Socialism
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic and constructive discussion from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
A certain knowledge of socialism is expected, if you are new to/interested in socialism, please visit c/Socialism101 before participating here. Socialism101 will gladly help you by answering questions, providing resources etc.
Memes go in c/Lefty Memes
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, upvoting good contributions and downvoting those of low-quality!
Rules
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith discussion is enforced here.
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such,
as well as condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavour.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry.
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Xenial Xerus" when answering question 2)
6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
7. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Queerphobia
- Ableism
- Classism
- Rape or assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)
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Problem there is a lot of communism fails because leaders become corrupt and the wealth still gets funneled to the few. Which isn't a problem with communism specifically. Communism would be sound if human beings were actually honorable. However, they're mostly not. In fact, generally speaking, humans are pretty shit, and a utopia of any sort simply isn't going to happen because of that. Human nature is too messy to allow it.
The problem here is that socialism is not communism. Under socialism compensation is based on individual contribution to work. This doesn't imply an equal share.
Oh, yep, that one is my bad. The general point still stands, though.
The point you were making that communism = bad stands.
But the post was about socialism (and misrepresenting what it is).
Absolutely not. If my point was communism = bad, then I would not have said it requires an honor from humanity they simply don't have. Ergo, communism is a rather honorable system, afaic. The problem is people will fuck up ideologies. Ideologies/idealities are not realties. In some cases you might get some stability for a few generations, but given enough time it will fuck up. And this goes for capitalism too, and pretty much every other form of government. It has nothing to do with communism specifically and is not because of communism.
Communism is fragile. It does work at the very small scale (a kibbutz) but the rotation of power requires that everyone in the chain needs to relinquish it at some time.
Central planning isn't great either, but maybe that can be offloaded to a dispassionate computer.
"Yellow cat or black cat, as long as it catches mice, it is a good cat." Adjustments need to be made according to the circumstances, just how it is. Though a lot of times, unfortunately, what needs to be done isn't what happens.
At this current time, I'd still be really hesitant to trust things to a computer. Both because humans can still mess with it and also that computers can be faulty themselves. Then again, we already have a lot managed by computers, so who knows, maybe it would work.
This is literally empirically false. Wealth inequality in, say, the USSR, plummeted to the lowest levels the region has ever seen. The top 1% in the USSR only had 4% of the total income, in modern capitalist Russia this number has risen at least to 20%. The top earners in the USSR were also not "le evil bureaucrat politicians", but university professors, artists, and other members of the intelligentsia. Income inequality actually evolved downwards during the existence of the country. Your analysis is not based on real data, it's based off vibes you've gotten from CIA propaganda.
I agree, but us communists are not utopians. Utopian socialism died in the mid 1800s, and Marx and Engels famously talked about Scientific Socialism as opposed to Utopian Socialism. The debate has been settled for almost 200 years: Marxists are not utopians.
You're commiting a type of McNamara fallacy here by accounting for financial income and ignoring the ability of people in charge of a command economy to, well... command.
If you are in charge of people, you don't need to pay for their services. You can command them to get things done. Imagine paying a company to asphalt 10 kilometres of road to your dacha. It would cost millions, but could be organised by most second-tier bureaucrats. Even now, Vladimir Putin doesn't need money. He can ask for anything he wants and if some people die for that, it's okay.
And yet, the intelligentsia often starved, because they had little to offer to the shadow economy. Even the people with thousands of roubles in their drawers had very little that money could buy, you could walk to a store with a full wallet and leave with nothing. And if it had anything, you would wait in a queue for several hours. People would queue up without knowing what they are waiting for.
It was far more important to have friends that can command some stuff your way. A cashier at a store or a cook at a cafeteria could get you the best food. A sailor could get you import magazines and electronics. A machine worker could get you tools and make you spare parts.
To a western person, this might seem obscene, but it's how those economies have operated for decades and something people have to actively unlearn.
