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refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months agoAccording to Professor Richard Wolff (economic historian and Marxist economist), capitalism fails on average every 47 years. The late 1800s to the Great Depression was about 50-ish years; the Great Depression to the 70s oil crisis was about 30-40 years (depending on when you start timing it, if post-Depression or during); the Reagan-era 1980s deregulation to 2008 was 30-ish years, 2008 to COVID was 12 years.
The USSR failed for many reasons. One of which is totally their fault, where they didn’t adopt computers early enough. Another big fault, though, is the Cold War, where the US did everything in its power to overthrow Communist idiology wherever possible (see: Korea and Vietnam for extreme examples). That also includes economic sanctions, like we see today with the US and Cuba. When the US sanctions a country, they don’t do as well as when they have the ability to trade. This is because the US is a massive global economic superpower that produces a lot of important things needed to run a society, like medicine, technology, food, etc.
I’m not as well versed in current-day European politics, but do communist countries even exist in modern day Europe? If they do, then they’re probably poorer due to the probable economic sanctions levied by capitalist countries (the US generally forces countries that it trades with to also sanction US state enemies, which includes all countries considering themselves Communist, other than China since China became a massive economic superpower, in part due to the US establishing free trade agreements with Permenant Normal Trade Relations with China). I’m just guessing on this front, though. I also am not as well versed as to the timelines of social democracy on Europe, but I have been seeing more economicly right wing voices in European politics as of late.
Social democracy probably extends that 47 year timeline a bit, but deregulation will usually come at one point or another, since corruption can still exist. Not that Communism doesn’t have corruption issues either, because it definitely does. The issue is centralization of power. Marxist-style Anarchy might be an option, but TBH I’m not well versed enough on that subject to really comment on it or give an opinion on it.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 8 months ago
There are no European countries that are communist anymore.
The only communist country that has ever done well economically is China, and that was after they threw away socialist dogma, and allowed capitalism in their economy.
I live in Denmark, which is part of Scandinavia, and we have been using the social democratic model since 1924 when we got a social democratic prime minister, who is also our longest sitting prime minister with 15 years.
Yes we are seeing an unfortunate turn to the right in recent years, as I mentioned before, probably to a large degree because of Immigration from the middle east. Where the right claim they will stop immigration. But probably also because we have seen socialism/communism is a failed model that simply doesn’t work.
Social democracy on the other hand does work pretty well, and is probably the strongest at protecting the population and observing human rigts. But currently people don’t want a humane government, they want the immigration to stop, because it threatens our democracies and economic model with a high degree of social welfare.
refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
100 years is quite a long time to maintain social demcracy.
While the right is using immigration to gain political power, I think if there wasn’t increased immigration, they would find some other way of gaining power. Idk which came first, but a lot of right wing politicians globally are taking notes from the US right (mainly Donald Trump), and the move towards fascism is gaining ground in many places right now, unfortunately. I can only comment on the US, really, but I believe in the US that this is successful due to people having economic hardship, which leads them to have more extreme idiologies (either socialism or fascism).
I hope Denmark will be able to maintain their social democracy and show that fascism is not the way.
Unfortunately, according to Marxist theory, social democracy will inevitably devolve back into straight capitalism, or worse. I hope Denmark can prove it wrong.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yes it is, but it’s not a Social democratic government all the time, but even when it’s not, the policies of the right are leaning a lot towards it. Our right govern way more like the left than the Democrats of USA. We also once had a communist party, even with representation in parliament. But it collapsed with the Soviet Union.
Yes, USA remains a huge influence here too, despite how obviously and incredibly stupid their policies are. We have a couple right wing parties that still at times take inspiration from Republicans. But luckily it’s impossible to actually use their policies here. For instance Gay marriage and LGBT rights are not in question here, and neither is the Scandinavian welfare model we build on. It’s sad that USA inspired democracy in Europe, but they haven’t been able to modernize it to better standards.
That’s what I’m seeing too. There have been some regressions in Europe too, mostly the old Eastern block, but also Italy and Netherlands. Netherlands is very disappointing IMO, because it’s a country that in many ways is like Denmark.
Yes I sure hope so too, it’s funny that we are among the countries in Europe with the least amount of problems from fascism and Nazism in particular, probably more because rather than despite the Nazi party is actually legal here. That makes it easy for media to point out how stupid they are, and it makes it easy for security services to keep an eye on them.
Funny story, my history teacher in the 70’s claimed that the reason Communist countries weren’t more aggressive towards capitalism, was that they expected capitalism to fail soon by itself.
Well I guess they didn’t account for the strength of democracy, which unfortunately isn’t as strong in USA and UK as it is in Europe.
Capitalism has reigned the west for 2000+ years where the Romans invented banks, saying that it will fail now for some reason, does not agree with the experience we have from history. The experience we have with Communism on the other hand is way worse. Maybe China has a model that can last IDK, but in general by Marxist theory, it simply doesn’t work, and neither do his predictions about capitalism. He was right on one point though, and that was that the exploitation of ordinary workers including child labor needed to be fixed. His way of doing that however was not it.
In your defense, our social democrats are not what they used to be, they are more center now than left wing in the current government, but they’ve also lost a lot of support on that. Unfortunately that support has spread to both sides for some reason. Denmark is not as left leaning as I would like, and I shudder at the thought that most places are actually worse. 😱
refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
The experience the world has had with communism is generally due to the centralization of power. Marx advocated for a stateless society, which, while it is something that I don’t fully understand, I think that it gets closer to a true democracy than a centralized government.