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Quarrelsome 1y ago
hard disagree, many OG and influentual socialists came from rich backgrounds. There's also lots of poor people out there who are simply waiting their opportunity to be corrupt. Anecdotally I've experienced many people from working class backgrounds who are extremely proud of their tax evasion. The key dividing line is those who follow the rules and believe in the system and those that don't and are just looking out for their own interests. This further explains corruption within socialist systems where everyone is effectively "equal" but some people are still looking out for themselves over everyone else.
- don_esteban 1y ago
  The problem is when the rules are made to sustain and exacerbate the social divide, not to make the life better for everybody. No need to go far, just look at the result of lobbying in the USA. Btw, while there are many famines caused by despots (Stalin's, Mao's, Red Khmer's), there is also Bengal's famine of 1943. One must also point out that China in the last 40 years have done perhaps more regarding the poverty mitigation than anybody else in the human history (capitalism, especially the wild one, has actually quite patchy record...)
  - whatshisface 1y ago
    The Chinese people did all of the work, their government simply allowed them, returning some of their own money in the form of state investment. Who pays for "state" investment?
    - don_esteban 1y ago
      The Chinese government did a lot of smart policies, empowering their people to unleash their entrepreneurial drive, helping them with targeted investment where that was deemed to get good long term/strategic payoff. This was not passive 'let them do what they want', it was (and still is) an actively guided process - there is enough information about that in the net. It also failed in many ways, but overall influence is highly positive, the results speak for themselves. Failing to see that is a sign of ideological blindness.
  - Quarrelsome 1y ago
    > The problem is when the rules are made to sustain and exacerbate the social divide, not to make the life better for everybody. perhaps "rules" was a poor choice of word. What I meant was more a belief in society in general, a belief in the nation, in fairness. I guess in one-word: selfishness. I believe the _real_ political divide is between those who are selfish and those who are not.
    - don_esteban 1y ago
      much better, thank you still, ideological zealots really unselfishly believe in their case, whether that is fundamental christianity/islam/communism/capitalism (ok, maybe capitalism not, almost by definition, capitalism is about greed) and are willing to inflict unbelievable horrors in the name of their ideology one should also not forget that there exist deep cultural differences and what is considered 'fair' and 'belief in society' is quite different e.g. between the western judo-christianism and eastern societies
  - Aunche 1y ago
    Lobbying isn't used to exacerbate the social divide. It's used to achieve incremental policy wins and prevent incremental policy losses for the clients of the lobbyists. This is what the general public needs to do as well if they want the government to better represent their interests, but they have little interest in that. People willingly choose to exacerbate the social divide, and the overwhelmingly negative sentiment to lobbying is evidence of this. Colonialism is a form of centralized planning, which catastrophically fails for the same reasons that it does in communist regimes. China is evidence of capitalism's incredibly successful record of poverty mitigation. They've retained some communist style central planning, but the "bad" part of capitalism is unlimited accumulation of wealth, as mentioned upthread, which China allows just like any capitalist country.
    - don_esteban 1y ago
      Lobbying to create laws that benefit rich people/big corporations and make the life of ordinary people tougher directly exacerbate the socio-economic divide. Telling the poor/weak to use the tools designed for rich/powerful is just obscuring the reality. The reality being that the system is designed by rich, for rich, to maintain and improve their position. "People willingly choose to exacerbate the social divide" What do you mean by that? People willing choose to be poor and powerless? "Colonialism is a form of centralized planning" - no, colonialism (and neocolonialism) is a form of institutionalized looting, historically highly successful (see the graph of the GDP (as a percentage of the whole world GDP) of Great Britain vs India for a nice example) No, the worst part of capitalism is unlimited accumulation of power, by the way of wealth buying/subverting the state. I suspect one of the reasons China was able to maintain its upward trajectory was their ability to separate the political power from the wealth (see the case of Jack Ma what happens if the wealth starts to impinge on political power in China). From the point of view of West, they did some highly questionable decisions that costed them trillions (squashing the blockchain miners, bursting property bubble, going hard after excessive gaming and internet time by kids) and would not be conceivable in the west, but overall might be net positive for the society at all.
      - Aunche 1y ago
miohtama 1y ago
> Capitalism has done more to overcome hunger and poverty than any other system in world history. The most devastating man-made famines over the past 100 years all occurred under socialism – in the 1930s alone, according to a range of estimates, between five and nine million people died in the Soviet Union from famines caused by the socialist collectivisation of agriculture. > The end of communism in China and the Soviet Union was a major factor in the 42 percent reduction of hunger between 1990 and 2017. https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/is-capitalism-to-blame-for-hunger-and-poverty https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/is-capitalism-to-blame-for-hu...
