Think harder. I’m not “moving goalposts”, I’m saying, if life in the countryside was so bad during soviet times, why are people from the countryside moving out now and not before… You said “tell that to the people living on the countryside”, the reality is that the people in the countryside were forced to leave the countryside after communism. So why don’t you go ask them?
No, I mean that it’s hypocritical criticising the other administration for following the same trend
Nah seriously, look up the role of the IMF in the “restructuring” of the Russian economy. And look up the social and economic consequences
How long did it last in the Weimar Republic (whose ideology you failed to mention btw). And when was it implemented in the rest of Europe.
But yeah for how long will our glorious liberal democracies have affordable healthcare and pensions, we’ve done nothing but degrade them for the past 30 years because apparently doing better is communism
No, it didn’t “fail” by any historical account. If you look up even on Wikipedia, which has an extremely western bias, you’ll see that the article is called , “dissolution” of the USSR, not failure or crumbling or whatever revisionist word of the day you wanna choose. The USSR was booming, it enjoyed overwhelming legitimacy in the vast majority of its republics (with some notable exceptions in the Baltics mostly) as proven by the soviet referendum to maintain the USSR, and it was only dissolved from the top down by a few party members, not a failure or crumbling by any means. The 90s crisis wasn’t created by socialism, it was created by the newly formed capitalist government which auctioned the country to the most corrupt bidder and created the russian oligarchy that we all hate now. It was literally directed by western institutions like the International Monetary Fund and economists from MIT, you can feel free to study this subject in the slightest if you’re interested and you’ll see that what I’m saying is right (clearly you haven’t done so before).
Data says otherwise. Since the end of the soviet block, there’s been a massive migration outwards from the countryside in favour of urban life all over the former socialist republics. Maybe the idea of subsidizing the infrastructure of the countryside despite it not making sense within capitalism wasn’t such a bad idea after all… Please, try to respond to that: why are people flocking from the degrading countryside in post soviet countries
And how much did they expand in Europe and how long did they last? Anyway, nice that you can only respond to that point
ROFL, the consumer index that your first source portrays, is still twice that of Canada at 86 points Vs 45, and Germany’s consumer index is -15 points… It’s on par with Australia and Spain, so what does that tell you?
The rest aren’t really indicators of Chinese people seeing the economy struggling aren’t they? They’re just western reports predicting the imminent collapse of the Chinese economy… as they’ve been doing for the past 20 years
It turned a backwater pre-capitalist empire where 80% of the population were poor farmers, into the second world power in unprecedentedly quick industrialization and development, defeated the Nazis and prevented their extermination of the Slavic people including Poles and Ukrainians, it guaranteed rights to women and to national minorities like Kazakh, Uzbeki, Georgians, Armenians, it established for the first time in history concepts like socialized healthcare and pensions for every citizen which western Europe later emulated… After being dismantled, of which it’s been 33 years, Russia still hasn’t recovered the GDP per capita of the USSR, so what does that tell you about how well liberalism is working in Russia?
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And access to transport was widely available to the overwhelming majority of the population through trains, trams, buses and trolleybuses. Even if your American mind can’t comprehend this fact, owning a car isn’t the ultimate form of mobility, there are alternatives that are arguably better. City design was centered around walkability, density and public transit; metro systems were luxurious and a predicament all out of themselves, and housing being generally obtained through the worker’s union implied that workers usually lived in relative proximity to their workplaces.
The soviet economy was a developing, centrally planned economy, not running under the premise of overproduction and surplus but running under the premise of 5-year plans of production. There was full employment, and almost complete usage of the raw materials extracted and industrial goods produced. Making twice as many cars, implied removing all of that labor and those resources from another sector of the economy. When the premise isn’t to “make money selling cars to rich people”, but to “grant adequate material conditions and welfare to every citizen”, you have to make decisions like that. More cars could have implied, for example, fewer hospital beds or fewer trams, but my point is that making more private cars would have NECESSARILY meant making less of something else of which there’s also no surplus (because the premise of the USSR was the non-existence of surplus). It’s very easy to have surpluses in a capitalist economy when you don’t care about 80% of the population not having access to the goods and services available, when you want everyone to have access it’s a different story.
For the last time, I’m not the ultimate supporter of themselves Chinese model of Communism, now that I’ve shown you that your position stems from being uneducated about socialism, its meaning, and its history, you resort to “how many gazillionaires” because you’re not trying to have a civilised discussion. You have a preconceived notion that “China isn’t communism”, which is fine, so do I, but when confronted with the discrepancies within the communist movement and how there are legitimate arguments to call it socialist and on the way to communism, you just spout your initial position again with stronger words. I’ll tell you what I said at the beginning: I don’t care whether it’s communist or not, but you saying “hurr durr no socialism if billionaires” is a shitty argument from ignorance.
especially the Chinese
Source?
