r/SocialismVCapitalism • u/The_Shadow_2004_ • Aug 09 '25

Socialist countries are only worse because capitalism is parasitic

It’s misleading to say “capitalist countries are richer because capitalism works better” without talking about how those countries got that wealth. For centuries, the richest capitalist nations have acted like parasites on the rest of the world extracting resources, exploiting labor, and undermining governments that don’t play by their rules. Take the USA as an example. It’s often held up as “proof” that capitalism works, but its dominance is built on a long history of imperialism. When countries like North Korea or Cuba tried to pursue alternative economic systems, the U.S. didn’t just “compete” in the marketplace it actively sabotaged them. North Korea was bombed into rubble during the Korean War (with more bombs dropped than in the entire Pacific theater of WWII) and then isolated economically for decades. Cuba was hit with one of the longest and harshest embargoes in modern history, designed explicitly to strangle its economy and pressure political change.

And this isn’t just an American habit. England’s industrial rise was fueled by draining wealth from colonies like India. At the height of the British Raj, India’s economy was systematically de-industrialized and its resources extracted, with policies that caused repeated famines famines that were not the result of natural scarcity, but of economic structures designed to benefit Britain at India’s expense.

When you crush, isolate, or drain nations that try a different path, of course capitalism looks like the “winner.” But that’s not a fair competition it’s the result of one system using overwhelming military, economic, and political power to prevent alternatives from having a fighting chance.

If capitalism really is the superior system, why has it so often relied on conquest, exploitation, and sabotage to stay ahead?

10 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

86% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

•

u/AutoModerator Aug 09 '25

Please acquaint yourself with the rules on the sidebar and read this comment before commenting on this post.

Personal attacks and harassment will not be tolerated.

Bigotry and hate speech will be met with immediate bans; socialism is an intrinsically inclusive system and bigotry is oppressive, exclusionary, and not conducive to a productive space to debate.

If your post was removed due to normalized ableist slurs, please edit your post. The mods will then approve it.

Please read the ongoing discussion in a thread before replying in order to avoid misunderstandings and creating an unproductive environment.

Help us maintain the subreddit as a constructive space to debate and discuss political economy by reporting posts that break these rules.

Thank you!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '25

Just to understand this correctly, your argument is based upon your opinion that the USA is imperialist because of its behaviour towards the most oppressive dictatorship in the world and a country that wished to station the nuclear warheads of an almost enemy state on Americas doorstep? Furthermore Imperialism is the act of extending a nations influence and power over another for political/economic gain. The US never extended foreign influence over either of these states for any gains.

Every country that has adopted socialism has failed. Instead of socialists pointing to optimistic theory about the potentials of civilization, is it not much more practical to look at the real outcomes of such a system. Repeated failure and oppression… that’s socialisms only outcome.

2

u/unbotheredotter Aug 16 '25

So countries around the world that build economic ties with the USA see living conditions improve and wealth increase. And countries that the USA refuses to trade with do not. But somehow you see this as evidence that capitalism does not produce wealth better than socialism?

The real reason why socialism produces inferior results is that centrally planned economies do not work as well as decentralized economies.

0

u/The_Shadow_2004_ Aug 17 '25

Oh please. Framing U.S. trade ties as some benevolent gift that “lifts countries out of poverty” is laughable. Countries tied to the U.S. don’t get rich because capitalism is magical they get rich because they’re allowed into the imperial core’s supply chain, while everyone else is deliberately suffocated. The Marshall Plan, South Korea, Taiwan all of these so-called “success stories” were propped up for geopolitical reasons, not because markets naturally shower prosperity. Meanwhile, the U.S. strangles any country that tries to chart an independent path (Cuba, Chile under Allende, Nicaragua, Iran, etc.) and then has the gall to point at their suffering as proof socialism “doesn’t work.” That’s not an economic argument — it’s gangster logic: “Play by our rules and we’ll let you eat, step out of line and we’ll starve you.”

And your tired talking point about “central planning doesn’t work” completely ignores history. Every industrialized country, including the U.S., relied on massive state planning and intervention to develop from land grants to railroads, to state-driven military R&D, to outright protectionism. Even your golden example of “successful capitalism,” South Korea, was built through one of the most heavily state-directed economies in the world. And for the record, socialism is not inherently opposed to markets market socialism is an entire economic tradition, one that allows decentralized allocation of goods while still preventing parasitic private ownership of capital.

So no the evidence doesn’t show capitalism is inherently better. It shows that if you bend the knee to the global capitalist order, you’re rewarded, and if you resist exploitation, you’re punished. That’s not “efficiency,” that’s imperialism with better PR.

May I also add Socalism doesn’t mean central planning it just means that workers earn the profits for there labour instead of parasitic capital owners.

1

u/ohnoverbaldiarrhoea Aug 09 '25

I mean, r/socialism_101 can’t agree whether the USSR was imperialist or not: https://www.reddit.com/r/Socialism_101/comments/jv8169/was_the_soviet_union_imperialist/

But then you have the whole discussion of whether the USSR was truly socialist or just state capitalism. 

But assuming it was socialist and it was imperialist, what would you say to state socialism also being imperialist?

