reddit comment

Alright, your arguments are already incredibly flawed right out of the gate.

> Most of the world isn't poor. Around 10-15% of the world would probably be classified as poor.

According to an arbitrary poverty line set by the World Bank that defines the poverty line as the equivalent of earning US $1.90/day. The rationale for deciding on this metric for defining poverty is unclear, since expert economists have criticized this measurement for how misleading it is. It is estimated that using the methodology that the World Bank uses to define sources of income in their measurements, a person would need at least $7.40 per day in order to adequately meet their nutrition needs in a way that would be needed for a person to achieve a normal life expectancy.

So by setting the standard at $1.90, you are defining someone who went from earning a starvation wage to earning a slightly higher starvation wage as having been lifted out of poverty, despite the fact that their life expectancy is still being artificially shortened and they are statistically likely to end up in an early due to lack of adequate access to the resources they need to live. 1.8 billion of the people that the World Bank defines as being lifted out of poverty in this way still suffer from from food insecurity and starvation that results in them having a reduced life expectancy.

And if you put yourself in their shoes, would you be happy to earn $7.40/day, having just enough to meet your nutritional needs and little else despite working all day in hard labor, and then being told that you're not in poverty? Because this poverty isn't being caused by people who are unemployed/underemployed, this is the vast number of people in the world who work in brutal conditions for as cheaply as possible in order to subsidize the cost of the cheap commodities that these international conglomerates sell to you in your local stores. Your cost of living is being subsidized directly by that extreme exploitation.

And this is exactly what I mean about needing to read from as many perspectives as possible, because your world view is being informed by an arbitrary metric that paints an incredibly misleading picture of the world in order to support a specific world view.

If you would like to read a thorough criticism of how global poverty is reported, [this article](https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/07/5-myths-about-global-poverty) does a great job of this.

> Second, every poor person isn't poor because of capitalism.

Why would this matter? We're doing a comparative analysis. And capitalism does in fact create structural barriers that cause poverty to persist despite the fact that the vast majority to live in poverty are doing incredibly valuable labor that the entire global market depends on, for the reasons I have already explained in this post. The fact that they are unable to earn a living despite this fact is nothing but a complete and total market failure. (Or a success of the market if you are one of the international conglomerates who make incredible profits off of this cheap labor)

> Third, socialism doesn't seem to solve poverty in the world, if anything, it makes it worse,

Patently false. Of all the criticisms you can have of existing socialist countries, this one has the least basis in reality. Socialist revolution has been the most successful anti-poverty program in the world, especially for the formerly colonized and several underdeveloped world. And not because they redistribute wealth to make everyone equally poor, but because they reorganize their labor around actually advancing the interests of the people doing the work by empowering them with a democratic say in how their labor is allocated and what priorities they pursue instead of simply selling their labor to a private capitalist who then keeps the profits from that labor and usually exports that wealth out of their country. This way of reorganizing the priorities of labor in a democratic way has been the most successful method for actually developing these countries, and institutions like the World Bank who cherry pick metrics that claim otherwise have a direct conflict of interest since they extract huge profits from investing in these countries and from keeping their markets/industries privately owned.

>There are plenty of articles and pieces of analysis done of things such as sweatshop labor, and a sad ethical reality of the matter is that these countires would be worse off without this labor, and under socialism,

There is plenty of sad, motivated reasoning done to justify the horrific exploitation of sweatshop labor by those who refuse to interrogate any solution other than the private dominations of markets and maybe some small tweaks of fiscal and monetary policy. What would be ethical is if the people who were doing that labor had a democratic say in how the surpluses from their labor were allocated instead of being forced into coercive labor arrangements where  the employer decides what to do with the profits from their labor according to the companies interest.

> and under socialism, there is no reason to expedite labor to different countries because, again, you aren't over-producing to meet market demands, markets wouldn't exist, and as a result you're not create competition or excess within your wealth accumulation.

Empirical data simply proves this wrong. How did the USSR become a global economic superpower if it wasn't producing surpluses? How did it provide robust social services if it wasn't producing surpluses? Empowering the people by giving them a democratic say in what priorities their labor is used to pursue and how the fruits of that labor are allocated doesn't make the accumulation of surplus disappear, it simply shifts the decision of what to do with those surpluses into the hands of the workers who created that wealth rather than leaving that decision in the hands of private corporations who are only accountable to their shareholders and the pursuit of the profit motive.

>Within socialism, there is far less wealth circulating, both to the rich and the poor, and as a result the poor get shafted worse than the rich would.
Empirically untrue, since the Soviet 5-year plans following the revolution are literally the most successful undertakings of rapid industrialization ever seen in human history, and they managed to catapult a group of severely underdeveloped nations into a global economic super power with far less suffering than had occurred in the brutal conditions of the industrial revolution within capitalist nations. And they did this with plans that were the most thorough and democratic processes ever seen throughout the world.

