reddit comment 2

>We haven't seen this happening.

>There's a lot of gesturing towards possible futures or impending issues that haven't been well-realized.

We have seen exactly this sort of thing happen. The gilded age of monopoly capitalism is an extreme example of this, and the disastrous effects of monopolization have been partly mitigated by trust busting and the nationalization of key industries that are inherently prone to monopolization. (There is no way to have a competitive market for railroad construction, for example. You aren't going to have 30 different companies each build a separate line between New York and Baltimore just so that customers have the option to choose between competing rail lines. And trying to force a clumsy market solution in this way would be an incredible waste of resources and unnecessary duplication of effort.) Those aren't impending futures, that is the historical trend of capitalism. We have empirical observations of exactly what this concentration of wealth and power into the hands of a few has on the lives of everyone who is required to enter into agreements with one of these private owners in order to get access to their means of subsistence. We have seen the industries that were broken up for being monopolies slowly consolidating once again through corporate mergers. And since these industries have grown into international conglomerates instead of just national companies, the ability of US lawmakers to regulate this consolidation is extremely limited. Even if there was a political will to regulate these companies, they could offshore assets and holdings and threaten to pull out of the American economy.

This consolidation and lack of competition is exactly the reason that average wages in the US have been falling over the past several decades when accounting for inflation. Average household wealth and quality of life has been decreasing over the past several decades.

>It's not like you're doing less work within socialism, nor is it like you get less work hours within socialism.

You did in fact work less hours and get paid more under socialism when compared with capitalism.

The relevant comparison is working conditions between industrializing capitalist countries around the turn of the 20th century compared to the newly formed USSR.

Labor rights laws didn't exist in almost any of the developed world except for the USSR at this time. Workers lived completely at the whim of the market and on the demand for their labor. It was common to be required to work 12-14 hour days, 6-7 days a week in order to make ends meet. "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair is a good example of what these conditions were like. What many people took away from that book was how horrific the meat packing industry was, with workplace accidents that resulted in fingers being chopped off and just thrown in with the meat grinder, as well as things like rats and rat droppings and other unsanitary things ending up mixed in with ground meats. But the more important lesson of that book is that it shows how a man who was strong and hard working was effectively thrown out on the street when he got injured on the job and couldn't work anymore. He was left to beg for employment, and as he became more frail and sickly from living out on the street he couldn't find employment anywhere and was left begging for food and eventually dead from exposure because the labor market had no use for him.

That was the reality of industrial work under capitalism. It wasn't until the Russian Revolution that a 40 hour work week and things like paid vacation had been guaranteed in any major economy. And those benefits were guaranteed while also developing their industry far more rapidly than had been done in any capitalist country.

>The work stays relatively the same, you're just being compensated equally and have more say in your companies trajectory while being given a standard subset of base living necessities.

Not even the USSR was organized around principles of "lol just pay everyone the same." Most work was compensated on a quota system, where the quota was based on what could be comfortably produced within a 40 hour work week. But if you were a particularly hard worker or particularly skilled worker and you wanted to fill 2 days worth of a quota within one shift, then you would get 2 days worth of pay.

Ironically, this actually provides an incentive for hard work compared to capitalism. Actually having your compensation tied to what you produce means you have an incentive to produce more, whereas in most capitalist jobs your hourly compensation remains the same no matter how hard you work. Capitalist work is motivated through coercion, by your employer threatening you with being fired and replaced. But that will only get most people to work as little as they can get away with without being fired. Tying your compensation to the value you create actually gives you the incentive to work harder, which is partly why the original targets of the first Soviet 5-year plan were met in only 4 years because people kept exceeding their quotas. This is also where the dumb meme of 2+2=5 being an example of the supposed authoritarian brainwashing of the public by controlling information or whatever. In actuality "2+2=5" was just a slogan on some posters celebrating that the country had achieved in only 4 years what they had expected to take 5 years, and then hacks like George Orwell removed it from that context and wrote a whole ass fanfiction about doublethink.

Also, "a standard subset of base living necessities" is a whole lot better than the millions of jobs that are equally intensive under capitalism and yet pay poverty wages.

>Point is, if you're working for 10 dollars an hour 10 hours a day, but get to go home to a decent house with a happy family, have access to immediate social benefits, technological benefits, and so on, then chances are people would prefer to operate within that system than one that pays equally, but none of the benefits of the abundance of wealth exists.

