United States | News & Politics

The vast majority of every poverty alleviation statistic for the last 50 years has been China.

Generally speaking, third world countries do not advance without tackling the worldwide capitalist system. This is because it is set up to enrich international corporations largely seated in the heart of first world countries, particularly the US, and can only sustain itself through the maintenance of profits acquired through exploitation of those third world countries. Unequal exchange, forcing international business-friendly labor laws on them, preventing them from building up their own industries so they must import necessities, structuring their economies around whatever the imperial core needs (lithium, oil, an underpaid service industry), forcing them into situations where they have a ton of dollars and therefore must import using them, etc etc.

Under this scenario, conditions in these countries regularly degrade. Poverty and a lack of infrastructure, low wages, and the necessity of a pro-international-capitalist government means petty autocracy around the basics of life. High unemployment, rates, few prospects, a brain drain, and eventually internal violence via black markets, the associated organized crime, the government, and those who correctly recognize the problem and attempt to directly combat it (fighters for national liberation, socialists, etc). Things are not good and they rarely get better, quite the opposite. They shift according to whims far outside their control at virtually any level, as they are enslaved by capital right down to their national government. Resistance movements rise up for simple things like insigenous rights, land rights, etc, and the federal government suppresses them with far greater violence.

When organized anticapitalist forces win a revolution, they tend to work directly against the problems that fomented the revolution. They address issues of land rights, abolish systems like feudal relationships and the most heinous capital relations, invest in public education, utilities, housing, etc that were denies by their xapitalist comprador governments.

And the US responds. It attempts to destroy them, as it requires control over its vassal states to maintain its position at the top of a conveyor belt moving their resources and other labor products over to itself. Much of what you see that is negative in countries run by socialists is of that particular legacy. The US killed 20% of the population in North Korea and tried to isolate it so it spawned Juche. After the fall of the USSR, its primary trading partner, the US unleashed a massive series of sanctions, attempting to starve the country of everything needed to run it. The meme of a starving, poor North Korean is from the poverty created by fuel and food from sanctions. You until the late 80s North Korea regularly outperformed South Korea. This playbook has repeated many times. Those countries that can both carry out the initial revolution and then defend it against attack do much better than the alternative offered to them.

You might be thinking, "hey, but what about Japan or Taiwan or Estonia? They are doing okay." This is true, though you should keep in mind that they have been propped up in order to act as forward bases against targets of US Empire, namely Russia and China. And they are reigned in and will be subjugated as soon as it is seen as more beneficial than not for US interests. Japan experienced this in the 90s when the US created a massive recession for them.