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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that's my theory as well: as long as there was a "socialist block", the capitalist countries felt some kind of obligation to demonstrate that capitalism could also care for the not-so-well-off. After that, it was back to capitalism's essence of the rich (the exploiters, if you want to use socialist jargon) getting richer and the poor (the exploited) getting poorer.

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They’ve been saying that the poor are getting poorer my entire life.

Yet in my country, we’re healthier; longer living; and yes the average person is wealthier than ever before.

It’s physically impossible for the poor to get poorer every year without a complete societal collapse. Yet people keep repeating this line.

Reading this topic, I'm so glad there are people who can see this, there is some hope in this nonsense I see around.

You're talking about absolute poverty and they're talking about relative poverty.

In many culture war debates there's a consistent theme of ignoring and/or discounting absolute figures and monomaniacally focusing on relative figures.

‘The poor getting poorer’ refers to absolute poverty.

It has nothing to do with reality. It’s socialist jargon.

This is so dumb. The entire history of “capitalism” is of the rich getting richer and the poor getting richer too.

Having a strong "socialist block" could easily have the reverse effect whereby political discourse is scared away from socialist ideas as they are considered to be evil communism (c.f. McCarthyism). I would consider that a lot of mainstream media (owned by rich and powerful people) has attempted to keep alive the idea that socialism is the enemy and needs to be fought against.

Yet slightly left-leaning policies wouldn't look as "communist" when there's actually a communist state in existence.

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