After Mao, the malnutrition rate in China is 7%.
After Indian capitalism, the malnutrition rate in India is 51%.
Mao set a world record by doubling life expectancy in in the shortest period of time. Life expectancy was doubled from 32 in 1949 to 65 in 1980. A world record! Think how many lives Mao saved! Sure he killed some people, but he saved so many other lives. This is why so many people who lived under Mao revere him to this very day, though it is admitted that he made mistakes.
No, they like them because they are Social Darwinists and they think they won the genetic lottery. Not only that, they think everyone who lost the lottery shouldn’t even get a chance to play. Or maybe even not get a chance to live. That’s what it’s all about. All HBD’ers hate socialism because it requires people to share. HBD’ers are unbelievably selfish. They don’t want to share with even one other human being. Their motto is as Adam Smith wrote, “Everything for me, and nothing for anything else.” Capitalist fanboys who love Smith fail to note that that philosophy was also one of the most evil philosophies that exists.
There is evidence for free markets. Yeah. Evidence that they don’t work. Look what the Chicago Boys did to Chile. Look how free market capitalism blew up the whole US economy in 2008 and took most of the world economy down with it. Love how capitalism starves to death 14 million people a year, mostly in South Asia.
There’s evidence that Communism saves lives. Stalin broke the world record for increasing life expectancy, doubling it from 1927-1953. Mao then broke Stalin’s record, doubling life expectancy in an even shorter time, 1949-1980. Where’s the evidence that free markets are good for public health or the health of any individual. How do free markets work if they don’t even give people enough food to live on? How do they work if they aren’t even able to provide shelter for all people? How do they work if they can’t even provide people with health care? Obviously in a lot of ways, free markets don’t even work at all.
Radical neoliberal free market capitalism doesn’t “work better” than socialism, at least not in my book anyway. I believe in survival. Radical capitalism doesn’t allow people to survive. I am against that. What it boils down to is that I will always support a system that allows people to survive (socialism) against a system that doesn’t (radical free market socialism). So to me security > wealth. You’re free to differ.
Many varieties of socialism have been 100% proven to be better for workers than radical free market capitalism. I also believe in a strong safety net. Your argument is that zero safety net works better than a strong safety net. Well, as one who supports a strong safety net, I just don’t agree with that.
My definition of socialism includes social democracy.
We have basically centuries of evidence that radical free market capitalism is catastrophic to working people. We can go all the way back to the 1800’s and even further back to the fencing off of the Commons in England if you like.
The debate is settled. It’s over. Radical free market capitalism is a disaster. If you ask me, it doesn’t work. I drive around my town and see countless homeless people wandering the streets every day in one of the richest countries on Earth. Now to me that is not a system that is “working better,” sorry. Don’t buy it.
The power of capitalist propaganda is immense. According to the ruling class media, the only system that starves anyone anymore is Communism.
One hears this platitude over and over – Communism = starvation. It is true that 600,000 have starved to death in North Korea since the 1990’s. However, 14 million starve to death every year in the world – mostly in South Asia but also 1 million in Latin America – almost all under capitalist regimes. Not one word of this from the ruling class mouthpieces.
This has been going since at least 1986 (when the figure was calculated) with no end in sight.
n Vietnam, the malnutrition rate of 18% is about 1/2 the Thai rate of 36%, one positive aspect of Vietnamese socialism. When one thinks of Thailand, one never suspects that 1/3 of the population doesn’t get enough food to eat. All one thinks of are tourists, skyscrapers, traffic jams, girly bars, beaches and elephants.
In Pakistan, 62% of all children are already stunted in growth by the tender age of five. But the media tells us that stunting only occurs in North Korea. After all, it is only Communism that starves the people.
let us focus our attention on the capitalist showcase of Niger, in northern Africa, where the human-hunting industry, the most profitable enterprise capitalism has ever developed, yet festers.
Here capitalism has blessed this blighted and unstable land with the worst human development indicators on Earth, where 40% of children are chronically undernourished (And that is in a bountiful harvest!), where the literacy rate is a Medieval 17%, life expectancy is a tragic 44.7 years, the infant mortality rate is an outrageous 151.8 per 1000, and Niger is bested by only one other country when it comes to killing little kids under age 5.
What is killing the children of Niger, or for that matter, kids across the Sahel? None other than the free market. Recently, free market fundamentalists convinced the government to deregulate the grain market, leading to major fluctuations in grain prices. When prices are high, they are so high that families could not even afford to buy food for their kids.
Worse, money that should have gone to education and health care, such as it exists, goes for food. The wonders of the invisible hand of starvation! Incredibly, while the people starved, Niger exported food according to capitalist market “logic”. One is reminded of Czarist Russia, which exported wheat every year while the peasants went hungry.
Going the free market route was one of the dumbest things Niger ever did. It increased poverty, hunger and starvation. Yet the media tells us that this free market project is the only thing that works, and everything else is “failed”. I think if the successful project were starving me, I might give one of those “failures” a shot.
