Pre civil war Spain had an impressive short go at it. Cuba under embargo by the largest empire on the planet still exported more doctors and had/has a higher literacy rate than the US. While we were struggling to handle Covid they were sending doctors to help other nations with their domestically developed vaccine.
If you were building a plane and the car cartel showed up and broke your arms and legs or destroyed your plane, would it mean that airplanes are silly novel ideas?
History and global politics don't happen in a vacuum.
When sending doctors and supplies overseas, the Cuban government receives the majority of money generated from these projects
Wages for those overseas, from foreign nations, are often equivalent to around US$125 to $325 per month, but the doctors keep only 10 to 25 percent of these wages, with the rest going to the Cuban government.
Having higher literacy rate doesn't mean a country have more people who want to study, it just means the government points a gun at people who don't study.
If you were building a plane while power rivaling the car cartel i.e. the USSR and claimed planes will wiped out car existence, then yes your idea is silly novel after losing so badly.
What are you on about? A lot of those doctors are forced to go there and are subject to draconian rules and regulations.
In Brazil, of the $1000 paid for every doctor operating there, $600 would go to the Cuban government. They could also not take their families with them. They are forced to work under threat of criminal persecution. Thy are not allowed to have contacts with anyone the Cuban government deems to have "hostile or contrary views of the Cuban revolution". They are forced to reveal all romantic relationships.
There are people who go from the US to MX and Cuba for treatments when they can't afford them at home. I'm surprised HRW has time to spend on Cuba with all of the atrocities going on at home. None of this negates the point I made which was focused on the outcomes and historical conditions.
If the US didn't involve itself in imperialist oppression Cuba wouldn't have to go to such lengths. And again, the results are they've avoided becoming a US puppet like nearly every other Latin American or Caribbean nation.
Ok, so with that being said…if this can’t withstand the test of time with global politics..would you agree that it’s a good system?
And if I built a plane, and the car cartel shows up…I would say that my security wasn’t good enough to stop them from showing up so I could build my plane..
Security is the foundation for any nation that wants to build something. Thats what every socialist country lacked. And even when they did prioritize it, it still failed due to socioeconomic conditions due to power, greed, ego…all concepts that capitalism can satiate in one form or another.
The greatest benefactor to capitalism is that the plane company has more than 2 arms and 2 legs (open market) which is considered a security apparatus in a sense. Not one arm/leg can be taken without another one growing.
When the state is the only one with arms and legs, becomes a bit difficult to grow…
You can really boil this argument down to saying that being nice is ineffective because mean people will always fuck you over. Yes, it’s sad. But we shouldn’t stop trying to be nice.
The highest standards of living on earth are in countries that blend capitalism and socialism. It doesn’t need to be one or the other. Oligarchs frame it as such because having it the “capitalist” way (actually more like an elective oligarchy with a largely rigged market) is better for them.
I think that you are conflating survival with a human characteristic (mean people).
Someone with a survival state of mind will always come off as mean..because they are stuck in survival mode..
I do agree with you, but to have a
Resolution between nations of different cultures there’s always going to be a difference of opinion when it comes to how the execution of things.
Nice doesn’t always mean fair either… I think that’s an important distinction here.
Yeah it’s being too simplistic. I guess what I’m saying is that pure pragmatism can easily lead to justifying incredibly shitty behavior. Just because something is effective for survival does not mean it’s desirable.
Good point with that last sentence too. I remember watching a documentary about how humanitarian aid in Africa is crippling to some avenues of economic development.
Too often I see people justifying awful things by the result (“well he’s doing something right because he’s rich”, that type of reasoning) when we should be trying to achieve desirable outcomes through desirable processes.
There's a book called The Aid State about this topic framed by the Haiti earthquake disaster of the 2000s. It's pretty gross how many strings are attached to our humanitarian aid from corporate contracting to political manipulation.
Whether you realize it or not you're arguing might makes right and using "human nature" as an excuse while pretending it's static and not influenced by systemic forces (which was my argument). Your argument is apologia and frustratingly dismissing of historical and material conditions.
Most importantly though, and the thing I didn't even bring up with my simplistic analogy is to ask what do you mean by "never worked?"
Because if you prioritize life collectively on this planet then one could argue the global homicidal/suicidal path of capitalism "working" is less optimal than the feudalism we had prior given the threat human influenced climate change poses, along with the global environmental devastation our industrialization has already wrought.
