Comments by "Chompy the Beast" (@chompythebeast) on "Capitalism Really Sucks, But Why?" video.
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"Communism" didn't kill millions, but rapid industrialization and modernization skipping over hundreds of years of development in mere decades while under global embargo took a heavy toll. Compared to the time it took China and the USSR to go from peasant societies to the #2 economies on earth, in the West, where industrialization happened first over hundreds of years, famine after famine, failure after failure, starvation after starvation occurred, killing untold numbers of people. At any rate, these problems are 20th century problems for those same nations―historical in nature and important lessons for developing countries today, but no longer the material conditions limiting the success of socialism in those places.
The United States of America would be a perfect breeding ground for successful socialism and communism with its high level of industrialization, though any new regime would inherit trillions of dollars of necessary infrastructure reforms that the current master class is just plain ignoring as best it can.
In short, as Marx noted, Capitalism is good at bringing agrarian societies into industrialized ones, Communism is good at taking industrialized societies into post-class societies. China and the USSR skipped over Capitalism, and thus faced rapid challenges that will not be faced by nations that have experienced Capitalism, such as the industrialized West
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@BirdieTheGreat Not exactly. Each idea has its use in its time. Marx himself actually advocated that Communists support certain bourgeois parties in Europe at a time when monarchies were still holding sway, with the full intention of rather turning on those capitalists once they were in power. For Capitalism fundamentally lays the foundations for its replacement with Communism in the same way that Feudalism fundamentally lays the foundation for its replacement with Capitalism.
It was Lenin who argued half a century later that you could kinda skip the Capitalist phase with a strong central vision, and Mao expanded on that idea later still, and in a very real sense they were proven correct: Both the USSR then and China today rocketed from feudal peasant societies in mere decades to become the #2 economies on earth. The cost was great and lessons were learned, to be sure, as they were when England and America industrialized over centuries rather than decades, and all those lessons can be applied to future revolutions.
But Capitalism and Communism are completely incompatible with one another, you can't have a bit of both at once in a lasting system. In essence that's what Socialism might be said to be, but only insofar as Socialism is the transition phase between Capitalism and Communism. So I guess, in that sense, you're right: Capitalism and bourgeois influence don't just evaporate overnight, after all, and in the Socialist phase to come, it will look a bit like an impermanent mixture for a time
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America literally does all of those things. America literally has Gulags: We have the most incarcerated population per capita on earth. 1 in 7 Americans goes to bed hungry every single night despite the fact that 30-40% of all food brought to market going to waste. The nation is built on slave labor and the genocide of the people who lived here first. We have around 600,000 people living on the streets and treated like criminals for doing so. We have more than 50% of the wealth of the richest empire in human history in the hands of a mere 50 aristocratic families. We have the #1 and #3 most expensive militaries on the planet, with #3 being American Policing, which has absolutely no targets but the very people forced to foot their bill. Our economic system collapses into recession approximately every decade, and every single time we respond by bailing out the rich and leaving the poor to get poorer. We murder innocent people all over the world in the name of maintaining the imperial authority, to absolutely no benefit of our general population, indeed to their detriment.
Communism is the lesser evil, my friend. Keep watching Hakim's vids, and when you feel yourself kicking back hard at something said, pause and consider it first: Do not respond as you have been programmed, but only as you actually consider the ideas presented. This is a difficult thing for anyone to do, but as Westerners living under capitalism our whole lives, it's important, because it's the only way we break free of the convenient lies and narratives we've always been told to excuse the rotten system we live in
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