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.
Or, what system is not responsible for human atrocities?
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.
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)
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.
Maybe we need better terminology
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.
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 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.
Are you complaining about taxation and regulation? Both are cornerstones of every successful state in human history.
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.
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
This has me wondering, do people think the military is 1/3 of the US economy? That would explain a lot of discourse.
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.
Especially when the year before the agricultural reforms there was minimal starvation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.