this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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To be honest, they are more communist than capitalist countries.
Every country is a mixed economy. Capitalism/Communism as ideology is dumb (like most ideologies). The closest to a fully capitalist country was probably Somalia in the 90s.
How dare you make this not black and white!
I wish everyone would embrace this view so we could start talking implementation details instead of the endless ideological warfare. These capitalists and communists might as well just make a fucking church out of it already, so much dogma.
I have gotten into it with tankies on lemmy.ml on this topic at length. If you are only criticizing historical communism or historical capitalism then you are guaranteed to be fighting a strawman. These ideologies are not even fixed or singular even within the source material, much less in practice. Yet so many people seem unable or unwilling to even engage on conversation about first principles if it doesn't cleanly fit inside their geopolitical head cannon.
Maybe, but are they more communist than they are capitalist?
If you're talking about China, no, not really. If you're talking about everyone else... depends... I'd say mostly.
You can't be "more communist-er" than something - you either are or you aren't.
Yes you can. You could organize certain aspects/fields of the economy differently, injecting communist ideas into otherwise capitalist countries. So a country where everything is subject to a "free", capitalist market could be calles less communist than a country, where for example the development and maintenance of public infrastructure is organized and funded by a government, be it democratic or authoritarian.
The stance that there is only pure capitalism or pure communism is propaganda used by both sides in order to prevent reforms.
No, you can't. What you are describing is merely using faux-leftist ideas to protect capitalism from itself by throwing more scraps at the working class - that is all.
"Reform" is how capitalists protect their power and privilege from working-class revolt. "Reform" is always used to protect the status quo from desperately needed radical change. "Reform" almost never infringes upon the power and privilege of capitalist elites. "Reform" is a vital tool in the wealthy's arsenal when it comes to class warfare.
"Reform" is not change - it is used to prevent change.
Name five.
Name five what? Things that make communist countries more communist than capitalist countries?
Just 5 communist countries. I can easily name 25 capitalist countries but only 5 communist countries would be enough for me to shut up.
Truly communist countries? As in perfect communism? That doesn't exist, as well as truly capitalist countries, that doesn't exist as well.
I'd say the US is close to perfectly capitalist, if you have enough money you can just rent legislators and call that "lobbying" (as opposed to renting legislators and callying it "bribing" or "corruption", which isn't much better tbf).
The US is very good at playing the democracy/capitalism game. Democracy can't be sustained by a capitalist economic system by the reasons you pointed out. Once money is involved in the mix, there is no democracy. You can buy everything with money.
Lol! What would "perfect capitalism" even look like? I'd say the only people who even imagines a "perfect capitalism" are magical capitalists like (so-called) anarcho-capitalists and objectivists - and the level of brain-rot you have to suffer from to buy into that kind of sixteen-dimensional logic-pretzel is next-to lethal.
LMAO red fash isn't more communist than northern Europe
What is red flash?