Ok, what you described with so many words is "corruption". Corruption exists in any system, not specially in communism. Now you have the burden of providing numeric evidence that corruption was more widespread than it was in comparably developed countries at the time, and that it was big enough to generate differences in access to purchase power comparable to the ones we see nowadays.
It's not just corruption when most people engage in it to some extent. You would literally see factory workers bring stuff from their work without hiding it en masse and nobody would get fired. And then you would trade or share stuff you stole with your friends who stole from their jobs. Try stealing stuff from your own job openly every day, see how well that goes.
Yes, because there is an easy way to measure how much everything costs in a system where monetary value means next to nothing. How much would a sirloin steak cost if somebody offered it to you on the street? What if your friend gave it to you? What if no steaks were available at a grocery store? Would you trust any estimate of a price when money is mostly meaningless?
Asking about purchasing power is also meaningless, you either knew someone who could get you stuff or you didn't. In a weird way, Soviet shadow economy ran like a prison: if you know a guy, you can get stuff, if you don't, you make do what is given to you or lie, cheat and steal to get what you need.
Also, official statistics would lie and as the lies travelled upwards, they would stray further and further from the truth. So no reliable statistics are available or possible. But you take what numbers you can find, ignore any you can't get, and claim that Soviet Union was somehow a paradise, thus commiting McNamara fallacy:
Damn, that's a lotta words to say "I have no evidence to support my claim of inequality in the USSR". Your entire analysis is vibes-based so it can be entirely disregarded.
So what is it, was it only the party leaders commanding everyone at their will creating huge inequality, or is it everyone engaging in it? Because the original claim was the former. If everyone engaged in it, it's not a mechanism for inequality.
Literally yes. You can measure so-called baskets and translate the goods and services to international prices. The fact that you can't source up this data simply means you're making it up, not that it's not possible. If everyone had access to free healthcare, education to the highest level, housing costing 3% of the monthly income, there was no unemployment, and as you say a huge chunk of consumption was heavily subsidized, all of that points to inequality being low.
In capitalism, if you're richer than your neighbor and you pay for a car they can't afford, that's legal and creates inequality. In Soviet communism, if you are owed a favor by an official and you get placed earlier on the list of car recipients, that's illegal and it creates inequality. The entire point that you're making, apparently, is that while in capitalism the mechanisms that lead to inequality of consumption are legal, in the USSR they were illegal. That's not pointing in the direction you want it to point, and you're only looking ridiculous because you're clearly not speaking from data but from vibes.
Unlike in capitalism, where companies deciding how to do their own accounting without external supervision are surely not lying to anyone (wink wink) that's why we constantly have banking and financial crises because banks and companies constantly lie about everything and anything which leads to huge bubbles and bursts. Don't be ridiculous. Just admit you're going off vibes and let it go.
I was born right after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I have experiences of my parents. I have experiences of my parents' friends. I have experiences of my teachers.
Yes it is, because some things are in higher demand than others. Cashiers and cooks were like gods that got the first picks and everyone else had to pick what's left.
The "baskets" were mostly empty, the pantries were often full. Things such as mayonnaise and canned peas were highly sought after deficit goods that were hard to acquire.
Bribing the doctor was expected if you needed anything more than a checkup.
was only available to the best students, once again encouraging bribery.
that you could hardly acquire, some people waited up to 30 years to be allowed to buy a flat and many lived in dorms with other people. I grew up sharing 67 square meter flat with 12 other people.
because it was illegal, but firing someone was very difficult as well, encouraging laziness, theft and alcoholism in the workforce.
Also, the competition for prestigious positions was fierce and often skewed by the favour system as well. My mother-in-law's math teacher gave her a bad grade because the in-laws' cousin got a position the teacher wanted for herself, sabotaging my mother-in-law's chances at a higher education as a result. My mother-in-law later became a cashier at a local store and never sold the teacher any under the counter goods. They are both still alive and still hate each other to this day.
