that's what money flow should look like.
community (town, city) donates money to people, who then use it to buy goods and services from companies (which make a profit that way) that are then taxed by the community.
share your opinion
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
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You didn’t have people like Musk or Bezos, you had people like Stalin or Beria. If you’re going to try to argue that that’s some kind of improvement, I can’t really take you seriously.
I would caution anyone who thinks life is better under another regime just because the numbers are smaller. That’s a pitfall many people here seem to keep falling into. Numbers are meaningless without a discussion of quality of life. We’re ALL living like kings (yes, even people struggling to afford a 1BR studio working a retail job) compared to people under Stalinism.
If you think Stalin is worse than Musk or Bezos there's really no point trying to have a discussion with you. I grew up in USSR, and it's always hilarious to watch ignoramuses try to tell me what life there was really like. You're like a poster child for the Dunning-Kruger effect buddy.
We’ll have to agree to disagree then.
Have a great day!
You can disagree all you like but the facts are not on your side.
Russia went from a backwards agrarian society where people travelled by horse and carriage to being the first in space in the span of 40 years. Russia showed incredible growth after the revolution that surpassed the rest of the world:
USSR provided free education to all citizens resulting in literacy rising from 33% to 99.9%:
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960's, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
USSR ended famines under Stalin https://artir.wordpress.com/2017/02/04/the-soviet-series-from-farm-to-factory-stalins-industrial-revolution/
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:
USSR moved from 58.5-hour work weeks to 41.6 hour work weeks (-0.36 h/yr) between 1913 and 1960:
USSR averaged 22 days of paid leave in 1986 while USA averaged 7.6 in 1996:
https://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1994/94B09_66_englp2.pdf
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm
Had the 2nd fastest growing economy of the 20th century after Japan.
The USSR started out at the same level of economic development and population as Brazil in 1920, which makes comparisons to the US, an already industrialized country by the 1920s, even more spectacular.
Free Universal Health care, and most doctors per capita in the world.](https://www.marxists.org/archive/newsholme/1933/red-medicine/index.htm) 42 doctors per 10k population, vs 24 in Denmark and Sweden, 19 in US.
Had near zero unemployment, continuous economic growth for 70 straight years. The "continuous" part should make sense – the USSR was a planned, non-market economy, so market crashes á la capitalism were pretty much impossible.
In 1987, people in the USSR could retire with pension at 55 (female) and 60 (male) while receiving 50% of their wages at a at minimum. Meanwhile, in USA the average retirement age was 62-67 and the average (not median) retiree household in the USA could expect $48k/yr which comes out to 65% of the 74k average (not median) household income in 2016:
https://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1994/94B09_66_englp2.pdf
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/could-you-get-by-on-the-average-americans-retirement-income/
All education, including university level, free. 2
Combatted sex inequality. Equal wages for men and women mandated by law, but sex inequality, although not as pronounced as under capitalism, was perpetuated in social roles.
Combatted Racial inequality.
Soviet power production per capita in 1990 was more than the EU, Great Britain, or China's in 2014.
GDP took off after socialism was established and then collapsed with the reintroduction of capitalism:
The Soviet Union had the highest physician/patient ratio in the world. USSR had 42 doctors per 10,000 population compared to 24 in Denmark and Sweden, and 19 in US:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0735675784900482 (use sci-hub for access)
The Social Consequences of Soviet Immunization Policies https://web.archive.org/web/20240218132709/https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1997-812-03g-Hoch.pdf
Now let's look at what happens after the USSR collapsed, and what came with capitalist privatization:
For an overview of the soviet experiment, watch this brilliant talk by Micheal Parenti, or read his article, Left anticommunism, the unkindest cut.
Also read this great article by Stephen Gowans, Do publicly owned, planned economies work?. Audio on youtube
And here we have some academic studies on USSR
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
Making any sort of equivalence between that to the hellscape that liberal capitalism has created is both deeply ignorant and dishonest.