this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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I mean there is, but all of the major nations fall somewhere in the middle of the capitalism / socialism spectrum.
China, a communist nation, has private businesses. The US, a capitalist nation, has public infrastructure and social safety nets.
It’s a gradient, and very few nations are 100% on the edge of the spectrum.
China is socialist under Primary Stage Socialism with development emphasized. Social safety nets and public infrastructure are not automatically steps towards socialism (in the first place because the U.S. is imperialist and finances these gains with the wealth of other nations with the aim of pacifying conflict rather than ushering in genuine positive change). This spectrum approach ignores political and developmental realities, in the first place with China being a dictatorship of the proletariat and the US being a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and with private businesses subordinated at every step to the popular mass party (and with the final goal of expelling them when socialism is fully developed (1949/1950), since China is a backward nation that did not undergo a capitalist period before developing the DOTP. The “more state or more private” dichotomy is imo an incorrect way of looking at things.
Is it, though? I certainly don't see the Chinese political leadership needing to put in considerable labour for their income. In practice, they don't look so different from American business and political elites, to me.
Look I understand where you're coming from with this, and when you're talking about America in particular I'm relatively on board. But I suspect this was intended to refer to western capitalist democracies more broadly, and while I understand what you mean, I simply don't agree that it's fair to call a democracy using a serious democratic system running free and fair elections a "dictatorship" in the same paragraph as you're calling China a dictatorship, as though the two are comparable.
Yeah, FPTP is fundamentally anti-democratic, and most democracies have some flaws in how free or fair they are, with the result being that they're less than perfectly democratic. The US is particularly bad, but even worse is a place like Singapore, which barely pretends to be a fair democracy. But if you mean to suggest the same of countries like Australia, France, and Germany, I'm just not on board. To pretend even America is on the same level of being a dictatorship as China is ludicrous.
I say this as someone who is rather anti-capitalist in general. In theory, I think the ideals of socialism are fantastic, and from what I've seen socialists say about how the system could work, I don't disagree.
But then I see socialists do things like pretend America is just as much of a dictatorship as China or (as I saw the creator of the explicitly socialist Second Thought YouTube channel "Second Thought" do on his news channel) side with Russia (or at least, against NATO and Ukraine) in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, or blame America for China's aggressive policy towards Taiwan. And as much as I'm on board with socialist economic ideals, I also fundamentally believe in the rights of individual freedoms afforded by liberal democracies.
I don't think that these have to be in conflict, but for some reason every time I see someone espousing socialism they seem to end up supportive highly oppressive regimes like China and Russia. It makes it very hard (read: impossible) to actually take that final step into embracing the label of "socialist".
This is the most correct political spectrum I've seen in the wild in ages, probably because it's based in materialism instead of pure nonsense.
The US has a blend of public and private infrastructure. Cities like Chicago sold the rights to their parking to private companies. Red light and speeding cameras are also privatized. Some states have sold their turnpike system to non public entities. Busses are unreliable in most metro areas because bus systems don't turn a profit.
Amtrak, America's only passenger train system, operates nearly entirely on private tracks. Its nearly always as expensive or more for a train ticket than it would be to just fly. At that the system is unreliable with trains constantly having to wait hours for freight trains to pass because they have the right of way on private tracks.
Nearly all utilities (power, water, gas) are ran by for profit companies. Americas "social safety net" reads like a punishment most of the time. Seniors living on social security eat cat food to get by. Politicians want work requirements on food assistance. Homelessness is at epidemic levels, in a more liberal area there are some depression era hoovervilles built. Conservative areas just buy bus tickets to the liberal areas.
Amtrak is supposed to have a window of right-of-way. Freight companies ignore it in a combination of ways.