Thanks. To be fair, it was distressing, but things have only gotten much, much better. In hindsight, it’s funny and makes a great story. It was just a bad convergence of situations. Plus, it was before I had a computer; I’m sure we had other options financially that we just didn’t know how to access. Also, I was also young and didn’t know how to maneuver around in corporate retail. If I saw myself heading toward another situation like that again, it’d all go a lot differently. Didn’t mean to bring anyone down!
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It’s a distribution problem. We have means of keeping water clean, of feeding people, of dealing with malaria, but the capitalist system is profit driven. If it’s more profitable to let people die, it goes down that way.
We have the most people in prison in the world, with prisoners acting as defacto slave labor.
Our young men and women are dying or being maimed to secure oil fields.
See above regarding prison.
We have the death penalty and at least some people on death row are innocent.
Again, this is a problem in capitalist countries as well, with the poor selling organs because they can’t make ends meet.
We need all those things in abundance, because people go hungry here or die of easily preventable diseases here. Because “the market”.
Look, no one is denying any of what you’re saying. We all know these things happened and they are horrendous and inexcusable. But when you say it’s only caused by socialism, you’re ignoring the fact that such things have happened in places with a capitalist economy, and continue to happen in places with a capitalist economy (which is quite nearly everywhere now). It’s always about power, and people keeping themselves in power. We should always oppose abuses of power wherever they happen. But if we just imagine it only happened in one place or the other, we’re missing the reality - that the problem is power being wielded for it’s own sake and the people in power using whatever handy ideology gets the job done. If Kim Jong-Un didn’t have Junche as an ideological framework, it would be something else - maybe capitalism, or religion, or whatever. It’s naive to think we can wipe out something like socialism (which is a broad terminology that can work as part of a democratic system, as we know from Western Europe), and fix all our ills. It’s not like the Soviets got rid of commuism, and now they are free from oppression of all kinds. Hell, WE’RE not really free from oppression here in America!
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Setting aside the very odd appearance of “socialists” in your post…
China will make very sure that the undesirable population will never reach sufficient numbers (nor be allowed to ‘organise’) to be any threat. There will be a curve and its shape will be a state secret.
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You’re right (and fairly eloquent) on all counts, but…you could have saved some time by just telling him to stop accepting the label of “socialist” whenever an insane, authoritarian regime uses it.
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Telling who to stop using it? I’m not sure that’s possible. People are going to use and abuse all sorts of terminology for their benefit. So I don’t know what the answer there is. Socialism has gotten a bad rap, and most people are just unwilling to do the intellectual work to see that it means more than just Stalin and the gulags. I wish more people could see shades of grey, but black and white is what most prefer, I fear.
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Democracy and republics seem to have survived the People’s Democratic Republics.
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They seem to be teetering now, if you ask me, but in that case the PDR were less the problem than their (mostly) going away as an alternative has proven to be. It seems to me that the living reality of the PDRs/communist threat kept the worst impulses of capitalism to want to make everything into a market based transaction under control, allowing for some real mixed alternatives that are now under threat.
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China is…complicated.
They certainly aren’t what I’d call a legitimate socialist state, but they also aren’t capitalist in the Western sense. If I had to give a one-word description of their ideology, it’d be “nationalist”.
The state appears to control capital; any of the new tycoons who challenge state authority tend to find themselves dispossessed and imprisoned in fairly short order. But the general motivation of the state does appear to be directed towards national welfare, in a very authoritarian top-down macro-scale sense.
On the one hand: modern China has done more to reduce world poverty than any other nation in history.
On the other hand: accelerating Orwellian surveillance state.
So, yeah. Complicated.
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