this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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The USSR and CCP were/are Marxist states. Saying they weren't is just a cope from American socialists who feel the need to defend leftism anywhere, presumably because dumbasses think all socialists need to answer for every flaw while capitalism always has "context."
Regardless, they, and various social democracies, did do something America refuses to, solve homelessness and hunger (after some... Initial difficulties).
I don't particularly like the concept of the welfare state but it's better than nothing and union busting.
Both communist and capitalistic systems have different expressions of socialist programs. It's too bad that the transition from capitalist to communist economies stops at the authoritarian stage.
Socialism is the workers owning the means of production. It is not welfare programs. It is not a "socialist" program to give a starving person bread, it is a state run charity, and they make damn well sure it's both hard to get and try to shame you for needing it.
When society was largely feudal, was it "socialism" when the king hosted a public feast to celebrate selling his daughter to a rival warlord? Or was it him giving some of the peasant's taxes back to them and expecting gratitude?
To liberals, unironically yes, lol.
Yeah, unfortunately. If only they had access to some kind of collection of human knowledge they could use to look up basic definitions or something.
Do the leader of those countries hold more power than the worker?
If so then there is a class struggle and you can’t consider it
This post is retarded but there is a nice middleground that works well for us europeans as well. There are more options than the extremes.
I find that most people talking about the "extremes" tend to not be able to define what, exactly, they find so terrible about the idea that the workers should be the primary beneficiaries of their work.
Because that's all left/right is. If you want to talk about the pitfalls of Marxist-themed authoritarianism I'm all ears but it isn't "extreme socialism" anymore than fascism or an absolute monarchy is "extreme capitalism."
And, just for the record, the wealth gap is growing faster in Scandinavia than America. The ruling classes might deign to take care of the most vulnerable but the model doesn't actually solve the underlying problems, it just treats the most severe symptoms.
Which is better than nothing, I'll take a ruling class that believes in noblesse oblige over one that does not, but the cancer remains. The system funnels wealth to the owner class, it can not do anything else without breaking.
Europe also benefits from literally trillions of dollars a year in net wealth extracted from the global south.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X