I see young people advocating for socialism a lot in Canada, but rarely communism as in communist Russia and communist China. As others have said, old style communism isn't even around anymore. Russia is a fake democracy and China is a strange blend of one party rule and capitalism.

I don't think it does anyone any good to throw around naive and simple terms like communism. Focus on issues like public healthcare, breaking monopolies, basic incomes, and so on. We'll get along a lot better that way.

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2 days ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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8note 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

canada has our own history of socialism in the form of crown corps and healthcare. why wouldnt we lean into our own successful practices?

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roenxi a day ago | parent [-]

Because they'll make you worse off the more you scale them up. It's like pointing out that a drink of alcohol with a friend led to positive results so why not lean heavily into drinking? And the answer is because it is something that people enjoy that can be tolerated in small amounts but isn't much of a strategy if the goal is a happy, healthy outcome.

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tensor 12 hours ago | parent [-]

That's ridiculous. The countries with the highest quality of living all have strong social programs. If you want an analogy for alcoholism look at the US. Capitalism works here, so let's use it everywhere!

	▲	roenxi 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm tempted to copy what you wrote as a response without the "That's ridiculous" part. It isn't ridiculous, it is just a factual description of reality. The reason the US can afford the strong social programs is because of its heavy commitment to capitalism. If a country is poor and weak then it can't afford to endure the pain that a strong social program causes. Poor countries just can't sustain populations of people who consume resources and don't create anything especially valuable. If you scale up the social programs too far at some point the wealth destruction becomes intolerable; there's some optimal amount of damage that can be accepted and "lean in to socialism" isn't the best strategy to find that balance because by the time the pain becomes intolerable it has already happened.

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jackb4040 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

"communist Russia"