The sentiment about work, investment, economic prospects, consumption are all quite bad
Source?
My brother in Christ, Mensheviks and Dengists were against the consolidation of centralised socialist economy before the historical consolidation of capital in the hands of the bourgeoisie, the difference being that Menshevism died off and Dengism ended up taking the lead after Maoism. The restoration of capital is simply a consequence of Dengism taking over AFTER Maoism, not because Dengists believed there should be first Maoism and then Dengism.
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when I pointed out that people had to wait for years to get a car, and bread lines were common
Breadlines weren’t common. Breadlines never took place in the USSR between WW2 ending and Perestroika taking place, you’re being ahistorical. Food supply wasn’t secure for all the population in any nation until the green revolution, the USSR being no exception to that.
Regarding waiting for a car, the soviet economy simply didn’t prioritize car manufacturing. The planning didn’t intend for every citizen to have a car in the 70s or 80s, they didn’t intend to make so many cars, so naturally, the people who had the wealth to buy a car, had to wait in waiting lists to get one, it’s not so hard to understand. There are no waiting lists in capitalism because you can segregate 99% of the population from consuming a particular good simply by making it expensive. In socialism, when you don’t have extreme inequality, most people will have access to purchase power for the vast majority of goods you produce. This in turn means that either you manufacture literally from the start one product for every citizen, or there will be waiting lists, it’s really as simple as that.
When you can’t afford a house in capitalism until you’re 35 (if you can ever afford it) you aren’t technically in a waiting list, so even if there’s only new housing for 5% of the population every year, there will be no “waiting list” because simply the prices will go up until only 5% can afford it. In socialism, the same 5% of housing can be afforded by 50% of people, so the way to allocate the goods is a waiting list instead of priority through wealth accumulation.
Do you really fail to understand this?
From Wikipedia article on Mensheviks: (you’ve been talking to someone else in the comments)
Mensheviks came to be associated with the position that a bourgeois-democratic revolution and period of capitalism would need to occur before the conditions for a socialist revolution emerged.
So yes, mate, there are literal historical figures of communism debating this exact same issue that you find so laughable, it’s literally the raison d’etre of the word Bolshevism. There is no specific “Marx passage” as if it was the bible, where it says “in case some fella called Mao organizes a socialist revolution in a peasant agrarian society, pls pull it back to capitalism first, and then go to socialism once it’s capitalist, ok?” If you generally read Marx, you can see how he puts socialism as the necessary and logical end of capitalism, as something inevitable that will happen because capitalism will bring forward the material conditions for the revolution. But despite that, Marx also was a highly politically involved individual, who pushed forward momentously the socialist movement in Europe together with Engels.
Marx isn’t a gospel that you’re supposed to be able to chant and have undying faith for, it’s an analysis of reality that you can agree or disagree with, which explains the existence of different flavours of communism such as menshevism and bolshevism or such as Maoism and Dengism, which can be explained by the material and historical conditions leading up to those moments. Marx himself said that Marxism has to be constantly interpreting the reality of the moment and critically adapting everything. So if you’re looking for a direct quote from Marx about Dengism or Menshevism, I’m not here to provide that, I’m here to tell you that the definition you consider stupid has been hotly debated for a hundred fucking years, so maybe it’s not so stupid.
And I’m saying that you have clearly not dedicated much time to thinking about or studying the issue. I’m a Marxist-Leninist, so I’m not very supportive of Dengism, but if you listen to Dengists and Mensheviks they will tell you that China still has a communist party in power (as does Vietnam and as does Laos) whereas the former USSR has a capitalist proto-fascist in government. Only time will tell who’s really right, and whether china shifts to a less market-socialism society and more towards a democratic centrally planned economy in the hands of the workers and the state.
the situation on the other side of the planet
Not so far down the planet when it’s your government funding the genocide, giving the perpetrators their political legitimacy in the international sphere, and literally shipping the weapons with which the genocide is carried out.
go fight with hamas
Go make a counter-reactionary terrorist insurgency or political group in the US if you’re so concerned about the other types of rights you’ll lose if Trump gets into office
The “slave labor” thing about china is 40 years too late. China now has wildly better working conditions than India or Phillipines or Indonesia or Malaysia.
Aren’t you concerned with the cold-war-like escalation that we’re seeing the US adopt against china?