I never understood why people promote Marxism. Leaving aside the fact that Marx was racist, any society that went in this direction has suffered horribly. Scientifically and even theoretically, there is no evidence that Marxism has worked or will work in the future.
There is a reason people from more socialist countries flee to less socialist countries like the US despite any problems in the US.
Nowadays, we can’t even fully split up labor and capital as though they are two different sets of people as it was in the days of Marx.
Everything is a spectrum. Going to any of the ends (pure capitalism or pure communism) will be a disaster.
Consider the bankruptcies, the imprisonment-for-profit, the financial corruption, the racist police violence, the homelessness, the opiate scandals, the gun violence, the fact that most of the population has no safety net of any kind - and that's nowhere close to being a complete list.
There were privileged people in the Soviet Union who were doing just fine, and they had no interest in how well the system was working for everyone else.
We know how that ended.
It's very, very unwise to assume that the US can't possibly make the same mistake.
Have you considered that "more socialist" countries might have done better had other countries not felt the need to "bring democracy to," or "liberate" them? Or lured them into massive arms races that ultimately neither side could afford?
Both India and China are market economies. Market economies have the property that certain people can succeed wildly, but also that certain people are left behind. This explains why people leave.
How exactly would you build a country that was politically resistant to outside interference from countries that are much wealthier than it? This is a genuine question.
India was a socialist nightmare. Only recently has it switched to a market economy. It is still recovering and will take decades to recover. This is all well-known.
I thought these were well known. If you are willing to rectify this, I am willing to engage more, but respectfully decline to continue further otherwise.
> How exactly would you build a country that was politically resistant to outside interference from countries that are much wealthier than it? This is a genuine question
You can’t that’s why pure communism/socialism is a disaster almost always.
A better question is why other countries with US interference like Japan and South Korea have ended up being much more richer than before. North Korea without any US interference is much much poorer. (It is almost like a controlled experiment) Why is that?
I am aware of this. India has been a market economy since the 90s. Is almost 30 years not enough for the magic of markets to improve the situation?
Regarding China, "legal status" is irrelevant. Prices in China are set via market mechanisms. That is a market economy, period. Your link boils down to this:
> According to the EU, China subsidizes its industries to a great extent, particularly steel and aluminum, making their sales prices in the international market unfair.
This is essentially saying China is using market mechanisms that the EU does not like.
Moreover, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_market_economy#Marke..., "Julan Du and Chenggang Xu analyzed the Chinese model in a 2005 paper to assess whether it represents a type of market socialism or capitalism. They concluded that China's contemporary economic system represents a form of capitalism rather than market socialism...."
Rectified.
In response to your edit: "Currently a majority of North Koreans are dependent on markets for their survival." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jangmadang. North Korea is also a market economy.
In what way has the US interfered in South Korea or Japan since 1950? How does that compare to being sanctioned and embargoed by every major Western nation? Would you like to hear about Cuba instead?
Which part offends: my defense of the claim that India, China, and North Korea are market economies, or the part about how the US interferes in other nations' affairs? Can you be more specific as to what I'm to stop? Did I not mention UBI and land value taxes enough, or something?
None of that. It's the tedious and predictable aspects.
These arguments are an endless carousel. They turn nasty and convince no one. If that's the game you want to play on the internet, there are other carnivals.
> Is almost 30 years not enough for the magic of markets to improve the situation
We are leaving out the 300 years of colonialism. And 50 years of socialism. 30 years is not enough to move a billion people out of the ills of socialism and colonialism
The US stopped interfering in South America by the 90s. By your own logic, how long do the socialist countries in South America need to recover from US interference? 10 years? 30 years? 100 years? 1000 years?
>In response to your edit: "Currently a majority of North Koreans are dependent on markets for their survival." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jangmadang. North Korea is also a market economy.
You are missing the point here. The illicit market economy is what is helping them survive the legal socialist economy. Thank the market economy for saving the NK.
> In what way has the US interfered in South Korea or Japan since 1950? How does that compare to being sanctioned and embargoed by every major Western nation? Would you like to hear about Cuba instead?
Care to tell me first how the US has interfered in Mexico?
> I never understood why people promote Marxism. Leaving aside the fact that Marx was racist, any society that went in this direction has suffered horribly.
Since Marx’s time, basically every country in the developed West has gone in the direction of Marx’s prescriptions, driven largely by Marxists and other socialists (often through the labor movements as vehicles).
You're probably confused by confusing Leninism and it's descendants with Marxism, a piece of Leninist propaganda that capitalists have been prone to adopt as their own. But Leninism abandons central features of Marxism to avoid Marxists dependendencies on the existence of advanced capitalism and broad working-class consciousness, in favor of an centralized authoritarian system designed to be implemented in pre-capitalist societies under a narrow elite. But even if Leninism can be seen as a form of Marxism rather than a massive deviation from it, itself a debatable point, it clearly would even then be a subset of, and not coextensive with Marxism, so it would be still improper to limit “went in that [Marxist] direction” to adopting Leninism or one of it's descendants.
The states non-Leninist socialists, including Marxist Communists, described as “state capitalism” aren't “more socialist” (and certainly not more Marxist) than the states which adopted a subset of the Marxist program in the conditions for which Marx prescribed them.
As I said, everything is a spectrum, even Adam Smith wanted capitalism with regulation.
What would you say defines Marxism and Leninism? I have spent countless hours and have arrived at the conclusion that most definitions of these are inconsistent and informal.
I will be happy to engage with you if you have a formal and concise definition and I will be ready to change my stance based on that.
There is a reason people from more socialist countries flee to less socialist countries like the US despite any problems in the US.
Nowadays, we can’t even fully split up labor and capital as though they are two different sets of people as it was in the days of Marx.
Everything is a spectrum. Going to any of the ends (pure capitalism or pure communism) will be a disaster.