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  It's impossible to say with any certainty that was down to an economic system change and not the myriad of other issues plaguing the Soviet states. And maybe on balance hunger went down, but in particular for a whole lot of those Soviet states, the transitions from the failing "communist" state and the market-based alternatives was incredibly harsh and involved a whole lot of starving as the prices of food and other critical goods soared out of reach of Soviet citizens, not even going into the psychological effects. Also also, insofar as "communism" "failed" (the USSR was incredibly authoritarian and corrupt, many communists and socialists take big issues with them or China for that matter being called communist but I digress), it "failed" alongside a host of economic sanctions brought upon it by it's Capitalist neighbors, utterly terrified at it's very existence. I mean Christ calling someone communist is still an insult in the United States, and an attack on a politician here too, decades after the Red Scare supposedly ended.
  - nradov 1y ago
    What sanctions? The USA and Canada literally sold huge quantities of grain to the USSR even during the height of the Cold War. Without those food sales even more Soviet citizens would have gone hungry.
- storus 1y ago
  > The end of communism in China and the Soviet Union was a major factor in the 42 percent reduction of hunger between 1990 and 2017. This sounds like a complete BS. There were no starving people in the Soviet Union and its satellites after a brief post-war period. They had no luxuries all year round like exotic fruits, but the basics were covered. They had also vastly more educated population than the US. Just their governance and understanding of economics didn't consider the innate selfishness of humans and the need to dominate and outdo others so supply-demand laws didn't work well. China fixed that part later by allowing private corporate ownership and throwing its population into a Darwinian environment while keeping minimal social standards for the unlucky ones. North Korea, Cambodia and Laos would be the only "communist" countries where famines were still present.
cptskippy 1y ago
The problem with broad generalizations like that is you will make enemies of allies and allies of enemies, only you won't realize it and fail to understand why people aren't 100% behind your agenda. This is itself a form of corruption.
- FollowingTheDao 1y ago
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  - cptskippy 1y ago
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      - cptskippy 1y ago
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snowwrestler 1y ago
In a socialist system you still need a government, which is a group of people who are empowered to enforce the rules of socialism. As a result, they end up having access to most of the collective wealth as well. If they are very good socialists they will redistribute it all. If they are not-very-good socialists they will redistribute some of it and reserve some to support a nice lifestyle for themselves and their families. They won’t personally “own” mansions, airplanes, factories, etc. like capitalists do, but they still control them legally so the practical effect is very similar.
- don_esteban 1y ago
  "As a result, they end up having access to most of the collective wealth as well." Umm, it does not work like that, look at the Scandinavian-type socialism. The collective wealth is in the functioning education & health system, social support net, working public transport and such. Not a type of wealth that the government can usurp for themselves, to the detriment/exclusion of the remainder of the society. Too much ideological argumentation here...
  - deleted 1y ago
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- FollowingTheDao 1y ago
  No, you don’t need a centralized government in all social systems. Centralized government is the big distinction here. Libertarian socialism of a decentralized government.
jandrese 1y ago
It's not the concentration of wealth, it is the concentration of power. Communism doesn't solve that problem. The less centralized your power is the more efficient your economy works. Pushing decisions down to the edge means the people deciding how to allocate resources are the closest to the information about what is needed where. The problem with highly centralized economies is that as an economy grows beyond a trivial size it's impossible for the centralized system to manage the flow of information from the edges. It doesn't scale. Also, honest competition is good for optimizing your resource allocation, if someone is ultimately in charge of both sides they will be inclined to try to choose just one and "avoid waste", which ultimately is just avoiding optimization. This is also why companies become less competitive as they grow and are always under threat from startups and a big reason why antitrust is about more than just "protecting consumers". That's also why big companies are always lobbying government for protection of their business models.
- TFYS 1y ago
  > It's not the concentration of wealth, it is the concentration of power. Those are the same thing. > The problem with highly centralized economies is that as an economy grows beyond a trivial size it's impossible for the centralized system to manage the flow of information from the edges. It doesn't scale. That was true a few decades ago. Now with everyone having a smartphone in their pockets at all times and the amount of computing power we have it should be doable. Still not easy for sure, but not impossible. > Also, honest competition is good for optimizing your resource allocation Think about how much non-productive work has to be done just to enable competition. Instead of one organization per industry we need multiple, all with their own overhead costs. Every company has to do their branding, HR, marketing, etc. The whole advertising industry pretty much exists only because companies try to get an edge with propaganda instead of improving their product. Wasted work. Competition also forces companies to do unethical things. Say one company starts cutting down rainforests to get an edge over the competition. Now they're cheaper than other businesses, and every business that wants to survive has to start cutting down rainforest. One country gets rid of worker rights -> businesses move there and other countries must follow suit. Same with taxes.

