Sickist thanks for the reply, and i'm open to talking about this stuff any time. i have been lacking a lot of irl political discussion due to work lately, so i have been more active with it online.
Socialism tends to be the name that these Marxist-Leninist countries use, which is why I dislike "that" Socialism.
i'll start here. i am not going to bore you with definitions of socialism/communism, as i am sure you have looked those up before. what you are referring to by "that" socialism is marxist-leninism, i.e. the derivative of socialism practiced in many revolutions from 1910-1960s across the globe, and the only form of socialism (authentic) which has genuinely seen great success. socialism by definition is a transition period towards communism, which is attainable once class antagonisms, and the state (not the government, those two terms are often confused) recedes.
Actual Socialism I'm still personally not a fan of due to my belief that it won't work for the US as well as it has for places like Sweden or Norway, although a part of me is convinced that Sweden's success is partial due to the US paying for half it's military. To be fair to Sweden, the US pays for a good chunk of basically all of our NATO allies' militaries for some reason, giving the European nations much more room for social spending.
if you have looked up the definitions of socialism/communism, then you should be able to recognize that sweden, along with other nordic model countries, are indeed
not socialist, nor are they attempting to carve out a path towards socialism. erroneously termed the "middle path," the nordic model does
not in any form attempt to attain socialism, merely to reroute the surplus of capitalism back inward, instead of entirely remaining in the hands of private capital through means of high taxation and cooperative social funding. socialism, in a short summary, is completely distinct from the capitalist mode of production in its erasure (again, transition period, so it is not complete) of extraction of surplus value from the workers. these private industries you see in sweden, denmark, etc. would not exist in the form you see them now. merely pooling resources through mutual funds extracted from labor value does not equate to socialism; otherwise, if taxation if socialist, then the united states, the uk, etc. are all socialist havens. socialism's theoretical element dies out, and becomes a mere construction of tax rates and mathematics. clearly, this is not what the ussr, china, or other socialist countries attempted. if they had been merely another iteration of the nordic model, or state fed capitalism, then we would not have even had a cold war -- they would have been ideologically integrated into our model.
your first mistake lies in not actually knowing what socialism is beyond the colloquial phrasing of it as "sharing" and "equality." neither of these qualities are absent from socialism, but they do not form the cornerstone of what socialism is, in fact they are quite irrelevant to it. from here, you need to learn not only about what socialism/communism is, but what defines capitalism if you wish to move further. i would suggest reading the seminal texts of economic theorists during the age of dual revolution, mainly excerpts from smith, ricardo, and later on people like marx. if you actually read these texts, you will quickly understand what these systems are, and their intertwined historical relationship. oddly enough, marx's labor theory of value rather heavily borrows from ricardo's, with distinctions precisely being in regard to the historical temporarily of its application.
I'm not going to try and defend Capitalism as the best system in the world. It's exploited people just as much as every other system has. There will never be a perfect system, realistically speaking.For example, let's compare Communist China to Britain-owned Hong Kong in 1960, 1980, and 2000. All aboard, we're back on the I-hate-the-CCP-train. In 1960, under Mao, China's life expectancy was 43.72 years, compared to Hong Kong's 66.96 years. In 1980, 2 years after China started adopting Capitalist policies, China's life expectancy sat at 66.84 years, and Hong Kong sat at 74.67 years, again a notable difference. Looking 20 years further into 2000, China's life expectancy was 71.40 years and Hong Kong's was 80.88 years.
On the note of China, I think China's culture and history are interesting. However, I think the Chinese Government's ongoing genocide of Uyghur Muslims and other religious minorities is not cool. I also don't think threatening your neighboring countries with invasion, especially an island that's been hold democratic elections for a long time, is cool. Therefore, I hate the Chinese Government (The CCP) and not the Chinese People. If that's a problem for anyone, I seriously ask you to reconsider your point of view.
i am glad that you brought up some historically relevant statistics of china, however, assuming they are accurate, they do not tell the full picture of china's history. previous to mao, china had a life expectancy far below even what it was in the 1960s. hong kong, a captured british territory as a result of the opium war, had exceeded both life expectancies greatly. this development, of course, is obvious. what your analysis crudely omits is that china was not only brutally imperialized by britain in the centuries prior, which effectively neutered its development through war and other brutal tactics, but also carved out specific enclaves within captured territories which, of course, reflected a life expectancy closer to the "developed" world. capitalism is a stage past what china was -- a feudal state. peasants are not known for living long fruitful lives, especially when their regime is being toiled with through war, a flood of drugs, and multiple reactionary movements brought from external sources. perhaps, hong kong was only so successful precisely because it suppressed and extracted development from elsewhere....
