nobody believes that they’re a threat and they’re going to put supermarkets out of business. You could just have standardized, ubiquitous food banks run by the government.
I think they mean all this business with water and housing. Investment properties are a plague all over this country. They inflate the price of housing so that someone can make a living off of someone else’s need for shelter.
Since China is communist like tankies believe, you also forgot a fascist police state with total control over the internet tot he point where you’ll get a police visit if you post a meme critical of the government.
Making this meme took longer than opening a book to understand what communism actually is.
What everyone points to as “communism” shares more in common with capitalism than anything else. They had authoritarian rulers and a small wealthy class that lords over the rest of the populace.
There is nothing “worker owned” about these examples and it only serves to spread FUD about moving away from capitalism towards a more human centric economy
Communism isn’t the issue the same way Capitalism isn’t the issue, the issue is rich people abusing working class and poor people. Removing democracy from these systems just make them absolutely horrid in the long run. Also China isn’t communist it’s state capitalist dictatorship.
China are ABSOLUTLEY communists, just the smarter type
It’s just like Hitler’s party’s name. They said that they are socialists, but in practice it wasn’t true at all.
How are they communist? Their economy is obviously heavily based on capitalism, no redistribution of wealth. The only thing that lines up is the promise of socializing in the future? Though I don’t believe western politicians nevermind Chinese dictators.
Finally, a smart person here
I wonder, are people advocating for a system similar to the USSR or North Korea? Or actual communism?
Neither of those countries ever claimed to have a communist mode of production. Being led by a Communist Party and having a communist economic system are two different things. The USSR never claimed to have achieved communism, they achieved socialism (a transitionary phase between capitalism and communism) according to Marxist-Leninist theory.
This is a quote from Engels describing such a transitionary system:
What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.
If an advanced capitalist country in the imperial Core, today, attempted a similar transition, it would be nothing like these other examples because our material conditions are entirely different (Marx didn’t expect communism to be tried within individual countries in isolation or within undeveloped countries). Marx didn’t provide a blueprint for transitioning to communism because what that looks like is different in every country and material situation etc.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong but if you boil it all down communism is when the state acts as a central power to decide how to allocate wealth and resources to the people. Does anyone here actually think you could trust the state ever ever ever to do this right? You can’t trust a centralized power no matter how much they claim to be of the people. It’s not that the state is inherently evil, it’s that humans are incredibly biased and flawed.
Communism is when no state as central power.
Communism is a community dictating how it should behave itself and how it allocates skills and resources.
If authoritarian centralized power focused on capital is Reddit, decentralized independent federated communities that dictate how they should behave themselves and allocate skills and resources would be lemmy
Thanks for the reply and I hear what you’re saying however I think the issue with that argument is that each federated community still has centralized admins with authority. For example Ruud at lemmy world could wake up one day and impose some crazy shit. Or he could give his friends better moderating positions than others, etc.
Seems like an analogy to help you understand, not an argument. No analogy is perfect.
My point is that even in community based organizations you still have human administrators who have to make decisions for the community which ultimately leads to corruption of the system. That’s what my original argument was.
Edit: will go ahead and add that the same thing happens in capitalism however the huge difference is that there any many capital owners to distribute resources (ie companies, corporations, the state) VS in communism it is only the state that distributes the resources.
How does the state distribute resources if the state doesn’t exist under communism? I think you might be misunderstanding the basics of communism.
Maybe so. But, in reality every communist country has a state. I get that could be the “transitory” stage between capitalism and pure communism, or a tainted form of communism altogether. Cool. Let’s assume we get past that and are able to get to that idealized version of communism. Let’s have a thought experiment. Let me preface by saying I am not trying to have a gotcha moment, but honestly think this through out loud. In pure communism, who manages the water utilities? Like, who makes sure that water is delivered to the people and that it is safe to drink?
I don’t really think you need a state to have administrative powers over large things like food production, power, and other utilities. Ideally the communities would be fully self sufficient in power, food, water, housing, etc. Big power plants that supply power to a massive amount of people would be difficult to set up, but is still possible with enough community effort.
The biggest threat to communism and socialism is that capitalist countries will starve them out of international trade (or do more active things to try to prevent a successful communist movement) because they won’t play ball. It would be extremely easy for a capitalist team to destroy a few small crops and kill any chance of self sufficiency- meaning they’d have to depend on trade with those capitalist countries.
Yeah it’s not a perfect metaphor. Though, I guess even if an admin is terrible and abused their power, it has way less influence on Lemmy as a whole than if Spez abused their power on Reddit. Also, you’re free to create and host your own instance and run it however you’d like.
To make the metaphor more apt, every member of the server would own a part of the server and could vote democratically on how they want the server to run. It would involve no hierarchies of power, so there’s no mods and admins. Though, I really don’t know how this would work technically in regards to having thousands of people own a server (or if it’s even possible).
So like the Lemmy platform, communism would be easier to manage the less people are involved. That’s why people say that communism only works in tribes and small villages. I’m not under the illusion that it wouldn’t be difficult, and I think communism would lead to a bit more of an insular society as a whole, but I think that if everyone had realistic expectations and goals, it definitely seems more ideal that the current situation where we’re just being yanked around by the whims of ultra rich people trying to skim more from the top of the people doing actual work.
