What would a Socialist (Socialist Party, USA) America be like?

Great Debates
81

I’m sorry… You mean the ‘Capitalist economist’ who writes for “New Politics - A Journal of Socialist Thought”?

Wow. You found a socialist who thinks that socialism is good. Imagine that.

Your second cite is another apologia for the Soviet Union. Please don’t be disingenuous and label these people “Capitalist” just so you can claim some sort of balance. Or maybe I should start citing the Heritage Foundation as a socialist organization so I can ‘prove’ that not even socialists are buying the theory any more.

It’s not hard to have full employment at the point of a gun. If the people have no choice about where to work, and are forced to work at gunpoint, then they’ll go to work. And you can always find the means to pack such people like cordwood into shabby little 500 sq ft concrete apartments and give them 1200 calories of crappy food a day, so long as they wait in line several hours for it.

In fact, they had so much will to make them go away that they made them go as far as Siberia. It’s pretty easy to have zero unemployment when you’re willing to round up the unemployed and the troublemakers and ship them by the millions into forced labor camps.

Well, the will and a whole lot of leg irons, anyway. But hey, think of the jobs that would be created in the burgeoning leg-iron industry.

You seriously underestimate how miserable life was for the average Soviet citizen. I had a friend who’s family got out of the Soviet Union. They were ‘middle class’ - dad was a chemist. This is what their life was like in the 1970’s: First, 8 people lived in an apartment with one bedroom, and maybe 600-700 square feet. The kids all slept together in the living room with the grandparents. They were on a waiting list for a car, but never got one.

Every morning, her Mom would get up at about 5, and make the family breakfast - usually something crappy like hard rolls and butter with maybe some leftover fat or something for flavor. Then she would get the kids off to school, and Dad would go to work. Of course, they didn’t have a car, so everyone walked a lot. They didn’t have any sort of automated appliances, so mom had to hand-wash clothes and stuff. Early in the afternoon, she would head out for the daily ritual of standing in line for the staples the family needed. For hours. Standling in line was so ingrained in the Soviet Union that it had its own customs and unwritten rules of behaviour. People would see a line forming and join it, without even knowing what might be at the other end. Hey, if there’s a line, it must be something valuable, right? If not, maybe you can trade whatever it is with someone else.

Anyway, she’d get home at 6-7 PM, make supper, everyone would do chores, and then it would be off to bed again.

What a life. I’d rather be poor in the west. Oh, wait - I WAS poor in the west. At the same time, I lived in a single parent family with my mother making minimum wage. My life was WAY better than my friend’s.

This nostalgia you’re displaying for the Soviet Union truly amazing.

Wow, you make it sound so good!

82

You most certainly did make that assertion (emphasis added):

And the rest of your post was pure bullshit, as others have already pointed out.

83

In Soviet Union, what doesn’t kill you makes you live a bleak depressing life with only thoughts of escape and gallons of vodka to make it bearable.

84

Yeah, the Soviet Union was so wonderful they had to put up razor wire and machine gun nests to prevent the people from fleeing the glorious worker’s paradise.

85

But at least you had the comfort of knowing that if you ever starved to death it wouldn’t be like in American where the poor starve to death on street corners and no one cares. You’d be warmed by the thought that you were starving to death because Comrade Stalin cared enough to WANT you to starve to death.

86

You did.

87

Um, yeah. Socialism naturally leads to the deliberate starvation of millions by mad dictators. Just like democracy leads naturally tno nuclear weapons. It’s all very logical out there in some universe or other.

You claiming we couldn’t have fed and housed our poor during the Depression if we had had the will to? The problem with the Depression was … no social safety net. That’s what happens when you try to run capitalism without a net – people die.

88

So how many people starved to death in America during the Great Depression?

89

Not at all. Sometimes it isn’t deliberate.

90

You don’t like my cites, but I note you’re attacking the sources rather than trying to dispute my essential point, which is that the old Soviet Union housed, fed and employed its citizens. I got the cites. You got the handwaving. We’re on the Dope.

Good luck with all that handwaving.

Yes, I agree, poor conditions were the norm in the Soviet Union for the middle class. But people in America who are homeless might trade those conditions for theirs. Is that so hard to understand?

I’m guessing it is.

