this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
892 points (98.4% liked)
Late Stage Capitalism
2536 readers
73 users here now
A place for for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited.
A zero-tolerance policy for bigotry of any kind. Failure to respect this will result in a ban.
RULES:
1 Understand the left starts at anti-capitalism.
2 No Trolling
3 No capitalist apologia, anti-socialism, or liberalism, liberalism is in direct conflict with the left. Support for capitalism or for the parties or ideologies that uphold it are not welcome or tolerated.
4 No imperialism, conservatism, reactionism or Zionism, lessor evil rhetoric. Dismissing 3rd party votes or 'wasted votes on 3rd party' is lessor evil rhetoric.
5 No bigotry, no racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or any type of prejudice.
6 Be civil in comments and no accusations of being a bot, 'paid by Putin,' Tankie, etc. This includes instance shaming.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What if both statements are correct? People love the parts but we don't know how to blend it into a coherent working system.
The comparison of the Fediverse with Bluesky suggests that people reach goals less efficiently without leaders and capitalist funding.
I don't see anything in the socialist philosophy that precludes individuals in positions of leadership. And I certainly don't see anything about excluding funds for capital improvements to the nation-state - or even the world as a whole.
The Soviets seemed to manage running a space program that routinely outpaced their American counterparts while still juggling tenants of socialist economics with a hierarchical leadership structure and significant investments in new productive output. That's how they achieved Superpower Status in the midst of a World War while states like France, Japan, and Brazil languished for the rest of the century.
I'll spot you that building a functional socialist system is difficult, especially when you're battling hostile outside forces. Allende's Cybersyn put a big fat nail through Mises's Economic Calculation Problem shortly before Pinochet and his goons had the project terminated. We've had a parade of Iranian presidents attempt socialist internationalism across the Middle East, only to see their diplomats gunned down, blown up, and poisoned to death by the enemy intelligence services. Even when countries can move unfettered - as Raul Castro and Nicholas Maduro kinda-sorta did during the Obama administration - people regularly make mistakes and miscalculations, attempting to provide short term relief to an impoverished population at the expense of longer term economic development.
And then sometimes a system flat out fails - as pretty much the entire Warsaw Pact did during the 1990s - due to internal contradictions and external pressures.
Socialism isn't infallible. Socialists aren't immaculate. The experiment of Communism is ongoing, in the same way the experiment of American Liberalism and Saudi Monarchism and German Fascism continues apace. Part of the struggle is getting people to see enough merit in a blueprint to begin building. Nobody knows how to do anything until they try.
The Soviets ate their own propaganda and thought that the future is in space and not in technological progress. They missed the digital revolution. Being the best socialist state doesn't help against stronger capitalist states.
There is no blueprint for a full system. Nobody wants to repeat the leadership style of the successful days of the USSR. And as you can see, barely anybody is willing to acknowledge that void so it won't be filled anytime soon.
Aerospace has been critical for industrial scale information networks, particularly climate, navigation, and logistics. I don't think you can overstate the impact of GPS in the modern era.
They didn't miss it because they failed to invest in technology. They missed it because Boris Yeltsin was shelling parliament while the US was sinking billions into Intel Pentium processors.
The USSR leadership was born out of the military that won the Second World War. The American leadership was born out of the business executives that profited off the Second World War. I don't think you could argue either one was terribly successful in the modern era. The American system is also in decay, with leadership that is increasingly incompetent, incestuous, and outright evil.
But because we're swimming in US propaganda, we keep getting told "Russia Bad, America Good!" on a loop. That scares us away from any kind of rational analysis, on the grounds that questioning the status of the US is some kind of assault on American society.
The USSR failed much earlier.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-soviets-invented-the-internet-and-why-it-didnt-work
Stalin was leading before WW2.
We will see how successful American leadership is if they manage to contain China. Of course, they already threw away the opportunity to maintain earth with an intact ecological environment and we are way behind what could have been. But if they manage to end up with an AI that controls the world then they win.
And the US was studying psychics as late as the 2000s.
Because he was a senior leader during the Russian Civil War.
What do you even think that looks like at this point? They are the single largest and most productive export economy in human history, and we're their biggest customer.
Oh no, you're one of those...
For context
I think socialists don't try to figure out why they are not winning. So there are the people in that above mentioned loop of US propaganda, but the people outside are in another.
What's your point? Have you read the article? The crushed potential by 'existing socialism' ministers is in my opinion no less than the success of the USSR itself.
The USA did stupid stuff with an abundance of resources. The USSR blew their future by not doing crucial things. That's the opposite.
Same as Japan, leave them as a stagnant economy that supplies the world.
Those who believe that AI is possible?