Have you ever visited any of the AES Countries? They have a few rich and powerful families running everything and sucking up to daddy china. I have visited Laos and Vietnam and talked to the working people. They are suffering, barely making ends meed and are fed up with the people in power taking everything for themselves and living in luxury. And if they talk too much about it they get "visitors". These people in power over there are not working class. There is also absolutely no basic healthcare. If you get sick you die. I am sorry but for me a socialist country does not have an elite living on luxury and it doesn't have people dying of poverty and lack of healthcare.

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 month ago (8 children)

Look at trendlines. This is a figure for the USSR, which often also gets slandered as you have done.

Vietnam and Laos are Socialist, and remain to be so. Socialism isn't defined as "everyone is pleased," it's a transitional state to Communism. Look at metrics over time, don't analyze immediate snapshots.

[–] Malidak@lemmy.world -3 points 1 month ago (7 children)

What are you trying to say with this graph? That distribution of wealth is better when it is distributed amongst less than 1% of the population of they call themselves proletarian? Or that it is somehow better if standard of living goes down for everyone just because the then nonexistent ressources are shared equally?

In a perfect world a whole cake is shared equally by all 8 people. But if you smash half the cake, give a quarter to one person and the remaining quarter to the remaining 7 it is not better than 2 ppl having half a cake and letting the other 6 have the other half. Maybe not the best example but I hope you get my point.

If not having equal but good standard of living, what is it we are strivong for?

I suggest this link as a good read. Because I think just strictly defending the existing socialist countries is actually hindering progress towards a both fair and high quality of life society.

https://queer-bolshevik.medium.com/the-aes-doctrine-wrong-then-wrong-now-a8666de371da

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 7 points 1 month ago

What are you trying to say with this graph? That distribution of wealth is better when it is distributed amongst less than 1% of the population of they call themselves proletarian?

You haven't interpreted the graphs correctly. That the share of the top 1% got reduced during USSR times is what the graph is showing, and it was much greater before and it's much greater after. The remaining population had a bigger share of the total wealth of the country during socialism than they did before or than they do after. Please re-read the graphs.

Or that it is somehow better if standard of living goes down for everyone just because the then nonexistent ressources are shared equally?

But that's not what happened, and you would know if you had read about the topic before making claims out of your ass. The wealth of the USSR and its citizens grew MASSIVELY during its existence. The country went from a preindustrial, almost feudal backwater, with 80+% of population being farmers working the fields with manual labor, to the second world power. The gains in living quality for citizens were absolutely massive. Free healthcare, education and public retirement pensions for everyone, millions of living units were built yearly, and were rented to families for an average of 3-5% of their income making homeless disappear, everyone was guaranteed to have a job available if they wanted to work with the average time to finding a job being 2 weeks, real consumption rose, during the worst years, at a rate of 3% per year... If you really want to study the evolution of soviet quality of life, I recommend you the book "Human Rights in the Soviet Union", by Albert Szymanski. Please, refrain from making false claims about the material living conditions in other countries that you patiently haven't made any effort to inform yourself about.

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