The page you posted is just using the SWIFT network. People who don’t trade in USD generally don’t use SWIFT. USD is still the dominant currency but I have seen numbers somewhere around 50% not 80%.
My country and my Brazilian brothers are already planning on creating a local currency called Sur Global, and it seems the trend after the proxy war in Ukraine is shifting towards trade done in other currencies among the Global South. I remain hopeful we will be free from your oppression in the future, even if you do not wish to see my people better!
In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.
State socialism transformed desperately poor countries into modernized societies in which everyone had enough food, clothing, and shelter; where elderly people had secure pensions; and where all children (and many adults) went to school and no one was denied medical attention.
Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds, 1997.
Improvement of living conditions in the USSR for example happened not just for a massive number of people, but at a pace not seen before.
In the USA, a prime example of capitalism gone wrong, there’s poverty so bad that it’s the 4th leading cause of death (and worse, the poverty may even be underreported). There’s rolling back of social programs, overturning of child labor protections, destruction of the public education system, over-incarceration and for-profit slave labor-driven prison systems[1]. Try to make me a similar list of government-backed initiatives in the USA that are intended to lift people out of poverty rather than put them there or keep them there. There’s a lot of effort being spent on making sure people can’t get themselves out of poverty. The USA is much more interested in punishing and continuing to exploit the impoverished than helping them–helping them isn’t profitable.
Another thing you’re conveniently overlooking is the destruction of the rest of the world, that is, the ones not being supposedly lifted up in those capitalist states. Even if everyone in the capitalist states was lifted out of poverty, if the cost of that was destruction of other country’s economies and lives of the people therein, effectively putting them into or keeping them in poverty, then it’s a wash at best. Capitalism is great at externalizing negative costs: externalizing it not just onto consumers, but onto citizens of the world, and, worse, onto the future stability of the planet and its ability to host life.
If you take into account the number of people forced into and kept in poverty worldwide and compare that to the number of people truly lifted out of and kept out of poverty due to capitalism, I don’t think you’d be able to assert what you have.
And if you’ll remember, the only reason most of these social programs ever existed in a somewhat-useful manner in the first place was because the USA had to convince its populace that the existing capitalist system was better than the competing socialist/communist states it was waging economic and ideological war on. Once it was able to destroy the ideological competition, it could change its narrative as well: now, the failure of those socialist/communist states was due to inherent failures of the underlying ideology and not due to a concerted external effort to defeat it. Once there was no competition on the “treating-your-citizens-better-and-like-humans-deserving-of-empathy” front, tearing down of these programs sped up, and the money that was taken out of the taxpayer’s pocket that should have funded those programs was not returned to the taxpayer but instead funneled cleanly upwards. ↩︎
The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history
Should be pretty easy to provide some actual numbers then, doesn’t look good according to this:
I’m not even including North Korea as people are literally starving because of military spend, and Cuba may have free education and healthcare but it’s shit compared to any western European country
Is that data supposed to go back before 1990? Because it doesn’t on my end, and as such that data isn’t going to prove your point or disprove mine.
North Korea is confounded by the fact that Western sanctions are in large part responsible for famine: the region is notorious for not being very arable, and the USA’s meddling with the South Korean puppet state actively worsens the situation. Similarly in Cuba: not every fault can be blamed on the USA, but if you don’t think the continuous trade embargos aren’t partially at fault for the situation, I don’t think you’re honestly evaluating the situation.
Cuba may have free education and healthcare but it’s shit compared to any western European country
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. I would much rather have access to any sort of free healthcare than not have access to any, as is my current lot in life. I don’t care how good certain exclusive healthcare is, when the majority of the population has no access to healthcare. But frankly I think you have an unjustly negative view of the Cuban healthcare system:
Cuba has the highest ratio of doctors per inhabitant in the world. We have more than 100,000 doctors for a population of 11 million – 9.2 for every 1,000 inhabitants. We also have the highest ratio of health workers per inhabitant – 500,000 overall. But it’s not that we have leftover professionals. We don’t have so many doctors because we like training them, but because we have a health policy that employs all of them. This includes those who are in management positions and those who are committed to our international solidarity missions, our collaboration in health.