None of the nations in the USSR met this standard prior to the USSR, so why is this a relevant point of comparison?

Also, lol equal pay. You really got all your info about your own country from US propaganda, didn't you?

> More so than just that, virtually every country on earth that has or continues to operate under socialism or communism has a pretty disillusioned populace. You don't even need to talk about the USSR for this as much as you can Cuba and its migrant crisis.

The US just tried to agitate protests against the government in Cuba a few months ago, and the counter-protests the public organized in support of the government absolutely dwarfed any "disillusioned populace."

Cuba is a tiny island nation that has been forced to endure decades of crippling embargoes by the US, and yet has still managed to consistently improve quality of life and develop industries like medicine and education to the point where they now have an average life expectancy that exceeds the US and they regularly donate medical surplus and send doctors to help aid public health outbreaks around the globe

So according to which criteria is Cuba a failure exactly? Because they haven't accumulated as much wealth as countries that were founded on massive colonial empires that built their economies by extracting wealth from resource colonies? Why not compare Cuba to any of the Latin American countries who started out with similar levels of underdevelopment at the time of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and see if any of those countries have been able to achieve similar levels of development in the same timespan with a capitalist economy. Because the development that Cuba was able to achieve despite a crippling is staggering when you make that comparison.

>It also managed to starve millions of people, get immediately co-opted by an authoritarian who killed millions more, and then collapse all within the span of around 70 years.

You fail to quote any exact numbers, so I have no idea what scholarship you're basing this off of. But the Black Book of Communism is the most common source of these kinds of claims, and the scholarship in that book is so poor that 2 of the 3 authors of that report refuse to be associated with its findings because of how egregiously it twisted the facts and figures in order to artificially inflate things like famine deaths.

The methodology used population growth estimates from pre-famine and compared them to post famine, and reported the difference as estimated deaths. The problem with that methodology is that if people emigrate out of a region because of food shortages, they are counted as a death. If families put off childbirth, that baby that was never even conceived is counted as a death. And while there was a lot of hardship as a result of famine that did result in death, this methodology would also inflate those numbers because any potential children they might have had would also be counted as deaths.

But if we're going to use methodology like this to condemn the USSR, how does it compare to what came before? Famine is a tragic event, but it is ultimately caused by natural forces. And cyclical famine had been endemic to these regions for centuries before the USSR came into power. The only significant food shortages caused by famine conditions such as droughts occurred in the early years of the USSR while they were still trying to build up the basic industries needed to provide a decent standard of living. Once these industries had been established, food shortages due to cyclical famine conditions that had persisted for centuries prior were finally eliminated.

So if we're judging the hardships of capitalism as unfortunate but necessary, what exactly are you criticizing the USSR for here? If we use this same methodology but instead compare life expectancy in the USSR to the same regions pre-USSR, doesn't the rapid improvement in life expectancies mean that the USSR saved hundreds of millions of lives? Is the criticism simply that the Soviets couldn't immediately conquer nature and needed time to develop first? Do the capitalist nations who placed sanctions and embargoes on the USSR while these famines were occurring deserve any culpability in letting people starve because they refused to allow the Soviets to trade in order to make up for food shortfalls?

How can you remain consistent in your apologies for all the horrors of capitalism as being necessary for development, but then not be willing to accept that famine is an unfortunate outcome of both natural factors like poor weather and underdevelopment? It's not like capitalism would have handled famine any better, and even American had mass famine deaths during the same time period as a result of the dust bowl. So why is one of those evil but the other is unfortunate but necessary?

>Every criticism masquerades as a "well, they were trying their best guys!"

My criticisms of capitalism are "these are the logical consequences of the way society is organized, and the conditions in which those principles are operating."

Why would my critique of socialist countries not involve the same rationale. Why would I remove the creation and consolidation of police and security forces from the geopolitical context they were created in response to? Should I recommend that these things never be created so that socialist countries can just be annihilated by a superior military force, just like many democratically elected socialist governments were throughout the Cold War? Are you not doing the same thing when you dismiss so many of the consequences of capitalism as unfortunate but necessary? I think criticisms should involve analyzing how these things were structured, what principles they used, how standards were enforced, and so on, because understanding those things are what help build more resilient institutions that are less prone to abuse. But I guess you want me to criticize that security and counter-intelligence organization exists while also excusing any hardships of capitalism as unfortunate but necessary?