So was most of the production, because most factories would have collapsed without it. If it wasn't for the oil fields in Siberia, Soviet Union would have collapsed much earlier.
Also, especially before Andropov, many factories produced things illegally just so they could buy things such as tools and machinery illegally. A nearby ship factory produced car trailers (a highly sought after deficit product) that they would sell for US dollars locally to buy other deficit goods needed for shipbuilding such as welding masks and gloves.
They were technically illegal but seldom punished. In fact, making deals and trading favours was a way of life.
At least you have the state statistics department and independent organisation checking their claims. As per Wikipedia:
Ok ok, so all public sector = bribery, all private sector = meritocracy, got it buddy! Free healthcare is bad because sometimes you'll need to pay your doctor to get something done (I thought money was worthless?), unlike in private healthcare where you always need to pay your doctor and so poor people can't get healthcare, so good!
In capitalism most people can't even afford to buy a flat, again you're proving you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Home ownership rate is 98% in Kazakhstan, 96% in China and Laos, 92% in Russia and Serbia, 90% in Cuba, and in glorious capitalist countries it's 69% EU average, 66% in the USA, 57% in South Korea, or 42% in Switzerland. You're just a propagandized anticommunist with absolutely 0 empirical data to back up what you're talking about, angry at communism because your life in capitalism was shit.
It sounds to me like you should blame capitalism. Out of those 12 other people, how many were unemployed adults who would have had a job in capitalism?
Your comment is full of anecdotes, but again you have 0 statistical data about what you're saying. Literally all of that takes place in capitalism even worse, and I'm giving you data for it. Keep crying about communism while your Eastern European country becomes a fascist hellhole with destroyed infrastructure, fucked up healthcare, and massive migration towards the EU because people can't find fucking jobs.
It was. You would mostly bribe people with stuff.
We inherited the living situation from the Soviet era. Gradually, other people moved out to their own places and we bought the rest of the flat from them.
My life IN "capitalism" is actually pretty good. But I also had a free education and get decent hybrid-system healthcare.
And you're just a propagandized anti-capitalist with 0 actual experience of life in USSR, angry at capitalism because your life in capitalism is shit.
Outside of our most recent government, most of those things are actually improving here, lol. If anything, Eastern Europe is the new land of opportunity. There's plenty of jobs for those willing to work, as well.
GDP:
QoL:
Absolute changes in potential road accessibility in the period 2007–2015. (a) Pan-European perspective; (b) macro-regional/CEE perspective.
Wow, GDP, the metric of capitalism, rose! Nothing to do with the financialization of the economy, I'm sure! On that same study, which BTW only takes into account 2007-onward investment from what I see and doesnt take into account disintegration of existing infrastructure, shows on Figure 8 how the entire rural regions of the country have been abandoned by capitalism. What a great way of rising GDP, let's force everyone through lack of infrastructure out of their homes and into big metropolises where housing is expensive (high GDP growth) and forget about the rest. Surely rural Eastern Europe is doing great!
You showed absolute quality of life, didn't compare it to Soviet times. Now go and ask people above 50 where QOL was better, in communism or capitalism. Most people in Eastern Europe who actually lived through communism will agree that it was better on average in Communism!
It's not a perfect measurement, but it creates a metric that is easy to calculate and it's easy to compare the economies of similar countries or the same country across time.
Dude, you just cut the legs off your own argument and declared victory as it bleeds to death. The system that abandoned the rural regions was actually the Soviet Union. First of all, they destroyed many smallholding estates that dotted the countryside under the guise of melioration (reverse irrigation). Second of all, they botched the collective farming (stealing was super common in those too). Third of all, they exiled the most productive and educated members of society, disproportionately from the countryside. Fourth of all, rapid industrialization created a massive demand for workers who would abandon the collective farms and move to cities in droves. This process is simply continuing because once it starts, it's very hard to stop.