… and Cuba doesn’t hoard its medical professionals …
We do a lot of international collaboration. Cuba has been there to support others during all the major health disasters. During the Ebola crisis, Cuba was one of the very few countries that sent medical brigades in Africa. We are always present during earthquakes, fires, and floods. And we always favor communities where most of the time there are no health workers, or we go to places that lack healthcare services. This is the vision of Cuban medical collaboration, which is implemented through two main channels: health workers’ training and provision of care.
Notice that healthcare works differently when it isn’t purely profit driven. It works differently when incentive structures favor patient health over profit.
I mentioned this later in my comment: if you look at the suffering caused externally by capitalism, it’s at best a wash with the benfits caused internally by it. You’re also pointing to examples where things aren’t great because of USA’s interference. It’s disingenuous.
The USA loves to wage economic and ideological war and, when it makes some progress in tearing down its target, point to the downfall of the target and pretend that the downfall is purely due to internal conflict. And you’re buying in to that narrative.
The latter part of my comment was, in my opinion, more important than the first part. The proportion of the world’s population being hurt by capitalism, compared to the proportion of the world’s population helped by it, is massive; the fact that you’re putting more value on small benefits conferred to a small proportion of the population at the expense of the rest is unfortunate but to be expected in a defense of capitalism.
North Korea is confounded by the fact that Western sanctions are in large part responsible for famine: the region is notorious for not being very arable, and the USA’s meddling with the South Korean puppet state actively worsens the situation
If the place is not so arable, why is South Korea doing so well?
It’s almost as if communism leads to autocratic states in every country to try it…
Up close, things look different. According to a recent survey of 5,000 persons, 75% of 19-34 year old natives of the world’s 11th richest nation want out
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possilbe:
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile, hilarious for you to mention Cuba and DPRK given that your shithole excuse for a country has done everything possible to choke their trade with the world. Good thing that SWIFT is going the way of the dodo now.
Lol, you’re claiming one measure in physical quality of life means communism is great. Ignoring the fact that all of those countries have now either failed or have moved to a market based system in order to improve life.
Yeah, pretty hilarious that once these countries abandoned communism and switched to capitalism quality of life rapidly deteriorated. Thanks for underscoring my point.
Not according to actual data from the last 30 years, but you don’t actually accept facts so discussing anything with anyone as deluded as you is pointless
Why do you think 19th century ideology is relevant in the 21st?
In fact, capitalism is responsible for some of the worst crimes against humanity in history and is currently destroying our ecosystem at a planetary scale. You should also learn the difference between correlation and causation if you think that technology is developed as a result of capitalism.
No, capitalist ideology that necessitates constant growth and capitalism is directly responsible for setting the conditions for how humans behave. Meanwhile, technology develops much faster outside capitalism as USSR has shown where nearly a century of capitalist progress was accomplished in mere decades with USSR going from an agrarian society at the time of the revolution to being the first in space.
Plenty of capitalist countries collapse, every single human society has collapsed sooner or later. You’re living in a collapsing society right now. The actual question is how well the country manages to meet the needs of its population while the system works, and USSR did a far better job meeting the needs of its people than capitalists states today can manage. USSR eliminated things like homelessness, and ensured everyone had their basic needs met. This is evidently an impossible task under capitalism. And of course, today China is the biggest growing economy that’s lifted over a billion people out of poverty. One has to be an utter ignoramus to think that communism does not work.
Meanwhile, communism is an economic tool just the same way capitalism is, however it’s pretty obvious that both economic systems require an ideology to function. The nordic model is the best example of Europeans plundering the rest of the world to subsidize their lifestyle.
Humans are responsible for crimes, not capitalism…
That is true, but capitalism provides the means to make those crimes possible on a world wide scale.
Technology, specifically the computer and the internet came as a direct result of the industrial revolution and the scientific method.
Capitalism isn’t the industrial revolution or the scientific method, it’s just a economic ideology where the means of productions are owned by a handful of capitalists. After ditching capitalism, the USSR literally won a space race against a country that was much more developped than them just 50 years before, while still recovering from the impact of one revolution and two world wars.
Babbage, Lovelace, Turing, Berners Lee.