by your logic, you must also applaud the incredible,
record breaking ascension of life expectancy in china from that period onwards. if socialism as a system is so prone to failure, then how, under extreme external and internal pressures, did the life expectancy of china begin, and continue, to rise at an unbelievable pace? as of yet, socialism has not failed within china. if anything, it has been one of the most successful stories in all of human history to uplift a nation of billions out of feudal poverty into industrialized heights, and without capitalism at the helm no less. i believe you could likely find similar statistics for the british occupation of india.
your second point betrays the first one. i agree that chinese culture/history is interesting, which is why i attempt to understand it moreso than a dichotomy of non-existence/communism. on your latter two points, regarding the claimed genocide of the uyghur muslims, and what i assume is a reference to taiwan, then i would implore you to do more research beyond what is directed at you from mass media. taiwan is the most inexplicable, and any logical political observer not blinded by biased sinophobia should come to the conclusion that taiwan, essentially, is an illegitimate state. a political force lost a civil war, and fled. questions over what authority china has over it should end right there.
I mean, the Homelessness problem is not a thing of the past, it's definitely still a thing. Oh, and should I mention the literal human feces you can find just about around every corner in places like San Francisco. Unfortunately, the "Rag on location" is shifting from California, where dumb stuff like that was relatively confined to, to just big cities in general. City crime rates have skyrocketed after the whole "Defund the Police" arc, and these cities are just covered with garbage EVERYWHERE.
i was being sarcastic when i said homelessness was a thing of the past, along with my later quote of "the law is the law" to point out the absurdity of conservative rage in a constant cycle of attention and disinterest. perhaps to elucidate my real point, i can tell a story.
i live in a medium sized city in upstate new york. my rent is dirt cheap and my housing is garbage. every day, i walk downtown to take the bus to work, and then walk home taking the same bus. during the early hours of the morning, you can see homeless people wandering aimlessly, gathering cans from trashcans, and occasionally asking you for money. garbage is outside on the streets, the rivers run murky, and in general the city is burnt out, abandoned, and disgusting. so is the reality of urban decay. what once was a prosperous (relatively) city, has now fallen back on itself, and cannot seem to get up. defund the police has nothing on decades of urban decay in america's forgotten cities. it is an absurd misnomer, meant to attribute the decay of capitalism to a weak, transient political movement. such is another displacement of class-related problems to culture.
this is a constant reality of city life anywhere. at night, it only gets worse, and more disappointing. the reason california has such a terrible problem with homelessness is because of a motley of different causes. one, being that other cities, where it gets cold in the winter, literally ship their homeless off to other states so that they do not freeze. homeless is unavoidable in any city as long as we continue the way things are, but it is also incredibly undesirable. of course, the solution to homelessness remains ephemeral, if not completely removed from actual discussion of the homeless. people, not just conservatives, hate the disgusting lives of people forced to live out on the street with their illnesses and addictions, but fail to understand why they are out on the street in the first place.
However, that's when we established ourselves as a world superpower, and started doing everything for everyone. That was one of our worst foreign policy choices of the last 70 years. It's one thing to help rebuild and renew where things were destroyed, but we ended up being the world babysitter, and that's left us in the position we're in.
you have to ask yourself, did we really do this so we could be the world's babysitter, out of good-will, or did we do it to establish ourselves as the british empire had in the past, as the absolute unrivaled world power with access to finance capital, raw resources, new investment opportunities, and new alliances to make the most out of our economic boom following the war. the marshall plan was essentially a massive FDI ploy, and it worked not only in europe, but in africa, where took a major stake in the most important raw resources of the world, being oil, copper, iron ore, diamonds, among others. at the same time, we opened major stakes in the now bankrupt european strongholds of industry and finance, further cementing ourselves as the richest nation in the world, with ties financially, now dominants, to every other capitalist/developed country. the colonialism you later refer to as ending post ww2 merely gave way into a more developed form of neo-colonialism, where countries were ostensibly free, yet in reality had no ownership of their industries, and were in fact actively impeded from development. just as
there is no such thing as free lunch, there is no such thing as free aid. what could be described as "foreign aid" in the new language of the united nations was merely FDI mere decades prior.
there are of course, specifics attached to each of these cases. far too many to get into at the moment, but i will give you a quick outline so you can research further.
