What we see during COVID-19 is stark operational differences between nations where politicians are the top authorities, and nations where Capital is the top authority. We are endlessly told that nations with activist governments are unfree, and that any support for these governments must come from either a pathological culture of obedience or the threat of state violence. And yet socialist nations plainly outperformed capitalist ones in terms of fighting the virus. [12]
This analysis does not imply there were simply two modes of response: capitalist and socialist. Market domination is not a binary affair, and Capital doesn’t rule by decree. As Roberts puts it, the market doesn’t tell capitalists what to do — rather, they have to guess and prognosticate and forecast and hope. Capitalists don’t find out whether they did what the market wanted until after the fact. [13] People around the world defended themselves from the virus, repressing the political will of Capital, in proportion to what they could get away with politically and economically. In socialist states, resources were deployed as deemed necessary to meet the challenge. In capitalist states in the sphere of influence of socialist China, such as South Korea, capitalists offered a decent response, perhaps because catastrophic handling would create a domestic political shift in favour of socialism. In the imperial core, where white supremacy reigns and there is no political will whatsoever to look to China for a good example, self-assured capitalists simply allowed the plague to spread essentially unopposed. In fact, imperialists succeeded to a great extent in turning the ensuing resentment into a foreign policy weapon. [14] This isn’t isolated to the most proudly capitalist nations; the kind of political power, infrastructure, and resources needed to enforce a tolerable quarantine has been completely eroded in social democratic havens like Canada and Sweden. No notable political force in the West referred to socialist successes in their efforts to affect domestic COVID-19 response policy, and I attribute this mistake to chauvinism.
Exactly. I could also add the former socialist states, most of them still had some kind of anti-epidemic structures and procedure which weren't liquidated by liberals (probably by omission, it's not like libs ever expected plague in the first place) and had decent reaction at least at first, but then at some point they just cancelled it when capitalist orgs pressured governments.
And yet its collectivism makes it a much more cooperative society than America. People take care of the commons instead of taking as much as they can before anyone else
India above China? Do those many Chinese citizens believe in using capitalism to develop the productive forces to the point of seeing it as a net positive in a world where Socialism has already existed and thrived?
People in India are actually experiencing the brutality of capitalism, while Chinese people are living their best life in a cozy socialist state. They don't know what it's like.
India sits on a volcano right now. Those farmer? protests where a bunch of people were waiving hammer-and-sickle flags a couple years ago had millions of people participate.
BJP, Hindu nationalism, et al have a hold on the country at the moment. But I could absolutely see something pop off in India this century. It has a “Russia in the 1870s” vibe to me. I think if there’s one country communists all over the world should learn about and pay attention to, it’s India (admittedly I don’t even know how to go about that, I’ve never been able to find much in English at least).
I am willing to bet half of those are just antiwoke chrisitian theocrats or just tiktok contrarian teens who think capitalism and communsim are equally bad
Very little of that in France or the US is genuine unfortunately. They're mostly socdems or "eurocommunists" who want social services on the backs of the global south's workers.