I’m not gonna check all those people, but Berners-Lee worked at the CERN when they developped the WWW. It’s an international organization publicly funded by European countries, not a capitalist corporation but really the product of state planned economy.
You won’t be free from the dollar, 90% of foreign exchange is in dollars, most global commodities are priced in dollars
The dollar and the euro make up for nearly 80% of all global payments.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1189498/share-of-global-payments-by-currency/
The page you posted is just using the SWIFT network. People who don’t trade in USD generally don’t use SWIFT. USD is still the dominant currency but I have seen numbers somewhere around 50% not 80%.
USD and Euro are 42 and 38% iirc
My country and my Brazilian brothers are already planning on creating a local currency called Sur Global, and it seems the trend after the proxy war in Ukraine is shifting towards trade done in other currencies among the Global South. I remain hopeful we will be free from your oppression in the future, even if you do not wish to see my people better!
Lol, oppression. Capitalism has done more to lift people out of poverty and provided the technology to do so than any other system in human history.
Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds, 1997.
Improvement of living conditions in the USSR for example happened not just for a massive number of people, but at a pace not seen before.
In the USA, a prime example of capitalism gone wrong, there’s poverty so bad that it’s the 4th leading cause of death (and worse, the poverty may even be underreported). There’s rolling back of social programs, overturning of child labor protections, destruction of the public education system, over-incarceration and for-profit slave labor-driven prison systems[1]. Try to make me a similar list of government-backed initiatives in the USA that are intended to lift people out of poverty rather than put them there or keep them there. There’s a lot of effort being spent on making sure people can’t get themselves out of poverty. The USA is much more interested in punishing and continuing to exploit the impoverished than helping them–helping them isn’t profitable.
Another thing you’re conveniently overlooking is the destruction of the rest of the world, that is, the ones not being supposedly lifted up in those capitalist states. Even if everyone in the capitalist states was lifted out of poverty, if the cost of that was destruction of other country’s economies and lives of the people therein, effectively putting them into or keeping them in poverty, then it’s a wash at best. Capitalism is great at externalizing negative costs: externalizing it not just onto consumers, but onto citizens of the world, and, worse, onto the future stability of the planet and its ability to host life.
If you take into account the number of people forced into and kept in poverty worldwide and compare that to the number of people truly lifted out of and kept out of poverty due to capitalism, I don’t think you’d be able to assert what you have.
And if you’ll remember, the only reason most of these social programs ever existed in a somewhat-useful manner in the first place was because the USA had to convince its populace that the existing capitalist system was better than the competing socialist/communist states it was waging economic and ideological war on. Once it was able to destroy the ideological competition, it could change its narrative as well: now, the failure of those socialist/communist states was due to inherent failures of the underlying ideology and not due to a concerted external effort to defeat it. Once there was no competition on the “treating-your-citizens-better-and-like-humans-deserving-of-empathy” front, tearing down of these programs sped up, and the money that was taken out of the taxpayer’s pocket that should have funded those programs was not returned to the taxpayer but instead funneled cleanly upwards. ↩︎
Should be pretty easy to provide some actual numbers then, doesn’t look good according to this:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=RU-CN-MN-EU-US
I’m not even including North Korea as people are literally starving because of military spend, and Cuba may have free education and healthcare but it’s shit compared to any western European country
https://academic.oup.com/heapol/article/33/6/760/5035053
Is that data supposed to go back before 1990? Because it doesn’t on my end, and as such that data isn’t going to prove your point or disprove mine.
North Korea is confounded by the fact that Western sanctions are in large part responsible for famine: the region is notorious for not being very arable, and the USA’s meddling with the South Korean puppet state actively worsens the situation. Similarly in Cuba: not every fault can be blamed on the USA, but if you don’t think the continuous trade embargos aren’t partially at fault for the situation, I don’t think you’re honestly evaluating the situation.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. I would much rather have access to any sort of free healthcare than not have access to any, as is my current lot in life. I don’t care how good certain exclusive healthcare is, when the majority of the population has no access to healthcare. But frankly I think you have an unjustly negative view of the Cuban healthcare system:
Quoting Ileana Morales from the Cuban Ministry of Public Health,
… and Cuba doesn’t hoard its medical professionals …
Notice that healthcare works differently when it isn’t purely profit driven. It works differently when incentive structures favor patient health over profit.
