this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
78 points (98.8% liked)

Memes

50965 readers
183 users here now

Rules:

  1. Be civil and nice.
  2. Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
78
Capitalism in theory vs capitalism in practice (lemmy.ml)
submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
3 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
top 3 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] -4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Non-democratic/psudo-democratic socialism/communism: "You're paying for this service whether you want it or not. There is no motivation to make a quality product."

Democratic socialism/communism: "Well, only 60% of you care about this enough to vote. We'll put some funds into it, but definitely not what it needs. And oh dang, everyone hates it now, guess we'll defund it."

Edit: I'm not disagreeing with OP. Capitalism sucks too. Socialism and Communism *can* suck. It depends on the governing body. There are good examples of all three economic systems working and bad examples of all three screwing people over. I'm anarchist and believe good systems will eventually fall to corrupt politicians if safeguards are not in place to prevent it, and there's a bunch of sneaky intentional and unintentional loopholes to sneak in power grabs.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

meanwhile in the real world

Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possible:

Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:

A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:

This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.

This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.

Romania, the inustrialization of an agrarian economy under socialist planning

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

The profit motive is an exceptionally inefficient motivator for creating quality goods and services, while producing based on needs often results in more risks being taken and a higher quality end result, as the goal is to fulfill the need and not to take a profit. It's easy to see the failures of Windows over time vs Linux when it comes to being a quality OS, but this extends to Socialist economies like the PRC, which despite being a developing country has developed far better and more extensive infrastructure than the US, such as a robust High Speed Rail network. Even Cuba, with all of the sanctions and embargoes, has one of the best healthcare systems in the world. When compared with economic peers, it isn't even close.

What Capitalism brings is massive disparity, centralization of Capital, a fusing of bank and industrial Capital, dominance of financial Capital, Imperialism, de-industrialization, stagnation, and then crisis. Socialism is that next step beyond Capitalism where Humanity directs production according to a common and deliberate plan, rather than submitting to the chaos of the market and the plunder it requires to be satiated.