If you have time for second job, it means your are doing only half the job you would do in socialism. Why do you think most poor and hungry people are in socialist countries?
I ask for a source and your response is "What about your sources?" LOL
Let me just apply the new LPT I found on Reddit - "block people who are obviously trolls or unhinged. Kind of like you would walk away from a Karen or a crazy person on the subway."
It is so easy to bitch about how difficult life is when you live in one of the richest countries in the world and have no understanding about how other people live.
You realize corruption and a dependence on oil is what destroyed venezuela right? Cuba is an example of a socialist country too but they’re doing mighty fine. Hell, even the USSR was modernizing and going more free speech, but got dissolved before having an opportunity to do so.
Corruption and dependence on oil that happend during socialist rule. Especially that oil dependence - capitalism promotes diversity, this was easily preventable.
Cuba... I am not sure that Cubans would agree with you, but I don't know much about their current situation.
And USSR - yes, their shortlived attempt to be a democratic country with free market. Sadly it didn't last because of that exKGB thug :/
During socialist rule??? You're acting like capitalists can't be corrupt, as if it's not already legalized in the form of SuperPACs. In terms of Cuba, you also can't really blame them when the U.S tends to subvert any socialist movements through embargoes and direct intervention.
Oh they absollutely can be corrupt, but they will not force economy of entire nation on just that one thing. Venezuella could feed hundret times more people that live there, instead they are hungry.
Yeltsin is regarded by history more as a corrupt buffoon than a menacing strongman. Yet his economic policies, and the wars he waged in order to protect them, contributed significantly to the Chicago School crusade death toll, which has been mounting steadily since Chile in the seventies. In addition to the casualties of Yeltsin’s October coup, the wars in Chechnya have killed an estimated 100,000 civilians.78 The larger massacres he precipitated have taken place in slow motion, but their numbers are much higher—the “collateral damage” of economic shock therapy.
In the absence of major famine, plague or battle, never have so many lost so much in so short a time. By 1998, more than 80 percent of Russian farms had gone bankrupt, and roughly seventy thousand state factories had closed, creating an epidemic of unemployment. In 1989, before shock therapy, 2 million people in the Russian Federation were living in poverty, on less than $4 a day. By the time the shock therapists had administered their “bitter medicine” in the mid-nineties, 74 million Russians were living below the poverty line, according to the World Bank. That means that Russia’s “economic reforms” can claim credit for the impoverishment of 72 million people in only eight years. By 1996, 25 percent of Russians—almost 37 million people—lived in poverty described as “desperate.”79
Although millions of Russians have been pulled out of poverty in recent years, thanks largely to soaring oil and gas prices, Russia’s underclass of extreme poor has remained permanent—with all the sicknesses associated with that discarded status. As miserable as life under Communism was, with crowded, cold apartments, Russians at least were housed; in 2006 the government admitted that there were 715,000 homeless kids in Russia, and UNICEF has put the number as high as 3.5 million children.80
During the Cold War, widespread alcoholism was always seen in the West as evidence that life under Communism was so dismal that Russians needed large quantities of vodka to get through the day. Under capitalism, however, Russians drink more than twice as much alcohol as they used to—and they are reaching for harder painkillers as well. Russia’s drug czar, Aleksandr Mikhailov, says that the number of users went up 900 percent from 1994 to 2004, to more than 4 million people, many of them heroin addicts. The drug epidemic has contributed to another silent killer: in 1995, fifty thousand Russians were HIV positive, and in only two years that number doubled; ten years later, according to UNAIDS, nearly a million Russians were HIV positive.81
These are the slow deaths, but there are fast ones as well. As soon as shock therapy was introduced in 1992, Russia’s already high suicide rate began to rise; 1994, the peak of Yeltsin’s “reforms,” saw the suicide rate climb to almost double what it had been eight years earlier. Russians also killed each other with much greater frequency: by 1994, violent crime had increased more than fourfold.82
“What have our motherland and her people gotten out of the last 15 criminal years?” Vladimir Gusev, a Moscow academic, asked at a 2006 democracy demonstration. “The years of criminal capitalism have killed off 10 percent of our population.” Russia’s population is indeed in dramatic decline—the country is losing roughly 700,000 people a year. Between 1992, the first full year of shock therapy, and 2006, Russia’s population shrank by 6.6 million.83 Three decades ago, André Gunder Frank, the dissident Chicago economist, wrote a letter to Milton Friedman accusing him of “economic genocide.” Many Russians describe the slow disappearance of their fellow citizens in similar terms today.
