this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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I'm curious now: what would be the right direction without going backwards?
The right direction would obviously be socialism with public ownership of the means of production and an economy being directed towards meeting the needs of working majority as opposed to a handful of elites. Should be pretty obvious, yet here you are.
So communism.
Not that I dislike the idea in principle, it's just that it didn't work well.
Here we go!
You're typing this comment in the Year of our Lord 2025. Currently, China is becoming the world's main economic superpower as the United States squanders its imperialist hegemony. Cuba has the most successful healthcare system in Latin America, while everyone else in LatAm is either moving in the direction of socialism, or failing.
The time to make these embarrassing arguments was a century and a half ago, when the only examples of socialism were failed experiments like the Paris Commune. Hell, these days we can even point to how socialism's failures, like the later years of the Soviet Union, were still better than what came after, in the form of neoliberalism.
So either you've gotten to this point in the conversation because you're trolling, or you're really this ignorant and get all the information about the world around you from the New York Times and white boy youtubers.
China is no more a pure Communist country and Cuba may have a good healthcare system, but sorry if I stick to my capitalistic Europe.
I guess we will stick to our own opinions. Bye!
Exploiting the global south good job lib.
What do you mean by "pure communist country"? You don't know what the words you're using mean. Communism is not a system that can exist within one country, it's a state of the entire globe not having classes, states, or borders. "Communist country" is an oxymoron unless you mean "country ruled by a Communist party" which China objectively is.
China is a socialist market economy. The majority of the economy is under the state's control, and the public has democratic control over the state, so they are free to chart their own path and decide where their economy is headed. In contrast, under capitalism, if the market decides that building more housing and providing healthcare is not profitable, the people must just accept it. See the difference?
I don't know where in Europe you live, but chances are, conditions in your country are only acceptable because Europe built its wealth by exploiting countries like Cuba. Cuba taking its destiny into its own hands and improving conditions for their people should be applauded, not treated like it's insignificant.
That's correct communism is the end goal. Also, not sure what you could possibly mean that communism didn't work well. Everywhere it's been tried, it has lifted millions out of poverty and provided them with housing, education, food, and healthcare. Countries run by communist parties today are demonstrably doing a far better job providing for the working majority than their capitalist counterparts. The research on the subject is extensive and the results are beyond question.
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possible: https://web.archive.org/web/20200119044114/https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.507.8966&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2672986?seq=1
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1646771/pdf/amjph00269-0055.pdf
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2430906/
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe. https://academic.oup.com/cje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cje/beac072/7081084?guestAccessKey=01c8dd9f-af1c-48b3-b271-eb5d3a45017c&login=false
Romania, the inustrialization of an agrarian economy under socialist planning https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/888851468333915517/pdf/multi0page.pdf
An exploration of China's mortality decline under Mao: A provincial analysis, 1950-80 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25495509/
Authoritarianism, repression, slower innovation and progress compared to Capitalism, pick what you prefer.
Not even China or Russia are pure Communist anymore.
You're just regurgitating nonsense here.
The term authoritarianism is utterly meaningless because all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.
The reality is that every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.
What ultimately matters is which class controls the institutions of state violence. In capitalist democracies, the government represent the interests of the economic elites who fund political campaigns, own media outlets, and control key industries. Western public lacks the mechanisms necessary to hold the government to account, and the ruling class is disconnected from the broader population. That’s precisely what’s driving political discontent all across western sphere today. Meanwhile, in so-called authoritarian regimes, the ruling party serves the working class as seen in countries like China, Cuba, or Vietnam. Hence why there is widespread public trust in these government and they enjoy broad support from the masses.
There's also zero evidence for the notion that there's less repression under capitalism than there is under socialism. The incarceration rate in the US is higher than in China, and it's even higher than it was in USSR under Stalin.
The claim that the rate of innovation is slower doesn't stand up to scrutiny either. USSR had plenty of technological and scientific firsts. China currently pushing ahead of the west technologically on many fronts.
