Modlog has this comment: My grandparents would like a word, since they barely escaped communist rule, while their siblings/other family members didn’t. They could tell you first hand what it was like. So go ahead and call me brainwashed.

Do people just not believe Eastern Europeans etc exist lol

Luckily most countries don’t believe the lies the US is trying to spread about China.

Would you like to provide a link, or any sort of proof to back up this outlandish claim?

Communism inevitably will always lead to dictatorship and totalitarianism.

In order to become a communist state, you have to: 1.) Get a bit army or group of people to enforce the upcoming rules. 2.) Force people to get rid of private ownership or threaten them to give it up. This will piss a lot of people off. 3.) Get rid of them if they don’t. This will piss a lot of people off. 4.) Realize that you’ve pissed a lot of people off, and that your the only power in the land, you definitely don’t want to give this up. 5.) Enact a single party system…oh, fuck…

Communism doesn’t work on a large-scale, and it’s not sustainable. By it’s very nature it’s extremely prone to abuse, and fundamentally impossible to install any sort of checks and balances on a single party-system. Look how bad it is with a two-party system in the US.

…and how do you enforce it? No one is going to want to give up the land that they worked for and purchased themselves, or that they developed. Give up your rights or we imprison or kill you?

And who controls this enforcing agency? The single party government? Because you can’t have multiple parties…how do you prevent the government from taking advantage of their position? Like, I don’t think communism is this magical fix-all that you think it is.

Cuba. Cuba has the most educated population in North America, more doctors per capita then almost any other nation. The only reason they’re struggling is because America’s embargo. They want stuff too.

Mostly this, although Vietnam is doing quite well, especially considering their circumstances.

Cuba is also really interesting…not thriving, to be sure, but you have to end the US blockade before you blame them for their own hardships. And in spite of everything, they have democracy like we’ve never seen in the west.

Edit: also what beejboytyson said about Cuba.

Yeah but all forms of government are constantly attacked. You’re like a multicellular organism crying foul because bacteria and other pathogens are trying to invade it.

One of the reasons capitalism wins is it produces enough wealth to win wars. Consistently. The same wealth that leads to ever-lower levels of poverty also wins wars.

Democracy is mathematically impossible

You could’ve just typed “No”.

All the other things you’ve typed is nonsense anyways.

Meanwhile, if you want a historical example then look no further than USSR.

Russia went from a backwards agrarian society where people travelled by horse and carriage to being the first in space in the span of 40 years. Russia showed incredible growth after the revolution that surpassed the rest of the world:

• https://wid.world/document/soviets-oligarchs-inequality-property-russia-1905-2016/
• https://wid.world/document/appendix-soviets-oligarchs-inequality-property-russia-1905-2016-wid-world-working-paper-201710/

USSR provided free education to all citizens resulting in literacy rising from 33% to 99.9%:

• http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/PubEdUSSR.htm
• http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/anglosov.htm
• http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0000/000013/001300eo.pdf
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez

USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960’s, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Soviet_Union
• https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5054/index1.html

Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:

• https://www.scribd.com/document/430076844/CIA-RDP84B00274R000300150009-5-pdf
• https://artir.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/compar1.png?w=640

USSR moved from 58.5-hour work weeks to 41.6 hour work weeks (-0.36 h/yr) between 1913 and 1960:

• https://books.google.com/books?id=x8JYjwEACAAJ
• https://b-ok.cc/book/2669908/77497f

USSR averaged 22 days of paid leave in 1986 while USA averaged 7.6 in 1996:

• https://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1994/94B09_66_englp2.pdf
• https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm

In 1987, people in the USSR could retire with pension at 55 (female) and 60 (male) while receiving 50% of their wages at a at minimum. Meanwhile, in USA the average retirement age was 62-67 and the average (not median) retiree household in the USA could expect $48k/yr which comes out to 65% of the 74k average (not median) household income in 2016:

• https://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1994/94B09_66_englp2.pdf
• https://www.cbsnews.com/news/could-you-get-by-on-the-average-americans-retirement-income/

GDP took off after socialism was established and then collapsed with the reintroduction of capitalism:

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Union_GDP_per_capita.gif

The Soviet Union had the highest physician/patient ratio in the world. USSR had 42 doctors per 10,000 population compared to 24 in Denmark and Sweden, and 19 in US:

• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0735675784900482 (sci-hub for access)

• USSR defeated a smallpox epidemic in a matter of 19 days https://www.rbth.com/history/331857-how-ussr-defeated-black-smallpox

• The Social Consequences of Soviet Immunization Policies https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1997-812-03g-Hoch.pdf

So, how do people who lived under communism feel now that they got a taste of capitalism?

• A remarkable 72% of Hungarians say that most people in their country are actually worse off today economically than they were under communism. Only 8% say most people in Hungary are better off, and 16% say things are about the same. In no other Central or Eastern European country surveyed did so many believe that economic life is worse now than during the communist era. This is the result of almost universal displeasure with the economy. Fully 94% describe the country’s economy as bad, the highest level of economic discontent in the hard hit region of Central and Eastern Europe. Just 46% of Hungarians approve of their country’s switch from a state-controlled economy to a market economy; 42% disapprove of the move away from communism. The public is even more negative toward Hungary’s integration into Europe; 71% say their country has been weakened by the process.

• The most incredible result was registered in a July 2010 IRES (Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy) poll, according to which 41% of the respondents would have voted for Ceausescu, had he run for the position of president. And 63% of the survey participants said their life was better during communism, while only 23% attested that their life was worse then. Some 68% declared that communism was a good idea, just one that had been poorly applied.

• Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Young people and the better off are among those rebuffing criticism of East Germany as an “illegitimate state.” In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR.

• A poll shows that as many as 81 per cent of Serbians believe they lived best in the former Yugoslavia -“during the time of socialism”. The survey focused on the respondents’ views on the transition “from socialism to capitalism”, and a clear majority said they trusted social institutions the most during the rule of Yugoslav communist president Josip Broz Tito. The standard of living during Tito’s rule from the Second World War to the 1980s was also assessed as best, whereas the Milosevic decade of the 1990s, and the subsequent decade since the fall of his regime are seen as “more or less the same”. 45 percent said they trusted social institutions most under communism with 23 percent choosing the 2001-2003 period when Zoran Djinđic was prime minister. Only 19 per cent selected present-day institutions.

• 75% of Russians have expressed increasingly positive opinions about the Soviet Union over the years. Only a small portion of those surveyed said they had negative associations with the Soviet Union. The economic deficit, long lines and coupons were named by 4% of respondents each, while the Iron Curtain, economic stagnation and political repressions were named by 1% each, the Levada Center said.

• Adult mortality increased enormously in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union when the Soviet system collapsed 30 years ago. https://archive.ph/9Z12u

• Former Soviet Countries See More Harm From Breakup https://news.gallup.com/poll/166538/former-soviet-countries-harm-breakup.aspx

The Free market paradise goes East chapters in Blackshirts and Reds details some more results of the transition to capitalism.

Do you live in china?

It’s hard for me to look at % increases or “X out of poverty” or “This person makes 1+ what they did before!”. I get fed the same stuff about how great America is doing because of our “numbers”. Without being there it’s hard to grasp if what you’re saying is anything better, worse, or just par for the course of a developing nation with such a high output with manufacturing.

90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes

Seeing this statement and reading the link, they have absolutely nothing to do with each other and you make it seem like it’s a “quote” from the article (I’m guessing it’s from the 93 page research paper I’m reading through). They would’ve just been better off publishing whatever data they talked about researchers definitely having, the whole thing read like an Elon Musk press conference…

“To sustain poverty reduction gains, China will focus more on achieving endogenous development in areas that have been lifted out of poverty and introduce vigorous measures to support rural revitalization. Our goal is to achieve common prosperity and high-quality development including through the rural revitalization strategy with a focus in five key areas: industry development, human capital, culture, ecological environment and local governance.”

