Comment on Anon judges Karl
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 1 week agoMillions of people starved to death under the Soviet Union. it sucked.
Also do you think Korea was some developed country at the beginning of the 20th century. They had it hard in WWII and the Korean war. How did SK become a developed country and North Korea remains a horrible place to live.
Perhaps central planning can be beneficial for a developing country, if you don’t get ideology brained and do stupid mistakes like the Soviet Union and China did which resulted in famines. But even then once you get past basic needs, socialism stagnates. Who determines what people “need”? What if the powers that be decide “the people need more tanks?”
Once a society reaches a certain level of prosperity and people have some disposable income, it’s better to have a system that allows people to choose to do what they want with that income. Socialism fails at that point.
Once a society reaches a certain level of prosperity and people have some disposable income, it’s better to have a system that allows people to choose to do what they want with that income. Socialism fails at that point.
Just to be clear capitalism and markets aren’t equivocal. Market socialism is a thing.
Socialism is a really big umbrella term… similar to “democracy” there are a bunch of different ways to actually apply it. State socialism is only one scheme for it/
A lot of modern-day critique of communist regimes like Stalin’s are critiqued in a way that the problems they had are not only unique to communism, but were due to it. My great-grandfather was jailed into a gulag due to arrest quotas and being at the wrong place in 1956 in Hungary. By 2013, he was instructed to stop mentioning the arrest quotas by the NGO he used to volunteer to (due to “future US presidents might want to use them”), and that he’d get money if he made up a lie that would make it seem like he was arrested for being a conservative christian or something like that.
darthelmet@lemmy.world 1 week ago
There were famines before the Soviet Union. That’s kind of how things worked before modern industrial agriculture.
As for Korea… just think about it for 30 seconds… I’ll give you time…
…ok: South Korea was allied with the US, which helped rebuild it and became a trading partner. North Korea is an enemy of the US and has spent it’s entire existence being blockaded and provoked by the world’s largest superpower. Gee, why might they have had different economic outcomes?
As for the central planning point: idk. That’s something to figure out. It’s not even really the important part of socialism/communism. The important part is making sure the state can’t be taken over by a ruling class. Capitalism absolutely can’t keep capitalists from taking over the state. Whatever we should do, we don’t get to choose until we get the government in the hands of the people.