If we want to be scientific then we would run the same experiment and remove those geopolitical hostilities from the equation and see if these new organizing principles still develop in the same way. But we can't run that experiment, we only have one history to examine and it's the one where America uses it's massive military empire to coup, sabotage, embargo, invade, and otherwise interfere with any government that doesn't cave to US economic interests.

> Maybe you should create a blueprint if you want to be taken seriously? Considering this lack of blueprint just ended up with millions of people dead or starving, dozens of deadly prison camps, plenty of slave labor within the country, and an awful standard of living for those fortunate enough not to die.

Alternative history hours once again.

I don't know how I can have a discussion of legitimate criticisms when so much of your understanding comes from widely discredited and poorly founded propaganda.

Unless you want to tell me that you were there in the 1930s and you personally died in a famine while working in a prison camp.

Also, by no blueprint I mean that there is no existing practice to learn from the experience of, not that they were going in blind without a plan.

>How the hell is this a good argument for socialism? Socialism works when it deals with no foreign economic pressure, has perfect workers, no agency or free will, no dictator, and is actually just a utopia.

The argument is actually the exact opposite. Capitalism only works by aggressively expanding and containing to dominate more and more markets. Firms and even entire national economies are unable to halt this expansion and domination of markets, because if they ever let up then they will lose market share to their competitors, and that then loses competitive advantage, and losing competitive advantage means you risk being left with an unviable business. It is a system that systematically elevates only the most ruthless, cutthroat, and brutal into positions of economic power and influence, and the result is a hyper militaristic economic organization where powerful countries use their military might and economic influence to terrorize and exploit weaker countries in order to gain competitive advantages from cheap resources.

This is literally the most destructive form of societal and economic organization in human history.

>Because a good economic system knows how to handle foreign pressures. Which is why Capitalism has been capable of handle foreign pressures from Communist countries, for example, or other capitalist ones.

The major capitalist countries have had centuries worth of head start, where they colonized more than half of the world and developed their own economies at the expense, brutal suffering, and death of literally billions. The toll of this destruction is literally immeasurable.

The countries who undergo socialist revolution usually only do so under extraordinary circumstances. In Russia it was the Tsar sending his people off to die in an incredibly unpopular war, and in most others it is only the most brutally exploited, most desperate nations that reach the breaking point where they choose revolution. Where they are living in conditions so brutal and unlivable that the only options presented to them are to continue to endure and end up in an early grave, or try to fight back and maybe even win.

These countries have often ended up crushed in counter-revolutions or other kinds of foreign interventionism not because their new method of economic organization sucks and can't handle foreign pressure. They crumple under that pressure because that pressure is coming from economic superpowers who have not only had centuries of head start on economic development, but who also subsidized that development directly at the expense of those formerly colonized resource colonies who are finally learning the strategy and tactics they need to fight back and take their destinies back into their own hands. But when you are targeted with unrelenting pressure from an opponent who has far more resources than you do, sometime you still lose no matter how good your organizational principles are.

The countries like Cuba, Vietnam, and China who have undergone that revolutionary reorganization of society, and who have managed to endure that pressure, are far better off today than their counterparts who had similar levels of development decades ago.

Saying if you can't handle the pressure then your system is bad is literally just an argument of "Might makes Right." It is the most barbaric and inhumane justification you could possible make for capitalism.

Also, like, capitalist countries regularly fall to aggression from other capitalist countries. What the fuck is this argument supposed to mean?

> You do understand the standard of living in Russia has drastically improved... right?

It took 2 decades just to recover from the damage that privatization did to GPD and life expectancy, and I'm supposed to be impressed with capitalism for taking that long just to rebuild the damage it did when it took over? Besides, a lot of the recovery and economic stabilization in current day Russia was aided greatly by the re-nationalization of assets like oil. Capitalists looted the country for spare parts once the markets were fully opened back up and public assets were fully privatized, and it took the reigning in of capital to recover from the devastation that privatization caused.

>Every failure has been blamed on Capitalism

Sounds like a good reason to get rid of capitalism. That shit sucks.