[QatzelOk]

This graph shows that the EU is harmful. That's why non-EU member Switzerland is on top.

This must be "the devastating failure of the EU" that Nigel Farage tried to warn us about.

Cuba has a longer lifespan than the USA does now. I guess they should be bragging about "the devastating failure of for-profit medicine."

Then again, Japan has the highest lifespan, so Japanese people could be discussing "the devastating failure of every other nation on earth."

Women, who live longer than men, can discuss "the devastating failure of penis-ownership."

[Sandzak]

People drunk extremly because they could not lose their job, and entirely free health care.

[Julian658]

People drunk extremly because they could not lose their job, and entirely free health care.

And they pretended to work and the state pretended to pay them. Surprisingly, some people like that.

Seriously, Marxism is very compelling. Just listen to Imagine by John Lennon. In every new generation there are many who get turned on by socialism. Sadly, they are not taught anything about the downside of socialism in schools and universities. They mostly receive anti-capitalism indoctrination and that resonates. In the end Marx did a phenomenal analysis of the drawbacks of capitalism. The diagnosis was correct, but the treatment did not work and made things much worse. The preferred excuse is:"that was not real socialism".

[Atlantis]

Interesting that Russia isn't in the graph. The place where rapid neo-liberalization drastically decreased life expectancy and 90% of the country had to resort to personal cultivation to survive while the Western-backed puppets plundered and raped the country.

Russia like Ukraine and Belarus never made the transition to a functioning state. Left to their own devices, these countries just stagnated in the corruption inherited from the previous regime.

The countries in the graph were admitted to the EU to guide their way to democracy and the social market economy. That's why they prospered and that's why life-expectancy increased.

[Sandzak]

And they pretended to work and the state pretended to pay them. Surprisingly, some people like that.

Seriously, Marxism is very compelling. Just listen to Imagine by John Lennon. In every new generation there are many who get turned on by socialism. Sadly, they are not taught anything about the downside of socialism in schools and universities. They mostly receive anti-capitalism indoctrination and that resonates. In the end Marx did a phenomenal analysis of the drawbacks of capitalism. The diagnosis was correct, but the treatment did not work and made things much worse. The preferred excuse is:"that was not real socialism".

Today is the situation not better in Eastern Europe. The wages are low, below 500 Euro for workers with college degree even in EU countries like Slowakia

[QatzelOk]

And they pretended to work and the state pretended to pay them.

In capitalist countries today, the goverment pretends to care about the people, and the people pretend to be a people who care about one another.

Our fakeness is more critical right now because it's right now, and not some historical cold-war abstraction.

[Julian658]

In capitalist countries today, the goverment pretends to care about the people, and the people pretend to be a people who care about one another.

That is quite true and in the end is part of our human condition. We evolved as selfish creatures and altruism only developed when there was an evolutionary advantage.

Our fakeness is more critical right now because it's right now, and not some historical cold-war abstraction.

I have always been an individualist and never believed any politician. I voted for whomever was going to cause the least amount of damage to my wellbeing. Those who vote for a politicians hoping that such politicians will raise them up are somewhat foolish.

I have a question for you: Who benefits from the poor and disenfranchised in a capitalist nation? The left wingers or the right wingers?

[Julian658]

Today is the situation not better in Eastern Europe. The wages are low, below 500 Euro for workers with college degree even in EU countries like Slowakia

Western capitalist nations are unknowingly returning to a feudal system where the bulk of the wealth is in the hands if a few. The ones that have most of the wealth present themselves as left wing liberals, so that is a problem. At the end of the day the elite left needs oppressed disenfranchised people to have a reason to exist.

[Deutschmania]

We do get the occasional poster reveling in communist nostalgia or the kid who believes s/he found the holy grail of political systems in communism. They will usually go on about how communism raised people from a primitive or impoverished state and how public infrastructure, the educational system or the health system were so much better under communism.

Yet, nobody is able to counter these facts:



While life expectancy steadily increased in Western Europe, it virtually stagnated in the dictatorships of Eastern and Central Europe under communist rule. Life-expectancy only improved after the overthrow of the communist regimes.

Even this biased U.S. funded state media disagrees with your assertion .

