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Comment by simianparrot | Hacker News Reader

That's something only people of privilege in countries that never experienced what the sickle and hammer does to its people.

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Non-hammer-and-sickle countries have done the same for centuries in order to amass wealth for its feudal lords. Only its targets used to be people in faraway lands whose humanity could be ignored in service of a 'civilizing mission', which just happened to tie in kindly with the interests of United Fruit Company, the East India Company, the South African diamond industry and countless others.

That arc of history is fast coming to an end as the easiest pickings for the feudal class today are right here at home. There's less resistance because the natives think their leaders are too civilized and their society too well-informed to end up on the pointy end of shareholder interests.

This is so dumb. Afghanistan? Eastern Europe? All the meddling everywhere from NK to Vietnam?

Having recently come off a micro-binge of the rise of USSR and it's history, the common theme in keeping a state communist through change of leadership is "The system works great, they just didn't know how to run it properly." Then they also proceeded to just continue the devastation.

The fundamental problem of communism is that everyone needs to play along, but the rewards for not playing along grow as more people do play along.

That is also the fundamental problem of every other system of human governance.

Chinese socialism is interesting and I think works quite well.

Absolutely new stuff is basically unrestricted. Go build, have fun, make money.

Intermediate stuff is partially state controlled, including cost, profits, pollution, and more.

Essentials are effectively state owned, cost controlled, and 'very stable'.

Also, the USSR was the first time it was tried. It succeeded some ways, but failed in others.

At the cost of the majority in rural areas living so far below what any modern country considers poverty that it’s hard to articulate.

But sure. If you’re in Shenzhen or Shanghai it works «great». Until you step out of line ever so slightly.

China got all of those rural folks out of extreme poverty too.

Only because they redefined the definition of poverty in rural areas to be around $2.30 a day (inflation adjusted). The medium daily income in major cities like Shanghai is $33 a day (inflation adjusted).

Obviously living rurally is a lot cheaper, but this difference is _massive_. We're talking a 14x difference in daily income.

With China, you always have to look deeper than the surface level reports. Just like you would anywhere else, but particularly with China because faking it is accepted as long as it saves face.

That's not a redefinition: when I was a kid, the definition of abject/extreme poverty was $1/day — inflation adjusted, that's the same amount.

Also, when I was I was born the entire country of China had a GDP/capita of about $6.10/day in 2011 dollars: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-p...

When it comes to the distribution, the best I know how to reach for is the Gini coefficient, on which measure China is better than the USA and worse than Germany: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/economic-inequality-gini-...

There's also this chart, but I don't know what search term I would use to describe it: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?Indica... (note this chart is in 2021 dollars, the first one is in 2011 dollars)

China is getting people out of extreme rural poverty faster than any other country on Earth.

Unless you're referring to Mao's rule, "Chinese socialism" is another word for "capitalism".

The US, too, has some fields of the economy that are almost entirely state owned. E.g. roads, K-12 education, public safety, transit. The existence of a few public industries does not make a country socialist.

If you look at Chinese communism on a timeline, it just appears that they are walking backwards from communism to capitalism at a very slow pace.

It seemingly works because China flipped away from communism to something more like corporatism/fascism.

No, not exactly. Under corporatism/fascism, the capitalists have control of the levers of the government. Under Socialism With Chinese Characteristics, that's basically the one thing the capitalists are never allowed to get. Money is blocked from translating into political power, which lets the government make long-term plans.

It works quite well in China, assuming of course you are not so unlucky as to want to protest on Tienanmen Square. Or have useful organs someone higher up might want to harvest. Or are an Uygur. Or a Tibetan. Or live in a place downstream of a large dam. Or want to express an opinion.

Oh, and you know how Nazi Germany was the first time that Nazism was tried as well? It also succeeded in some ways, and failed in others. So I guess we should excuse that as well, then?

You haven’t listed anything unique to socialism. Capitalism also works well until you’re poor and don’t want to live right next to, I don’t know, a bitcoin mining facility or something. Authoritarians are the ones running down dissidents with tanks and spinning up concentration camps, not their economic systems.

And you don't think that an economic system that denies every aspect of freedom (down to, and including the freedom to decide what, or even whether you get to eat, what you wear, where you'll live, what your job is, etc.) can possibly exist without also introducing a very hefty dose of authoritarianism?

I think you’re very confused about the definition of socialism

What are the aspects of Nazi Germany that you think have merit and we should try again? You can't just pick and choose when the aspects are intrinsically linked though.

They had a strong focus on family and tradition. They were against globalisation, which is mostly a centralising force that benefits the super-wealthy, and _only_ the super-wealthy. They believed in themselves, as a people and as a nation, something we are not allowed to do anymore.

Will you now argue that those things are intrinsically linked to starting wars and conducting genocides? If so, you are going to need MUCH more than just "the nazis did that, therefore everyone who holds even one of those views must hold all of them". And just to make sure: my description of good points applies to the Amish as well, but I don't think anyone would accuse them of wars and genocides.

> The fundamental problem of ____ is that everyone needs to play along, but the rewards for not playing along grow as more people do play along.

Reminds me of capitalism.

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