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Yes and: One view is private vs public capitalism. USSR vs USA, respectively. Extreme wealth concentration at the expense of everyone else. Both are anti-demo
by specialist 4y ago
Yes and:
One view is private vs public capitalism. USSR vs USA, respectively. Extreme wealth concentration at the expense of everyone else.
Both are anti-democratic.
- Natsu 4y agoI think the USSR would object to being called capitalist, since they were one of the major Communist revolutions until their economic collapse. And in this vein, we shouldn't forget Mao's "four pests campaign" in China under Mao which caused mass starvation by killing sparrows which had been eating insects, leaving them with a literal plague of locusts. Mao would probably have murdered anyone who called him a capitalist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_roader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_roader
- mejutoco 4y agoIt is irrelevant if the object of the calling agrees or not on the name. Otherwise nobody would ever be called anything bad.
- Natsu 4y agoThat only works if you have some way to justify it to begin with and is rather transphobic to make other people the sole arbiters of one's identity.
- mejutoco 4y agoExtreme wealth concentration (the original claim) seems pretty easy to prove in the cases originally mentioned by another poster.
- Natsu 4y agoI mean, sure, that's what happens literally any time you set up a super-powerful government, necessarily including any government powerful enough to redistribute all of a society's resources. See also: company towns, Pol Pot, the Kims, Mao, or what was happening in that rebellious colony called the USA before the citizens stopped it. But claiming it fits a bespoke definition of "capitalism" seemingly invented for this particular discussion, despite that being against literally everything they professed, seems a bit much. They didn't end up with extreme wealth concentration by letting people freely exchange goods and services. That usually happens when people take control of who is able to exchange goods, whether via monopolies or government control.
- thephyber 4y agoYour parent didn’t call the USSR “capitalism”, they called it “private capitalism”. I’ve never heard that term before so I’m guessing it was ad hoc. I’m guessing the public capitalism / private capitalism has to do with where the ownership of property, concentration of human capital is, and there the market making prices are found. In that sense, the public/private dichotomy mostly works. Sure, Communists argue there is more virtue to their system than simply market making and state owned property, but those are effectively downstream / derived qualities. And Mao murdered tons of people (both directly and the way a mob boss would have) for many different reasons. He probably was the kind of person who might murder someone because he woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I don’t think that matters much in this discussion and I don’t think we should self-censor our thoughts because the ghost of a terrible person might hear us.
- Natsu 4y agoThat formulation erases any distinction between capitalism and anything else, leaving it as just an empty synonym for badness. I'm calling out the intellectual emptiness of that use as an epithet here.
- specialist 4y agoOwnership, correct. Who gets to the keep the surplus (profits). Tragically, I biffed. USSR is public (as in the state is the owner) and USA is private (as in you and me). I wish I could remember where I heard this taxonomy. James C Scott, Richard Wolfe, other? Sorry. A quick search suggests "USSR is state capitalism" was one of Trotsky's (many) criticisms of the USSR. Wage labor, exploitation, yadda, yadda.
- ratboy666 4y agoThe USSR did call itself democratic. In a sense, since it was central control for all. The USA did NOT call itself democratic -- the preferred term up to the '70s was "constitutional republic". To avoid the flattening that "democracy" was perceived to produce. The argument is that democracy ALWAYS leads to tyranny and collapse. To quote "Both are anti-democratic". Which I don't understand. Is your claim that both systems (as practiced in the USSR and USA) led to extreme wealth concentration? Did the economy increase during this concentration? If so, do you still consider this "anti-democratic".
- greedo 4y agoDemocracy is inherent and implicit in a republic. And I think you're mistaken about "constitutional republic." That term really wasn't used much, though representative democracy and "democratic republic" were terms that were used more frequently. The entire argument about the US not having a democracy but a republic really stems (in modern times) from the John Birch Society.
- ratboy666 4y agoYou could well be right (I am not American). I do recall discussing the GDR with some USA people... a "democratic republic". Was told, back then, that the term had been co-opted. But then, I don't know much about the John Birch Society.
- specialist 4y ago> Is your claim that both systems led to extreme wealth concentration? Yes. > The argument is that democracy ALWAYS leads to tyranny and collapse. Rather than Plato's mob rule criticism, I'm using the more contemporary capitalism-vs-democracy (winner-takes-all) food fight. The tension in USA, at least, has always been wealth vs democracy. The "liberal" in the traditional "liberal democracy" was a reference to our economic system of free enterprise. The aspiration was to balance winner-takes-all with will-of-the-people. Basically the formulation of modern Nordic "democratic socialism".
- dd36 4y agoFalse. We’ve always had a representative democracy.
- gramie 4y agoCapitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is the reverse.