Albanians seem to be burning more than French atm. Given enough time capitalism will drive us all up a wall, into war and to concentration camps. It's only natural.

It was the communists that saw life expectancy dramatically rise as to what came before. You seem to have pivoted from the question of whether or not socialism is good to whether or not the same benefits could have been made without socialism, or in other words you have conceded that socialism was a positive.

Your author is a propagandist with bad data, that's the point. You referenced a contributor caught lying.

Does Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: A Guide for Foreigners count, or is it too commie?

Everywhere communists have taken power has seen dramatic, rapid improvements for the lives of the working classes. Every single time socialism has been solidified, it has worked out for the majority of society.

The dictatorships capitalism and socialism drift towards are not dictatorships in the popular imagination, of a single individual, but instead of classes. Capitalism is the dictatorship of capitalists, who collectively decide the course of society. Socialism is the dictatorship of the workers, who also collectively decide the course of society. In both cases, there is democracy for one class and dictatorship for the rest, the primary difference is that in socialism it is the great majority of people, the ones that actually create value for society, that finally control it.

its funny that all the life expectancies shot up in the 1940s, as thats when penicillin went into mass production and was widely implemented

how come it has billionaires then

does it have billionaires

• yes - It is capitalist
• no - it may be communist or socialist

Because it has private property in the marketized sectors of the economy. The CPC takes a Marxist view of economics that sees markets as progressive with respect to decentralized, underdeveloped production, and regressive with respect to large scale production. The commanding heights of the economy are overwhelmingly socially owned, while developing sectors are marketized to accelerate the process of socialization, which speeds up the effective rate of collectivization.

Not evenly. China was emerging from civil war and semi-feudalism in 1949, it had no way to get mass amounts of insulin nor produce them until later. Addressing economic problems improved access to necessities for the majority of society.

No? What determines if a country is capitalist or socialist is if private or social ownership is the principal aspect of the economy, and if capitalists or workers control the state. It isn't based on an arbitrary level of wealth held by any given individual.

Why should it matter which political philosophy a policy comes from? If a policy optimizes the HDI, GDP PPP, and environmental impact then we should implement it. If it fails to provide better outcomes then why continue to implement it?

Definitely too commie for them. But the question isn't whether lib theory exists, but whether they actually read it.

The vast majority of liberals get their ideas passively, from cultural hegemony. They don't read books on politics because they think they already have all the answers, that it's all simple and obvious. Just support "freedom" and oppose "authoritarianism," and there's no need to actually deconstruct and examine those concepts, because it's "obvious" what they mean.

It's like, hell, I've even read shit by Giovanni Gentile, who laid out the ideological foundations of fascism, in the hope of finding a coherent formation of that ideology for the sake of knowing the enemy. But I did so knowing that actual fascists would never read that nerd shit. What they actually engage with are conspiracy theories, rage bait, incoherent rants, shit like that. It's the same way, we can seek out liberal theory to try to grasp some insight of the latent assumptions liberals are operating under, but it's only so useful when they themselves don't read it, when they aren't even consciously aware of those assumptions.

If you try to ask them something that exposes a hole in their ideology, they'll just ignore it, refuse to answer, or change the subject. They never step back and actually think about what they believe. It's not something they're interested in. Instead, they're immersed in the soup of current events, just reacting to the current thing, and their opinions are formed around a combination of ideas absorbed from cultural hegemony, and what the news tells them to think about them.

@cowbee sparked a liberal massacre here. I've never seen so many bans.

its just the "for progress" excuse.

You don't need billionaires or exploitation of workers for progress

If you have billionaires, whatever policies you have implemented are defunct and flawed

No? China is the most rapidly developing socialist country in the world, the working classes there see the most rapid uplifting in quality of life in history. Do you think China would be in a better position if they had no capitalists at all, even in underdeveloped sectors where markets legitimately do aid in developing the productive forces?

You don't need them for progress, sure, but marketizing underdeveloped sectors sure benefits workers more than dogmatically treating planned economy as the most effective in all cases at all levels of development. China already tried your approach under the Gang of Four, and this was seen as a misstep.

Oh fully agreed! Common sense is just ruling class ideology, and this applies to capitalism and socialism alike.

Haha, they do it to themselves.

oh wow, could've fooled me! which one is it then? or have you hallucinated some brand new baseless accusations?

You clearly don't understand what fascism means, nor are you familiar with how China operates at any level

You have to understand how to view the world and how it works to figure these things out effectively and in a timely manner.

There's 8+ billion people and these governments are decades to millenia old. We definitely have the ability to test and see if we wanted. Most of the time though we let society run on pure unadulterated emotions without any care for outcomes.

real original, buddy. the fact you can't even stand behind your accusation tells a lot about it, tbh

You know how some physics experiments are difficult because of shit like particles having indeterminacy, behaving differently when observed and interference from other particles making them interact in unpredictable ways? Well, people are even worse.

That said, geopolitics is a giant live experiment, you need only pay attention and analyse. If you come up with a good enough model of undertanding, you can predict what is the likely the best course of action before taking them.

That's myopic. China, for example, takes a scientific approach to development through a Marxist-Leninist framework.

It's a live experiment. We're always going to be doing something and we will at least have data for that. Like Portugal's decriminalization of drugs has shown to be far more effective than the US war on drugs in decreasing drug use.

