Hello. This is my second time here...

Hello. This is my second time here. I'd like to ask if there's a general consensus on this board's posters about these topics:

Are the successful northern european countries considered socialist by you guys (Sweden, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, etc)?
Are the shitty central and south american countries considered socialist by you guys (Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, etc)?


Thank you and have a great day.

Attached: spagett.png (225x353, 67.95K)

Other urls found in this thread:

newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-mother-and-the-failed-experiment-of-yugoslavia
news.gallup.com/poll/166538/former-soviet-countries-harm-breakup.aspx
foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/11/03/better-red-than-unfed-a-survey-of-post-communism/
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Social democrat

Cuba, is arguably socialist, the rest are social democrat. And what do you mean by shitty? They are doing fine compared to much of Latin America

Sweden, no.
Switzerland, no.
Iceland, no.
Norway, no.
Denmark, no.
Venezuela, no.
Cuba, yes.
Bolivia, possibly. I haven't researched it much.

No. There's no consensus on any topics.

Only by social democrats. Having welfare isn't changing the fundamental economic system. It's still capitalism.
Depends who you ask. Generally the best answer is that the economic system is not socialist (depends on the country though), but the government is run by (often reformist) socialists who are trying to get there. Politics is complicated and you're better off grappling with the specific situation than just asking "is is socialism?"

Cuba is socialist but that's unraveling by Imperialism very quickly
Bolivia and Venezuela are SocDem

I would argue Venezuela is trying to be socialist but they're running into various obstacles and in effect it's social democratic even if the leaders might be socialist personally.
Other than that pretty much the same as what this user said

😕? As for your question: Cuba yes, rest no.

General consensus, like a heavy tendency. Not actual consensus.

And also, would you people give up on socialism if your specific way of socialism had been tried and failed?

If that were the case I personally would try another way with a different socialist theory.

Even if those end up killing millions from both starvation and from being shot to death?
Would you consider taking only part of the territory of a country to do the socialist experiment instead of the entire thing, so that people can just leave if they don't like it?

Castro was the only good M-L in history

Attached: cuba sun.jpg (480x516 27.91 KB, 429.92K)

No, I decide to take them all down with me.

Would you give up on quitting smoking if you try that once and you go back to smoking after a while?

Socialism = workers' ownership of the means of production, no private property. None of the countries you've named are socialist except Cuba.


Seems unlikely to me considering historical socialist countries have a track record of massively improving quality of life, combating famine and being responsible for less mass murders than major capitalist powers

SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM ARE ECONOMIC SYSTEMS, NOT LIFESTYLES

Doing a local communist 'experiment' or starting a kibbutz does nothing. To establish socialism you need a world revolution or at least a socialist country which has the potential to be self-sufficient. Otherwise you will remain dependent on capitalism, a global system that has to be counteracted on a global scale.

Marxism is intended as scientific socialism, i.e. if something goes wrong we examine what happened and try to come up with solutions.

the living, walking parody

Attached: 43c.jpg (480x272, 19.7K)

I wouldn't even start socialism/smoking.

No, they are social democratic, but thats better than capitalist. Its a step in the right direction.
Nope but better than what they would otherwise be
Incredibly based and arguably the furthest along out of any existing country right now, but doesnt have a full on socialist economy. You could argue they are socialist.

Such as?


What if, somehow, it's fundamentally wrong? Like, for example, lacking a basic mechanic that makes society function.

USSR, china, cuba, DDR.


What if, somehow, you're making a shitty attempt at validating your own preconcieved notion that "communism doesnt work"?

Are you saying that those countries aren't lying about their numbers?

I am not, I'm just asking if you'd give up on your ideology if you knew that it didn't work.
I myself really think it doesn't work, I'm just asking stuff about you people to see what you think. For example, what about the economic calculation problem? Is it actually just bullshit and a state can in fact run the country without the information that free market provides?
But maybe you're just jaded as fuck, considering what you said, and just want to insult me, in which case, that's fine too.