1. african states were previously ruled by colonial powers. these were, as you would likely agree, harsh relationships which had explicit power dynamics that were transparent.
2. ww1/ww2 made these relationships unsustainable due to the debt of many european nations, and the revolutionary waves sweeping countries now freed of military grasp. european powers, albeit slowly, receded.
3. that power vacuum was now handed over to a new ruler: the united states. however, the age of colonialism had passed. africa, however, still had numerous resources which were needed for further industrialization.
4. we, along with the remaining european powers, instead decided to heavily invest in the balkanized african states, in distinct currency zones, with industries which were entirely owned by our investment.
5. i will let you figure the rest out, but the end result is severe underdevelopment. if these countries develop further, as they did beyond colonialism, how would our interests react? would we be able to retain such wealth extractions from countries now acutely aware of their own potential? and additionally, ask yourself what role does foreign aid play in all of this.
again, your perception of the united states as a babysitter out of moral good and not financial obligation is, of course, absurd and misguided. we followed the path of development, not morals. a development which for the much of the 20th century granted us incredible returns, at the expense of other nations stunted in place.
That's the point of history: It's already happened! There's nothing we can do to undo awful stuff like Native American relocation or Slavery, it's in the past. What's important is moving forward from our mistakes. That's my whole problem with the stupid slavery reparations thing: People that support it are so stuck in the past that they can't train their eyes to move forward. We should all be able to agree that these mistakes were awful things, so let's move on.
and your answer, to the recent enslavement of tens of thousands of people is to say, move-on? i'm not even taking the position of reparations here, but this is just egregious. history happened -- so forget about it! yes, it is true, we cannot move backwards in time and rectify out mistakes. however, given we are currently alive in the present, we can do things to retroactively fix them. further, as with my last post, i believe you are once again confusing systematic operations with spontaneous actions of misjudgment, which makes them far more excusable. these were mistakes only in the most absolute technical definition of the word. in reality, they were intentional, planned out, systematic, and calculated moves. you love history and want to talk about it, but that is all you can do, talk.
how can you move forward, when everyday your life is just another reminder of the past?
And while we did royally screw up South America during the 1960's, the abuse of the developing world was mainly Europe's fault.
i believe you are severely underselling just how badly we screwed up latin america, the middle east, east asia, and even parts of europe.
I'm not going to ever use "It wasn't that bad" because 99% of the stuff we did had major blowback. Again, I am not a fan of US interventionism unless we absolutely have to!
ugh
It saddens me that American citizens hate this country with a passion for mistakes that everyone else is just as guilty of, especially when America has given so much for a lot of them
how, under any logical comparison, is the individual american
just as guilty or even theoretically capable of being just as guilty of the actions of its government and corporations.
Moving on, one statement that was made in a post further up "the law is the law". I find this statement to be a little concerning, as some laws are unjust and need to be repealed
i was being sarcastic. i was contrasting your complete anathema to censorship, yet immediate deference that the law is now in place.
It's perfectly capable to have return to being moderate, it just takes time and effort. Germany is a prime example of this, as I assure you today that the German people are not the Nazi's from the 1930s and 1940s who were radicalized by their horrible leading party. People just need to stop being so idealist about every single thing and start compromising to make a better future for ALL of us.
no, it is not. in short, the historical conditions which allowed such moderation and stability in the midst of capitalism are no longer present. instead, we are oscillating between crisis after crisis with no end in sight. we did not one day wake up and choose to be radical, in the same way the germans did not one day wake up and decide to be nazis. what you are describing is a purely reactionary movement which wishes to return to a past which is no longer feasible. this is a constantly occurring theme, with countries; the most obvious one i can think of is the eventual decay of feudal arrangements in europe as a result of liberal radicalism across a 60 year-or-so span. the economic reign of feudalism died out because the conditions that made it possible were no longer present. the same appears to be happening with capitalism. if you want a reason for this, re-read my 5 points on african investment and reflect that upon the greater global market, and the general trend of accumulation that has been happening throughout the past century of our dominance.