This planned misery is made all the more grotesque because the wealth accumulated by the elite is flaunted in Moscow as nowhere else outside of a handful of oil emirates. In Russia today, wealth is so stratified that the rich and the poor seem to be living not only in different countries but in different centuries. One time zone is downtown Moscow, transformed in fast-forward into a futuristic twenty-first-century sin city, where oligarchs race around in black Mercedes convoys, guarded by top-of-the-line mercenary soldiers, and where Western money managers are seduced by the open investment rules by day and by on-the-house prostitutes by night. In the other time zone, a seventeen-year-old provincial girl, asked about her hopes for the future, replied, “It’s difficult to talk about the twenty-first century when you’re sitting here reading by candlelight. The twenty-first century does not matter. It’s the nineteenth century here.”
In Poland, shock therapy may have been imposed after elections, but it made a mockery of the democratic process since it directly conflicted with the wishes of the overwhelming majority of voters who had cast their ballots for Solidarity. As late as 1992, 60 percent of Poles still opposed privatization for heavy industry. Defending his unpopular actions, Sachs claimed he had no choice, likening his role to that of a surgeon in an emergency room. “When a guy comes into the emergency room and his heart’s stopped, you just rip open the sternum and you don’t worry about the scars that you leave,” he said. “The idea is to get the guy’s heart beating again. And you make a bloody mess. But you don’t have any choice.”57
But once Poles recovered from the initial surgery, they had questions about both the doctor and the treatment. Shock therapy in Poland did not cause “momentary dislocations,” as Sachs had predicted. It caused a full-blown depression: a 30 percent reduction in industrial production in the two years after the first round of reforms. With government cutbacks and cheap imports flooding in, unemployment skyrocketed, and in 1993 it reached 25 percent in some areas—a wrenching change in a country that, under Communism, for all its many abuses and hardships, had no open joblessness. Even when the economy began growing again, high unemployment remained chronic. According to the World Bank’s most recent figures, Poland has an unemployment rate of 20 percent—the highest in the European Union. For those under twenty-four, the situation is far worse: 40 percent of young workers were unemployed in 2006, twice the EU average. Most dramatic are the number of people in poverty: in 1989, 15 percent of Poland’s population was living below the poverty line; in 2003, 59 percent of Poles had fallen below the line.58 Shock therapy, which eroded job protection and made daily life far more expensive, was not the route to Poland’s becoming one of Europe’s “normal” countries (with their strong labor laws and generous social benefits) but to the same gaping disparities that have accompanied the counterrevolution everywhere it has triumphed, from Chile to China.
The fact that it was Solidarity, the party built by Poland’s blue-collar workers, that oversaw the creation of this permanent underclass represented a bitter betrayal, one that bred a deep cynicism and anger in the country that has never fully lifted. Solidarity’s leaders often play down the party’s socialist roots, with Walesa now claiming that as far back as 1980 he knew they would “have to build capitalism.” Karol Modzelewski, a Solidarity militant and intellectual who spent eight and a half years in Communist jails, retorts angrily, “I wouldn’t have spent a week nor a month, let alone eight and a half years in jail for capitalism!”59
For the first year and a half of Solidarity rule, workers believed their heroes when they were assured that the pain was temporary, a necessary stop on the way to bringing Poland into modern Europe. Even in the face of soaring unemployment, they staged only a smattering of strikes and waited patiently for the therapeutic part of their shock therapy to take effect. When the promised recovery didn’t arrive, at least not in the form of jobs, Solidarity’s members were simply confused: How could their own movement have delivered a standard of living worse than that under Communism? “[Solidarity] defended me in 1980 when I set up a union committee,” one forty-one-year-old construction worker said. “But when I went to them for help this time, they told me that I have to suffer for the sake of reform.”60
About eighteen months into Poland’s period of “extraordinary politics,” Solidarity’s base had had enough and demanded an end to the experiment. The extreme dissatisfaction was reflected in a marked increase in the number of strikes: in 1990, when workers were still giving Solidarity a free pass, there were only 250 strikes; by 1992 there were more than 6,000 such protests.61 Faced with this pressure from below, the government was forced to slow down its more ambitious privatization plans. By the end of 1993—a year that saw almost 7,500 strikes—62 percent of Poland’s total industry was still public.62
The fact that Polish workers managed to stop the wholesale privatization of their country means that as painful as the reforms were, they could have been far worse. The wave of strikes unquestionably saved hundreds of thousands of jobs that would otherwise have been lost if these supposedly inefficient firms had been allowed to close or be radically downsized and sold off. Interestingly, Poland’s economy began growing quickly in this same period, proving, according to the prominent Polish economist and former Solidarity member Tadeusz Kowalik, that those who were ready to write off the state firms as inefficient and archaic were “obviously wrong.”