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Health: Life Expectancy Continues To Drop In Former Soviet Union
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Health: Life Expectancy Continues To Drop In Former Soviet Union
February 09, 1997 00:00 GMT
By Kevin Foley
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Washington, 21 February 1997 (RFE/RL) - Stark contrasts in public health highlight this week's File On Health, as one report notes a continued decline in life expectancy in the former Soviet Union, while improved treatment methods in the U.S. are saving more lives than ever before.

WHO Reports Declining Life Expectancies in Former Soviet Union



The World Health Organization says life expectancy for both men and women has been decreasing steadily throughout the 1990s in the Baltic states and other states of the former Soviet Union.

The information is reported in the WHO's compendium of health statistics for 1996. The 900-page document, which contains statistics on most United Nations members, was published this week.

The data on the former Soviet Union and the Baltic countries comes as no surprise to public health officials in the region. However, the WHO says in its analysis that the statistics are significant because they reveal, for the first time, "differentials in health within the monolithic former Soviet Union that had not been documented earlier."

The report did not contain an analysis of statistics for the former communist countries of central and eastern Europe.

The WHO says that in most of the industrialized world, life expectancy was increasing throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. Life expectancy is the number of years a person could be expected to live from birth.

Even in the former Soviet Union, the WHO says life expectancy was increasing until the beginning of the 1980s. However, the report says that:

"By 1991 in Lithuania, 1992 in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia and Ukraine, by 1993 in Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation, and by 1994 in Kyrgyzstan and the Republic of Moldova, life expectancy of the male population had fallen to a level below that in 1981."

https://www.rferl.org/a/1083524.html And also this .

The transition to the market economy and democracy in Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union countries in the 1990s caused a dramatic increase in mortality, shortened life expectancy, and led to depopulation. In Eastern European countries (including East Germany), in most cases life expectancy fell by 2-3 years at the beginning of the 1990s; the most pronounced decline was observed for men in their 40s and 50s. In Russia, the steep upsurge in mortality and the decline in life expectancy were the biggest ever recorded anywhere in peacetime and in the absence of physical catastrophes, such as wars, plague, or famine. This type of natural experiment provides rich material for understanding the impact that different types of social upheavals and stresses have on mortality and life expectancy.

There have been numerous studies and explanations of the increase in mortality (e.g., stress associated with the transition to the market economy and privatisation; alcoholism, economic hardship, and the ‘demographic echo’), but there is still no agreement among scholars as to the most important drivers of the mortality crisis in post-communist countries during transition.

https://doc-research.org/2018/06/mortality-life-expectancy-post-communist/

Male life expectancy went from 64.2 years in 1989 to 59.8 in 1999. The drop in female life expectancy was less severe from 74.5 to 72.8 years.3

https://newint.org/features/2004/04/01/facts/ In addition the Soviet Union had a long list of noteworthy accomplishments .

[late]

Socialism works.

No, socialism worked.

What killed the USSR was an economic collapse. It literally stopped working.

When the economy was simple, a command economy works fine. But it's crude and slow. Eventually that inability to adapt caused it fail.

These conversations tend to rehash old Cold War arguments. It's ancient history now. The reality is extremes never work. So every country has to find a middle ground to deal with it's problems.

[Red_Army]

@Atlantis

"left to their own devices"

[Sivad]

Who benefits from the poor and disenfranchised in a capitalist nation? The left wingers or the right wingers?

Both. The capitalists benefit enormously from impoverishing and disenfranchising people and then after they've been impoverished and disenfranchised the capitalists can exploit them even more now that they're desperate and disempowered. And then the "socialists" come in and seize on the opportunity provided by all the poverty and disenfranchisement to overthrow the capitalists and set themselves up as the new oligarchs.

[Julian658]

Both. The capitalists benefit enormously from impoverishing and disenfranchising people and then after they've been impoverished and disenfranchised the capitalists can exploit them even more now that they're desperate and disempowered. And then the "socialists" come in and seize on the opportunity provided by all the poverty and disenfranchisement to overthrow the capitalists and set themselves up as the new oligarchs.

