this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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Couple things, here.
Define "thriving," even the most famously abusive Socialist economies like the USSR managed to double life expectancy, and achieve other good metrics like free Healthcare and education, which even modern Capitalist economies struggle with.
"Capitalism" did not make everyone's lives better. Development did. That's why the USSR, in spite of its top-down, brutal structure, managed to double life expectancy.
Simple "blind brand loyalty" and monopolization are not the only hallmarks of "Late-Stage Capitalism." Other hallmarks include rampant consumerism, bullshit jobs, stagnating wages with respect to productivity, further alienation from labor, increased Imperialism, and more.
Blind brand loyalty isn't the issue here, and you cannot "fix" Capitalist exploitation within Capitalism, only make it more bearable.
All in all, lots of assumptions with no ground to stand on. As a leftist, I think it's safe to say that democracy is generally a good thing, as is decentralization, so a better system than top-down Capitalism would be an economy with democratic participation from the bottom-up. Communism can achieve this.
I'd define thriving by peoples control over their lives. Like working class people being able to persue hobbies and afford luxury items. Yea it's quite possible to make people live long lives but from what I've seen in my home state of Vermont living a long fulfilling life is much harder than having a long miserable life. From what I understand I didn't know that people lived longer in the ussr but I'm aware the average jo didn't have a color tv or a car much less a car with climate control, radios, automatic transmissions, convertible tops or a sense of fashion. I'm even told a toilet that flushed was quite the lugury just as it is in China. I can buy that people who didn't get disapeared could live long lives but it couldn't have been pleasant lives. Seriously American consumer products were so good that many of us are still using tractors from the 50s houses from that same time are just now starting to rot. Even today Japan is making cars that are far more reliable and efficient than any other countries. Tiwan is leading the way in high quality computer chips. Chips that are used in both weapons and lugury products. Henry Ford forsed all car companies to make cars for average folks. Then other companies were able to force Ford to make cars that aren't the model t.
I think your biggest issue is that you're comparing a developing country that was severely underdeveloped before the USSR rose with a developed economy, as though they can be meaningfully compared. If your metrics for thriving consists of looking at people's access to luxury commodities in a country that saw the bulk of the fighting in WWII, was founded in a Civil War during WWI, and was a backwater, feudal landscape that hadn't even reached full Capitalism yet, then I'm afraid you aren't being honest.
Let this be clear: I am not a Stalinist, nor am I saying the USSR was "good." However, my point is that even in the USSR, the principles of Socialism are so sound that it dramatically improved people's lives over what came before, and since becoming Capitalist, wealth inequality skyrocketed and life expectancy sharply dropped until the last decade.
As for control over their lives, the citizens of the USSR in many ways had more freedoms, and in many ways less freedoms. They couldn't go against the party in any meaningful way, but the Soviet Democracy meant that they generally had more local control than workers in Capitalist workplaces. I would personally like to have the best of both worlds, more democracy, without top-down Capitalism.
Edit: as an example for the last point, George Lucas famously said that he was jealous of filmmakers' freedoms in the USSR, as he claimed that creating movies for profit was even more constricting than not being able to criticize the Communist Party.