I mentioned this later in my comment: if you look at the suffering caused externally by capitalism, it’s at best a wash with the benfits caused internally by it. You’re also pointing to examples where things aren’t great because of USA’s interference. It’s disingenuous.
The USA loves to wage economic and ideological war and, when it makes some progress in tearing down its target, point to the downfall of the target and pretend that the downfall is purely due to internal conflict. And you’re buying in to that narrative.
The latter part of my comment was, in my opinion, more important than the first part. The proportion of the world’s population being hurt by capitalism, compared to the proportion of the world’s population helped by it, is massive; the fact that you’re putting more value on small benefits conferred to a small proportion of the population at the expense of the rest is unfortunate but to be expected in a defense of capitalism.
If the place is not so arable, why is South Korea doing so well?
It’s almost as if communism leads to autocratic states in every country to try it…
This same South Korea? Almost, like you have no clue regarding the subject you keep attempting to debate here 🤡 https://asiatimes.com/2019/12/75-of-young-want-to-escape-south-korean-hell/
Young people want to travel, shocker.
Stop sending me polls, it’s boring.
yeah let’s look at some actual numbers shall we
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possilbe:
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
This study shows that unprecedented mortality crisis struck Eastern Europe during the 1990s, causing around 7 million excess deaths. The first quantitative analysis of the association between deindustrialization and mortality in Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile, hilarious for you to mention Cuba and DPRK given that your shithole excuse for a country has done everything possible to choke their trade with the world. Good thing that SWIFT is going the way of the dodo now.
Lol, you’re claiming one measure in physical quality of life means communism is great. Ignoring the fact that all of those countries have now either failed or have moved to a market based system in order to improve life.
Hilarious
Yeah, pretty hilarious that once these countries abandoned communism and switched to capitalism quality of life rapidly deteriorated. Thanks for underscoring my point.
Not according to actual data from the last 30 years, but you don’t actually accept facts so discussing anything with anyone as deluded as you is pointless
Why do you think 19th century ideology is relevant in the 21st?
Capitalism has done no such thing:
In fact, capitalism is responsible for some of the worst crimes against humanity in history and is currently destroying our ecosystem at a planetary scale. You should also learn the difference between correlation and causation if you think that technology is developed as a result of capitalism.
Humans are responsible for crimes, not capitalism…
Technology, specifically the computer and the internet came as a direct result of the industrial revolution and the scientific method.
Babbage, Lovelace, Turing, Berners Lee.
No, capitalist ideology that necessitates constant growth and capitalism is directly responsible for setting the conditions for how humans behave. Meanwhile, technology develops much faster outside capitalism as USSR has shown where nearly a century of capitalist progress was accomplished in mere decades with USSR going from an agrarian society at the time of the revolution to being the first in space.
Lol, the Soviet Union collapsed. How can you claim it was successful?
Capitalism isn’t an ideology, it’s a tool. The Nordic model is the best example of using the market and social policies
Plenty of capitalist countries collapse, every single human society has collapsed sooner or later. You’re living in a collapsing society right now. The actual question is how well the country manages to meet the needs of its population while the system works, and USSR did a far better job meeting the needs of its people than capitalists states today can manage. USSR eliminated things like homelessness, and ensured everyone had their basic needs met. This is evidently an impossible task under capitalism. And of course, today China is the biggest growing economy that’s lifted over a billion people out of poverty. One has to be an utter ignoramus to think that communism does not work.
Meanwhile, communism is an economic tool just the same way capitalism is, however it’s pretty obvious that both economic systems require an ideology to function. The nordic model is the best example of Europeans plundering the rest of the world to subsidize their lifestyle.
That is true, but capitalism provides the means to make those crimes possible on a world wide scale.
Capitalism isn’t the industrial revolution or the scientific method, it’s just a economic ideology where the means of productions are owned by a handful of capitalists. After ditching capitalism, the USSR literally won a space race against a country that was much more developped than them just 50 years before, while still recovering from the impact of one revolution and two world wars.
I’m not gonna check all those people, but Berners-Lee worked at the CERN when they developped the WWW. It’s an international organization publicly funded by European countries, not a capitalist corporation but really the product of state planned economy.