My wiki link was not about the name, but the contents of the article.
Just seems to me that every time a country that is run by socialist goes bad it is never blamed on socialism, is just that it never seems to be successful anywhere but in a classroom.
This discussion won’t go anywhere if you don’t acknowledge the historic and material circumstances of the countries you cite. Though China is a pretty good example of a successful socialist country, for all their flaws. Same for the USSR. Despite their flaws, they managed to create a state that rivaled the power of the most powerful capitalist country to ever exist. China is clearly the current rival to American hegemony, as well.
Any other country that attempted to implement anything resembling socialism or communism was stopped dead in its tracks by the most powerful military and economy to ever exist.
They didn’t do this because of altruism or because they wanted to spread freedom. They did it because they knew that socialist economies in the third world would be a direct threat to U.S. economic hegemony.
You also continue to ignore countless examples of failed capitalist states or the times capitalism has “gone wrong.” If we’re saying socialism is when the government owns productive enterprise and capitalism is when these enterprises are privately owned, then there are many examples of capitalist counties with blood on their hands.
Take India for example. From the book Hunger and Public Action:
“it is important to note that despite the gigantic size of excess mortality in the Chinese famine, the extra mortality in India from regular deprivation in normal times vastly overshadows the former. Comparing India’s death rate of 12 per thousand with China’s of 7 per thousand, and applying that difference to the Indian population of 781 million in 1986, we get an estimate of excess normal mortality in India of 3.9 million per year. This implies that every eight years or so more people die in India because of its higher regular death rate than died in China in the gigantic famine of 1958 – 61. India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame.”
These conditions in India were created by a system of private land ownership. If socialism must take responsibility for the death toll of the Great Leap Forward, than surely capitalism must take responsibility for the starvation that takes place under it.
By your definition, socialism only applies to failed governments of the global south. It doesn’t apply to any socialist policy enacted by western governments apparently.
These things can’t be divorced from historical analysis. They didn’t happen in a vacuum as an experiment of whether socialism could or couldn’t work.
www.heritage.org
en.wikipedia.org
theconversation.com
www.britannica.com
