• @testfactor
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    -35 hours ago

    Lack of good examples of countries that are successful without being capitalist?

    Pretty ubiquitously non-capitalist countries have a pretty poor track record.

    I often hear the phrase, capitalism is terrible, but it’s the least bad of the terrible options.

    As an aside, I’m arguing here for capitalism, not billionaires. Supporting capitalism isn’t an endorsement of a complete lack of controls and safeguards.

    • Cowbee [he/him]
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      05 hours ago

      Lack of good examples of countries that are successful without being capitalist?

      There are many. The USSR, PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, etc. Have all drastically improved on previous conditions, achieving large increases in life expectancy, democratization, literacy rates, access to healthcare, housing, education, and more. Read Blackshirts and Reds.

      Pretty ubiquitously non-capitalist countries have a pretty poor track record.

      This is false. What are you specifically tracking? Freedom for the bourgeoisie?

      I often hear the phrase, capitalism is terrible, but it’s the least bad of the terrible options.

      The phrase is typically used to describe democracy, not Capitalism.

      As an aside, I’m arguing here for capitalism, not billionaires. Supporting capitalism isn’t an endorsement of a complete lack of controls and safeguards.

      It doesn’t matter what you support, the Superstructure, ie laws and safeguards, comes primarily from the Base, ie the Mode of Production.

      Markets move themselves regardless of people’s will towards centralized syndicates, monopolies over production. These make themselves ripe for siezure and central planning, markets themselves prepare the proletariat for running a socialized economy as they coalesce over time. This is why Marx says the bourgeoisie produces “above all else, its own gravediggers.” There is no maintaining Capitalism, it eliminates itself over time.

        • Cowbee [he/him]
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          24 hours ago

          I’m confused, do you think the USSR’s economy was powered by starvation of ethnic minorities, and through this magic starvation power industrialization could occur? What point are you trying to make?

          • sunzu2
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            14 hours ago

            I cant tell if this for real…

            But so we are clear… USSR had undesirable minority farmers who didn’t like collectivization.

            They need hard currency to buy tooling and equipment to industrialize.

            They took all crops from these farmers, sold it on International markets and kicked industrialization into high gear…

            Millions died. So yes USSR industrial at expense of millions of lives. I don’t think there is much dispute here.

            • Cowbee [he/him]
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              3 hours ago

              Do you think Kulaks were an ethnicity, and not a bourgeois class? Collectivization of agriculture was poorly done, yes, but it wasn’t what powered industrialization. This is a misanalysis of the USSR.

              • sunzu2
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                04 hours ago

                Weren’t they ukrainian?

                I don’t think kazakhs were ever called kulaks, not sure tho

                Collectivization of agriculture was poorly done,

                And here comes genocide apologia … Again

                • Cowbee [he/him]
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                  3 hours ago

                  You’re conflating disparate factors. Ukraine was the breadbasket of the USSR, that doesn’t mean there was a targeted famine towards them.

                  Kulaks were a group of bourgeois farmers that opposed collectivization. Many of these Kulaks burned their own crops and killed their livestock to avoid handing it over to the Red Army and the Communists.

                  The famine in Ukraine and parts of Russia was a separate but linked matter. The Kulak resistance to collectivization was multiplied by drought, flood, and pests, making an already low harvest spiral into crisis. The idea that it was an intentional famine and therefore a genocide actually originated in Volkischer Beobatcher, a Nazi news outlet, before spreading to the west. It isn’t “genocide apologia,” it was a horrible tragedy caused by a combination of human and environmental factors.