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hard disagree, many OG and influentual socialists came from rich backgrounds. There's also lots of poor people out there who are simply waiting their opportunity to be corrupt. Anecdotally I've experienced many people from working class backgrounds who are extremely proud of their tax evasion. The key dividing line is those who follow the rules and believe in the system and those that don't and are just looking out for their own interests. This further explains corruption within socialist systems where everyone is effectively "equal" but some people are still looking out for themselves over everyone else.

don_esteban 1y ago
The problem is when the rules are made to sustain and exacerbate the social divide, not to make the life better for everybody. No need to go far, just look at the result of lobbying in the USA. Btw, while there are many famines caused by despots (Stalin's, Mao's, Red Khmer's), there is also Bengal's famine of 1943. One must also point out that China in the last 40 years have done perhaps more regarding the poverty mitigation than anybody else in the human history (capitalism, especially the wild one, has actually quite patchy record...)
- whatshisface 1y ago
  The Chinese people did all of the work, their government simply allowed them, returning some of their own money in the form of state investment. Who pays for "state" investment?
  - don_esteban 1y ago
    The Chinese government did a lot of smart policies, empowering their people to unleash their entrepreneurial drive, helping them with targeted investment where that was deemed to get good long term/strategic payoff. This was not passive 'let them do what they want', it was (and still is) an actively guided process - there is enough information about that in the net. It also failed in many ways, but overall influence is highly positive, the results speak for themselves. Failing to see that is a sign of ideological blindness.
- Quarrelsome 1y ago
  > The problem is when the rules are made to sustain and exacerbate the social divide, not to make the life better for everybody. perhaps "rules" was a poor choice of word. What I meant was more a belief in society in general, a belief in the nation, in fairness. I guess in one-word: selfishness. I believe the _real_ political divide is between those who are selfish and those who are not.
  - don_esteban 1y ago
    much better, thank you still, ideological zealots really unselfishly believe in their case, whether that is fundamental christianity/islam/communism/capitalism (ok, maybe capitalism not, almost by definition, capitalism is about greed) and are willing to inflict unbelievable horrors in the name of their ideology one should also not forget that there exist deep cultural differences and what is considered 'fair' and 'belief in society' is quite different e.g. between the western judo-christianism and eastern societies
- Aunche 1y ago
  Lobbying isn't used to exacerbate the social divide. It's used to achieve incremental policy wins and prevent incremental policy losses for the clients of the lobbyists. This is what the general public needs to do as well if they want the government to better represent their interests, but they have little interest in that. People willingly choose to exacerbate the social divide, and the overwhelmingly negative sentiment to lobbying is evidence of this. Colonialism is a form of centralized planning, which catastrophically fails for the same reasons that it does in communist regimes. China is evidence of capitalism's incredibly successful record of poverty mitigation. They've retained some communist style central planning, but the "bad" part of capitalism is unlimited accumulation of wealth, as mentioned upthread, which China allows just like any capitalist country.
  - don_esteban 1y ago
    Lobbying to create laws that benefit rich people/big corporations and make the life of ordinary people tougher directly exacerbate the socio-economic divide. Telling the poor/weak to use the tools designed for rich/powerful is just obscuring the reality. The reality being that the system is designed by rich, for rich, to maintain and improve their position. "People willingly choose to exacerbate the social divide" What do you mean by that? People willing choose to be poor and powerless? "Colonialism is a form of centralized planning" - no, colonialism (and neocolonialism) is a form of institutionalized looting, historically highly successful (see the graph of the GDP (as a percentage of the whole world GDP) of Great Britain vs India for a nice example) No, the worst part of capitalism is unlimited accumulation of power, by the way of wealth buying/subverting the state. I suspect one of the reasons China was able to maintain its upward trajectory was their ability to separate the political power from the wealth (see the case of Jack Ma what happens if the wealth starts to impinge on political power in China). From the point of view of West, they did some highly questionable decisions that costed them trillions (squashing the blockchain miners, bursting property bubble, going hard after excessive gaming and internet time by kids) and would not be conceivable in the west, but overall might be net positive for the society at all.
    - Aunche 1y ago

miohtama 1y ago

> Capitalism has done more to overcome hunger and poverty than any other system in world history. The most devastating man-made famines over the past 100 years all occurred under socialism – in the 1930s alone, according to a range of estimates, between five and nine million people died in the Soviet Union from famines caused by the socialist collectivisation of agriculture. > The end of communism in China and the Soviet Union was a major factor in the 42 percent reduction of hunger between 1990 and 2017. https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/is-capitalism-to-blame-for-hunger-and-poverty https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/is-capitalism-to-blame-for-hu...

