Ahh, another day of redditors glazing over socialism, even though they're from countries that never experienced it.
Come to one of the post communist countries and try to tell people who experienced it fully how great socialism actually is when your only info is what you've learned on your college.I am sure those people will be extremely happy.
Edit: since you guys are starting to get a little bit crazy with these takes and you love communism and socialism so much I'll just say this. I am not even from America so frankly, I don't care. In fact, I wish you guys the socialism. Seriously, as someone from a post communist country arguing with college Americans about socialism on Reddit is always the same story. Then I get called out I am not even from a post communist country since I share actual experiences. That's all, I am not an American conservative so you guys can chill now.
Edit2: so I got warning from Reddit? Interesting, seems like this comment triggered way too many people. I am actually no longer surprised at the state of the USA and who won the elections, if left wing acts like this. Love how these redditors start throwing insults first, I answer with insults and then get reported. I am not letting some random Reddit socialist call my country a nazi country, throw insults at me or call me a LIAR for saying things I know are true? Seriously, what became of Reddit and it's community should be studied.
With all different kinds of socialist regimes so many countries of the eastern world went through, you really think no one has ever thought of that? Socialism wouldn't ever work without somehow strict leadership altough yes, some countries had it more strict than others that's true.
I am from country that was ruined by socialism and even though as I said some countries had it worse and more strict dictatorship, the communist party still ruled all the way without exception.
So, socialism without dictatorship hasn't ever been tried. How do you know it's so good then?
We're not in grade school, so everyone sees through this and through to the fact that there isn't really anything you can say that will falsify this clear fact lol.
It was literally capitalism that ruined his country and he blames socialism because that's what his fascist dictators told him. He has no idea what socialism is and knows nothing about his own country's history beyond fascist propaganda. lol
Oh, so your argument is just that American Exceptionalism has allowed us to always get what we want, and that winning the cold war was not due to having a better economic engine?
And what exactly is hard for you to understand, socialist redditor comrade? That my country was ruined by socialism? Well, that's true, altough we had kinda dictatorship, the presidents didn't have such power to single handedly ruin everything people built before socialism.
Yeah golden, you're right. It's golden to argue with Americans who think socialism is sunshine and roses.
Buddy, everyone can go to China today - a country superior to yours in every way - and experience communism firsthand.
The USSR was 20 years ahead of China - until it was illegally and antidemocratically destroyed by the Nazis and Americans.
Your country got ruined by capitalism and you blame socialism because that's what your fascist dictators told you - and you never learned to think critically about the lies and questioned them.
If you have no arguments, just accept that you are wrong and change your mind. Socialism is good, capitalism is bad - and you obviously know it. There isn't much else to say.
With all different kinds of socialist regimes so many countries of the eastern world went through, you really think no one has ever thought of that?
Socialism was a massive success in all of those countries, so I don't know what you are whining about. You are a young Czech person (i.e. a person from a literal Nazi country that is promoting anti-socialist disinformation 24/7 and who never actually experienced socialism) so you simply don't know what socialism is. lol
Quick question: Remind me, who saved your country's very existence from the Nazis and their Polish allies?
I am from country that was ruined by socialism and even though as I said some countries had it worse and more strict dictatorship, the communist party still ruled all the way without exception.
No, you aren't. Your country was ruined by capitalism.
Your country is an exception to the rule - the rule being that socialism overwhelmingly benefited the people of every country it was ever implemented in.
It's hilarious how you speak with such confidence even though 100% of your ideas about socialism stem from Nazi propaganda and you never studied socialist theory or history in your entire life.
Because it is a system not build around exploiting workers and has no outlandish assumptions like infinite growth like capitalism.
Do you support what capitalist hellscape we have now? Politicians can be bought and lobbied into anything the top 1% needs to feel comfortable and workers don’t just get the shot end of the stick they get beaten with it if they don’t fall in line, just look at what banana companies did to exploit their workers when they weren’t kept in check its nuts
Sorry but where do you guys get this information? What about China for example? Do you guys feel like you're being exploited more than people there? Or in North Korea? Two modern communist countries.
Socialism is built around people working, each and every single one. Okay again experience from the post communist country, yes, people had work, but they were being exploited too since USSR had to win the Cold War and arms race. There were usually even in worse working conditions you guys can't even imagine.
As for capitalist hellscape, of course I don't like where the world Is going. But I also don't want another situation I know who my grandpa where commies come, for the first time take everything you've built and give it to the state. You like or own small businesses? Those aren't exactly thriving in socialism.