KaiserJeep wrote:Again, I must point out that the only form of economy with a record of lasting success is the Capitalist system. To claim that it is broken, while endorsing Marxism/Socialism/Communism, is silly. The dreams of Marx and Engels have an unbroken record of failure.
KaiserJeep wrote:All of that is quite theoretical, as nobody can reliably forecast the future. PRESENTLY Capitalism rules and supports 7.7+Billion humans. That is the very epitomy of success. Any Marxist regime would be in profound collapse with much environmental damage.
Which of course is yet another prediction of a future not yet real. However, my prediction is based on a consistent history of a couple of millenia of success with Capitalism, and the miserable eventual failure of all attempts at Marxism in dozens of variations.
Really - just think about it. Can you point to ANY Marxist system more than 50 years old?
mmasters wrote:I love it when people complain about capitalism yet they have an iPhone. That was created with capitalism.
GHung wrote:mmasters wrote:I love it when people complain about capitalism yet they have an iPhone. That was created with capitalism.
I don't have an iPhone, don't "complain" about capitalism, and China makes more smartphones than anybody (exports more than 4 times the #2 country).
GHung wrote:mmasters wrote:I love it when people complain about capitalism yet they have an iPhone. That was created with capitalism.
I don't have an iPhone, don't "complain" about capitalism, and China makes more smartphones than anybody (exports more than 4 times the #2 country).
Incidentally, China still has 5-year plans and the whole economy is planned. The business sector has to go along with the plan, and if you do not go along with it, they can confiscate your business. A party committee sits on the board of all large corporations. The government owns every inch of land in China. The state invests an incredible amount in the economy and also overseas where it makes vast investments. This is because some Chinese government companies are very profitable. A number of Chinese government companies are on the list of largest companies in the world.
Capitalists in the US openly complain that they cannot compete with Communist Chinese government corporations, crying that they get subsidies so it’s not fair. So here we have US corporations openly admitting that they can’t compete with Chinese government Communist state-owned companies.
45% of the economy is state owned and it is very profitable. Much of the state sector is owned by small municipalities and this works very well. Further, cities compete against each other. For instance, City A’s steel mill will compete against City B’s steel mill and both will compete against a private sector steel mill, if there is one. Successful enterprises bring in a lot of money to the city, which they use to upgrade the city, which results in more workers moving there, which grows the economy more with more workers and more demand.
here are also still a number of pure Maoist villages in China that are run completely on a Maoist line. Everything is done as it was right out of the Mao era. I understand that they do very well and there is a huge waiting list to move to those villages.
Also party officials lobby the state to try to solve any urgent problem in the area. The government is always running around the country spending lots of money on public works or on fixing various environmental problems and issues. A lot of the dissertations coming out the universities are on how to deal with this or that societal problem or issue. So instead of leaving it up to the private sector to fix the problems in society and create public works, the government does all of that.
There are 1,000 protests every day in China. Yes there is corruption and government abuse of this or that, but if protests last long enough, the party usually gets alarmed and tries to do something about the problem because they don’t want serious unrest. This is party that does everything it can to serve the people and try to remain popular with the people by giving them as much as they want and doing as much for them as
possible.
It’s illegal to be homeless in China. If you end up homeless in China, they will try to put you in a homeless shelter or if they cannot do that, they will send you back to your village because most homeless are rural migrants who moved to the city.
The state spends an unbelievable amount of money on public works all over the country all the time. Many projects that in the US have “conclusively proven” to be too costly to be implemented have been done in China in spades. And China’s per capita income in less than 10% of ours.
The economic model of China is called Market Socialism and a lot of modern day Leftists and even Communists support it and agree that this is the way forward for the left and Communist movement. Like all words, the word Communism has no inherent meaning. It means whatever people who use it say it means. So the definition of Communism can clearly change with the times as Communists update their definitions of what the word means.
China cannot be called capitalist in any way. Their model is far more socialist than anything in any European social democracy. It also goes far beyond the US in the New Deal and of course beyond beyond the social liberalism and its more left analogue in Canada, not to mention beyond social democracy in Australia or New Zealand.
Interestingly, Japan is not a capitalist country. They don’t have neoliberalism. That country does not operate on the capitalist mode of development. Instead the resemblance is, I hate to say, to Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany also did not have a capitalist mode of development. I’m not sure what you call it, but it’s not capitalism. For instance, in Japan, the commanding heights of the economy, including almost all of the banks, is owned by the state.
The state still plans the economy. They plan the economy together with the business community and the state allocates a lot of funds and loans to areas of the economy it wishes to develop. There is probably a similar model in South Korea, which also is not capitalist and instead operates on a series of monopolies that are owned currently by large corporations and the government. The South Korean economy is also planned, and the plan is worked out by the government and the business sector working together.
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