> Because capitalism hasn't caused near the amount of suffering for its core populace

"Colonialism, imperialism and the brutal exploitation of the world for the benefit of a tiny "core population" is actually good."

This is exactly why I say that when you analyze an economy, your analysis is incomplete if you stop at a single nations borders. All the capitalist countries who were colonial empires had fantastic economic growth within their own borders, but the resources colonies that they occupied and looted at gunpoint to accumulate large portions of that surplus suffered to a horrific degree.

> Because it doesn't default to totalitarianism whenever it tries to be implemented.

In what ways are the major capitalist countries not totalitarian?

Is it not totalitarian when you stage a military coup in sovereign nations because they tried to nationalize several of their industries and you want to install a dictator who will open those markets back up and sell off those national resources to private capital at rock bottom prices?

If police repression and an extensive security state in the USSR during a time where it had to defend itself against unrelenting Cold War hostilities is enough to decry it as a totalitarian dictatorship that used police to control the population, then what does it say about the US having 21% of the world's prison population despite only representing 4% of the world's population? The carceral state in the US dwarfs any comparable metric from the entire history of the USSR by roughly an order of magnitude. What does it say about about the explicit political repression used to protect the US against anti-capitalist influences, such as the public show trials of notable communists during McCarthyism, the banning of anyone with even the slightest communist sympathies from public office or from having membership in labor unions in the communist exclusion act and the Taft-Hartley act respectively, the jailing and assassination of political activists in programs like COINTELPRO, and so on down the list? What about studies from Princeton University that tried to ask and answer the question ["does the US government represent the interests of the people,"](https://youtu.be/5tu32CCA_Ig) and what they found while analyzing decades of public opinion data is that regardless of which party is in office, the opinion of the general public had a practically zero, statistically insignificant impact on the likelihood that any given policy would become law. And that it's only when you narrow your analysis to the opinions of the wealthiest 10% that any correlation between policy preferences and the likelihood of that policy becoming law emerges. If the people who have the money to finance political campaigns and pay for lobbying want a policy to pass, then it is incredibly likely to pass. And if that group overwhelmingly wants that policy to fail, then it is almost certain to fail regardless of how popular it is among the general public. Does this not represent a totalitarian government that represents the interests of a tiny but incredibly wealthy oligarchy, who resorts to incredible police state violence to suppress any dissent? What makes the US non-authoritarian in any meaningful way other than the PR spin and propagandistic branding it gives itself, repeatedly claiming to be a bastion of freedom and democracy as if it were a mantra? A literal mantra in the case of the "Pledge of Allegiance" that we make school kids recite everyday.

And you are correct, any alternative system to the current geopolitical reality of global capitalism that is being backed the United States' global military empire will need to be able to endure fierce aggression and pressure to re-privatize their markets and to sell off national public assets to major international corporations. But explain to me exactly why the victim of that aggression is at fault for every failure that they suffer rather than the aggressor?

>These three factors along with a better standard of living in all 1st world capitalist countries kind of nullify the USSR's positives when compared to its competitors.
A standard of living that is subsidized by literal slavery and near slavery conditions inside and outside of its own borders is something that I should admire? No other country can replicate what the US does to subsidize its standard of living because we don't have any new land to conquer and new nations to colonize/imperialize. Adn even with all of those ridiculous advantages gained through centuries of plunder, the US economy is still unable to provide a consistent standard of living for its own citizens, with metrics of wealth accumulation and economic stability such as home ownership rates falling with each subsequent generation.

>You don't have to look far for that data, I mean, virtually no living people who lived under the USSR enjoyed it, including every member of my extended family and relatives.

If you would like to recall what you told me earlier, anecdotes can not replace data. Polling on [nostalgia for the Soviet Union](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia_for_the_Soviet_Union) is at an all time high within former Soviet states, with the majority of that support for the Soviet Union coming from the older generation that was alive before the collapse and could compare their lives from back then to the harshness of privatization and the restoration of capitalism.

>It isn't, because what you're defining seems to be a necessity of any successful economic system that doesn't collapse rather quickly (such as socialism/communism), and while that suffering is undeniably bad, and that which is caused today ought to be softened and solved, the amount of good that has been done by capitalism isn't to be ignored either... which you seem to be ignoring.

You've stumbled into exactly the reason why I am making this comparison. If it is your position that these horrors and brutality that arise as natural consequences of capitalist organizing principles do not serve to disqualify capitalism as an economic system, and that we must also evaluate the merits of capitalism in our analysis, then it is also true that you cannot disqualify socialism for the suffering that was caused without also taking into account its merits.

