this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
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The justification doesn't really matter. The point is this is the situation the makes "all socialist countries are bad" a belief people hold. It's wrong. It's "the only socialist countries who could survive capitalist intervention also did bad things. The ones that didn't last are forgotten and we can't know how they'd fare."
The reason why the Cold War was happening at all was because the US shoved themselves into a role of preventing "communism," which extended to any leftist government, from spreading. They needed to ensure socialism couldn't achieve its goals, because if it could then other capitalist countries would see the benefits and follow suit. Obviously the owner class in capitalist nations couldn't let that happen. You can even see it even within the US with the dismantling of leftist policy.
Socialism isn't bad. It's what capitalists forced socialism to be in order to survive that's bad. Capitalists are the issue with socialism. To use it as an argument for capitalism seems pretty fucked up. It also ignores all the harm done by capitalism. This mostly happens outside of the rich countries though, so most of us don't interact with it.
That's an unfair assessment. The USSR also placed itself into the role of defeating "capitalism" and intervened in a number of countries to encourage socialist/communist revolutions. The actual ideologies here aren't particularly important, what is important is who has the most influence in those regions. The US didn't particularly care what government was in power, provided it was more friendly to western countries than the USSR.
By the Cold War, the US was already more socialist than much of the world. We had just passed the New Deal, unions were quite common, and 34% of Americans were in a union in 1954, and we still have most of those institutions (though union membership fell to around 20% by the fall of the USSR and 10% today).
The opposition here wasn't ideological, that was just how it was sold (the whole "red scare"). The opposition to socialism was to prevent further expansion of influence by the USSR. If the opposition was purely on ideological lines, surely politicians would have eradicated socialist institutions like Social Security and Medicare, but they instead expanded them (source is about SS expansions).
Blame whatever you want, but the facts remain that socialist countries by and large have been bad for the people living under them, whereas capitalist countries with a mix of socialist institutions have been good for people living under them. Those are the facts available to me, and until I see evidence that pure socialism is actually a net positive, I'll continue to believe that it's not.
Most of those harms have little if anything to do with capitalism itself. Capitalism is only an economy policy, not a political ideology, whereas socialism covers both. Most of the evils "under capitalism" can largely be tied to authoritarianism of some variety, and to me that's the main issue w/ socialism as it tends to exist. The problems don't necessarily come from the economic system, they come from the political systems in place.