The question will always be if policies from a different political philosophy or one not yet invented or otherwise canonized are more optimal. We shouldn't be enslaved by a particular way of thinking aka it is / isn't in this political philosophy therefore it will / will not work / be better

Exactly. But knowing what worked for Portugal is just one clue. It's also important to have an understanding of why it worked, identifying other factors that could have contributed, ways the policy can be improved, how effective it would be if implemented in vastly different countries ways to adapt policies to those countries, and even expand the concept beyond drugs.

Imagine a country is going through terrible times and decides to implement some radical austerity measures, sell public companies, defund public services, do all the stuff the IMF loves. Or maybe the opposite, the country nationalizes everything and expels all foreign companies. Let's say a decade or two later the country starts really prospering. It would be unwise to assume this is just universal without proper understanding the mechanics of what happened.

Nobody is saying all answers have been discovered, you're confusing political philosophy as a world outlook with a particular formula and set of definite conditions. These aren't the same thing at all, Marxism-Leninism argues against set formula.

The "dictatorship" you fear is the dictatorship of the proletariat. It's called democracy, something that's incompatible with capitalism.

You're seriously saying with a straight face that you're concerned for the right of .01% of Americans to be idle parasites sucking our blood dry? You can fuck right off, and keep fucking off.

what even happened? Did they all get scratched and spew racist and homophobic shit or something?

Someone who claimed China was better off as a semi-feudal semi-colony and had family there, someone bringing up the Black Book of Communism as a source on China Bad, someone who referenced the Wikipedia page title "People's Democratic Dictatorship" to claim China has a sole dictator, etc.

Oh I see, the typical reactionary liberal.

Yep.

I'm glad you've had a much more pleasant experience with this instance than I have, but even the mountain of downvotes and people shitting on me for speaking my truth should paint a pretty clear picture about how non-.ml people are treated on .ml.

Feel free to thoroughly dig through my moderation history to see that I've never been anywhere near inflammatory in the incidents I'm talking about.

Unless you're taking the stance of "I've seen otherwise in other instances, so I'm not going to believe you or check to see if you're telling the truth," of course.

So you're just going to side-step the question?

I guess I'll continue to soap-box for those who are still reading and not hostile (none, by the looks of the votes) then:

I used to think "communism" was not the same as "socialism" until I was told by a communist (I think on lemmy.ml? Maybe it was Twitch?) that Karl Marx and other communist or socialist academics technically never made an academic distinction between the two.

My perception before that date was that "socialism" is kinda like a direction on a continuum (the opposite direction from "capitalism," more or less, but more strictly speaking the opposite of "individualism" or "selfishness"), while "communism" was the destination, typically explained as an anarchist/stateless society resembling ancient societies who had literally no form of measuring trade discrepancies (e.g. currency), and would just give what extra goods they produced freely to those they believed needed it and vice versa, i.e. the Marxian mantra of "from those based on their ability, to those based on their need."

That's just paraphrasing off the cuff of my former understanding until I was told otherwise by someone who very much seemed to be much more educated on the topic, and you're free to correct me/them at any point.

... or you could just dodge the discussion again.

How so? Kindly sum up for those who are apparently not interested in digging themselves and me who apparently doesn't understand.

That is the basis of marxism in a nutshell. It is a scientific framework to observe society and derive conclusions. it is not a set in stone fixed ideology. All real existing socialist projects were and are quite different in practice. And there is a ton of disagreements among leftists about the details.
The fundamental common idea is just to create a society that works in the interest of the 99% instead of being controlled by a small capitalist class.
How to go about this in detail must change over time since society and the world around us changes all the time. But policies must always be derived from empirical data and the scientific process.

Right now most policies in capitalist countries are created through a very chaotic and mostly unguided process involving competing capitalist interests and the occasional opposing social movements.

Marx made the distinction between "lower-stage" and "higher-stage" communism. Marxists since Marx have clarified this lower stage to be socialism, and that this stage itself has stages. Here's a diagram by Cheng Enfu:

Communism in the Marxist conception and anarchism are in essense polar opposites, communism is a fully collectivized global system while anarchism is a fully communalized decentralized system. Through a scientifically planned economy with advanced productive forces, everyone's needs are met in communism.

flawed yes but not defunct. Every system created by humans is flawed. The usual process with pretty much everything in life is to try to improve things iteratively over time.
China is well aware that the market reforms in the 80ies and 90ies created inequalities and billionaires. But it also created massive amounts of wealth and made china the second biggest economy in the world. Right now one of their stated goals is to reduce that inequality moving forward. I personally am quite confident that they will succeed given their track record of achieving their 5 year plan goals.

I already explained to you in that thread before you got banned. Which is what you then kept doing anyway. You are free to dig that up yourself. It's in your post history after all since you remember it oh so much

Pretty sure you didn't. If I recall correctly it was circular and increasingly stretchy logic. In fact I don't think you ever called me a fascist?

It's been a while; of course I don't remember it "oh so much."

Pretty sure you didn’t. If I recall correctly it was circular and increasingly stretchy logic. In fact I don’t think you ever called me a fascist?

It’s been a while; of course I don’t remember it “oh so much.”

I did explain it, it was you prodding and prodding with repeated questions to hope I eventually would make a mistake arguing with you, for you to then go in and focus only on that mistake, ignoring everything else. That's what you lot do.

And I am telling you to go back to that post yourself, you can go into your own post history, I do not care for it.

Pretty sure you're lying or at the very least mischaracterizing what I said.