>The amount of wealth, whether you want to cry about much of it going to a rich upper class or not, circulating through dominant capitalist countries and the world is a huge boon to providing aid to struggling countries.
> Just so we're clear, right now the United States provides 8 billion dollars more in aid every year than its closest competitor.

The USSR provide development aid to the socialist aligned countries when it was still a dominant super power, and the major difference is that the aid that was provided actually resulted in meaningful development of those economies.

US aid has not resulted in the same, unless you are looking at places like Israel who the US has invested heavily in as a technologically advanced military ally in the middle east as a way to help secure strategic military objectives in the region. But the aid that goes to places like the formerly colonized countries throughout Africa is an investment, not a gift. If those regions see any development at all from this kind of aid, it is in purely extractive industries and infrastructure such as mining and transportation from the mine to the nearest port. And because private foreign capital owns these assets, the net result of this aid is that resources are cheaply extracted and exported from these countries, where those companies will then make huge profits from those resources while the economy they were extracted from sees little benefit.

In other words, the money that the US spends on aid in developing countries essentially came from the value that those countries created in the first place, and that aid that is being given only serves to better facilitate extraction of resources in arrangements where the local economy sees little to no benefit.

As for a more though critique of the charity model that is used, [this episode of citations needed](https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-146-bill-gates-bono-and-the-limits-of-world-bank-and-imf-approved-celebrity-activism) does a great job of discussing this.

And the book "Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism" by African scholar and political leader Kwame Nkrumah discusses very thoroughly the ways in which this foreign aid is utilized, including how much of that aid goes into weapons spending and the militarization of police forces so that the police in these US proxy governments  can use the police to break up striking and protesting workers by massacring them in the streets. US "aid" is a demerit against capitalism, not a benefit of capitalism. Because of this adversarial nature of capitalism and the need to aggressively pursue profit at any cost since you would fall behind your competition otherwise, so much of the surplus wealth of our society ends up wasted on weapons spending and bombs. The result of which is not only trillions of dollars being lit on fire because it is literally being spent on bombs, but at the same time that the US is destroying it's own surpluses by literally making them explode you are also destroying actual wealth producing infrastructure in the countries that are targeted by the never ending wars and interventionism that the US has waged for the last ~70 years.

>Notice how you aren't actually making arguments for socialism as much as you're making arguments against capitalism, ignoring all of its benefits.

What I've noticed is that you are once again responding before finishing my post, because I do in fact both defend the merits of socialism and I compare them to the merits of capitalism. I can do another post where I discuss where capitalism has positive applications, since Marxist analysis is based not on a condemnation of capitalism but of a thorough understanding of capitalism and of the characteristics it takes on at various stages of economic development.

>As I already said, i'm pro-socialization of capitalism. I'm totally fine with applying more regulations to private capital, market forces, etc.
>
>And it's not like capitalism hasn't become more regulated over time... it clearly has, so it's not like this is unheard of.
Okay, lets investigate the regulation of capitalism as a solution. First, under what conditions has the regulation of capitalism occurred? Historically, any significant regulation that has been used to reign in capital and introduce any kind of public accountability and oversight has not come out of purely electoral processes. Nor would we expect it to, because if electoral processes could impose significant restrictions and accountability of private owners to public interests, then capitalism would have never grown and developed in the way that it had. If you left matters up to a democratic vote and told the voters, "I need your tax dollars to fund the massive police state that enforces the private ownership of Mr. Rockefeller's industrial empire so that he can be an unaccountable and unelected authority in the organization of an industry that is equivalent in size to the economy of several nations," then almost no one would vote to authorize such a thing. No one would vote to spend so much of the public treasury on something that benefits so few people, and yet functions of the state such as the allocation of police funding that is used primarily to enforce the private ownership of industry go completely unquestioned. It is a sacrosanct foundational principle of liberalism that the state must protect those rights at all costs, enshrined into the founding documents of these nations who had liberal revolutions and replaced the hereditary rule of feudalism with governing principles that centralized property rights. And these governments enshrined those property rights by forming governments that explicitly assigned representation in government according to how much property you owned. You can see this in the US constitution which founded a government in which only white, male land owners with at least 40 acres of land were allowed to vote and participate in government. The US constitution explicitly defined a ruling class that only included what were roughly the wealthiest 10% of Americans.

The changing/regulation of this system has always had to come from outside the electoral process. The expansion of rights for the masses were the result of dedicated people organizing in large numbers in movements like the fight for Universal Franchise, abolition, Labor rights, Women's suffrage, the first and second civil rights movements, LGBT rights, disability rights, and more. Those victories were won by people taking to the streets in numbers large enough that they could throw themselves into the cogs of society and refuse to allow business as usual to continue until their demands have been reckoned with. These were fights where people had to fight and die in the streets in order to win these concessions, with extreme cases like the fight for abolition pulling the entire country into a civil war.

