volodya_ilich

The "slave labor" thing about china is 40 years too late. China now has wildly better working conditions than India or Phillipines or Indonesia or Malaysia.

Aren't you concerned with the cold-war-like escalation that we're seeing the US adopt against china?

Think harder. I'm not "moving goalposts", I'm saying, if life in the countryside was so bad during soviet times, why are people from the countryside moving out now and not before... You said "tell that to the people living on the countryside", the reality is that the people in the countryside were forced to leave the countryside after communism. So why don't you go ask them?

No, I mean that it's hypocritical criticising the other administration for following the same trend

Nah seriously, look up the role of the IMF in the "restructuring" of the Russian economy. And look up the social and economic consequences

How long did it last in the Weimar Republic (whose ideology you failed to mention btw). And when was it implemented in the rest of Europe.

But yeah for how long will our glorious liberal democracies have affordable healthcare and pensions, we've done nothing but degrade them for the past 30 years because apparently doing better is communism

No, it didn't "fail" by any historical account. If you look up even on Wikipedia, which has an extremely western bias, you'll see that the article is called , "dissolution" of the USSR, not failure or crumbling or whatever revisionist word of the day you wanna choose. The USSR was booming, it enjoyed overwhelming legitimacy in the vast majority of its republics (with some notable exceptions in the Baltics mostly) as proven by the soviet referendum to maintain the USSR, and it was only dissolved from the top down by a few party members, not a failure or crumbling by any means. The 90s crisis wasn't created by socialism, it was created by the newly formed capitalist government which auctioned the country to the most corrupt bidder and created the russian oligarchy that we all hate now. It was literally directed by western institutions like the International Monetary Fund and economists from MIT, you can feel free to study this subject in the slightest if you're interested and you'll see that what I'm saying is right (clearly you haven't done so before).

Data says otherwise. Since the end of the soviet block, there's been a massive migration outwards from the countryside in favour of urban life all over the former socialist republics. Maybe the idea of subsidizing the infrastructure of the countryside despite it not making sense within capitalism wasn't such a bad idea after all... Please, try to respond to that: why are people flocking from the degrading countryside in post soviet countries

And how much did they expand in Europe and how long did they last? Anyway, nice that you can only respond to that point

ROFL, the consumer index that your first source portrays, is still twice that of Canada at 86 points Vs 45, and Germany's consumer index is -15 points... It's on par with Australia and Spain, so what does that tell you?

The rest aren't really indicators of Chinese people seeing the economy struggling aren't they? They're just western reports predicting the imminent collapse of the Chinese economy... as they've been doing for the past 20 years

It turned a backwater pre-capitalist empire where 80% of the population were poor farmers, into the second world power in unprecedentedly quick industrialization and development, defeated the Nazis and prevented their extermination of the Slavic people including Poles and Ukrainians, it guaranteed rights to women and to national minorities like Kazakh, Uzbeki, Georgians, Armenians, it established for the first time in history concepts like socialized healthcare and pensions for every citizen which western Europe later emulated... After being dismantled, of which it's been 33 years, Russia still hasn't recovered the GDP per capita of the USSR, so what does that tell you about how well liberalism is working in Russia?

And access to transport was widely available to the overwhelming majority of the population through trains, trams, buses and trolleybuses. Even if your American mind can't comprehend this fact, owning a car isn't the ultimate form of mobility, there are alternatives that are arguably better. City design was centered around walkability, density and public transit; metro systems were luxurious and a predicament all out of themselves, and housing being generally obtained through the worker's union implied that workers usually lived in relative proximity to their workplaces.

The soviet economy was a developing, centrally planned economy, not running under the premise of overproduction and surplus but running under the premise of 5-year plans of production. There was full employment, and almost complete usage of the raw materials extracted and industrial goods produced. Making twice as many cars, implied removing all of that labor and those resources from another sector of the economy. When the premise isn't to "make money selling cars to rich people", but to "grant adequate material conditions and welfare to every citizen", you have to make decisions like that. More cars could have implied, for example, fewer hospital beds or fewer trams, but my point is that making more private cars would have NECESSARILY meant making less of something else of which there's also no surplus (because the premise of the USSR was the non-existence of surplus). It's very easy to have surpluses in a capitalist economy when you don't care about 80% of the population not having access to the goods and services available, when you want everyone to have access it's a different story.