this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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We seized some means of production... sort of?
There have been at least two different countries seize the means of production over the years, it didn't really work out for either of them. Turns out they just swapped one bourgeoise class for another, while the peasants and proles starved.
What you said is fractally wrong.
What do fractals have to do with this?
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fractal_wrongness
Really? So the USSR and China during the cultural revolution were utopias where everyone had their basic needs met, and nobody went hungry?
I bet they link some bs survey about how life is great in China
China isn't communist anymore anyway.
It absolutely is.
Sorry bud, they're as capitalist as any other country these days. They even have billionaires now.
Sorry bud, that's just an incredibly ignorant statement. If China was as capitalist as any other country then we'd see the same things happening in China that we see happening in actual capitalist countries. A good comparison would be with India that started roughly in the same place as China after WW2, but took capitalist route.
It's also pretty funny that you seem to be suggesting is that you know better than 1.4 billion people actually living in China what their political system is. China is a state governed by the Communist party where Marxism-Leninism is the official state ideology. 87.6% of young Chinese identify with Marxism, and the party has 95 million members. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that these people do in fact understand what socialism is and what kind of a system they have.
Having special economic zones where capitalism is allowed does not make China capitalist any more than having some social services make Canada communist. One key difference with China is that all the essential industry is state owned, and capitalists do not appear to be in charge of the government. However, even Marx argued that capitalism is likely a necessary stage for developing productive resources needed for socialism and communism to be possible.
One simple test to consider is that China doesn't suffer from regular crashes seen under capitalism. An inherent contradiction within capitalism is that the capitalists always want to cut pay for their employees to minimize the costs, while they also require consumers with enough spending power to consume the commodities they produce. This is why capitalism results in regular economic crashes when wages fall below the point where consumption can keep up with the rate of commodity production. At that point you end up with overproduction and a crash. If China was capitalist then it should be experiencing these kinds of crashes regularly just like actual capitalist nations are in the Western world.
And a related point is that quality of life in China continues to steadily improve and the government is actively working on doing things like eliminating poverty, creating public infrastructure, providing healthcare, housing, food, and education for all citizens. Chinese government practically eliminated poverty, and in fact China is the only place in a world where any meaningful poverty reduction is happening. If we take China out of the equation poverty actually increased in real terms:
China also massively invests in infrastructure. They used more concrete in 3 years than US in all of 20th century, they built 27,000km of high speed rail in a decade. 90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it's the most populous country on the planet. Finally, even NYT admits that people in China enjoy high social mobility unlike people living under capitalism.
These are just a few examples of things that simply do not happen under capitalism.
Highly recommend reading this book to actually educate yourself on how Chinese system actually works instead of regurgitating nonsense https://redletterspp.com/products/the-east-is-still-red
Their wealth disparity is on par with the US. If they are communist, they are failing hardcore.
Everything that contradicts western propaganda is bs. Such galaxy brain logic you've got there.
Well, let's just see what happened during cultural revolution, sure seems like an improvement over what was happening before https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25495509/
Meanwhile, Russia went from a backwards agrarian society where people travelled by horse and carriage to being the first in space in the span of 40 years. Russia showed incredible growth after the revolution that surpassed the rest of the world:
USSR provided free education to all citizens resulting in literacy rising from 33% to 99.9%:
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960's, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:
USSR moved from 58.5-hour work weeks to 41.6 hour work weeks (-0.36 h/yr) between 1913 and 1960:
USSR averaged 22 days of paid leave in 1986 while USA averaged 7.6 in 1996:
In 1987, people in the USSR could retire with pension at 55 (female) and 60 (male) while receiving 50% of their wages at a at minimum. Meanwhile, in USA the average retirement age was 62-67 and the average (not median) retiree household in the USA could expect $48k/yr which comes out to 65% of the 74k average (not median) household income in 2016:
GDP took off after socialism was established and then collapsed with the reintroduction of capitalism:
The Soviet Union had the highest physician/patient ratio in the world. USSR had 42 doctors per 10,000 population compared to 24 in Denmark and Sweden, and 19 in US:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0735675784900482 (sci-hub for access)
USSR defeated a smallpox epidemic in a matter of 19 days https://www.rbth.com/history/331857-how-ussr-defeated-black-smallpox
The Social Consequences of Soviet Immunization Policies https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1997-812-03g-Hoch.pdf
These are just some of the biggest technological and social achievements of the Soviet Union.
academic studies on USSR
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possible:
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
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, how do people who lived under communism feel now that they got a taste of capitalism?
