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There is no propaganda in America (europe.pub)

submitted 4 days ago by yogthos@lemmy.ml to c/funny@lemmy.ml

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[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 15 points 3 days ago (3 children)

This article makes a succinct argument, but essentially the reasons for its fall:

The cold war arms race upped by Reagan - a huge drain on both material and mental resources that would've been better allocated to other industries. The US's constant military pressure and brinksmanship forced the USSR to play catchup against an opponent with a larger chip stack.
The USSR acted as anchor and banker to many third world revolutionary projects, which proved an additional drain on its economy. PRC avoided this mistake by being strictly non-interventionist, and avoiding these dangerous foreign policy traps.
De-linking from the world economy and not being able to take advantage of the newest technology and consumer products from the west. The PRC corrected this mistake by the 1980s.
Capitulations by Gorbachev to begin the process of privatization and dismantle the planned economy. PRC also avoided this by strengthening its publicly owned portion of the economy, refusing to privatize them, and making sure they commanded the top position.

[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Basically "because the most powerful countries in the world tried their absolute hardest to kill it for decades and they finally succeeded in its slow death." Pretty much everything other than de-linking from the world economy was brought on by the West.

AKA "socialism doesn't work because it's our mandate to ensure it doesn't work"

[–] Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago (2 children)

De-linking from the world economy and not being able to take advantage of the newest technology and consumer products from the west. The PRC corrected this mistake by the 1980s.

Is this not evidence that the Soviet (and Chinese) economy was less innovative than the West's.

[–] Aria@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 2 days ago

You're comparing 300 million and 1500 million people to the entire rest of the world. And in that rest of the world is about 1000 million people with significantly better living conditions, infrastructure, institutions and education, who of course have huge advantages in being able to create advanced technologies.

And even then you're ignoring that there are industries where the Soviet Union and China both managed to become world leaders.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 days ago

Read the article I linked above for the answer. Richer countries like the US and western europe industrialized at least a hundred years before. Both the USSR and PRC were largely feudal economies in the early 1900s. But the soviet union (despite starting out from about the same point as Brazil in 1920) caught up to the US within a few decades, beating it to space, and forcing it to allocate tonsof resources to state-run research and development projects.

It wasn't even really the USSR's choice to de-link, it was heavily attacked by all the western countries during it's civil war, and they embargoed the country when they lost. The west rode their hundred-year head start on industrialization and resource advantage from hundreds of years from colonialism and slavery, and also funded the newly defeated fascist countries like germany and japan to become anti-communist bulwarks producing consumer goods.

The PRC has now surpassed the US in most tech sectors, once again proving the superiority of socialism.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 14 points 3 days ago

It's also important to add the overarching context here which is that the US got to sit WW2 out and develop its industries while the rest of the world burned. So, when it started the Cold War, the US was far ahead economically and used its advantage to drag USSR into the arms race. And the western world has been riding that advantage ever since.