So does Net Material Product. Why don't you bring data with those numbers instead of a metric by which an increase in rent costs and healthcare prices makes GDP increase? Ireland GDP for example is fucked up because of the obvious effect of financialization of the economy now that they're a tax haven. Surely the financialization of the economy has a lot to do? Let's compare instead stuff like tons of steel produced, number of housing units built, homelessness, access to healthcare, emigration rates... you know, the things actually affecting humans, not "line go up".
Bffffhahahahahha... Oh god, that's hilarious. How many abandoned rural hospitals are there in your country now that socialism is no more?
Smartest section in your comments so far. Yeah, that's a reality of the situation, but in that process life expectancy of people in the countryside was doubled. The rapid industrialization is a controversial policy of the USSR, I agree, but it's one not taken out of ideology, it's one taken out of necessity against external invasion. Famously, in 1931, 2 years after the beginning of collectivization and rapid industrialization, Stalin said in a speech (paraphrasing): "we are 100 years behind the rest of the world, and we need to catch up to them in 10 years. Either we do this, or they kill us". 10 years later, operation Barbarossa began, in which the Soviet Union saved most of your people from slavery and genocide. This was only possible thanks to the newly-created industrial might, which allowed for example the USSR's T-34 to be the most manufactured tank in WW2. Had there been no rapid collectivization and industrialization, you wouldn't have been born because your ancestors would have been entirely genocided by Nazis.
Speaking of your population. Assuming you're Lithuanian, the population peaked at about 3.7mn in 1990, then dropped to 2.7mn in 2020. Surely capitalism is working wonderfully for your country!
Because nobody uses it anymore?
Why would you measure steel production in a country with no iron or coal mining?
I could try to find some data for you to cherry pick and make conclusions that agree with your ideology but at this point, why would I bother?
Stalin also purged a lot of competent people and that made Hitler attack earlier too.
Just so he could do his own slavery and genocide?
It's easy to claim what would happen if something didn't, but fundamentally we will never know. If Stalin didn't do his purges or if Germany overextended into Siberia, or if Hitler was replaced with a less crazy leader. I could use the same argument: I'm sorry if you think I'm stupid, the teachers of my teachers died in Siberia.
It is. Of the million people who left, 200-300K were ethnic minorities, especially Soviet colonists, despite that unlike other Baltic states, we offered them Lithuanian citizenship. Nobody misses them.
Of the rest, a lot of people still have ties to this country and send back money, sometimes buy property. The 2000-2007 economic boom was mostly caused by that money. Also, our migration statistics are improving. Migration from third countries is increasing rapidly too.
Net migration to and from Lithuania:
Re-immigration (green) vs immigration (blue) by foreigners:
Except it's not even capitalism as you imagine it. We still have a lot of regulations, high taxation, massive safety nets, affordable education and the means to buy property. Lithuania is a poor country that is getting richer.
Most of you ”socialists that defend Soviet Union" are from rich countries that are getting poorer. But socialism as imagined by Soviet Union was a horrible system made by horrible people and it will not save you.
And every time you use the example of Soviet Union as an example of how great socialism is, your cause actually loses.
Aaaand that's where we stop. I don't discuss socialism with overtly racist people. There's no point arguing in good faith against people guided by racist beliefs. Burn in hell, bigot prick. I pray that the next time fascist want to exterminate you and your family you won't have alienated everyone who might protect you.
Should the people who were colonised mourn when colonisers return home?
I'm not racist in any way, shape or form. I have friends from every corner of the globe.
And the next time the socialist revolution comes, I hope the purges come for you, too.
Okay, cool, so the USSR was, by your words, less prone to creating a wealth disparity. And lets just not talk about the several million that died under Stalin. Now, the USSR may not have funneled wealth, but in the end, it still collapsed on itself. It did not last, and this was largely due to internal affairs.