Any capitalist government where so much accumulation has concentrated wealth into the hands of so few people is going to have inherently undemocratic principles that disenfranchise certain interests from the political process, simply because that is a pre-requisite for that kind of accumulation to occur in the first place. And despite the many victories that people have won struggling against this system, every time some concessions are given out and the people in these movements become satisfied with their victories, or simply exhausted from the fight, that organization disperses and those concessions are either slowly rolled back or new methods of disenfranchisement are introduced such as gerrymandering, targeted underfunding and closing of polling locations for elections, targeted mass incarceration, and a campaign finance system that makes running for public office prohibitively expensive. And we know empirically that these methods have worked to maintain the class character of these governing institutions, because we have research like the study from Princeton University that shows how only the policy preferences of the wealthiest 10% have a statistically significant correlation regarding which policies will become law.

So what are your recommendations for actually reforming that system? How do you plan to win those reforms? What would those reforms even entail? Would you break up giant corporate conglomerates into smaller pieces so that the market could have more healthy competition again?

The problem with these kinds of reforms is that the natural conclusion of capitalism is the consolidation of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. This isn't greed or corruption, it is the market revealing to us that this is the most efficient way of organizing production. Small businesses being able to stay in competition continues to become rarer and rarer simply because a large organization of many people working toward a common goal is far more efficient than small scale production. There are still some markets where the barrier to entry is fairly low and there isn't much of a competitive advantage from being a giant conglomerate. All you need to be competitive as handyman/plumber/electrician is a bag of tools and some technical skills. But most of the major industries that we rely on are already these giant enterprises with many people cooperating together. It is not us socialists who want to socialize production, production has already been socialized by capitalists. Socialists merely argue that we should do away with this outdated and incredibly costly style of autocratic organization of production, where a few c-suite executives who are only accountable to their shareholders have the deciding say in how that production is organized and how resources are allocated. Any economic function that owners/CEOs/shareholders serve with regards to economic organization can be equally fulfilled by a democratic organization of the people who are actually doing that work. There's no reason why we would need private owners in order to minimize economic factors such as risk and opportunity cost, since every worker in an enterprise would already have a vested interest in minimizing those factors. There is no rational reason that we should be letting an unaccountable ownership class make decisions about how the surpluses that were created with our labor are allocated. Whatever benefits that capitalism had during time periods with robust and competitive markets are long gone. The argument for needing market signals to efficiently allocate resources is nonsensical in the modern day, since large portions of our economy are already centrally organized by the board rooms and planning committees of companies like Wal-Mart and Amazon. And the profit motive is inherently bad at motivating all kinds of production that are none-the-less incredibly valuable to society. Our entire modern information era economy is built on technologies that were developed during the Space Race, but the investment required into the shuttle program would have never happened if it was left up to the whims of profit seeking enterprises. There was not market for consumers that wanted to purchase a shuttle for space exploration and scientific discovery, you can only get those things by deciding on what priorities and aspirations you have as a society, and setting aside resources from the public treasury so that you can pursue that advancement.

>Well all land and resources aren't even close to being privatized, so idk why that would be an argument against the current issues within capitalism or even the impending ones.

Did I miss something? Did the enclosure of the commons not in fact happen ~400 years ago? Are there still public pastures where you can graze your farm animals and forage for resources to be self sufficient without needing to participate on the market?

Or are you trying to argue that because there are publicly owned industries that is somehow relevant to a point about how the means for the self sufficiency of workers are locked away from them. Am I able to support myself just because the USPS is publicly owned?

Or are you referring to things like national parks as unclaimed wilderness that you can still go out into and live as a woodsman? Because the National Parks program specifically regulates these public lands in a way that prohibits any hunting/foraging from these lands with heavy penalties for violating these regulations. This regulation was used as a way to police and prohibit Native Americans from their historic hunting grounds, pushing them into "reservations" that are effectively slums/ghettos.

I suppose it would be more accurate for me to say that any land and natural resources that has practical value is gated from general public use, or that use is otherwise heavily restricted, but my overall point remains the same. If you are someone in society who has no resources of your own, and you have nothing for sale except for your own labor power, then you are forced into inherently coercive economic arrangements in order to earn the wages you need to stay alive. This drastically restricts the amount of negotiating power you have in labor negotiations, and while it still not impossible to gain some competitive advantages on the labor market it is still an arrangement that drastically benefits any employer you attempt to negotiate with at your expense.