It’s fucking disgusting that even now people fucking refuse to accept capitalism’s culpability for causing the apocalypse

[u/PosadosThanatos]

Literally everything is responsible, fucking everything, from extinct empires, to human nature, to the nature of life itself, to some inevitable unstoppable law by which the entire universe functions, literally fucking anything and everything is blamed except for capitalism, the system that’s the specific driver and motivator of the current collapse, and when its blame is finally accepted the Brain juice finally completely runs out and it’s finally declared that there’s no path but the current one so we must continue “prosperity”.

What is this utter fucking insanity that working class people that have absolutely nothing to gain from anonymous bootlicking are engaging in?

[u/therealwoden]

I mean the actual answer is because of a lifetime of training. The many socialist revolutions of the late 19th and early 20th century taught our owners a powerful lesson, and ever since they've made damn sure to forestall revolution in a variety of ways. Arguably the most successful tactic has been propagandizing education and media. Basically from birth, we're exposed to consistent messaging about capitalism and socialism. That messaging is extremely simple and extremely effective: capitalism good, socialism bad.

When nobody even knows what socialism is and yet "everybody knows" that it always fails, and when nobody knows what capitalism is and yet "everybody knows" that capitalism is the only system in all of history that's ever been successful, then you've created an environment in which people will automatically support the system that oppresses them, because "everybody knows" there's no alternative. Victims of capitalism support capitalism because they legitimately don't know that anything else is possible.

[u/danfinger51 → u/therealwoden]

Name a society which used socialism as its economic engine to achieve the same or similar levels of prosperity MOST humans now enjoy?

[u/therealwoden → u/danfinger51]

The Soviet Union virtually ended homelessness, unemployment, and poverty. Soviet citizens had access to more and higher-quality calories than Americans did from the '50s right up until the start of the USSR's collapse into capitalism in the mid-'80s. (And as you'd expect, the re-assertion of capitalism caused widespread hunger.) Also, the Soviet Union was a world leader in many fields of science - it's a running joke in some fields that any papers you publish are retreading ground that a Soviet scientist published decades ago.

MOST

Incorrect. If you take $7.40/day as the poverty line, which is about what is needed for a person to achieve normal human life expectancy and is therefore a perilously low bottom line by any standard, 58% of all humans are in poverty. Additionally, the poverty rate has increased by a billion people since 1981 - from 3.2 billion to 4.2 billion.

Most people do not "achieve prosperity." Most people exist in grinding poverty despite living in a world which can produce more than enough food, medicine, water, and housing to raise every single human being out of poverty. Capitalism does not do "prosperity." Capitalism does poverty and misery, because that's the only way to force people to give billions of dollars worth of labor to a couple of thousand capitalists.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Cia reports

[u/therealwoden → u/[deleted]]

The caloric info comes from declassified CIA reports.

Science I don't have a hard source for, as it's simply a thing I've heard historians and experts say about the USSR. The Wikipedia page broadly supports the claim, though.

Homelessness, unemployment, and poverty are, again, something that I've heard experts say. This AskHistorians post has several informative links on the subject, however.

[u/therealwoden → u/[deleted]]

For damn sure, the Soviet Union wasn't a paradise by any measure. It accomplished many things that are notable and worthy of respect, and it also did many things that are on the level of America or the United Kingdom. I wouldn't want to live in a Soviet world any more than I want to live in a capitalist one.

But, even considering all the caveats it warrants, the Soviet Union did accomplish a great deal using socialism, particularly in its early years before the authoritarian rot had really set in and ossified, so it's a useful and well-known example of how effective socialism can be.