ToucanLoucan 1y ago
It's impossible to say with any certainty that was down to an economic system change and not the myriad of other issues plaguing the Soviet states. And maybe on balance hunger went down, but in particular for a whole lot of those Soviet states, the transitions from the failing "communist" state and the market-based alternatives was incredibly harsh and involved a whole lot of starving as the prices of food and other critical goods soared out of reach of Soviet citizens, not even going into the psychological effects. Also also, insofar as "communism" "failed" (the USSR was incredibly authoritarian and corrupt, many communists and socialists take big issues with them or China for that matter being called communist but I digress), it "failed" alongside a host of economic sanctions brought upon it by it's Capitalist neighbors, utterly terrified at it's very existence. I mean Christ calling someone communist is still an insult in the United States, and an attack on a politician here too, decades after the Red Scare supposedly ended.
- nradov 1y ago
  What sanctions? The USA and Canada literally sold huge quantities of grain to the USSR even during the height of the Cold War. Without those food sales even more Soviet citizens would have gone hungry.
storus 1y ago
> The end of communism in China and the Soviet Union was a major factor in the 42 percent reduction of hunger between 1990 and 2017. This sounds like a complete BS. There were no starving people in the Soviet Union and its satellites after a brief post-war period. They had no luxuries all year round like exotic fruits, but the basics were covered. They had also vastly more educated population than the US. Just their governance and understanding of economics didn't consider the innate selfishness of humans and the need to dominate and outdo others so supply-demand laws didn't work well. China fixed that part later by allowing private corporate ownership and throwing its population into a Darwinian environment while keeping minimal social standards for the unlucky ones. North Korea, Cambodia and Laos would be the only "communist" countries where famines were still present.

cptskippy 1y ago

The problem with broad generalizations like that is you will make enemies of allies and allies of enemies, only you won't realize it and fail to understand why people aren't 100% behind your agenda. This is itself a form of corruption.

FollowingTheDao 1y ago
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- cptskippy 1y ago
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  - FollowingTheDao 1y ago
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    - cptskippy 1y ago
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snowwrestler 1y ago

In a socialist system you still need a government, which is a group of people who are empowered to enforce the rules of socialism. As a result, they end up having access to most of the collective wealth as well. If they are very good socialists they will redistribute it all. If they are not-very-good socialists they will redistribute some of it and reserve some to support a nice lifestyle for themselves and their families. They won’t personally “own” mansions, airplanes, factories, etc. like capitalists do, but they still control them legally so the practical effect is very similar.

don_esteban 1y ago
"As a result, they end up having access to most of the collective wealth as well." Umm, it does not work like that, look at the Scandinavian-type socialism. The collective wealth is in the functioning education & health system, social support net, working public transport and such. Not a type of wealth that the government can usurp for themselves, to the detriment/exclusion of the remainder of the society. Too much ideological argumentation here...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
FollowingTheDao 1y ago
No, you don’t need a centralized government in all social systems. Centralized government is the big distinction here. Libertarian socialism of a decentralized government.

jandrese 1y ago

It's not the concentration of wealth, it is the concentration of power. Communism doesn't solve that problem. The less centralized your power is the more efficient your economy works. Pushing decisions down to the edge means the people deciding how to allocate resources are the closest to the information about what is needed where. The problem with highly centralized economies is that as an economy grows beyond a trivial size it's impossible for the centralized system to manage the flow of information from the edges. It doesn't scale. Also, honest competition is good for optimizing your resource allocation, if someone is ultimately in charge of both sides they will be inclined to try to choose just one and "avoid waste", which ultimately is just avoiding optimization. This is also why companies become less competitive as they grow and are always under threat from startups and a big reason why antitrust is about more than just "protecting consumers". That's also why big companies are always lobbying government for protection of their business models.

TFYS 1y ago
> It's not the concentration of wealth, it is the concentration of power. Those are the same thing. > The problem with highly centralized economies is that as an economy grows beyond a trivial size it's impossible for the centralized system to manage the flow of information from the edges. It doesn't scale. That was true a few decades ago. Now with everyone having a smartphone in their pockets at all times and the amount of computing power we have it should be doable. Still not easy for sure, but not impossible. > Also, honest competition is good for optimizing your resource allocation Think about how much non-productive work has to be done just to enable competition. Instead of one organization per industry we need multiple, all with their own overhead costs. Every company has to do their branding, HR, marketing, etc. The whole advertising industry pretty much exists only because companies try to get an edge with propaganda instead of improving their product. Wasted work. Competition also forces companies to do unethical things. Say one company starts cutting down rainforests to get an edge over the competition. Now they're cheaper than other businesses, and every business that wants to survive has to start cutting down rainforest. One country gets rid of worker rights -> businesses move there and other countries must follow suit. Same with taxes.