How can you still be socialist given how consistently it has failed?

How can you still be socialist given how consistently it has failed?

From the USSR, to Laos, to China, to Yugoslavia and the entire Eastern Bloc; it has been an abject failure.

Further, socialist appeals currently hold NO RELEVANCE to modern living conditions in the West; "The exhausted toiling peoples of Europe"… where are they to be found? The only place since WW2 was in fact in the USSR and the other socialist states!!!

Living standards in the West are as good as they are due to regulated capitalism, and goods are of as high quality as they are due to competition.

Sure, the third world is having a hard time of it, and we should of course buy fair-trade and seek to force our governments to adopt fairer deals; sweatshop labour, too, must be cracked down upon.

What we shouldn't do is dismantle this wonderful wealth-creating system simply because of its drawbacks and excesses; things can't be perfect, but we can try! Sure, the rich will always have a greater say in policy decisions, but the public can organise to control them and impose itself upon our leadership. Force them to give you healthcare and welfare, force them to take stronger actions against monopolies, but don't abolish private property altogether, because with it you destroy the profit incentive, entrepreneurship, and that competition which is so integral to our way of life!

You all have clean water to drink, housing, and many of the wonderful things in life. Why on Earth you should risk to jeapordise it all for some communitarian dream is beyond me.

Socialism is a noble idea, but it's failed. Worker self-management in capitalist co-operatives could perhaps work, preserving both democratic ideals and competition, but you'd eventually end up with a ruling class of the most efficient, miserly, and skilful workers anyway, and once again surplus labour will be extracted for capital valorisation; and you're back to square one.

In the West, minimum wages have been achieved, welfare measures are present for those in need, some form of universal healthcare is present everywhere except the US, and, most importantly, technology is progressing in such a way as to ensure that all metrics such as these will improve, and improve all over the world!

Pic unrelated.

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Let neoliberalism continue to hold Europe for another 10-20 years and maybe dissolve the EU for good measure (for war to happen anyway), Porky will have set himself up into 1917 again

things could be better.

Ask the hundreds of thousands executed by Stalin or Mao whether it was worth it.

Exactly. Consumer society that has been pushed on us by the profit chasing, entrepreneurial and competitive overlords is the most disgusting thing the world has ever seen. There is literally zero reason to keep capitalism around, you'd have to be a retard or willfully ignorant to not see this.

Ask the millions dying of thirst and hunger each year if your iPhone is worth it.

Ask the tens of millions killed in wars fought for profit whether it was worth the McFreedom.

We have this thread every day. You probably won't get proper answers to it because it's exhausting.

In short: It hasn't been a failure. USSR achieved one of the highest amounts of economic growth only second to Japan, East Germany had a higher economic growth than West Germany, everywhere socialism was applied it managed to raise the living standards for the entire society and made a semi-feudal peasant state like Russia into a space-faring superpower.

Last time I checked, people still worked for a wage. By the way, productivity has been increasing, a worker today produces almost twice the value than someone 40 years ago, however, wages have been stagnant.

Except they are stagnating and competition also causes planned obsolescence in products. A lot of the wealth of the West is also generated through imperialist policies.

Free trade agreements are toxic for developing countries, the Third World should have tariffs, such as the West had in the 19th century.

I don't want to respond to the rest, seriously, read a book

Socialism single handedly dragged peasants into the industrial age without the need for vast overseas empires

Socialism produced two world powers, with one contending with the USA for global superpower status currently

Socialism is now even more popular in the West with how the fall in living standards shows the western capitalists cannot hold to their promise of better conditions

By which logic? Technology has "improved" for the past 40 years, yet welfare has dropped. Why is this? Is there maybe a power structure that keeps the wealth from going downwards?

Ask the girls who have to sell their ass to raise a child whether it was worth so you can buy a nintendo switch

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How much did the first human to invent the wheel get paid?

aaaaand it's a hit-and-run again

Good grief, have socialists degenerated since Kautsky.

Maybe you should do a little more research into matters before you call it just another failed socialist state. I will prefent you future embarassment.

Yugoslavia was propped up by the West during the Cold War; it fell apart into ethnic conflict because it couldn't repay its substantial loans

They have, which is why we should learn from them and not make the same mistakes.


Things are good in the west, and we should continue to make them better. We have 8 hour workdays, why not make it 4? We have unions to represent workers, why not replace this with full economic democracy? We have relatively high wages, why not make them higher? We have relatively democratic and free states, why not make them more democratic and free?