Adult mortality increased enormously in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union when the Soviet system collapsed 30 years ago. https://archive.ph/9Z12u
Former Soviet Countries See More Harm From Breakup https://news.gallup.com/poll/166538/former-soviet-countries-harm-breakup.aspx
The Free market paradise goes East chapters in Blackshirts and Reds details some more results of the transition to capitalism.
I love how either no one anwers to these, or they claim they're made up after pretending that they're more informed and definitely not living in their own propaganda reality.
I bet the response to this will be that they don't have time for these walls of text because they're too busy working.
Probably because nobody is going to read a big wall of text like that, with the sole purpose of debunking. People have better things to do with their time.
TheRadBrad: "How conVENient"
I mean, you are comparing it to the US, which is about the worse country in the west that is still called "developed".
Do the same with Norway, Finland, Denmark or Sweden. Your choice.
Oh you mean compare with colonial regimes that brutally exploit the rest of the world to prop up their own standard of living?
If you're comfortable with these sort of things happening so you can live well then what else is there to say https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/12/mars-nestle-and-hershey-to-face-landmark-child-slavery-lawsuit-in-us
I'd rather have no source than that source
Ever heard of Cambodia?
And Pol Pot got deposed by Vietnam after they kicked the US out. They really should get more credit...
That's another one. They killed a large chunk of their population, didn't they?
Between 21-24%
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide
Jesus, I'd forgotten just how bad it was.
And it took until 1997 to arrest Pol Pot. He does of a heart attack the following year.
They literally only claimed to be communist for a few years out of their decades long rule. They had cia connections. The vietnamese communists overthrew them and installed a communist democracy. But sure, they're communist /s.
This Cambodia? https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/03/20/american-bombing-50-years-ago-still-shapes-cambodian-agriculture
Yes that one, the one with all the Chinese land mines, both countries have done shitty things, there are no good guys
I think I'm going to call people like you Tankards, like a tankie, but with added tard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_mines_in_Cambodia
Only question is what the fuck was US doing murdering people half way across the world. I guess that's the whole missionary mentality coming from enlightened Europeans where your tradition is to go around the world to kill and enslave people.
My tradition? All those people are dead, and I'm pretty sure the Barbary pirates weren't European but still took slaves, as did most of Asia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Asia
Judging historical events by today's standards is fucking stupid.
The CCP is literally enslaving and sterilising Uyghurs right now, cretin
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22311356/china-uyghur-birthrate-sterilization-genocide
The only thing that's fucking stupid here is pretending that the west isn't practising colonialism today and that your standard of living isn't subsidized by the people literally enslaved by western companies https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/12/mars-nestle-and-hershey-to-face-landmark-child-slavery-lawsuit-in-us
Yeah you keep on peddling debunked conspiracy theories there since that's all you've got to wok with. Weird how Uyghur population keeps growing. China can't even get genocide right apparently. Should probably learn from the brits how to do it right.
Yet more whataboutism, suprise
Fuck off and learn something instead of spamming my inbox Tankard
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/xinjiang-uyghur-crackdown-population-decline-by-yi-fuxian-2022-07
Love how you trolls always reach for whataboutism. How dare you hold countries to the same moral standard you say as you adorably stomp your little feets. Meanwhile, here's what an actual genocide looks like https://bylinetimes.com/2021/09/15/up-to-six-million-people-the-unrecorded-fatalities-of-the-war-on-terror/
Tankard, for the last time, two wrongs don't make a right
In the west we are free to protest, in CCP land or Russia, you are not. End of discussion.
LMFAO https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/01/imprisoned-51-weeks-protesting-britain-police-state
Yes, the Tories passed stupid laws for votes.
When they get voted out, the laws can be repealed.
It's called a democracy, tankard
How do the people in authoritative one party countries change the laws? Dur?
yup, that's the kind of coping I'm here for