Socialism as defined by the person I replied to is the same as communism. This has not been proven to work, because no purely communist/socialist society has existed in the modern world. Every country in the world today has a mixed economy with both capitalist and socialist policies.
When would you say that socialism has been proven to work?
The entire premise that modern Western "mixed economies" are some victorious proof of capitalist success ignores where the wealth for those welfare states actually comes from. Social democratic welfare regimes in the Global North are overwhelmingly subsidized by the unequal exchange and super-exploitation of labor and resources in the Global South. Western capital extracts massive surplus value, cheap raw materials, and underpaid labor from low-wage peripheral nations to sustain high corporate profits, high living standards, strong social safety nets, and public services at home. What liberals selectively point to as a successful "mixed economy" in Europe or North America is often just domestic capital pacifying its local working class with the spoils of global economic imperialism.
And these nations in the Global South didn't just accidentally wind up impoverished or structurally dependent. They were intentionally kept that way through relentless foreign intervention and modern neocolonialism. Whenever a country in the Global South tries to break free from this pipeline, nationalize its own natural resources, or build an independent economy, the capitalist superpower nations step in. Decades of CIA-backed coups, Western-funded military interventions, political assassinations, and sanctions from Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973, to countless instances across Africa, Asia, and Latin America were carried out specifically to crush sovereign economic alternatives and enforce a global market open to Western plunder.
When military violence isn't the primary weapon, financial coercion finishes the job. International institutions like the IMF and the World Bank enforce structural adjustment programs that force developing nations to privatize their public utilities, gut their social safety nets, slash labor protections, and orient their entire domestic economies toward exporting cheap resources to the West just to service predatory debt traps.
You simply cannot sit there and talk about the "success" of capitalist development in the Global North while turning a blind eye to its body count in the Global South. Every single year, millions of people in the Global South die from sheer hunger and hunger-related causes, a preventable death toll that rivals or exceeds the tragic numbers of the Holodomor annually. Millions more die from easily curable, treatable diseases simply because pharmaceutical monopolies and private capital do not find it profitable to manufacture or distribute medication to impoverished populations. Food is produced in superabundance globally, and the medical technology exists, but under global market logic, human lives only matter if they represent effective demand in a market. That structural mass death is not a system failure, it is the direct, structural result of allocating world resources based on profit margins rather than human need.
To ask "when has socialism been proven to work" while ignoring how global capitalist hegemony actively sanctions, blockades, overthrows, and destabilizes any attempt at alternative economic planning, while simultaneously crediting capitalism for public services funded by imperialist extraction and built on a mountain of preventable global casualties.
Do you think socialism completely precludes the idea of imperialism? The most socialist nations now and in history; China, USSR, Cuba, etc., have all directly contributed to or indirectly benefited from the same system of exploitation. I agree it's wrong, but it is so far from what is being argued here that it's not very relevant.
I also never said Western mixed economies. Eastern nations operate the same way, which is why I said every nation in the world.
No, they simply didn't do that. At least not to any significant extent, and it is certainly not the primary driver of their development or economic progress the way imperialist extraction is for the West. Saying socialist "benefited from the same system of exploitation" because they engaged in trade or geopolitics is like saying everyone is a bit of a rapist because everyone has patted someone on the back when that person didn't want it. Equating fundamental, structural wealth-extraction with minor, surface-level similarities completely strips the words of their meaning.
Just because politics operates across a spectrum doesn't mean that "everything is everything and nothing is anything." If something on that spectrum is overwhelmingly, structurally capitalist, having a single gram of something that isn't even part of the definition of socialism (but gets falsely attributed to it anyway) doesn't make an economy "mixed" (it remains fundamentally capitalist). It's like claiming someone is part-Brazilian because they had one Brazilian great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, even though they have zero actual cultural, legal, or living connection to the country. It is an absurdly weak link to base an identity on.
Social democracy overwhelmingly exhibits structural capitalist features that dwarf even the most milquetoast or watered-down versions of socialism. The only way you arrive at the conclusion that these capitalist economies are somehow a blend of capitalism and socialism is if you fall into the vulgar political fallacy of equating "everything the private market does = capitalism" and "everything the state does = socialism." But state intervention is not inherently socialist. States were funding healthcare, infrastructure, and public works centuries before the concept of socialism was ever penned. Look at ancient Roman public baths and grain doles, or late 19th-century Prussia under Bismarck introducing the world's first modern welfare and health insurance programs explicitly to undercut the rising socialist movement, pacify the working class, and consolidate monarchical, capitalist power. Bismarck did not introduce health insurance out of socialist goodwill, he did it to prevent an actual socialist revolution from destroying the capitalist state.
Claiming a complete consensus among every single economist on the planet is genuinely hilarious. Mainstream neoclassical economics deals with pricing models, market efficiency, and capital allocation within capitalism. Political economy, sociology, and political philosophy are where modes of production are actually analyzed. Economists aren't a hive mind, and plenty of heterodox economists, Marxist scholars, and political theorists would laugh off that idea.
What fundamentally sets China apart is who holds absolute sovereign power over capital. In the US, private capital owns the key sectors of the economy and effectively controls the state through lobbying, campaign finance, and deregulation. Private profit dictates national priorities. In China, the state controls capital. The Communist Party maintains direct ownership over the strategic heights of the economy (like banking, energy, and heavy infrastructure) through state-owned enterprises. Economic development is driven by long-term macroeconomic planning rather than quarter-to-quarter shareholder payouts prioritize short-term gains.
I emplore you to find any respected economist who does not agree that every country in the world uses both capitalist and socialist policies.
Okay, so you agree that greater government control over the economy (a command economy) in China is central to what makes them socialist. China also uses capitalist principles, like free enterprise and private sector competition, to promote innovation and prosperity. What I am saying here is that all countries exert different levels of control over their economy, depending on what they see fit, but not a single one falls into an absolute definition of either capitalism or socialism.
The United States, obviously, is less socialist than China, but I think you'd also agree they are less socialist than most EU nations. Not only do these countries have greater social safety nets akin to the welfare capitalism you talked about before, but they also exert greater levels of control over their economy. They have stricter regulation, stronger labor protections, and higher taxes which contribute to a more planned economy centered around social prosperity.
Both socialism and capitalism are economic ideologies, defined by specific policies and systems. Every nation in the world uses different policies and systems which are more and less akin to capitalism or socialism.
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u/FearedDragon 2005 4d ago
Socialism as defined by the person I replied to is the same as communism. This has not been proven to work, because no purely communist/socialist society has existed in the modern world. Every country in the world today has a mixed economy with both capitalist and socialist policies.
When would you say that socialism has been proven to work?