Honestly? Most of them. Life for the average Russian in 1917 was both garbage, and hadn’t changed in hundreds of years. Within a few decades they went from a feudal country without real industry, chronic illiteracy, cyclical famine every few decades, and serious underdevelopment to an industrialized and urbanized with a space program, a caloric intake that rivaled the US, guaranteed healthcare, education, and housing. The average Russian went from an illiterate peasant working long hours and living in a one room shack to living in a city with electricity and running water, working a 40 hour week with paid vacation and a standard of living that was light years ahead of anything they had ever experienced before. This was he same story for the bulk of these countries, even today Cuba surpasses the US in some measures of development including literacy, infant mortality, and life expectancy. I’d recommend this article to get a sense of the kind of positive changes that people in socialist countries experienced. It’s about Yugoslavia but this is a fairly common story.
newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/my-mother-and-the-failed-experiment-of-yugoslavia

Many of the numbers that modern historians work with are taken from formerly classified material that was never meant to be made public. Why would they lie in such documents? Furthermore if somebody presents you with evidence that contradicts your narrative, you can’t just dismiss it as a lie without proof.

Im sure the USA was just making up the fact that a third world country went to threatening the existence of the entire capitalist world and America in the span of a few decades. Im sure all the former east germans are just pretending they want the DDR back. Im sure that the western media is just pretending that china is one of the most powerfull countries right now. Im sure the WHO is just lying when they talk about cuba having the best healthcare in the world.

Its a loaded question. You just keep asking and asking "but what if it doesnt work though". As soon as someone says "well i wouldnt try something that was proven not to work" you would then go "aha, gotcha now, the ussr collapsing proves communism doesnt work therefore you are hypocritical and now you look stupid and i am right". This thread is posted every few weeks mate.

Yes. See this short paper for a refutation of that "argument".

oh look it's this thread again

What if Russia got better in spite of the regime, and not thanks to it?

According to… Cuba? Shouldn't people question statistics provided by dictatorships about themselves? Do you think North Korea also provides real numbers about themselves? Or maybe you people defend it here, too.

That's cool, makes sense.

This, however, to me, is bullshit. Trusting "evidence" that was presented just because you don't have other "evidence" despite the provider being extremely, EXTREMELY untrustworthy, is just a terrible idea.


It is not a loaded question. A simple "yeah, if I realized it doesn't work I'd drop it" would suffice, I just find it mind boggling how hard it is for you people to say this. This makes me think of you as some sort of cult instead of just following the ideology.
A loaded question would be "If you finally could see that it doesn't work, would you then admit it?" or something, as if it really doesn't work. The question I asked was if you came to that conclusion.


I just came in to see if people here actually defend left-leaning places that went to shit, as far as I know, and ask a few questions. Not trying to insult or anything. You people expect me to just accept everything you say and not explain anything to anyone? Is this how one should operate to talk to you? Is confrontation this much of a sin to you?

In any case, what I'm bothered the most when talking to leftists is how they simply can't be brief. They have to link over 10 pages of content instead of just being succinct. It's just like the meme I posted earlier, here

I thought it was just a meme problem, but now it seems to me that it's something you do with everything.

Well it was thanks to the efforts of the Soviet government that these benefits happened. They were the ones building factories, schools, roads, hospitals, etc. That shit didn’t just happen or appear out of thin air. Furthermore the argument that it happened in spite of socialism rather than because of it is unfalsifiable. You yourself said that we ought to base our views on the actual results of an experiment like socialism. The fact is that under socialism, the lives of almost all Russians improved dramatically.
And the UN, and WHO, and MSF.
You could apply that scepticism to literally anything. I could argue that because corporations lie all the time, any news media owned by a corporation can be assumed to be fake. What you’re doing is assuming that these governments are lying without giving any actual reason for it other than your pre-existing bias against them. If you accuse them of lying, you need to show a credible counter narrative with more believable evidence.

