It's strange that people look at the millions dead from starvation from communism, and the quite recent destruction of Venezuela, and still think communism can somehow work this time.
The modern market economy + democracy + regulation + social programs.
The atrocities normally attributed to such systems like the Korean war, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Vietnam war, Iraq war, etc actually turns out to not really be atrocities when you look just a little bit closer, or at least are trading a small atrocity for a much larger one.
Smells like "no true scotsman" fallacy because they are nearly synonyms. Nobody in USSR could tell the exact difference or at least there was no consensus, and you are expecting modern Americans to do better huh?
This basically sums it up:
> According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "Exactly how communism differs from socialism has long been a matter of debate, but the distinction rests largely on the communists' adherence to the revolutionary socialism of Karl Marx." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism#Communism_and_social...)
(To make it more fun Marxism is also its own thing)
But this is to privilege 100+ year old origins of these terms over their actual application and development in most of Western Europe. It’s anachronistic and misleading.
No, this was true in USSR so like even 40 years ago, I grew up exposed to that a lot and believe me no one can say for sure which is which.
To keep things fun, USSR was not communist either for most of the time, it was sort of socialist I guess. There are a lot of jokes reflecting the confusion between socialism and communism and how we always go to communism but never reach it
Today there are examples of socialist but not communist countries in Europe. But if you compare them to Venezuela or Brazil you would be crazy.
I think we’re actually agreeing the terms are confusing. The point is that Western European socialism is not the same as the thing that was essentially synonymous with communism in the USSR in the early 20th century.
In the UK at least, the distinction was important because calling oneself a socialist was acceptable, whereas being a communist during the Cold War was not.
The USSR was economically socialist, ideologically communist, and politically somewhere on the autocracy-dictatorship spectrum. (That last varied over time, as is normal for such governments. Underlings always want autocracy, which means more power for them. The top guy almost always wants an absolute dictatorship.)
There were plenty of communists who didn't like that last part - but they were brutally purged by the autocratic-dictatorial faction. Famously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky
I'd blame the angry, simplistic Western denunciations of anything vaguely resembling communism (including socialism) on the Western monied classes. Whether Old Money, Plutocrats, Wall Streeters, wanna-be's, sycophants, or whatever - those folks generally hate any idea which might mean less for them, and more for the 99%.
That's entirely orthogonal to the fact that Americans thend to label literally anything and everything they don't like as communist. Especially any sort of social(ist) policy good for the people and bad for the 1%.
It doesn't help that a lot of the suggested policies are mind numbingly stupid. Like "wealth tax" for people who own controlling equity in companies. Someone else values your company more and now you are forced by law to sell it and lose control, probably destroying the company.
The German Social Democratic Party is the literal actual identical party of Marx and Engels.
That we assign to the Bolsheviks the mantle of one or another 19th c epithet is a kind of secret pact between the two sides of the Cold War. It is itself doctrinal Leninism even if the State Department spreads it. Its func
Meanwhile, in Europe (I don't know Latin America well enough, although I know a few well-known right-wing leaders that didn't have stellar records) socialist governments consistently have a better record on basically everything from press freedom to economy to public health compared to economically liberal ("centrist") governments. But they're socialist so it doesn't count.
Pretty much every remotely developed country is capitalist. The wealthiest country with a non-capitalist economy is Cuba or Turkmenistan, depending on where you draw the line.
The context of this discussion is Brazil and the intentions of the socialist Brazilian government. Are you claiming that the socialist party in Brazil intends to dismantle capitalism? In case you are unaware, countries can have capitalist economic systems and still have significant socialist traits like: large public sectors, state enterprises for natural monopolies and important industries, subsidized education and healthcare, etc.
My previous comment came off as disagreement that I didn’t intend. Most countries in the world are both socialist and capitalist.
I don’t intend to defend the “socialism bad” argument. There are several countries (many in Europe) that have great outcomes while being about as socialist as left-wing Latin American governments. I think a fairer criticism is some of the Latin American parties have a track record of flawed implementation that caused distrust among a lot of the population.
You can’t have it both ways though. The policies enacted in Northern Europe would definitely be agreed on as communist/socialist by the majority of mainstream American politicians, Democrats included.
> definitely be agreed on as communist/socialist by the majority of mainstream American politicians
The US has generous social assistance, just less of it than some European countries. It has unions more powerful than many European countries. Meanwhile the most popular Dem-aligned politician in the US has recently introduced a bill to partly nationalise AI companies.
> You can’t have it both ways
You’re responding to my first comment in this thread
For some people, even the government interventions by those specific rich market-capitalist European countries are "too socialist" and get the exact same "didn't you realise Stalin killed millions?" kinds of responses.
It's just a motte-and-bailey argument. You say you're okay with social democratic policies when you're opposing anything stronger, but oppose social democratic policies when anyone is trying to actually implement them.
PRC is way more capitalist than Norway or some other European countries. Approximately, one is capitalist dictatorship and the other socialist democracy.
Yes PRC government was originally propped by USSR but that's it. If you look at labor protection laws, social security, etc it's nowhere near.
Nordic style social democracy works quite well though. Communism sucks, but too much unregulated Capitalism isn't great either, as we can see in USA and many other countries that suffer from extreme inequality.
Nordic style social democracy only works well (I think) if the country has reliable sources of income separate from corporations; Norway has a trillion dollar investment fund from oil and gas revenue that is still being added to. The Netherlands earned billions from a gas field in Groningen which they used to fund the social securities systems (subsidies, benefits, etc). But with the closing of those gas fields (they were causing earthquakes, plus environmental concerns) that source of income is gone, and with that + baby boomers retiring + NL being a tax haven so we don't earn much from the huge sums passing through + skyrocketing cost of living, these systems are being broken down one by one.