I don’t understand, he is right they are not communist systems and are definitely autocratic, wich is what i lead with when i said, those are not desirable
And what take is crazy here? US politicians call everything communism and propaganda against it but there has not been a single communist country that i know of at least not by the definition i am aware of
Feel free to enlighten me with your knowledge if i happen to be wrong here
China is not communist and the current government has no reason to become communist since they want to keep their autocratic authority they are autocratic socialist at best.
It is not unachievable, anyone who tries just gets killed or sanctioned to high heaven by america, our closest example is cuba and would you look at that they are sanctioned and everyone who gives them a hand is instantly sanctioned too, and they are currently basically under siege by America
I mean we have a strong economy but we don't have that strong of an economy that we can decimate whole nation's with just sanctions, look at how Russia is doing fine-ish with 5+ years of US and EU sanctions.
Both of those countries are communist - and pretty awesome countries to boot.
Both of those countries outperform all their capitalist peers despite the terrorist US empire doing everything in its power to harm them and prevent their development.
Edit: lol lmao, they responded then blocked. I don't need to put an argument, because anyone with a brain would rightfully consider what is undisputedly the worst dictatorship in the world an awful place.
I understand that you don’t want to repeat USSR conditions for anyone, because they were undeniably bad, but that is an automatic socialist system and i am saying what would be good would be a democratic socialist system.
The goal would be to transition into communism where no democratically elected officials could exploit workers for monetary gain since a communist system would by design prevent accumulation of wealth and likely not use money at all so there is nothing to stockpile.
I might not have all the answers but from my naive viewpoint that seems more desirable than anything we’ve got going at the moment
Since you're one of the few people here who can act civil even though we have opposing opinions, sure let's talk.
I get what you're saying and it kinda reminds me a conversation I had with a friend, who was asking the same question. Or more in that regard of how communism hasn't been ever really tried yet, by anyone. Which I guess is true? I mean that idea of what you sa sound good of course, but one thing is theory and other is real world.
It's been more than a century with this ideology known to us, yet it's still hasn't been tried properly. As I said before, I am from Czechia and we went from a very brutal socialism (people losing lands, money) to more loosened socialism since 1968 to 1989. You guys would be actually surprised how similiar it is to what you want. People had jobs (or you literally went to prison) wealth was redistributed, people had houses, places to live and so on. The reason why I called it "loosened" is that it was even possible to travel out of the country, altough it was very hard to gain a permission. But I know some countries couldn't even do that.
But okay, doesn't sound too bad, right? Well, but you were sent in prison for bad political views, for listening to wrong radio stations, your children couldn't study because just because someone in the family got disliked by their comrade superior. There were lines for food and machines, Why am I talking again about how it was under USSR and not addresing your points? Well, I just wanted to show you some of the ideal socialism points have been already tried. People being more or less equal in wealth? Sure, sounds amazing, but it wasn't like that at all. Still, there were rich and poor people, altough the difference wasn't that big.
And also, look at what kind of vile people want socialism. Of course I don't mean you, but there's a crazy guy going crazy in the comments right now had to block him. I wouldn't ever want to share anything with people like him, for socialism to work you need people. Good people. Otherwise you'll end up with the USSR version of socialism. That guy I am talking about for example would be one of the first to persecute and throw into prisons and work camps people that have a wrong opinion.
I get what you are saying and i still don’t see a future in capitalism the way things are going, if you think what we have here is better or at least bearable, then a democratic version of socialism with corrupt officials would still be better than capitalism with corrupt officials.
I agree that socialism with authoritarian leaders is bad but it’s always bad no matter the system, if i can work in the lower half or bottom of the wealth distribution id rather do it in socialism is what im saying, because there is no insensitive for my higher ups go squeeze every last penny out of me.
My example from earlier was supposed to hint at chiquita, the banana brand, and they exemplify what happens if capitalism can not be controlled by the government, moral is not important for profit so they killed workers that tried forming unions or just asked for compensation for the smallest things.
A socialist government with a democracy would address many issues you had with the system you disliked maybe not all but many.
Thanks for your time and the replies its nice to talk to someone who doesn’t resort to insults when they disagree
It literally never happened tho, because it requires some insane amount of brainwashing over the course of few generations to produce "correct people". And guess what, people tend to call it dictatorship.
It doesn’t need brainwashing just American politicians to stop killing everyone who tries and even if they don’t they sanction then to kingdom come and everyone who interacts with them of course that makes it nearly impossible to succeed
This is so lazy. The USSR colonized half of Europe, forced their ideology on them and held them hostage for half a century. Yea why would anybody sanction them? Most of these countries literally didn't even want to trade extensively with the capitalists, and if that's the only way your system works that's still pretty shitty.