Yes, I would drop it if I "realized" it didn't work, is that enough for you to stop considering anyone a cult? you can't just expect anyone to seriously tell you anything other than "eh maybe" from that question, it's extremely open, failures will be seen as proof that I should stop being a socialist for you, for me it's just one of many revolutions that will eventually turn the tide in favour of socialism. There were many failed revolutions before feudalism got replaced by capitalism.

communism good. Capitalism bad. You brainwashed by propaganda. Communism improved many lives. Comparable countries without communism are hellholes. Look it up. We arent going to repeat carbon copies of the past but learn from their mistakes. Economic calculation problem was disproven in the early 20th century, it was never an issue and is even less of one today. Multinationals operate just like a planned economy does.

Succinct enough for ya?

How is labour-time even used in this paper if it's useless?


That's an argument for not trusting information from other sources too, not for trusting the dictatorships' information.

I'll stop being skeptical about that for a second and ask another question instead: why did the iron curtain fall and why were people running away from eastern Europe? Why do some eastern european countries hate communism so much? Did they make all that up? Though maybe these will be considered loaded questions and here the narrative is that actually eastern Europe was mighty fine and nobody was running away from it, and eastern european countries that hate communism were influenced by the capitalists.


If you hate talking to someone like me so much, just hide the thread and move along.

???
Explain your question. What do you think is useless and how is it useless?

No, socdem at best

Only Cuba

thanks for playing OP

news.gallup.com/poll/166538/former-soviet-countries-harm-breakup.aspx

Shocking, when your ideology is more than just dumbfuck appeals to 'muh race' you have to do a bit of thinking/discussion to get to the truth.

Attached: brainlet jellyfish.png (500x521, 54.49K)

Get a better understanding of dialectical materialism. Whatever system comes after capitalism will be the synthesis of the contradictions in capitalism.

Attached: 3aaca07227503341453038aaa59353be077af444c69ae80c4ac4798fad54c4c6.jpg (255x167, 5.71K)

Not but I'll answer
Well, the USSR wasn't doing good compared to the Stalin-Kruschev years, but it could have been easily kept if the ruling nomenklatura wanted it, but they didn't want it. Privatization meant that now they can reap all the profits. This is nothing compared to the priviliges they had as party elites. The USSR didn't collapse. It was dismantled.

Would you also tell those who tried quitting once and went back to smoking after a while that they shouldn't try to quit once more then? Inb4 I wouldn't even ever talk to smokers.

If they want to wreck their body it's their problem.

No, you don't think that. You have no concept of what "it doesn't work" here means. You are against it in the same sense as a toddler is against cooties, any "reason" to "support" your "theory" is good enough. It doesn't work because it is against freedom! – That sentence is good enough for you. And what does freedom mean here? You can't really substantiate it any more than saying socialism is bad because it's against arglbargl. You can connect the word freedom to a definition, but the definition is something you have to look up or you have to take a moment to come up with something yourself, which you do after making the assertion, the meaning isn't available to you in an instant like snapping your fingers; you don't reason based on meaning, the word just gives you positive emotions based on the contexts you have encountered the word in before ("free sample", "freedom fries"), and you make the assertion because you have heard it a lot on television before, that's all there is to your "thinking".

trots

You are dripping with arrogance, arrogance that you shouldn't have, and only makes you come out as an asshole. To me these ideals wouldn't work because those in power will fuck things up, and in socialism those in power have way more power than in any other system. In communism, well, I've asked here before what it really is, and if I asked 10 times, I got 10 different answers, but regardless, for both of them, if the conditions for them to work existed (humans not acting like we do in reality), then socialism/communism wouldn't be needed in the first place.

…
If you don't think different economic structures or institutional arrangements produce measurable results in society relating to everything from political behaviour to material standards of living, then you need to read a book. There is no "human nature" that condems us to the one economic structure or the other.

The worst of us will gravitate to power eventually, and you only need that to happen once to get ~50 years of ruin.

How is opportunism more of a problem in socialism than in capitalism?

Capitalism doesn't work and most people still haven't given up on that.

It works though, we're peak in human history.


In socialism, the dictator has even more power than politicians and big corporations do in current societies.

