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There is no propaganda in America (lemmy.ml)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/funny@lemmy.ml
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[–] 15 points 4 months ago

Capitalism doesn't work. The success of the USSR's planned economy are near the bottom of that page.

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    [–] 14 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    Actual question, what caused the collapse of the soviet Union? I'm sure answers will be simplifications but I wish I knew more about the history

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    This article makes a succinct argument, but essentially the reasons for its fall:

    • The cold war arms race upped by Reagan - a huge drain on both material and mental resources that would've been better allocated to other industries. The US's constant military pressure and brinksmanship forced the USSR to play catchup against an opponent with a larger chip stack.
    • The USSR acted as anchor and banker to many third world revolutionary projects, which proved an additional drain on its economy. PRC avoided this mistake by being strictly non-interventionist, and avoiding these dangerous foreign policy traps.
    • De-linking from the world economy and not being able to take advantage of the newest technology and consumer products from the west. The PRC corrected this mistake by the 1980s.
    • Capitulations by Gorbachev to begin the process of privatization and dismantle the planned economy. PRC also avoided this by strengthening its publicly owned portion of the economy, refusing to privatize them, and making sure they commanded the top position.
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  • [–] [S] 10 points 4 months ago

    It's also important to add the overarching context here which is that the US got to sit WW2 out and develop its industries while the rest of the world burned. So, when it started the Cold War, the US was far ahead economically and used its advantage to drag USSR into the arms race. And the western world has been riding that advantage ever since.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago*

    Basically "because the most powerful countries in the world tried their absolute hardest to kill it for decades and they finally succeeded in its slow death." Pretty much everything other than de-linking from the world economy was brought on by the West.

    AKA "socialism doesn't work because it's our mandate to ensure it doesn't work"

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  • [+] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    Read the article I linked above for the answer. Richer countries like the US and western europe industrialized at least a hundred years before. Both the USSR and PRC were largely feudal economies in the early 1900s. But the soviet union (despite starting out from about the same point as Brazil in 1920) caught up to the US within a few decades, beating it to space, and forcing it to allocate tonsof resources to state-run research and development projects.

    It wasn't even really the USSR's choice to de-link, it was heavily attacked by all the western countries during it's civil war, and they embargoed the country when they lost. The west rode their hundred-year head start on industrialization and resource advantage from hundreds of years from colonialism and slavery, and also funded the newly defeated fascist countries like germany and japan to become anti-communist bulwarks producing consumer goods.

    The PRC has now surpassed the US in most tech sectors, once again proving the superiority of socialism.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Another thing I thought of randomly: read cj chivers the gun, which compares the development processes of the ak47 vs the ar15, and their histories. It's a microcosm of the superiority of socialist / collective planning vs the shitshow of capitalist profit-driven development.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    My simplest explanation is that Russia's powerful wanted to be in charge and look out for themselves, just extracting weath from the other union members who they tried to keep in line with violence. Democracy was a farce and there were no plans to transfer power to the proletariat. This lead to separatist movements in many countries, violent and peaceful.

    The Chernobyl incident seems to be the nail in the coffin, bankrupting the state if they didn't get outside money. The Russian elite then shut the whole thing down, rigging the sell off of state assets (aka the whole economy) to create the oligarchy and an ultra capitalist Russia, and the reinvigoratation of the church and conservatism, undoing social progress too.

    I'm sure there other big factors too but they're the main ones that stuck with me, after going to dozens of museums throughout eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Russia.

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    • [–] 9 points 4 months ago

    There is no Propaganda in America! There is only Public Relations!

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    [–] 9 points 4 months ago

    And then China rapidly developed to be the world's leader. Meanwhile the USA continues to burn and Western-democracies crumble, espousing there's no money for any public-programs. Quality of life degrades materially and education degrades. All whilst the media's mouthpieces say socialism does not work, whilst the system of communist thought took two countries, in a hostile environment, from backwaters to parity of the world's capitalist hedgemon.

    I unfortunately think it's true that the majority of a citizenry do not understand the social order/the economy that they live in, nor do they have an interest in it.

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    [+] 14 points 4 months ago (12 children)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    For many this change was for the worse!

    you mean for the nazis?

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  • [+] -6 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    Not sure if snarkiness is in place on that serious topic. This is the narrative tought in history classes in Europe and I have personally heard about experiences of my grandaprents on this matter and yes, my conclusion is that Polish people had it worse under russian occupation, especially women.

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  • [+] -6 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Not to mention that Russia was one of the aggressors that started the war in the first place.

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    • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (8 children)

    You have no idea how people lived there...

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  • [–] [S] 13 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    I literally grew up in USSR fucko

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  • [–] -3 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    I was born in an ex-USSR country. You probably just miss being young, not the actual regime. It was objectively horrible.

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 4 months ago* (2 children)

    No, I don't just miss being young. If you think everyone having a guarantee of housing, food, jobs, healthcare, and retirement is terrible then you're frankly a selfish sack of shit. Nobody in USSR worried about losing their job and ending up on the street or not being able to save enough to retire in dignity. These were not the kinds of things people had to worry about while everyone lives under the gun in the wondrous capitalist system. On top of that, the fall of USSR was one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of the 20th century. Countless millions of people had their lives ruined and lost everything, but some parasites got theirs at the expense of everyone else, and now go around telling the rest of us how terrible communism was.

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  • [–] -2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    In my country food was rationed, you would wait in endless queues for hours just to get 1/4 of a bread. There was not much other than bread, milk and some vegetables (meat was rare). If you did not have a job, the state would take you and send you to a crazy big project of the state where you would probably die (work camp). If you had different oppinions about politics, you were basically captured, tortured and then killed. Every second neighbour was an informer for the state, no one to trust. Maybe your country was much better, but I can't understant how you can praise that. I love the ideology of socialism, but USSR was a horrible implementation of that.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 4 months ago

    Ah yeah, it's so much better now with seniors living under the bridges and scavenging for food in the trash. Also, it's funny how you ignore the fact that USSR existed under a siege during the entirety of the Cold War right after having been invaded by fascists during the second world war and was not allowed to develop peacefully. Then after USSR fell, the west immediately poured a bunch of money into Poland and the Baltics to prop them up which is where a bit of prosperity some people saw actually came from. Meanwhile, go look at what happened to other republics which weren't of interest to western propaganda. See how people are doing there now.

    And sure, USSR could have done better in many ways. It was literally the first attempt at building socialism. However, what happened after has demonstrably been a disaster on an unimaginable scale. And now it might even lead to a third world war and a nuclear holocaust.

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    • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Something similar happened to Japan between 1868 and 1910, minus the space age

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    [–] -1 points 4 months ago

    Or anywhere else.

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    [+] -6 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    I guess we never heard of America's lend lease program.

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    I sure have. Here's a book produced by US military about it which makes it crystal clear that the program played a minor role in the war:

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    • [–] -2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    You realize the Soviet Union wasn't communist right?

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