I can see how the elite left needs the disenfranchised, it is quite obvious. They also benefit from mass migration from poor nations as they would be expected to vote for the left.
The capitalists needs poor people and immigrants as cheap labor. However, these days is mostly poor immigrants. They are very happy to work for low wages and are loyal.

Who benefits more?

[Julian658]

No, socialism worked.

What killed the USSR was an economic collapse. It literally stopped working.

When the economy was simple, a command economy works fine. But it's crude and slow. Eventually that inability to adapt caused it fail.

These conversations tend to rehash old Cold War arguments. It's ancient history now. The reality is extremes never work. So every country has to find a middle ground to deal with it's problems.

This is the best accurate description of communism. The video is only a minute long, no stress.

[Wellsy]

No, socialism worked.

What killed the USSR was an economic collapse. It literally stopped working.

When the economy was simple, a command economy works fine. But it's crude and slow. Eventually that inability to adapt caused it fail.

These conversations tend to rehash old Cold War arguments. It's ancient history now. The reality is extremes never work. So every country has to find a middle ground to deal with it's problems.

Your explanation is crude, the stagnation of the economy didn’t in itself cause the collapse as much as the political reaction.
It was made more a crisis by the political reaction than some crisis inherent tk the economic circumstances as the stagnation wasn’t necessarily a crisis in the same sense it would be for the western capitalist economies.

[late]

Your explanation is crude, the stagnation of the economy didn’t in itself cause the collapse as much as the political reaction.
It was made more a crisis by the political reaction than some crisis inherent tk the economic circumstances as the stagnation wasn’t necessarily a crisis in the same sense it would be for the western capitalist economies.

Western countries faced the same drop in the price of oil. They fared a lot better than Russia.

Nice fantasy, but Russia was in a bad way.

[Wellsy]

Western countries faced the same drop in the price of oil. They fared a lot better than Russia.

Nice fantasy, but Russia was in a bad way.

I don’t defend that it was all roses and rainbows economically but I am skeptical to the explanation of the USSRs collapse as being as crudely reducible to economic difficulties. It seems more definitely an issue of politics at the time. It wasn’t some economic collapse toppling the USSR. There were clear political actors to which one can contest motivations and pressures on their decisions but I just don’t think the economics was any more pressing than a lot of other economic crisis which have not lead to an overturning of their political and economic systems.

[Atlantis]

@Atlantis

"left to their own devices"

Alright, I rephrase "left to their own corruption". Happy now?

[Red_Army]

No, there was a deliberate involvement by western governments and multinational corporations to destroy Russia via Yeltsin. Obviously there were Russian collaborators, but pretending its the fault of some kind of slavic racial weakness is stupid and wrong.

[late]

I don’t defend that it was all roses and rainbows economically but I am skeptical to the explanation of the USSRs collapse as being as crudely reducible to economic difficulties. It seems more definitely an issue of politics at the time. It wasn’t some economic collapse toppling the USSR. There were clear political actors to which one can contest motivations and pressures on their decisions but I just don’t think the economics was any more pressing than a lot of other economic crisis which have not lead to an overturning of their political and economic systems.

Economics had a lot to do with it. Western analysts did not predict the fall of the USSR. Because of that, they are still arguing why it fell.

And because of that, we've gone into great depth as to why it happened. I didn't find the article I was looking for. The one I did find is fine, but long. Just jump over the first part where they talk about getting it wrong.

The important bit is the economic analysis that shows how a gradual decline in a number of areas made the economy vulnerable to a shock. When oil prices collapsed, the economy started collapsing with it. America had had an economic collapse earlier; back in the Great Depression. It happens.

"The basic assumption here was that the absence of a market, or at least of market-like mechanisms, lay at the heart of the productivity problem; it followed that a solution would depend on economic decentralization. But would the Soviets be able make the transition?

The interesting thing here is that the Soviets analyzed the problem in much the same way U.S. economists did. The academician V.S. Nemchinov, most notably, had argued as early as 1964 that a far-reaching liberalization of the economy was needed if the productivity problem was to be solved — and indeed if the whole economic system was not to break down."


https://tnsr.org/2018/02/assessing-soviet-economic-performance-cold-war/