this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
925 points (86.4% liked)
Late Stage Capitalism
469 readers
561 users here now
A place for for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited.
A zero-tolerance policy for bigotry of any kind. Failure to respect this will result in a ban.
RULES:
1 Understand the left starts at anti-capitalism.
2 No Trolling
3 No capitalist apologia, anti-socialism, or liberalism, liberalism is in direct conflict with the left. Support for capitalism or for the parties or ideologies that uphold it are not welcome or tolerated.
4 No imperialism, conservatism, reactionism or Zionism, lessor evil rhetoric. Dismissing 3rd party votes or 'wasted votes on 3rd party' is lessor evil rhetoric.
5 No bigotry, no racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or any type of prejudice.
6 Be civil in comments and no accusations of being a bot, 'paid by Putin,' Tankie, etc.
founded 3 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They haven't yet, and there's no profit motive for it so it really can't happen.
While I can't speak to the veracity of your claims about the quality of life of the Soviet Union under Stalin, there are in fact many capitalist countries that have been able to achieve these feats that you mentioned.
The housing first policy in Finland has practically eradicated homelessness where only 3,429 were homeless in 2023.
Similarly in the Nordics, the majority of the population Sweden (72.2%), Norway (71.8%), and Denmark (71.8%) is food secure. The US to an extent has also been able to mitigate against food insecurity with the existence of food stamps and free/reduced school meals essentially meaning starvation is rare in some parts of he country.
Also, the NHS provides all individuals residing in the UK with free healthcare, so... yeah.
Furthermore, all employees in France are guaranteed up to 5 weeks of annual paid leave.
In Switzerland, for a full-time job, the median monthly pre-tax salary was a tidy CHF6,788 which is approximately 7500USD. I guess you can tell that this isn't a small amount of money compared to the low wages received by workers in the Soviet Union under Stalin (which if i might remind you, the piece-rate system was later revised under Khrushchev).
And finally free education. While most nations in Europe (Germany and the Nordics) offer free to low-cost education, you need not really look further than the US to see that while not entirely free, public schooling and community colleges provide accessible enough education to many that need it.
You can see it's not really about the capitalism, but the governments that run it