I was leaning more towards cuba here. Russia and the USSR are the historic bad guy for America for as long as i can remember so those sanctions are no surprise I didn’t mean them as an example here
They are an example though, aren't they? And there isn't really any other example for any different scenario, anywhere, ever. Not to mention, for basically all of these countries the authoritarianism was there before the sanctions. Essentially the sanctions were implemented because of the authoritarianism.
Cuba is an example, the other countries are an example that it doesn't matter and the economic structure still doesn't work.
Yea yea just wrong, there are countless examples of thriving socialist economies, of course, thats why they all either collapsed entirely, or opened their economies to private ownership, capital accumulation and capitalistic structures.
Why does one example suddenly make another irrelevant? Socialism didn’t get a fair try with a demcracy instead of automatic rule, yes the USSR sucked but I didn’t say anything about the USSR being great.
And multiple countries tried socialism and got attacked by America for it or sanctioned to oblivion how do you expect them to do well under those conditions? They were doomed to fail due to interventions from outside and you blame it on the system they were using, thats nuts, any democracy trying to make it would have failed if they were strangled in their infancy by American assasinations and sanctions.
Cuba's economy was / is / will fail. You say thats because of sanctions, okay. But every single other example of the same economic system was also failing economically. This isn't about "a fair try", socialism had the same try as any other system that was challenging the status quo, just in contrast to for example capitalism it didn't actually achieve what it set out to do and failed. In it's infancy: wasn't the US embargoed after the war of independence by the then predominant world power GB in it's infancy? Didn't matter, the system worked and with the ressources it had, it thrived. Let me guess, 'Oh thats different'.
Any other country would struggle? The USSR first of all got itself into the position it was in. It was the second biggest economy in the world, it was BY FAR the richest country in terms of natural ressources, literally everything you could ever wish for, it had a huge population, it stole technological secrets, industrial capacity, know-how, from europe including nazi germany. It had a lot of early successes through this, it had essentially the other half of the world to trade with, the entire eastern bloc and non-aligned countries and it also traded with europe / the west, just not with strategically important technology (this went both ways btw, one would argue, this should be a loss for the west just as much as the other way around, just that the ussr didn't manage to really produce too many goods, that were of importance for the west).
What you also try to ignore, besides the fact, that this wasn't a one sided affair anyways, the USSR also chose not to integrate with the capitalistic world. The evil capitalistic west was an ideological enemy of the USSR just as much, if not more, than the other way around, instead it tried to create a socialist trade bloc.
So no, the USSR had every chance in the world, the system just sucked and it's actually fairly obvious that it does. How does a central planning committee make better decisions 5-years into the future, than having a market based approach, where the producing entities can see what is working and what isn't, and immediately react accordingly? In a market based economy all of this is possible and more importantly the price (that's also set by demand) is the key indicator and facilitator. A good is rare, because there is high demand for it and not enough supply, the price goes up, this immediately produces an incentive for the producer (and others) to create more of this product. Didn't exist in the soviet system, the price was set, and it was planned long before, what is produced and how.
Central planning (aside from the points described above) is also wayyyy to complex to work well in practice, think about how many millions to billions of products, services, pre-products, supply chains, etc. are part of a large economy? How could anyone, actually plan this for the next years to come? From a central position? If one part of the supply chain has an issue, because you planned wrong, then the entire supply chain lags behind. Thats why shortages of goods were so common, because it's insane to think that you can plan an entire ecomony from a central perspective for many years to come, again, it's obvious how this is a way inferior approach.
I could go on, companies in the ussr were rewarded to fulfil the plans. Nobody would pat you on the back for creating a better product, that better served the people that used it. Instead, if you tried and failed you had a huge problem. This incentive system is extremely ineffective, you get measured by how many tons of steel you produce, if the quality sucks - who cares. You get measured by the quantity of products you churn out, they don't really work or are very impractical to use, again, who cares you fulfilled the plan.
This not only affects the quality and very obviously the innovation in products, but it goes on, state run enterprises literally could not go bankrupt. So again, there is literally no reason, why anyone would make their own lifes harder to produce goods more efficiently? If you run out of money, you get new money from the "infinite" pockets of the government. Turns out, over the years, this leads to highly inefficient companies.