As per the second part, sure, I'll concede to you the pedantic semantics of the word utopia. My point still stands. Don't get me wrong, if someome were to ask, "Would you rather live in a functioning capitalist society, or a functioning socialist society," I would choose and tell others they should join the socialist one. My point is that, at some point, that government is still going to go to shit, just because people are people. Though, please do not take this as any sort of statement like, "don't even try," because a better life is a better life. If it's feasable, go for it. It's just that the core problem (human nature) isn't going to be solved by a political ideology, rather, human nature will eventually fuck that ideology up.
Let's also talk about the tens of millions that were saved under Stalin from Nazi extermination, and about the tens of millions that were saved from hunger, poverty and treatable disease under Stalin, who took over a Soviet Union with a life expectancy of 27 years and died with a Soviet Union with a life expectancy of 60+ years. If you run the numbers, by any reasonable metric, the Soviet Union saved easily 30-40 million people in those years.
That sounds like a sophism, not like any real argument. What's your point? Socialism fell not because it's not sustainable, it fell because it appeared in a backward feudal country 100 years behind the capitalist west at its inception, and couldn't keep up with the progress and technology that the industrialized west + colonies were able to put out. This is changing now, as the biggest communist country is China and it has already overtaken the west in terms of economic output, and it's a matter of time before communism finally spreads to the rest of the world.
Cool, people were saved, even if you put it to a ratio of dead to saved, it's still a shitty ratio. And again, it still fell.
I don't give an ass's arse that you think it sounds like sophistry. Human beings will fuck an ideology up, full stop. And while China is definitely doing well, modern China isn't communist.
Is it? Europe at the time was full of colonial powers carrying out genocide in India, Southern Asia and in many places of Africa, the USA was a colonial power emerged out of the genocide of native Americans keeping the entirety of Latin America underdeveloped... The USSR never had a colony and it was a self-sufficient system that didn't rely on colonialism or neocolonialism, both of which kept and keep billions impoverished and overworked in the global south. Take those things into the ratio, compare countries, and you'll find that there hasn't been a country as moral and fair as the USSR.
"This may sound like I'm making shit up, but I'm very sure of it, full stop."
Chinese people often call it "Socialism with Chinese characteristics". You don't wanna call it like that, that's fine, it's just terminology. The point is that it's a fundamentally different economic and political system, and I think it's measurably better than the west in many metrics. If you agree, then you probably agree that we should pursue a similar system, whether you decide to call it communist or not?
Picks up a map.
Siberia? The Baltics? Caucasus? Central Asia? Warsaw pact countries?
Those were all Soviet colonies. A lot of them still are Russian colonies. Russia is the last colonial empire that refuses to die.
"USSR BAD!!!" picks map from Tsarist Empire
Workers in those regions had the same rights as workers anywhere, had self a representation in the government and local administration, and received massive boosts in quality of life through state investment in infrastructure, which ensured similar amounts of hospital beds per capita all over the country. You literally don't know what "colony" means, there's a reason why Central Asian countries for example overwhelmingly voted in favour of maintaining the USSR in the 1990 referendum.
Now that those regions have gone back to capitalism, a form of colonialism has returned, leading to disastrous conflicts like the Chechen War and the defunding of local infrastructure in favour of Moscow. Go open a book.
If you think that creation of USSR destroyed the tsarist culture of oppression, your education system has failed you.
Provided they were Russian or Georgian.
Provided they were communists that spoke Russian.
A place that the core country exploits for resources and financial gain while abusing and exploiting their people?
Yeah I do. I live in a former one.
And why didn't they?
Because the tsar has returned and so will the repression? Or maybe, because they can't let more colonies leave them because the ones that did are doing so well?
Yeah, you too. But maybe next time read something good and not something that defends a dead, failed state that brought misery to millions?
Spicy, first time I've seen anti-georgian nationalism. Funnily enough, Khrushchev and Brezhnev were Ukrainian, I guess that's not political representation to you?