Attached: 33f75a9cdc288114e69bc54a20b4319822732196aedb86e9a2ceb493b4935019.png (752x727, 103.94K)

Your posts are dripping with semen, porky semen that isn't yours, and it's coming out of your asshole.
Nonsense. People like Castro and Honecker led very humble lives compared to politicians in Western Europe (who have very humble lives compared to mega-CEOs).

inb4 "dictatorship of the proletariat"
Completely different concept. Words were used differently at the time. We hadn't had dictators like we had today. Marx lived at the time of monarchs. The concept of "dictatorship" in his context just meant "who runs things."

not socialist
could just infer this from the fact they have extreme racial hierarchies based around mistreating mixed race people who live there, then under them is outright immigrants. these are basically soc dem polite white supremacist countries
mild social democracy where most of the market is private still. they are moving towards a more egalitarian society against a right wing attempted coup and mass political violence against workers. wealth is still hierarchal; wage shares are not flattened out across the board like USSR had.
cuba is a socialist democratic republic with a functioning, healthy democracy (one of the best in the world) and is very egalitarian. so yes, it is is socialist in its governing principles and in effective day to day function.
don't know much about it.

i dont really understand this question. marxism is an analytical critique, dialectical materialism, of the system as it stands. we do not engage in orthodox marxism or parrot ML language and hope to create the same as the past: we use the failures of previous socialists to build the socialism of tomorrow, no matter what that entails and how it would function.

people are dying en masse from capitalist interventions every day. dont engage in pointless whataboutism; socialists havent done nearly the amount of killing capitalism has. all change requires conflict. how instead of bloody revolution, the rich who starve the poor give up their power peacefully? because thats what youre asking. youre asking for the impossible.

no one has personal responsibility.
humans are not special snowflakes, they are products of social machinery.

hahaha change your pants, your shit is showing
it isnt about how we act at all and no ML or aspiring communist would say that
you think you get 10 different answers because youre mind numbingly dumb and cant comprehend what you read

l m f a o

Attached: ApSep89.1684.4459.000.027.Sep1989.2.thumb.gif (250x308, 17.71K)

Test

Hey, I can't give you an good answer right now because I'm on vacation and don't have my books with me to give quotes. I also feel people around here make life in socialist states beter than it was/is. Of course people people who say it was brutal dictatorship where no one had fun and always starved is horseshit. Life there was pretty good, with great deal of people being nostalgic for Socialist times. Could you return here over an week? Make a new thread if this one isn't alive. If it is, I'll just write here. I'll post with the same nickname. I promise to make a good post with quotes and everything.

Sorry if the post is fucked up. My phone isn't the best one.

And you are literally this meme

Attached: SimpleVsComplex.png (1115x720, 741.58K)

This lol. Zig Forums laughs at us for being wordy, but they are legitimely no-books retards who somehow manage to have the shittiest opinions and analyses of virtually anything imaginable
Zig Forums posters can be stupid too, but only Zig Forums is so consistently retarded

Attached: Petersomme.png (577x498, 134.11K)

If I had enough free time to read all this shit I'd sum it up and throw it in your faces, but I don't. And I agree that discussing stuff you might need more words, but memes should be succinct. This is where the "left cant meme" meme comes from.

Smells like Zig Forums looking for a strawman

Attached: y2uNb2I.jpg (645x729, 67.53K)

The Zig Forumsyp is a brainlet. How typical.

Literal meme ideology.

Debunking incorrect statements made about socialist countries requires sourced data and charts, and such data is generally incredibly dry and boring. Correct, but boring. We are not afforded the ludicrous but tantalizing stories the reactionaries and anti-communists tell of us, just the "benefit" of having to respond to them.

Attached: bcdbae468d890f8ae6e6c80eed47e05aa2e646124dd93bc19f40ff1910833190.png (565x515 38.67 KB, 166.28K)

I said I don't have enough free time for this. Seems like you're the one who can't read.


Right, Castro, Chaves, Kim Jons, Stalin, all of them were not dictators.

None of them is socialist.

Then don't make a thread looking for answers if you don't really care.

Correct. Glad you could at least learn something here.