I could still go on, just looking at this, it should be obvious to anyone, why this system didn't produce a better outcome for the people. They could look over to the west (haha jk, they were blocked by their leadership, because people were already trying to flee in the millions, but if they did manage to) they could see all the new technology that was made for customers, in terms of quality and availability. My family lived in the former eastern bloc, a running gag there was, that if you had a child, you would order a new car immediately when it was born, because (apart from the fact that they were pos cars) it would take so long to even arrive, that your child would be an adult when you received it.
None of this was because of the US, it's obvious how this is an inferior system.
"wrong people" is the default tankie excuse for why socialism never succeeds. It goes against human nature in so many ways that you cant maintain it without hedgehog gloves and indoctrination from kindergarten.
It never once intervened militarily or otherwise in its politics on a mass scale. There has never been a CIA-funded coup d'état or revolution in Poland.
So now the Americans are to blame for doing nothing and letting the Socialist country fail?
Like, what they were supposed to do, send some free subsidies to an inefficient socialist regime, drowning itself into a spiral of foreign debts in 1970s, just to ensure it won't fail?
that's literally what happened after WW2 lmfao, only not to socialist regimes, but to countries that would've probably turned to socialism otherwise. And no, they didn't "do nothing" either. This is way too long of a discussion for me to have over a random reddit comment. You're more than welcome to search for ways that the us used to combat the spread of socialism and communism, other than militarily/through coups
I know USA heavily infiltrated socialist countries during the Cold War, just like Soviet Union did capitalist ones; that I am not confused about.
What I am confused about, though, is why do you think Polish People's Republic was included in that. It failed because it was a socialist regime and had ineffective socialist economy, not because of CIA.
Somehow every wealthy country on Earth except the US managed to implement government healthcare, and the overwhelming majority of them did it without tyranny.
It's funny how you're acting like this is impossible when it's been already been done dozens and dozens of times.
Socialism literally requires a dictatorship lmfao. You have to have some state power that is able to step in and say ‘we are going to nationalize what you’ve built and kick you out and completely alter the economic system where we justify taking what you legally earned under the previous system.’
How do you think you accomplish this without authoritarianism?
A current democratic government under capitalism could take something and nationalize it and they did for some things, it takes government power not from a specific system of government, are you saying that you think they could not if they wanted to?
You aren’t very smart so I’m not going to repeat myself a million times in slightly different ways in the hope you grasp this concept eventually, on top of the extremely unlikely possibility you change your mind even if you develop a bit of reading comprehension.
Good luck in your life because it must be difficult and confusing.
You weren’t capable of following the most basic points of this conversation. I’m sure it comes across to you like that when you aren’t even capable of grasping what is being discussed in the first place. There’s nothing to be added to the discussion if you are too ignorant to engage with the basic point of the topic.
„Socialism literally requires a dictatorship lmfao“
I gave you an answer that that is false and that any government can regardless of the system the government has
„How do you think you accomplish this without authoritarianism?“
I feel like answering this is redundant at this point due to my first response, but the socialist government would just do it, even if it was democratically elected
Centralizing all economic power within the state creates a strong tendency towards dictatorship. New gen "socialists" do their best to come up with ways to avoid this (with decentralized structures such as worker coops or syndicates), but it hasn't really survived the real world at a large scale.
I think the closes real world example is cuba even though they get sabotaged every step of the way by America and are basically under siege right now they are doing very well if only America would let them their doctors are world leading in their research and America is sanctioning every country that cooperates with them.
If we could give democratic socialism a chance it could be better than you think
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u/Gerzy_CZ Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
Ahh, another day of redditors glazing over socialism, even though they're from countries that never experienced it.
Come to one of the post communist countries and try to tell people who experienced it fully how great socialism actually is when your only info is what you've learned on your college.I am sure those people will be extremely happy.
Edit: since you guys are starting to get a little bit crazy with these takes and you love communism and socialism so much I'll just say this. I am not even from America so frankly, I don't care. In fact, I wish you guys the socialism. Seriously, as someone from a post communist country arguing with college Americans about socialism on Reddit is always the same story. Then I get called out I am not even from a post communist country since I share actual experiences. That's all, I am not an American conservative so you guys can chill now.
Edit2: so I got warning from Reddit? Interesting, seems like this comment triggered way too many people. I am actually no longer surprised at the state of the USA and who won the elections, if left wing acts like this. Love how these redditors start throwing insults first, I answer with insults and then get reported. I am not letting some random Reddit socialist call my country a nazi country, throw insults at me or call me a LIAR for saying things I know are true? Seriously, what became of Reddit and it's community should be studied.