This is literally not what happened. I already provided you information about things like hospital beds. Furthermore, every republic had the right to determine its own official language, people had access to education in their language up to 18 years of age (some universities also taught in the local language), most published books and newspapers by number were in the local language, all regions got industrialized though some were at a much more backwards starting point... If your metric for colonization is "extraction of resources", then surely in the period between 1955 and 1990, in which the USSR was a net exporter of raw goods and hydrocarbons and net importer of industrial goods in the Eastern Block, Poland and Czechoslovakia were colonizing the USSR?
Exactly my point, the tsar returned because there was no Tsar in the USSR. That's why wealth inequality rose through the roof in all former republics after the change ro capitalism.
No, it's something taken from Stalin's purge of the military. He removed most of the people who weren't Russian or Georgian.
Nope:
And some absolutely did not:
Their industrialization was often misguided at best and purposefully rigged to fail after dissolution at worst. Most of the countries would be better off had they developed independently.
Sarah Paine refers to this as a Doughnut Empire:
But the end result is still the same. If Soviet Union left the Eastern Europe alone, it would be almost as prosperous as the Western Europe is now. They took our best and gave very little in return.
The sad reality of Russia was that the people who were in charge of the dark half of the shadow economy gobbled up most of the former state enterprises put up for sale. They knew how market economy worked and had amassed enough money to buy them out. (Not just rapidly value losing roubles, but US dollars too.) You know, the same shadow economy that you claim was a non-issue.
But at least you're not simping for Putin's Russia, so you have that going for you.
Huh? Are you doing racial essentialism? Surely someone born in Ukraine and upbrought there is Ukrainian?
Evil soviets planning the dissolution and disindustrialization of the peripheral regions? Don't be absurd.
This is true for a total of 0 of the countries. Everything west of the Urals would have been genocided and enslaved by Nazis, and would be very similar to places like India, Brazil or Phillipines. Central Asian regions like Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan or Turkmenistan are orders of magnitude better than neighboring Afghanistan or Pakistan, which were actual western colonies with similar pasts. Had tsarism continued or capitalism fluorished, the ethnic minorities in Russia proper would have been assimilated in the same way that they're being assimilated now with Putin. My girlfriend's mom and grandmom studied in their native language, but she was born after 1990 so she didn't have that right. It took one generation for her language to be erased from her family, while it was maintained for 70+ years under communism. You yourself speak Lithuanian and your family too. For comparison with a capitalist country, in 1920 there were above a million Occitan speakers in southern France. By 2020 there's barely 100k. THAT'S what erasure and assimilation looks like. Yakut people got to preserve their language, culture and traditions, so did Bashkir, Mari, Lithuanians and essentially all ethnic minorities in the USSR. Belarusians are specifically hard affected, I agree, and some other ethnicities like Crimean Tatars or Koreans were also targeted during WW2. Those are big mistakes and we must learn from them and never repeat them, but despite this, it was the most inclusive and multicultural state at the time. For comparison, my homeland Spain outright banned the use of Basque and Catalonia at the time. This is what happens when you don't have Bolsheviks protecting you from fascism.
So if USSR extracts resources from some regions it's bad for said regions, but if it exports resources to other regions it's also bad. The conclusion is that USSR bad no matter what it does, got your logic now. True doublethinking.
There would be no Eastern Europe, there would be Greater Germany á-la British Empire.
This isn't a sad unfortunate mistake, it's literally the definition of capitalism, it's a "winner takes it all" system without regard to public well-being. This was directed to happen this way by economic authorities using neoliberal shock therapy that killed millions.
No, I don't simp for capitalist oligarchs, unlike you when you praise the capitalism that hollowed out 1/4th the population of your homeland and when you claim without evidence that "capitalist countries 100 years backwards in development would have somehow avoided Nazi invasion and caught up with western Europe standards of living without having colonies like western Europe, like other famous equally capitalist and developed countries at the time such as Indonesia, Brazil or Mexico".
