Post by Nora on Jun 29, 2021 13:14:53 GMT
Jun 29, 2021 7:55:19 GMT Nora said:
I really hope the solution is not to go through it just to learn 30-50 years later what a terrible idea it was, as that would come at a huge cost to the country, its people and human rights.Another point is that many of the problems of these regimes were often more due to hostility from the capitalist world than internal issues - the Russian Civil War would have been a lot less bloody if armies of foreign countries hadn't invaded to support the much smaller White Army; Cuba and N Korea would be wealthier without the economic sanctions placed on them etc.
Finally, on an international scale, capitalist powers have been involved in mass murder, human rights abuses etc in order to protect and increase profits eg supporting Pinochet in Chile. And even at a domestic level there are obvious problems - homelessness, high crime rates, and the US prison system compares poorly to CIA reports on the Soviet gulags in the 50s.
Of course, all that doesn't mean socialism doesn't have its dangers but we should acknowledge these without simply conceding capitalism is the lesser of two evils when it is in many ways as bad or worse.
What we need to address problems of capitalism is better antimonopoly/ fair competition laws and better lawyers / investigators pursuing those who break it.
However, even if there were some way to make capitalism fairer, it's still a system that's based on people generating more wealth than they are rewarded with. It's still a system where profits will inevitably tend to decline, leading either to collapse or pursuing more immoral forms of growth.
no the majority were not better off / in the long run certainly not. you may argue that in some of those countries some were Temporarily better off compared to what was before but overall the systemic limitation of human rights and freedoms that goes with Marxism is crippling for any society. And while capitalism goes hand in hand with government terror only in Some cases, marxism (soviet style socialsm) always does. The level of opression and terror is incomparable.