Finally, the discussion isn't whether China has pure communism or not. It's whether the system in China produces better results than western ones. That is the case practically by any metric you choose. On the other hand, we can see the regression in quality of life for vast swaths of the population in Russia after capitalism being reinstated. Here we have a direct comparison showing that capitalism does in fact perform worse than socialism.
I think that we can't agree on the very basic definitions here.
I wish you good luck. Bye!
This is so funny lol, what exactly is authoritarianism, then? You're just short circuiting because the most default liberal argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny. You don't have to run away from the conversation just because you have a different definition of authoritarianism. As much as we may have different definitions, we live in the same reality, we can discuss the same ground truths of what "authoritarianism" means to you and how we conceptualize those things in different ways.
You seem the most reasonable here, but I see a problem continuing this argument if we can't agree that there are fundamental differences between what is commonly intended as authoritarian government (let's say Russia, Turkey, Iran, China, ...) and the average western country.
It does not mean that western countries are perfect, nor that none shows sign of authoritarianism (Trump's US), nor that nothing should change, or anything of the things I never said in this thread.
Contrary to what you may believe, I replied to this thread to have some fun and a chat around what I find a terrible meme. What I learned is that I should simply avoid any interaction with anyone writing from hexbear since you guys approach politics in a very identitarian way which is something I find dull.
No offence intended, but continue without me. Bye!
Lol: "there's no point having this discussion if you're not going to agree I'm right!"
Why are liberals such massive cowards?
The US, which has an incarceration rate roughly 5x that of China and the single largest prison population in the world, is notably absent from your authoritarian examples (other than blaming it on Trump of course lmao)
That's because the US is not an authoritarian regime: there can be regular elections, there is freedom of speech, separation of powers, etc. It's true that it's far from being perfect https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-states/freedom-world/2024
Now please don't reply that it's a single-party state with two options. It's an old joke, it has some truth in it, but it's just a joke.
Yeah there's differences. In Western countries, a lot of wealthy white people can just chill while their governments enact tremendous violence against minorities to sustain their quality of life. In Russia, Turkey, Iran, China, and other peripheral or semiperipheral countries, the state has to deal with the contradictions head-on instead of exporting them elsewhere, so they have to be more repressive. That's a real difference, but it makes me think that the Western countries are worse than the "authoritarian governments" you list.
In fact, the way you choose Trump's US as the turning point that supposedly shows that authoritarianism just now appeared out of nowhere, shows how one-sided your view of history and politics is. Now the US turned authoritarian. Not when they were literally dousing Mexican immigrants in kerosene in 1916 or doing Jim Crow segregation that inspired the Nazis.
Don't put words that are not mine in my mouth.
Society is constantly evolving with huge differences even noticeable in a lifespan. It means that obviously 100+ years ago, something unacceptable for modern standards was the norm. It also means that it's ridiculous to bring up events of 100+ years ago to criticize the modern world.
To make an example: 80 years ago Europe was literally bombing Germany and Italy and their nazi-fascist regimes, but just a couple of decades later they were forming an alliance that eventually led to the EU. Even if today there are still nazi-fascist movements in the EU, and neo-fascist parties are even leading countries, one must be blinded by ideology to deny that there was an improvement. Improvement does not imply perfection.
Trump is a step back and I find his term horrifying. However, even in Trump's America, even with all the regressions in terms of civil rights, even with the changes to shift even more money towards billionaires, even with what ICE is doing, even with all of that, it remains a country where the vast majority lives a better life than in the large part of the present and past world. Failing to acknowledge that in the name of pure ideology is simply nonsensical. "US = authoritarian regime" or "they exploit the south" may have some truth in it, but it's such an extreme position to be unreasonable and, frankly, childish. It works only here, in a bubble in a corner of internet where everyone reinforce each other's ideas and violently reject any different opinion.
Bye!
Authoritarianism and repression are not downsides of socialism. They are how the state (every state, especially capitalist ones) works. If you want the workers to do a revolution and simply stop having a state, you're welcome to try and fail.
And you just got linked a wide array of studies showing how much better innovation and progress is under socialism!