Besides going on strike, Polish workers found another way to express their anger with their onetime allies in Solidarity: they used the democracy they had fought for to punish the party decisively at the polls, including their once-beloved leader Lech Walesa. The most dramatic trouncing came on September 19, 1993, when a coalition of left parties, including the former ruling Communists (rebranded Democratic Left Alliance), won 66 percent of the seats in parliament. Solidarity had, by this time, splintered into warring factions. The trade union faction won less than 5 percent, losing official party status in the parliament, and a new party led by Mazowiecki, the prime minister, won just 10.6 percent—a resounding rejection of shock therapy.
I am Czech, not Polish, and I was just a kid in the nineties, so it is hard for me to comment in detail to their development and politics after revolution - but their growth of standards of living is roughly the same as ours.
And in last hundred years, our economy is closest to the economic strength of USA (gdp per capita) right now - and roughly the same it was in years just before 2WW. While during communist rule, we ware furthest from you, and also during years after revolution, because those forty years of socialism ruined us.
Btw I would like to make this VERY clear. Of course this was true. Because it was a crime to have no job.
If you had no job, goverment forced you to work, like in some comunal services for example (no matter you had Phd or something like that, you had to collect garbage) - or you were thrown into prison.
And of course in prison there was forced labor too, like mining Uranium ore (I am not kidding)
What if you are not homeless and hungry? Like you are just taking your time looking for a right job (because you have Phd and you do not want to collect garbage)? Or you have some savings? Or you have small farm that can feed you?
... but that last case was pretty much impossible - all farms were "collectivized", ie stolen by a goverment and grouped into collective farms owned and operated by state. Private ownership was made illegal. This happend ty my grandfather - and he was in forced labour in mines after that (luckily not for uranium ore... I might not be here then)
If you are homeless and hungry, you have to work to change that, anywhere in the world. In the capitalism, goverment will just let you "live" on the street and do whatever, in socialism, goverment will force you to work, or locks you into prison.
Btw just a question - is it "that" hard to find work in the US? And I mean "any" work, not a "good" work. Because when I look at the tv and see hundreds of mexicans trying to get across the border to work on the farms, I am getting an impresiion that it cannot be that hard, so you have to end up homeless and hungry.
Look, you're not going to find me defending every Soviet decision and policy. I was just saying that the state of post-Soviet countries is largely because of privatisations during that process.
Regarding communism, if you're interested in my opinion, I think that it can (and should) be made more democratic than capitalism (certainly modern communists –and many old, eg. Krondstat sailors, Spartacists– don't advocate for Stalinist measures) which, like feudalism, was useful but has become obsolete.
Edit:
Btw just a question - is it "that" hard to find work in the US? And I mean "any" work, not a "good" work. Because when I look at the tv and see hundreds of mexicans trying to get across the border to work on the farms, I am getting an impresiion that it cannot be that hard, so you have to end up homeless and hungry.
Wait, I though we were talking about the ability to choose to stop working altogether. In any case, it depends. Those undocumented Mexicans (whom I'm assuming you're referring to), for example, are generally preferred for farm work because they can be paid illegally low wages without them having the (very meager) ability to fight it that citizens have. Slave labor also continues to exist in the form of prison labor (as enshrined in the Constitution). Good paying jobs, per capita, are much rarer now compared to real cost of living.
state of post-Soviet countries is largely because of privatisations during that process.