All over the world, 4 billion people live on

This can be stopped through mass action; sure, we'll always be at a disadvantage, but we can vote and march against war and for fair-trade. Further, we can consume more ethically and convince others to do likewise.

Really, and has this worked to date? You say socialism is a failure because it has never worked, and yet you say that ethical consumption will cure capitalism's ills, even though that has never worked either.

The only time marches have had any effect has been when violent revolution was in the air. Without the fear of revolution, the rulling class will shit on our plate and we'll ask for seconds, like you're doing now.

It hasn't worked because corporate power has monopolised discourse; the Internet changes this, as would simple organisation and propaganda.

If iStore workers refused to work until apple started paying more for their iPhones (produced in foreign factories, with the only demand coming from Apple; thus, they can force down prices), and simultaneously exposed their price inflation in store, then the company would relent.

We need energised, but not revolutionary, working classes.

Fuck him, he opposed the bolsheviks

You are saying this like it's a bad side of capitalism and not capitalism itself.
You are literally a liberal

He was also a sensible man willing to pursue reform and avoid bloody revolt. If he were alive today, he'd likely have voted Bernie, and opposed socialist troublemakers.

Read a book immediately.
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/

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Read a book immediately.
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/

Attached: cover_1500-15.png (1500x1909, 5.04M)

"Bretty güd book, 10/10"
t. Evo Morales.

Holy fuck the amount of garbage threads recently, made by Zig Forumsyps who believe they know anything about Socialism/Communism.

Everyone can fill this thread up with a million posts explaining all the minor things that caused all the past communist nations to fail but there's a simple idea that explains everything perfectly.
It's obvious who's to blame.
The West.
So long as the major superpower in the world is a capitalist cabal they'll do everything in their power to suppress communism.
Such is why not only must the west die for communism to live but also why communism limited to only a nation can never succeed, it must be global.

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And it will continue to monopolize discourse until it is overthrown. What you are describing is not a sustainable venture. The current prosperity in the west was the product of two things: imperialism and class struggle. The shitty living and working conditions of the 19th and early 20th centuries motivated people to organized and demand a better deal. They formed electoral blocks that influenced the state to quite literally enforce these better deals at gunpoint. So what did porky do? He outsourced, he found cheap labour and materials that could be used to satisfy the population of the first world with cheap products without lowering profits. Your solution is for Chinese factory workers to do what western workers did a hundred years ago, and that might work for a while. I'm sure Africa would be the next target, but in another hundred years when Africans do the same, then what? Once porky gets cornered you can say goodbye to your cheap goods, or goodbye to your high wages, because the likelihood of porky tolerating lower profits is pretty low.

And we'd all still be living in sub-gilded age conditions working 80 hours a week to get into more debt at the company store.

The only reason progress was made in the 20th century that lead to the much-lauded Western living standards was fear of socialist revolution brought about by the successful Bolshevik revolution. No pacifist movement can function without a more violent movement alongside it that prompts the establishment to bargain with the pacifists. Unfortunately, this "good cop, bad cop" routine only works until the "bad cop" is gone, at which point the establishment no longer has any reason to listen to the "good cop" anymore. And, as we can see, social democracy and the welfare state is on the retreat all across the Western world, standards of living are declining and the whole show is headed back to the gilded age with alarming speed.

No it can't. When has protesting (without risk of violence) ever actually achieved anything notable? I'll wait.


^This

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That's not a good thing. Stop being so gay

It is and you should read it.

...

I've read the book, and I don't think it's lost an of its relevance (Lenin's prediction of emerging State-Monopoly Capitalism is essentially true today when we look at the state-finance relationship) but I think the solution is for enlightened Westerners to oppose monopoly Capital at home; oppose the banks, oppose exploitative foreign loans through parliamentary parties that stand for regulated fair-trade capitalism, do whatever we can to ensure that foreign peoples can maintain access and control over their own resources.

This means opposing war, supporting more transparent banking practices, more stringent regulations, the elimination of corporatism, and the prevention of bank centralisation, and in addition strict anti-monopoly laws. Credit cannot control companies, for the means of credit cannot be centralised. Competition cannot be stifled, because Capital cannot centralise.

If the banks refuse to provide credit in this event, the democratic state, committed to preserving alienable property rights and capitalist production, will intervene.