Attached: 91126f57996c8138444b86b663c11a63244d1ba9.png (622x7043, 1.51M)

what about Lenin himself

One of the fundamental principles of the left, especially the Marxist left, is to apply the scientific method to history and society. This requires education and complex analysis so that simpler theories can be developed that are still correct. That is the only way to ever improve anything.

Also you absolutely do have the time to read everything here.

Yet you have "plenty of time" to argue in bad faith like you've mostly done in the thread. And it you also have "plenty of time" to ban evade as well.

You just don't want to read what people have said & would rather listen to your own facts & lies from other rightists.

Attached: Population_of_former_USSR.PNG (596x767 11.5 KB, 81.94K)

foreignpolicyblogs.com/2009/11/03/better-red-than-unfed-a-survey-of-post-communism/

I made a thread just asking some simple questions. People started talking more and I went along. It's not my fault that the left can't handle talking about some simple concepts, and instead devolve into thousands of paragraphs.

I have some 3~4 uninterrupted free hours I can use to sit down and read all this fucking shit, and as soon as I do that and critique something, I'm going to get another billion paragraphs.
I am not arguing in bad faith, you are. And "ban evading" for me is just picking up my cell phone and replying again.

...

I don't even get why you'd come into my thread, insult me, ignore everything I say, make fun of me, whine, and then complain about me for doing what YOU are actually doing. I got serious replies, and for those, thank you, even if I disagree, but holy shit, thr rest of you act like a damn cult.

...

You've got to be seriously retarded to consider this place a cult especially when compared to pol. People actually disagree here on serious issues and debate it.

Zig Forums is for humor


You are insane

if you are twelve

Attached: 8nRqoXW.jpg.png (800x729, 48.13K)

It sucks that brainlet like me cannot overcome great man theory without significant effort

They are capitalist nations with CAPITALISTS (do you know what this is?) that fit within US-led hegemony so they can impossibly be socialist. Were Sweden and Switzerland on the USSR's side during the cold war?

I vaguely remember something about Sweden using USSR submarine card against brits for fishes

wew

Attached: 0bf200ffbe27dbf3b0ba1d8178a2553b2c0547c623bb04e48b2e700275c9d2e0.png (550x696, 587.59K)

It’s very convenient you ignore every country it’s been a failure, or the falling rate of profit, or how failure is so ingrained in the system we can nearly predict when the next market crash will be every 10 years, or how it didn’t live up to expectations of people like Adam Smith.

Attached: BCE01DE1-93FC-4F1E-B7CF-7DB9B8D61B4F.jpeg (634x561, 69.6K)

Attached: 4629743A-D2EA-40B1-8C31-FCC93619A436.jpeg (600x831, 335.99K)

The only two currently socialist countries are Cuba and the DPRK.

For this alone we should consider Sweden honorary actually existing socialism.

Look, he was banned from speaking his opinion.
Just like in communism '

Attached: 49ded566082c440d4f448c624c985bff9cdaf2f2edc596e8132ce0d5d7802776.jpg (480x260, 24.9K)

Fuck off

Why does the right hate reading so much bros? Is anything other than "OONGA BOONGA LIGHT SKIN TRIBE BETTER THAN DARK SKIN TRIBE" too complex for them?

Just wanted to pop in to point out that Northern European countries are “successful” and Latin American countries are “shitty” for the same reason: imperialism. Le Baste Nortic System™ is essentially a massive parasite.

communism will win.

pretty much this.

Attached: ancap2.jpg (1770x1142, 388.05K)

For that

Russia had a reputation for being backward ass country during that time for a reason. Aristocracy was fine with things are while serfs toiled and solider lived in trenches. It was ripe for a revolution.

Revolution still happens but only the february revolution

The thing is Russia had not undergone liberalism like many western country had been. Lenin's radical reforms actually managed to bring real changes like gender equality, education for all, industrialization, criminalizing antisemitism in a very conservative rural country. Civil war was inevitable. Just look at current Russian state. Oligarchs, Orthodox Church being moral police, more homophobia, and regressive domestic violence laws.

And the right cant read.
Every.
Fucking.
Time.

Attached: 1501334249192.jpg (1141x656, 188.51K)