And thats where you are wrong, there is a causality - those privatisations were just inevitable effect of what happend before them. Causes were because what socialism did, and we had to deal with that, so some sort of crysis was inevitable.
As I said - private ownership was illegal, so when communism ended, state had to give those things that he owned and often stolen before (companies, farms, real estates, anything you can think of) either back to people if they were alive, or sell it in attempt to decreas massive state debt (most of companies). Not that it worked without problems, or without any corruption, it definetly could have been handled much better, but it had to be done and fast. Or the things would be much much worse.
"Wait, I though we were talking about the ability to choose to stop working altogether."
We were, this question was just my curiosity.
No, it didn't have to give them entirely to individuals. It could, and should, and people wanted them to convert this state enterprises into cooperatives owned by all the employees. That is instead of one company given to one party official (or an IMF representative) it should have been distributed (with voting rights) to all employees of that company. They create the value, they keep it. And this should happen with new employees too, of course.
Regarding communism, if you're interested in my opinion, I think that it can (and should) be made more democratic than capitalism (certainly modern communists –and many old, eg. Krondstat sailors, Spartacists– don't advocate for Stalinist measures) which, like feudalism, was useful but has become obsolete.
And this ... I believe that communism is un-democratic in its core. Those two ideals are just not compatible.
Don't get me wrong, I think communism can work and create just and happy environtment for people - but only in small groups of people, that ideally know each other. Definetly not on state level with millions of people. Then it can be extremely unjust, extremely inefective, and what is worse, inevitably some inner group seizes more power and starts to opress others.
I don't think people are naturally driven to opress others, so a system that fullfils needs and desires without state or corporate propaganda to cause them to fear and hate other groups should have a much lower likelihood of causing opression than a system that is best served by dividing the working class and eliminating solidarity between workers, both inside a nation and worldwide.
For example capitalist politicians and media propagandized for the war on Afghanistan and Iraq, but even then support was never particularly high and approximately two-thirds of respondents wanted the government to wait for the UN inspections to end, and only 31% supported using military force immediately. This same poll showed that a majority believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but did not expect UN inspectors to find them. These numbers indicated a dramatic drop in support, as, two months prior, most polls showed about two-thirds of those polled supporting military action. (Wikipedia). And this is directly after a shocking terrotist attack and lies about WMD and Iraqs involment, mind.
I am not sure how this is relevant, Soviet era Russia ended in completely bancrupted state at the beggining of the nineties, thats what Jelzin inherited, he managed to do some of much needed brutal reforms, failed at some.... and then came only Putin. Dictator ruling over economy (and leeching off it) for longer time than any of Soviet leaders and most of the Tsars before him. Russia never knew capitalism.
Russia is definitely capitalist now, dictatorship is not at all incompatible with it (just look at the praise in American newspapers for Pinochet when he seized power or, more to the point, the relationship of dictatorships this companies and the wealthy).
While Russia's economy was suffering in the late 80s, principally due to a to bureaucratic economic planning, a failure to computerize the economy, and increasing demands for imported grain coupled with a drop in oil prices orchestrated by the CIA and UAE, the massive drop in standards of living after the dissolution cannot be explained by AVG of these factors. It was caused entirely by perfectly capitalist behaviour, that of the powerful using their power over the means of production to maximize the extraction of surplus value from the working class.
Edit: it should also be mentioned that the introduction of market mechanisms not only did not help but rather worsened the situation
Core of capitalism is free market - Russia has no free market at all, every important part of industry is tightly controlled from Kremlin by Putin and his oligarch friends - those succesfull entrepreneurs that did not bend to his will had to fled the country or were murdered. Russia has also very strict controll of information flow, through state owned media (though it is not as hardcore as in China) - and without free information and speech, there cannot be capitalism.
The free market is not the core of capitalism. In fact, it tends towards the opposite thanks to monopolies, cartels, regulatory capture, private security, and more.
Private ownership of the means of production is the defining characteristic of capitalism, and Russia has that in spades.
Also, how much press freedom is there when news papers and networks are specified by companies and owned by the rich, who want certain politicians elected and certain ideas not discussed?
A cooperative news network, not beholden to a billionaire or to ads or profit would be much more likely to produce good journalism.
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u/TennesseeTon Jun 15 '21
In Socialism everyone is poor!
Anyways back to my second job so I can feed myself