My response to "communism doesn't work":

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/284346

Cuba has a higher literacy rate than the US.

The CPSU turned the Soviet states from backwards feudal shitholes into industrialized, functional economies and societies in a matter of 2 decades.

China doubled its population under Mao and literacy rates were boosted from the pre-PRC times. Just look at China's life expectancy from 1850 to 2020; before the founding of the PRC the average life expectancy was 32 years only for it to skyrocket after the establishment of socialism in 1949. The PRC is also one of the most successful democracies in the world. According to Harvard, the CPC has a support rate of 95.5%, and according the Latana-Alliance of Democracies Foundation (the latter is FUNDED BY NATO ITSELF), China has the highest percentage of people who think that their country is a democracy (83%) compared to America's 49%).

I could keep going about the successes of socialism. But now, let's talk about capitalism, shall we? After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, countries like Russia and Ukraine implemented economic shock therapy - liberalizing price controls, privatizing public property, etc. The economy crashed so hard that the Russian male life expectancy fell by 10 years. Russia and the Ukraine were turned into oligarch-infested wreckages of the economies they once were (sometimes literally; how many pictures of Ukraine have you seen that included several buildings that were built after the collapse of the USSR?). Domestic industries were replaced by imports (ie the infamous "Bush legs" that replaced Russia's native chicken industry), leading to enormous capital outflows from Eastern Europe to the West. Assets collapsed in value, allowing Westerners to purchase them at bargain prices; inflation was through the roof.

The economic failures were not made up for by some mythical "increase in democracy", either. Just look at 1993 Russia, where Yeltsin bombarded the parliament building and killed upwards of 2000 people in doing so, or 2014 Ukraine, in the Odessa trade-unionist massacre. 42% of Estonians are banned from voting because they are of "Russian, Ukrainian, or Belorussian ancestry".

In the end, both socialism and capitalism work wonderfully...to achieve their intended purpose. Socialism raises confident generations that take their fates into their own hands, whereas capitalism raises confident generations of old swine, robber barons that make their living off the blood of workers.