If making upper middle class people a bit less well off means that everyone can afford to eat and pay their medical bills, that’s fine with me

socialism would make life not worth living imo. so many luxury goods would cease to exist. there would be no bragging no motivation to do more because we would all have the same s***.

you can have it so everyone can eat under capitalism. how many people starved to death in usa 2020?

I dont confine myself to the idea of "working for the country" or "help society"

Thing is homie, we live in a dog eat dog world, we just happened to be born in a western world where we got the basics (school, internet, football),for basically not much and we are just maybe 30% that have had a normal upbringing(thats with ignoring wars and slavery) you forget that those from other places (from asia, africa, india etc) dont get that same chance. The world aint that happy jolly place where everything is perfect if you just do your job lol. You are indirectly enabling your surpressors for running your life. Do what you want, use the system they built and prolong your dreams and set your relatives in higher places and let your offspring have everything you wish you had and more.

I went to turkemenistan once.. it was depressing tbh

Commie designed apartments look like dogshit

This was a terrible response and you should stop ostracizing people for things if you have no clue what you're talking about.

I’m not sure why you think that. If anything, people who aren’t just scraping by in a hyper competitive society would have more disposable income and time to engage in their passions. You can’t really use the USSR as any indication either, since they tried to implement socialist policies too quickly and f***ed themselves over. China is a country which implemented multiple socialist tenets and is now the largest economy in the world

china also has over a billion people.

I just wouldnt want to live in a society where everyone has the same amount of money it would be meaningless and boring.

Also who would do jobs no one wants to do?
I also dont think its possible to get rid of social classes and hierarchy there will always be some form of it.

watch this lecture from about 10:17 to around 27:00 minute mark if you’re interested in the view of an actual economist who disagrees with you. economics is far from an empirical science. econ students and teachers who wrap themselves up in only the neoclassical model like to think it’s a science, but that’s delusional

no one is pretending the world is happy jolly lol

A lot of terrible stances itt

Dont worry there will be a hierarchy and rich ppl in that society... People in charge and their family n comrades gonna be the top dawgs in that hierarchy

They will have government grants and subsidized import export rights but these kinda privileges gonna be handed out to family n like minded friends... this will result in idiots running different industries and s***onomics for the plebs

and you're bold enough to assume what human nature is...

under capitalism the incentives of the people who own capital are to squeeze as much money as possible out of the workers and then spend that money on themselves. in the USSR the means of production were owned by the state and the profits were taken by the state, but the incentives of the state were to spend the money on the people: free healthcare, schools, factories, farms, roads, etc.

from a developmental level, from 1922 to 1948 the USSR developed from a rural agrarian society in the wake of both a world war and a civil war into the second largest economy in the world at the time and an international superpower due to its centrally planned economy.

comparatively it took the US 169 years from its independence and the establishment of capitalism to a superpower after world war ii.

the way the government was organized was essentially a house and senate divided by population and nationality. in this way the interests of ethnic minorities were given more representation and were given slightly more power to not be entirely weighed out of the conversation unlike in a direct representation.

also from a nutrition standpoint the CIA had sent spies to the USSR to report on what life was like and in their own words "American and Soviet citizens eat about the same amount of food each but the Soviet diet may be more nutritious.

According to a CIA report released today (8 Jan, 1983)) both nationalities may be eatng too much for good health.

The CIA drew no conclusions about the nutritional makeup of the Soviet and American diets but commonly accepted U.S. health views suggest the Soviet diet may be slightly better."

for the record i'm not exactly a soviet union ☭☭☭! shill but i don't think it hurts to look at what they did right and how these things can be applied to help our people in the us, especially those mostly affected by wealth inequality.

the collapse of the soviet union was due to liberalization and a shift towards a capitalistic market (glasnost and perestroika) under gorbachev.

there were definitely unresolved issues in the USSR but i wouldn't say it collapsed because of socialism

capitalism doesn't exactly mean free markets and such

capitalism is defined as an organization of the economy where the means of production are owned by the people who have capital (basically people work under rich people)

while capitalism has its upsides as its been the dominant form of economy since slavery, socialism is in essence a critique of capitalism and where it fails.

the main point of socialism is that there shouldn't be a hierarchy where people are either part of the capitalist class where they get to exploit the work of other people for the fact that they were born rich or that people are exploited for the entirety of their lives and the profits of the labor and work they've done are stolen from them.

people should be allowed to earn more of the profit that they've created through their own hard work, and in an ideal utopia (Communism) there would be state-less and hierarchy-less society where the basic human needs of people are taken care of while people can also work on the things that both need to be worked on and people would have the freedom to work on.

as far as social mobility goes, in a society where people aren't constantly being exploited and forced to spend the majority of their working life working s*** jobs, people can actually spend time on the things they'd like to achieve and love. with healthcare and basic necessities taken care of a single mother might be able to go to school to be an engineer or doctor or welder whereas in a parallel like the US you would not be able to take time off work to do that if you wanted to afford a basic standard of living.

how would life as an artist work under socialism? Im curious

it'd prob be close to what lean ecco2k and bladee do over in sweden.

clock in ur shift at the factory, do some work with your buddies, make art when you clock out and if you have to go on tour or something you just tell your boss you'll be back in 6 months or whatever.

i have no idea tbh but this is just what i figure

yeah idk, any society that doesn't view the arts as enough of a valuable contribution to human advancement to have that be someone's main working duty, then idk if I could ever stomach living in it

Reading up on this and

"In the East, we had professional bands which had all studied music and had official permission to play music. They were allowed to work as professionals and they had the right to charge money for their shows. If you were an amateur, you had to be classified at a certain level. There were three levels, and I reached the first one! I had a certificate which allowed me to charge four Deutschmarks (£1.30) per hour when I played a concert. Without this certificate it was illegal to play gigs, and you weren’t allowed to make contact with promoters without one. People accepted this because they had to. To get your certificate you had to play in front of a commission, like a jury, who decided if you had the right songs: you were only allowed to play 40 per cent cover versions in your set, the rest had to be your own music. Actually it wasn’t that bad an idea, because bands had to come up with their own stuff, and so there were a lot of interesting bands at that time.

The idea of a jury being able to decide based on their own subjective taste whether or not your music can legally be played in public after you perform in a courtroom is a disturbing thought to me lol

it's not like they need to work at the factory, they choose to. it allows them to earn money to spend on luxuries and i'm sure if you had all day every single day to do nothing you would rather dedicate your time to working on your craft or picking up a job to have more spending money

It took america longer to industrialise because the country started with fewer people and half the industrial machinery hadnt even been invented yet.

Also the Soviets didnt care about ethnic minorities to the extent you believe. Chechens, Jews etc were carted off across Siberia. This meets the un definition of genocide

Central planning is less efficient than a market due to the economic calculation problem

My ideal economic model is Sweden

yea i agree that those barriers to the US's industrialization should be taken into account when looking at the US's 169 years vs the USSR's 26 years to a post-industrialized superpower but i do also think that the USSR's accomplishment in this regard should be recognized.

and yea at large there were a lot of issues incorporating many nationalities and cultures under one nation, but to be fair every modern country faces similar issues and i do think the implementation of both the soviet of the union as well as the soviet of nationalities is an admirable decision to make in a representative democracy.

and again feel free to argue w me im not really a communist shill just tryna diversify my understanding

Yeah man mass murder and force labor gonna boost a country's economy in no time, aint gonna argue with that. We should put kids in factories and if they get hurt give em free healthcare.