Social democracy is a class-collaboration system where both the owning class and the working class compromise on their own interests (minimizing vs maximizing real wages) for the sake of stability or national interest. Class-collaboration systems -- however desirable they might be --are inherently unstable because the conflict between the owning class and working class is built into the basic structure of the economy. It's also the case that the state, which administers the conditions of this collaboration, is not a neutral party, but a tool of the owning class. Since the 70s, and especially since the 90s, that's resulted in the rollback of social democratic measures put in place after the Great Depression when the bulk of the owning class recognized them as necessary for stability. State oil revenues are a material factor that has slowed that rollback in e.g. the Nordic countries relative to the Anglosphere, but the underlying dialectic isn't any different.
I'm from Sweden. These "social democracy" systems are really market economies to 90% at least. It's kinda funny to call them socialist. Like calling a modern human a Neandertal because some of their genes are from that species.
Is this supposed to be an example of propaganda? The line that socialism killed millions uses the unfair standard of attributing wide categories of end-of-life to socialism but not to capitalism or Tsarism.
millions died due to exploitative labor practices by colonialist invaders exploiting the resources and cheap labor potential of the people in it yet I don't see you aknowledge that.
communism wasn't behind american slavery or the Belgian occupation of the congo.
Not a fan of communism but I dont' think unfettered capitalism is much better. both systems benefit a minority of people at the expense of the majority largely because they allow power to be concentrated in the hands of a few.
At this point, anyone spouting vitriole about communism and socialism like they are the same thing just come off as lacking basic capacity to understand nuance at best and mentally ill at worst.
Unfettered capitalism postdates 'colonialist invaders' by two or three centuries. Spain and Portugal didn't notice capitalism ... so they turned into backwaters.
Deliberate starvation is more of a capitalist thing. It's not like China or communist parts of India have a big famine problem, while the US and their partners are causing famines in e.g. West Asia right now.
Left wing policies actually work pretty well, this is why the US has spent so much resources undermining movements and states trying to implement them, and this is why the Soviet needed nuclear weapons to survive for as long as it did.
A better example of capitalism doing actual famine would be the Irish Potato Famine, which was concurrent with the writing of the actual Communist Manifesto.
Communism has also had famine, famously both the Holodomor in the USSR and the Great Leap Forward in China.
The only thing that really seems to end famine, is a deliberate policy of subsidising the overproduction of food.
It's kind of weird to attribute those famines, or e.g. the Kazakh famine contemporary with the holodomor which was arguably worse but is less well known, to communism. Quick industrialisation would be a much better, though partial, explanation. If it was a property of communist or socialist projects, why'd you need to reach almost a century back to find examples?
We're massively overproducing food now, and still have famines. Egalitarian distributive policies are key to ending hunger.
The Potato Famine is a good example because the UK government at that time considered Ireland to be "domestic" and was fully in charge of both the location and all responses, not only economic support but also with the capacity to change the laws, to raise taxes to perform emergency redirection of food from elsewhere, etc., and did not because laissez-faire capitalism (which specifically opposed food aid for famines occurring within the British Empire) was highly influential in the UK government at the time.
Your example wasn't such a strong one, because the current risk of famine in West Asia that the US can be blamed for, is not only extremely indirect (via starting a war which reduces fertiliser supply which screws over crop production but only if the conflict remains active for long enough) but also one of the few things about this conflict that is clear is that Trump did it despite plenty of advisors saying "don't do this, it is bad for the interests of the USA", for reasons including but not limited to the US dependence on oil which in turn is because president Trump also seems to think alternatives to oil are a conspiracy and keeps doing executive orders to make them go away.
The UK screwed up back then in a way that supported the rich. The US is screwing up right now in a way that doesn't. I don't think the victims care(d) in either case, but the former case can be blamed on capitalism more strongly than the latter case.
> We're massively overproducing food now, and still have famines.
Not within the capitalist nations. Or indeed the heavily industrialised nations, because your alternative hypothesis is perfectly sound as industrialisation is necessary (though not sufficient) for overproduction of food.
> Egalitarian distributive policies are key to ending hunger.
Only if they were global, though even then overproduction would still be necessary; sadly this is the exact opposite of what the USA voted for. Would you blame that more on capitalism or on democracy?
The most enormous understatement. They had the biggest famines ever seen.
> The only thing that really seems to end famine, is a deliberate policy of subsidising the overproduction of food.
That's nonsense. There is no money that can "subsidize" anything if people are already starving because the country screwed up the agricultural system. Starvation is more powerful than monetary systems.
Famine ceased to be a major world issue after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which abetted infantilism of different types in most of the countries that originated after WW2.
In my childhood there were always children starving everywhere but the causes of this were finally throttled, by and large, in the 90s and 00s, with a bit of regression in the recent past. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
This is one of the most important features of the history of the last half century but goes completely unnoticed.
Yeah, because to the capitalist starvation is not a bug, it's a feature. It's how you manage to keep up profits under competition and automation, by pressuring the cost of labour with the threat of misery. Almost fifty million people in the US, of which some fourteen million are kids, are food insecure.
Deliberate famine and starvation campaigns is still a thing capitalist countries engage in, e.g. in Yemen, Cuba, Haiti and Palestine. Due to international support of RSF the ongoing crisis in Sudan could count as well.
Or, what system is not responsible for human atrocities?