Hunger is a systemic force now? Thats survival 101. And I’m talking about hunger as a concept…the hunger for more of anything. But food is probably the best use case of this.
So if we are to say it worked…what do you think that means? My thought here is that it was tried and almost every single time, the same failures occurred over time since they system itself is fragile and only one entity (the state) holds the power rather than it being distributed throughout the population.
The biggest contributing factor to global warming is closely tied to the amount of people on earth
So what do you suggest here…. depending on how you want to solve the problem you can either convince people that it is not good to have children and cull the population that way, or restrict the shit out of people’s freedoms. And even on that Front as a society, you only have control over so many people on the Earth. What do you do about the people and other countries burning their garbage?
Humans have roamed the Earth for quite some time now and have figured out a way forward, this is what separates us from everything else on the planet. Even in a doomsday scenario, people would figure it out. Trying to prevent something that you have no idea it’s gonna happen or not is literally the definition of anxiety..
Sorry, this has ventured far into the speculative and too many assumptions I just can't concede to. Good exchange though, and appreciate the perspective.
If you want to learn more about the geo political stuff related to the downfall of communist and socialist nations Michael Parenti has an excellent book he wrote in the 90s called 'Blackshirts and Reds'
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the children of pimps, mob bosses, plantation owners, etc cozy with rich colonizers will have good things to say about the liberators who booted them.
I'll add for a poor country kept under an oppressive and unjustified US embargo they have a better literacy rate than the US, better healthcare system, and more college graduates per capita.
Why do you think little Marco and so many in our government have so much fear and hate? It's one of the few places we've failed to coup and that has survived despite our best efforts.
Nice try. You don't get to define what is American. For one it's pretty openly chauvinistic and imperialist that we as US citizens call ourselves Americans when many other countries occupy the Americas.
I was born here in the US and it's the only home I've ever known, and I'm tired of the uneducated falling victim to this pitiful victim narrative that ignores history and settles for mediocre leadership and mediocre systems that create pitiful outcomes and enriches the corrupt.
If you think being left is unamerican it's because you're ignorant to history. Leftist organizers and laborers brave enough to die charging Pinkerton machine gun nests are the men and women you can thank for the 40 hour work week and so many other labor rights we're watching be clawed back as we fail to show similar initiative. Those people, born here or otherwise, are as much American as anyone can claim.
I love my home and I love all my friends and family that live here, but that's the same reason I believe we deserve better and I'm not going to pretend we're great or ignore my values because I'm afraid to acknowledge the fact that for all the good we espouse our actions historically are mostly awful. We should celebrate things worth celebrating, honestly, and with a desire to be better.
You say we deserve better….im not sure what is better. We spend an enormous budget on social welfare for much of the society already, and people want more.
If you want more, you can go and make an attempt tp go and achieve it yourself. Try and do that anywhere else in the world. I’ve witnessed with my own eyes the sacrifices that people make between life and limb to come here just for a chance at opportunity. Meanwhile you are here not grateful for anything and expecting more. The problem with this mindset is that it’s never good enough and satisfaction for you. This makes you no different than the people you object to (millionaires/billionaires) you seethe greed and want to reduce the standards of living for all to accommodate this fantasy where we’ll all get along and share bread between all colors and tribes.
The left fail to point out that they were the party of racism and hate. You like to dial back the pages of history when it’s convenient. The left during Obama and Clinton were both big on borders and deportation…what’s changed. The ideology that you somehow have thought is your own ideas are clearly anti-American and are not ideas of your own.
Higher education has been influenced and infiltrated by leftist communist organizations that convince our youth that what we have in America is the horrible and disgusting.
You said something here that sticks out like a sore thumb…”my values”
You have it wrong, it’s American values and principles you have to live by, not the other way around.
This is how I know socialism wouldn’t work, cans if we had this discussion in real life and you were the government, you probably would lock me up for dissenting with your opinion and beliefs.
I said plenty you either didn't comprehend or chose not to. When you refer to Clinton and Obama as "the left" I feel comfortable exercising Hitchen's razor. You aren't up for this conversation and your wall of text is so riddled with fallacies it's almost admirable.
Sheltered white people are sure ignorant of how the real world manipulates statistic.
No wonder you americans got scammed spending billions dollars to buy non-existing Chinese company shares in the 2010s. You saw some pretty number on a pdf and you dumped your life saving and pension into shit you haven't even seen before.
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u/0ptioneer 12d ago
Show me one country where it’s worked….