It’s interesting and kinda disconcerting reading through the policies and how no real figures are presented for what the policy should be, such as the “common prosperity” they hope to achieve be 2030 (link page 15)

China has set a new goal of achieving significant progress toward common prosperity by 2035.1 While no particular income target or poverty threshold is attached to this goal, it can help keep the policy focus on the vulnerable population over the coming decade.

It makes me wonder if setting an elusive “goal” of a policy is better to get members on board and then slap them with the real numbers after they have already signed on and can’t openly complain about (bad for corrupt sectors of government though). There’s also just not enough information as stated in the paper to actually understand what is going on,

Finally, this review of China’s poverty reduction experience leaves a number of questions open for further research…

• the interplay between poverty reduction and growth deserves further analysis to understand the extent that poverty reduction measures may, in turn, help less-developed areas grow faster
• a deeper analysis of China’s use of policy experimentation at the local level combined with high-powered performance incentives may contribute to our understanding of models of decentralization and public service delivery
• an evaluation of China’s targeted poverty alleviation experience in recent years would benefit from further analysis of individual policy interventions and their interactions to better understand not just the effectiveness but also the efficiency and sustainability of the program.
• An analysis of the costs and benefits of policy intervention would also be warranted in a broader sense, helping to systematically account (suan da zhang in the Chinese term) for factors such as the impact of infrastructure investments on poverty reduction or the merits of the hukou system and man- aged urbanization policies. In all these areas, active exchanges between researchers within and outside of China, and between academics and policy makers, should be encouraged, and the data needed for high-quality empirical work should be made more widely available. These actions will help ensure that China’s poverty reduction achievements get the attention and understanding that they deserve.

Just now seeing and trying to wrap my head around the Hukou system. I’m not here arguing good/bad communism, I just like the information and think that many forms of government can work out with protections in place (regulations, corruption detection, etc). I just wanted to point out your article mention and link didn’t really fit together with how you presented it. I did enjoy the reading and will continue today, but I take it all with a grain of salt. I don’t really 100% trust any source these days, which in this technological era should really be the default for everyone. Definitely let it sink in and contemplate the realities of others, but you only have your own reality to work within for any type of effective action.

From your first source

Figure 1 shows that China had very low inequality levels in the late 1970s, but it is now approaching the US, where income concentration remains the highest among the countries shown

It always ends up as a dictatorship, because communism puts too much trust and responsibility on the one in power. So much so that, no one history was able to resist being a dictator.

Pol pot has entered the chat

Imagine how awesome a dictatorship would be if the dictator would want the best for their people instead of the best for their own? Oh right, never happened. Communism could be great, in theory. In real people partake and greed ruins it. Or is there a great working example?

And let’s not even talk about capitalism. If you really have to question this, enjoy your young innocent life with ideologies. Not meant sarcastically.

If .worlders could see hexbear and lemmygrad, they’d have an aneurysm. But then some of them would recover and look further into it and realize the commies are right. But that is of course why they’re not allowed to see it, as you said.

Why are liberals on a decentralized platform anyway? Surely the free market has provided adequate platforms for everyone’s needs

True democratic socialism is impossible as long as the United States exists as an imperialist force.

1, That’s silly, there’s tons of democratic socialist countries that are doing just fine - today! Bolivia, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand - think the US fucks with their way of governing?

2, the USSR was never a type of democratic socialism. Period. They literally called it ‘soviet democracy’ distinctly, and it meant something WILDLY different that the kinds of democratic socialism we see in the above listed countries.

Your premise is faulty, built upon an imagined soviet union that did not practice the tenants you’re endorsing.

True democratic socialism is impossible as long as the United States exists as an imperialist force.

Not sure how to explain, but I don’t think so.