Oh man, Lemmygrad will not like this one bit.
That echo chamber doesn’t like anything but themselves. Thin skinned, ban happy folks. Lol
comment section frustratingly filled with McCarthy-brained liberals who have never critically examined their preconceptions about communism
I guess I just really don’t understand the draw. Communism is a nice thought, until actual people are involved. People are corruptible, which is why communism is seen as utopian. It’s an ideal that only works under perfect circumstances.
I guess I just really don’t understand the draw.
CommunismCapitalism is a nice thought, until actual people are involved. People are corruptible, which is whycommunismcapitalism is seen as utopian. It’s an ideal that only works under perfect circumstances.Bullshit take. Show me one instance of communism implemented in a democracy and I’ll agree to your point, but you can’t because there isn’t one.
Pretty sure I explicitly struck out all references to communism so I don’t know what you’re talking about. My comment was about the fanciful idealism required to justify capitalism. Show me one instance of capitalism implemented in democracy (which didn’t devolve into cronyism).
Switzerland? Netherlands? Hell, even France, Germany?
Invoking cronyism as a downside in itself is silly. It’s not what matters, what matters is the quality of life. And just because US and a few other capitalist countries have drank from the neoliberal fountain and are unable to stop, it doesn’t mean that that is the only way. In fact social democracies, of which there are quite a few examples around the world, are pretty much still capitalist democracies whit none of the crap neoliberal ideas lead to.
Every one of those four is a mixed economy with significant central economic planning and regulation. Without substantial oversight, capitalism tends to degrade into private monopolies with feudalistic tendencies over time. Like I said, it’s an idealistic system which looks great until actual people are involved. Then you have to either modify it past anything but a spiritual similarity, or down in the neoliberal fountain.
Every one of those four is a mixed economy with significant central economic planning and regulation.
Every one of those four economies are democratic capitalist economies. What is mixed?
Yes, I don’t disagree, except far more people benefit from our form of capitalism, and you don’t see the death numbers you do from the absolute rule that communism demands.
This isn’t to say there isn’t any death due to capitalism. Or any strife, just certainly not on the same scale. I would say out biggest death toll comes at the hands of our military-industrial-complex being capitolistic.
The problem is, there’s nothing better yet.
Add up chattel slavery, Trail of Tears, proxy wars, not-so-proxy wars, the general condition of the M-I-C you’ve mentioned, the general plight of the Global South, etc etc etc, and get back to me. I’m not sure the advantage is so definitive as you assert. “Externalities”, the economists call them.
It 100% does not even come close. Not saying those deaths weren’t terrible or unavoidable, absolutely not.
But also, you can’t blame a capitolistic society for trail of tears or any other mass genocide that came before that. We didn’t become capitolistic until 10 years after Trail of Tears ended.
Edit to add: granted, that doesn’t say much about how Native Americans were treated post TOT. Though, it’s certainly through capitalism that Indian casinos have become so successful. 245 tribes own casinos today, all of which rake in the funds.
Firstly, I know you’re not going to justify genocide by saying the survivors of that genocide get to have casinos. That’s so outrageously, ghoulishly evil that you can’t possibly have meant that and I must have misunderstood.
Secondly, where do you get the idea that capitalism started in America in 1860?
Thirdly, you ignored everything else I asked you to add up. You made no mention of slavery, or the Global South.
Fourthly, what’s fundamentally different between the colonial exploitations of mercantilism and private exploitations of capitalism?
I call your arithmetical integrity, or more laughably your ability, into question.
Lol. You definitely misunderstood. I didn’t say in my comment that TOT was okay because now they have cassinos. I’m not sure how you could possibly get that out of what I wrote. The claim I’m arguing against is that capitalism has caused more deaths than communism, which isn’t the case. Especially since capitalism wasn’t America’s economic governing factor until - yup - the 1860. Capitalism wasn’t the cause of the TOT, but it was the cause of the survivors ability to create wealth for their tribes.
Again, because you somehow twisted what I wrote into saying it’s okay that all those people died because casinos, the TOT was horrific. It shouldn’t have happened. Nothing can make up for that, even the wealth made by their survivors. But it wasn’t caused by capitalism, which is the original claim.
And no, I wasn’t ignoring everything else you pointed to in terms of deaths under capitalism, because slavery and other horrors certainly were due to capitalism here in America. Though, it has nothing against rhe numbers stacked under communist rule.
I also want to point out that there are going to be deaths under every form of economic governance, because that’s just human nature. There will always be people that kill other people, for a variety of reasons. The goal, then, is to find the one governance that kills the least amount of people in total.
I’ll also point out that it’s not like capitalism was absent one day in America, and then suddenly it was governing the country. Capitalism, like most forms of economic rulings, was a slow creep. It happened in small stages until the 1860s, when it became the dominating force in America.
Capitalism and Communism aren’t a binary thing but instead something on a spectrum. Both ends of the spectrum are terrible and inhumane. The point is finding a balance.
The US is too capitalist and the UDSSR was too communist.
I think many modern european countries strike a good middle ground.