Look at history: the only countries that developed close to western levels of industrialization since 1900 were either communist countries (Eastern Block and China) or USA-sponsored coldwar military bases (South Korea and to a lesser degree Taiwan. Japan was already an industrial power and imperialist country by the 1930s). Literally no other capitalist country developed, bring up an example otherwise and explain me how Lithuania would have developed so much better than Guatemala, Mexico or Brazil because Lithuanians are white
Not if they keep speaking Russian and follow Russian norms and customs, they are still Russian. There are plenty of people in the Baltic states who don't speak the languages of their corresponding countries but instead mostly use Russian. We do not consider them ethnically Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian, but Russian and treating them otherwise creates a warped perspective of their history.
And yet some countries did better in the transition than others.
Finland. During the interwar period, it was a poorer country than Estonia and the gap between us as seen now is considered as what Soviet occupation took from us.
You keep refusing to admit that you'd be a Nazi colony. Come on, argue against this, don't keep avoiding it. Tell me how Lithuania would have avoided being ethnically cleansed and enslaved if it weren't for the Soviets.
Finland is now with a far right government, and in this past year they've put hundreds of thousands of people into poverty through austerity policy. The trend of European nations is downwards, and it has been since the USSR stopped being the beacon of worker rights that it was. Now that we don't need some shiny microstates as examples of social democracy against communism, we can happily let them rot!
Just because one option was bad and the other option was worse, doesn't make the first option good.
We were ethnically cleansed and enslaved. By the Soviets, yes.
They still fit your definition though. A non-communist country that industrialized.
The trend downwards was caused by the Russian state actors meddling in our information space, but it sure is convenient to ignore that.
The USSR was not self-sufficient for starters, and again, it failed. Because of its own problems. And I'm not making anything up, you're the one putting massive amounts of spin on things.
Yes, I would agree, and I don't see why you seem to think otherwise. I already stated that given a choice between a functional capitalist society and a functioning socialist society I would choose and encourage others to pick the socialist one. You have very little going for you in this debate, and as a result you seem to be increasingly capitulating towards making me into something I'm not in order to cope.
Right now, China is in a good spot, and it also has the benefit of an absolutely massive population. If they can get 1.4 billion people organized, stabilized, and working together they will be an absolute force to be reckoned with, of which only India could compete (though they suck at getting their shit together, currently.) However, since Deng Xiaoping, China has increasingly embraced tactics from other political ideologies to suit the present needs and find what works. If anything, I would say the way China allows its government to evolve while keeping retraints on it is its strength. Also their soft power strategy, but that's not a topic for now.
The USSR was from the start banned from international trade for the sin of being communist, only after WW2 did world markets open to it. Even then, it didn't rely on any country for its energetic, food, material, or industrial needs. You can read about this on Robert C. Allen's "Farm to Factory" or Alec Nove's "An economic history of the USSR". I'm not making things up, this is widely known.
No comment on the China thing. But if that's the model that works, you should seek to establish a Communist Party rule in your country.
Just say you don't have the foggiest clue what political ideology is all about - there's no reason to dress it up like this.
If there's leaders with enough power to manipulate things to their own end, it never even got as far as communism.
Its also not about "honor", it's about empathy. About caring enough about your fellow beings to enjoin efforts to raise everyone up, not just yourself or those you deem worthy.
Whether it is empathy or honor doesn't really matter. If you wanna say empathy, then we can roll with that. The point is that humanity doesn't possess enough of it.
Humanity may have enough of it but it is not distributed evenly.
They have plenty of it, they've just been trained out of using it. Part of that is making the assumption that other people are lesser or not worthy of it because they lack "humanity" by people who want to look down on them for no reason.
I have to strongly disagree here. While it is definitely possible to teach greater/lesser ideologies, and it absolutely does happen, at their core, humans are social creatures prone to forming groups and passing biased judgements on out groups. In groups and out groups form, and competition starts, followed by the mud slinging. It's not a training, it's part of human nature. The teaching just accelerates things and pushes people into groups faster and with more vehemency.
It's not a training issue. Their brains just don't work right - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder