this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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According to Professor Richard Wolff (economic historian and Marxist economist), capitalism fails on average every 47 years. The late 1800s to the Great Depression was about 50-ish years; the Great Depression to the 70s oil crisis was about 30-40 years (depending on when you start timing it, if post-Depression or during); the Reagan-era 1980s deregulation to 2008 was 30-ish years, 2008 to COVID was 12 years.
Also worth noting that what ended the Great Depression was both FDR's social democracy-style of politics along with the economic boost that WW2 gave to the US.
The USSR failed for many reasons. One of which is totally their fault, where they didn't adopt computers early enough. Another big fault, though, is the Cold War, where the US did everything in its power to overthrow Communist idiology wherever possible (see: Korea and Vietnam for extreme examples). That also includes economic sanctions, like we see today with the US and Cuba. When the US sanctions a country, they don't do as well as when they have the ability to trade. This is because the US is a massive global economic superpower that produces a lot of important things needed to run a society, like medicine, technology, food, etc.
I'm not as well versed in current-day European politics, but do communist countries even exist in modern day Europe? If they do, then they're probably poorer due to the probable economic sanctions levied by capitalist countries (the US generally forces countries that it trades with to also sanction US state enemies, which includes all countries considering themselves Communist, other than China since China became a massive economic superpower, in part due to the US establishing free trade agreements with Permenant Normal Trade Relations with China). I'm just guessing on this front, though. I also am not as well versed as to the timelines of social democracy on Europe, but I have been seeing more economicly right wing voices in European politics as of late.
Social democracy probably extends that 47 year timeline a bit, but deregulation will usually come at one point or another, since corruption can still exist. Not that Communism doesn't have corruption issues either, because it definitely does. The issue is centralization of power. Marxist-style Anarchy might be an option, but TBH I'm not well versed enough on that subject to really comment on it or give an opinion on it.
There are no European countries that are communist anymore.
The only communist country that has ever done well economically is China, and that was after they threw away socialist dogma, and allowed capitalism in their economy.
I live in Denmark, which is part of Scandinavia, and we have been using the social democratic model since 1924 when we got a social democratic prime minister, who is also our longest sitting prime minister with 15 years.
Yes we are seeing an unfortunate turn to the right in recent years, as I mentioned before, probably to a large degree because of Immigration from the middle east. Where the right claim they will stop immigration. But probably also because we have seen socialism/communism is a failed model that simply doesn't work.
Social democracy on the other hand does work pretty well, and is probably the strongest at protecting the population and observing human rigts. But currently people don't want a humane government, they want the immigration to stop, because it threatens our democracies and economic model with a high degree of social welfare.
100 years is quite a long time to maintain social demcracy.
While the right is using immigration to gain political power, I think if there wasn't increased immigration, they would find some other way of gaining power. Idk which came first, but a lot of right wing politicians globally are taking notes from the US right (mainly Donald Trump), and the move towards fascism is gaining ground in many places right now, unfortunately. I can only comment on the US, really, but I believe in the US that this is successful due to people having economic hardship, which leads them to have more extreme idiologies (either socialism or fascism).
I hope Denmark will be able to maintain their social democracy and show that fascism is not the way.
Unfortunately, according to Marxist theory, social democracy will inevitably devolve back into straight capitalism, or worse. I hope Denmark can prove it wrong.
Yes it is, but it's not a Social democratic government all the time, but even when it's not, the policies of the right are leaning a lot towards it. Our right govern way more like the left than the Democrats of USA. We also once had a communist party, even with representation in parliament. But it collapsed with the Soviet Union.
Yes, USA remains a huge influence here too, despite how obviously and incredibly stupid their policies are. We have a couple right wing parties that still at times take inspiration from Republicans. But luckily it's impossible to actually use their policies here. For instance Gay marriage and LGBT rights are not in question here, and neither is the Scandinavian welfare model we build on. It's sad that USA inspired democracy in Europe, but they haven't been able to modernize it to better standards.
That's what I'm seeing too. There have been some regressions in Europe too, mostly the old Eastern block, but also Italy and Netherlands. Netherlands is very disappointing IMO, because it's a country that in many ways is like Denmark.
Yes I sure hope so too, it's funny that we are among the countries in Europe with the least amount of problems from fascism and Nazism in particular, probably more because rather than despite the Nazi party is actually legal here. That makes it easy for media to point out how stupid they are, and it makes it easy for security services to keep an eye on them.
Funny story, my history teacher in the 70's claimed that the reason Communist countries weren't more aggressive towards capitalism, was that they expected capitalism to fail soon by itself.
Well I guess they didn't account for the strength of democracy, which unfortunately isn't as strong in USA and UK as it is in Europe.
Capitalism has reigned the west for 2000+ years where the Romans invented banks, saying that it will fail now for some reason, does not agree with the experience we have from history. The experience we have with Communism on the other hand is way worse. Maybe China has a model that can last IDK, but in general by Marxist theory, it simply doesn't work, and neither do his predictions about capitalism. He was right on one point though, and that was that the exploitation of ordinary workers including child labor needed to be fixed. His way of doing that however was not it.
In your defense, our social democrats are not what they used to be, they are more center now than left wing in the current government, but they've also lost a lot of support on that. Unfortunately that support has spread to both sides for some reason. Denmark is not as left leaning as I would like, and I shudder at the thought that most places are actually worse. 😱
The experience the world has had with communism is generally due to the centralization of power. Marx advocated for a stateless society, which, while it is something that I don't fully understand, I think that it gets closer to a true democracy than a centralized government.
I applaud Marx for trying to do something in a constructive way against the indecency of hard Capitalism. But maybe the reason you don't understand how to do Marxism without ending up with totalitarian communism, is because his idea that the state would wither away with Marxism because it is unneeded is fundamentally flawed.
I think that to have a good well functioning society, it needs to be strong. to be strong it needs to be well defined and organized. The idea that we can have a nice society without rules the majority agree on is ridiculous. The best way to have rules that are mostly accepted, is with democracy. Unless it's an extreme religious country, where they will only accept religious doctrine.
As you have probably heard before, democracy isn't perfect, but it's the least bad option we have. With social democracy we control capitalism to not be (as) exploitive, and we combine the best we have: The humanity of socialism and democracy with the economic efficiency of capitalism controlled to avoid harm.
I don't think you can create an economic model that won't end up being exploitive if it's not strictly controlled by regulation and an efficient government to enforce it.
So actually what we, as a society, have, is not considered a democracy, but instead is a constitutional republic (although some countries don't have constitutions). Besides that, we have essentially dictatorships, or in-between states. We do not have any direct democracies, which I think could be a good compromise between a stateless society and a centralized society. Here's my idea for how a modern, direct democratic society could run:
We have the internet and technologies like blockchain that can securely and verifiably store data that we could use as a voting system with fast elections. I know blockchain is kind of a toxic term with all of the scams that have been happening, but what I'm describing has nothing to do with anything that has financial value, and cannot be transfered/sold/exchanged between people.
This could essentially replace the Parliamentary system, or the US Congressional system, which giving people more direct power over their government.
There would still be a need for an executive branch (in US terminology), where there's a state leader, along with their cabinet (again, US terms) of agency leaders, all individually voted for. I believe this would provide the centralized "power" that you described.
Also on the economic model that doesn't allow for exploitation, I like Richard Wolff's idea of forcing all businesses (above, say 100 employees) to be worker-owned co-ops. In Prof. Wolff's terms, it will bring democracy to the workplace.
Some good points there. I particularly like that open source is in there, it's absolutely crucial for transparency. It used to be said that we couldn't have secure elections on the Internet, but maybe with blockchain it will be possible?
A republic is usually considered a democracy. I'm not sure what you mean that we have no direct democracies. Denmark is among the highest rating on the democracy scale. Which includes freedom of the press, which is better here than USA.
I am not sure why you wouldn't consider Denmark a direct democracy, we vote on our candidates directly, we do not have the indirect voting USA has for Presidential elections. Denmark also has a high participation rate, because there are no artificiel barriers like in USA, voting is easy, registration is automatic, it's always near where you live, and it usually takes only 5 minutes.
If you mean all laws should be by popular vote, that is not a good idea, it's way to much work to consider everything voted on to make it law, it would quickly become a huge burden.
USA is so way way behind on all these issues, I seriously doubt even Bernie Sanders is aware of how big the democracy/fairness gap is between Denmark and USA, and Bernie Sanders is a huge proponent for the Danish model.
I absolutely understand that many Americans want major changes, because it's so unbalanced in USA, and the 1% is grabbing ever more power. But IMO communism is not the answer, what people like Bernie Sanders and AOC are proposing is probably the best USA can do at this point, and then get rid of first past the post everywhere, so power isn't centralized among only 2 parties.
Way back in the 70's there was a saying that USA was only 1 party better than China. I didn't quite understand it back then, but it has become clear to me over time how big a problem it is.
Denmark is a representative democracy. And yes, by direct democracy, I do mean voting directly on laws. It doesn't necessarilly have to be a burden. It could be a system where once a week, there's a vote held for 1 or 2 bills, and if there is an urgent matter, such as going to war, or if there's another pandemic and there's an urgent need for a lockdown, then that vote can be held sooner.
I don't think any state needs to pass more than 1 or 2 bills in a week to be functional.
I think if electing representatives instead, corruption becomes way too easy to accomplish; just slip some cash into the right pockets and get whatever you want in return. Direct democracy would bypass that issue, since corruption would be way harder (as in, one would need to slip money into half of the populations' pockets, or run some very effective propaganda, which would be difficult if one person doesn't have insane amounts of money to spend to begin with)
I'd love for you to explain to me how corruption works/doesn't work in Denmark, though. My perspective is very US-centric.
Yes that's true, I thought you meant voting on your candidate directly, without an electoral collage like USA has for presidential elections. IMO the electoral college system is undemocratic.
It 100% will be, people barely care to vote every 4 years in most places, even where it's easy like here. It's not just the act of voting, but all the time needed to get familiar with the issue at hand. There is absolutely no chance that could work until we have a work free society. Possibly not even then.
That would be nice, but it's not plausible, industry needs to be regulated to function efficiently and have transparency and to not do harm, Industry has 100's of branches that each need their own specific regulation. Just think cars, food, medicine, appliances etc etc.
I think Marx too had this idea, based on that without capitalism, people would behave like model citizens, and companies would not hurt the community they are part of. But they don't. We have unfortunately seen that in communist countries companies actually behave worse.
Unfortunately like everywhere else we do have corruption, but for instance a mayor getting plumbing done by a company used by the city is a HUGE scandal. And will make it impossible for that politician to ever run for public office again. But there are many degrees of corruption, and we don't have a lot of corruption for personal gain, but more of the kind that some functions have a hard time managing, so they cut corners illegally. You can't generally bribe public officials, although I'm sure it's happening anyway, it's usually subtle, so they can say they didn't think it was a problem. Large scale corruption is almost impossible here. Either that, or they are damned good at hiding it. We did have a public servant a few years ago, that managed to funnel millions into her own accounts over several years. She managed to get away when it was detected, but was later found somewhere in Africa, and she returned home to face justice. A notable thing in this situation is that she was not just punished herself. The values of her family was confiscated, and they were judged to prison too, because it was deemed that they couldn't reasonably have believed she could have afforded the riches she gave away on a public servant salary, although she did serve in a very high position. She gave things like race horses to her daughters!
All in all, Denmark is often mentioned as among the least corrupt countries in the world. I'm not sure why? But we have among the worlds highest taxes, and I suspect people won't tolerate that they are wasted. Also everybody is paid reasonably well, and you can live fine on a minimum salary. So corruption is unacceptable because nobody needs to be corrupt to pay their bills. We have free education and healthcare. For education you even get support from the state to manage economically through the education. We have decent wages, and although high positions earn more, it's not the insanity like USA where one CEO can make as much as the rest of the company combined. CEO and other high salary jobs are more moderate here. So you don't need to skim money to give your children food and an education and a decent place to stay, and you don't need to finance some huge hospital bill. Everybody has 5 week paid holiday, and we get paid when we are sick too, although it's a reduced rate.
Despite the rosy picture, It's not perfect. Some people still have a tough time managing. But that's just it, we are at a point where tough times are considered a problem to be solved. Not a necessity for the economy to function.
To sum it all up, I think the low corruption is due to the mentality here, and the mentality is due to our living circumstances and policies that at least attempt to be fair. Where USA often seems more like everybody for himself, and I got mine.