Yes, Gulag very bad. You know what else? In America, we spend a LOT of money on heating oil! Billions! That must prove something, right? It proves at least as much about capitalism as Gulags prove about socialism.

Look, people I’m not just talking to Sam here, you’re ALL doing it). If you’re going to be calling my arguments bullshit you’re going to have to do a LOT better than this:

Me: “The Soviet Union has more land mass than most other nations.”

You: “But what about the mass killings! The Gulags! How can the Soviet Union have land mass when there are all those things!”

Or

Me: “The Soviet Union has more woolly mammoths frozen in tundra than the United States.”

You: But it can’t! It’s a police state! The secret police! How can there be so many woolly mammoths when people were being shot by the truckload in Lubyanka Prison!"

Remind me again – where does America rank in terms of people imprisoned per capita? Aren’t we the leading consumer of leg irons in the world? Or at least in the top five?

But they were not literally living in the street, were they?

[quote]
What a life. I’d rather be poor in the west. Oh, wait - I WAS poor in the west. At the same time, I lived in a single parent family with my mother making minimum wage. My life was WAY better than my friend’s.

I’m watching the lobsters crawling out of your ears again. It’s not a pretty sight.

91

Let’s remember that you piped in about communism (the USSR), not socialism. The thing is, both communism and capitalism are economic systems, not governmental systems. But experience tells us that communism can only be sustained in a totalitarian governmental system while capitalism can be be sustained in pretty much any kind of governmental system.

Any ecomonic system without a social saftey net is going to have people “starving” (for lack of a better word). The social safety net is determined by the government, but here’s the kicker: just how much of social safety net is needed is a function of your economic system. Capitalism has shown itselt to be the best way to create wealth and to eliminate the need for a safety net for the largest % of people in a country.

(I’ve never really understood the key difference between socialism and communism anyway, though. )

92

Here’s a cite.

Here’s another. This one tracks birth rates and death rates during the great depression and is very scholarly. No one seems to be tracking starvation in particular.

93

No, I didn’t make up your argument…you were the one who excused Chavez:

Would his level of “authoritarianism” be acceptable in the US, if the “entrenched elite” here tried to keep a leader from accomplishing things? I imagine Bush feels that a little authoritarianism helps him accomplish his goals, as well…so is that OK with you?

94

That lists one death. So, you’re outraged by one death in the capitalist system, but millions of starvation deaths in a communist system is just hand waved away. Got it. :rolleyes:

95

Is it your assertion that homeless people in the US have no access to welfare and public housing?

Do you have a cite that shows there were no homeless whatsoever in the USSR?

96

Well, to be fair, the extract also says:

Of course, other sites show the population actually rising during this period (albeit at the slowest rate in the 20th century, not counting the anomalous 1918 when a combination of war and influenza cause the population to slightly decrease), but hey, supposition and speculation are kinds of evidence, aren’t they?

So, how many Soviets died over the winter of '32-33?

As has been pointed out in various ways, the safest way to ensure your society has a safety net is to not hamper productive citizens beyond taxing them a little so they can create the nation’s wealth, some of which gets distributed to the poor. Alliteratively, if your system actively discourages productive citizens by not letting them benefit from their own labour, they’ll do all they can to escape.

Capitalism with a safety net is far easier to establish and maintain than communism (or extreme socialism) with limited personal freedoms. Neither system at its extreme is pretty, but capitalism needs less make-up.

97

So what? Since 1/6th of the population clearly didn’t starve that prediction was wrong. Anti-capitalist posters on this board like to imply that people were literally starving to death in the streets by the thousands during the Depression in the US. The fact is, you have to go to **socialists **countries (or Europe during/between the two World Wars) to see anything like that happening in the 20th century.

98

So I’m on your side, yeesh. It’s very easy for EC to use that as a site because he can use (or try to use) the mere speculation of mass starvation as evidence that there really was mass starvation.

My “to be fair” was ironic, a method of saying “sure one aspect of EC’s cite doesn’t prove anything, but here’s another aspect of his site that… still doesn’t prove anything.”

99

OK, but it’s unlcear to me why you’d think that was obvious.

100

A better question would be why the peoples of practically every other country don’t despise socialists the way Americans do. Is everybody out of step but Sammy?