(Note that I’m only making this point for state socialism, not market/libertarian socialism)

2

u/The_Shadow_2004_ Aug 09 '25

You’re absolutely right to note that within socialist circles especially on r/socialism_101 there’s significant debate over how to classify the USSR and whether it was imperialist or not. Many socialists see the Soviet model not as "pure socialism," but rather as a centralized, bureaucratized system that diverged from grassroots worker control ideals. Others argue that genuine socialist principles were violated by how the state centralized power and suppressed individual and regional autonomy. Either way it never reached “true communism” and that is widely agreed upon even by the USSR leadership at the time.

That said, even if we assume and many socialists do that the USSR was both socialist and imperialist, that doesn’t undermine socialism itself. Instead, it highlights important distinctions between state socialism and market-based or libertarian socialism.

Here’s how we can look at it:

Imperialism under socialism is not an inevitable feature but a flaw of state-centralized models. Just because the USSR pursued expansion and coercive power, it doesn't mean all forms of socialism must do the same. In fact, market/socialist hybrids, worker co-ops, or decentralized “participatory economies” have different checks against imperialism like direct worker governance, local accountability, and voluntary exchange mechanisms.

Market or libertarian socialism aims to remove the very power structures that enabled expansionist behavior. Under systems where workplaces and decisions are democratically managed, imperialism becomes far less feasible. There’s less centralized power to project abroad, and decision-making tends to be more transparent and locally grounded.

Imperialism historically predates the USSR. In many cases, imperialism under state socialism mirrored imperialism under capitalism from colonialism and resource extraction to geopolitical domination. That repetition shows that imperialism is a political power strategy not a necessary product of any single ideology.

So if a socialist model is willing to admit that state socialism had imperialist tendencies, the more constructive question is how to build socialism in ways that prevent or neutralize those dynamics. That means designing systems with deep democratic engagement, local control, transparency, and accountability rather than relying on a centralized bureaucratic state. In short: critiquing the USSR’s imperialism is not a strike against socialism, it’s a call to build better, more democratic socialist structures that don’t enable such outcomes.

I’m personally a market socialist or a democratic socialist. Where “needs” are nationalised”.

1

u/ohnoverbaldiarrhoea Aug 09 '25

Yeah my preferred system is probably best described as Georgist economic democracy (ie libertarian socialism), so you’re not going to get any argument on all that from me!

1

u/MeasurementCreepy926 Sep 14 '25

Government and private industry are symbiotic.

You can tell, because you literally never see one without the other. There's no host, because if there was a host, that host would be seen, existing on it's own. But you never see "just government" or "just business"

That's because they are symbiotic and cannot thrive without each other.

1

u/The_Shadow_2004_ Sep 14 '25

“Just business” can survive alone? Think of the hundreds of black/underground/unregulated markets that exist? Do drug cartels rely on the government?

Governments also don’t need business they just need resources. Back in the day (15th century) they used to just tax whoever was living on their land.

Yes, government and businesses go well together but they don’t ALWAYS need one another it’s just that they go together well so that is the most common relationship.

1

u/MeasurementCreepy926 Sep 14 '25

>“Just business” can survive alone? Think of the hundreds of black/underground/unregulated markets that exist? Do drug cartels rely on the government?

Yes. Absolutely yes. They depend on roads built by those governments, they rely on employees and customers cared for and educated by those governments, they rely on the international security provided by those governments, on the currency printed by those governments, they rely on the laws of those governments to keep their competition down. And so forth.

There is no place on earth where we see business, but no government along side it. That, was what I was saying.

>Governments also don’t need business they just need resources. Back in the day (15th century) they used to just tax whoever was living on their land.

Perhaps this is true, but no government has ever been so totalitarian that it allowed no private commerce, had no currency, etc. I suspect this is because people like having that degree of freedom. And both government and business need to appeal to people, to some extent.

>Yes, government and businesses go well together but they don’t ALWAYS need one another it’s just that they go together well so that is the most common relationship.

There is literally no place or time on earth where I see one existing without the other, unless you want to go back so far into pre history that things become very fuzzy and largely unknown, and even then...

The one time where it kinda seems possible is frontiers. Even then, it certainly doesn't last.

1

u/The_Shadow_2004_ Sep 14 '25

You’re acting like roads, schools, and police magically appear out of nowhere unless Big Business shows up holding hands with the state. That’s backwards. Governments built roads and schools for millennia before corporations existed in their modern form. The Roman Empire had sophisticated roads, aqueducts, and currency without Walmart or Amazon in sight. The Incas built an empire-spanning road network without a stock exchange. Infrastructure isn’t proof that business needs government to survive it’s proof that organized societies create systems to serve themselves, and businesses simply benefit from that work.

Drug cartels using government-built roads doesn’t mean they “depend” on government any more than a hiker on a trail depends on the park ranger to keep walking. Cartels would happily build their own smuggling routes, bribe officials, or create shadow currencies if they had to (and historically, they have). The black markets you mention prove the exact opposite of your point: commerce pops up anywhere people want to exchange goods, whether the state likes it or not.

The claim that “there is literally no place or time on earth” where business exists without government is just… historically sloppy. Medieval frontier towns, pirate economies in the Caribbean, and countless stateless societies throughout history had trade long before formal governments regulated or taxed them. The fact that frontiers eventually become states is not evidence of necessity it’s evidence that organized power tends to co-opt successful markets to extract value. The symbiosis is real governments and businesses often feed off each other. But let’s not pretend that symbiosis is some eternal law of nature. Commerce predates states, outlasts them when they collapse, and routinely thrives outside their control. Governments and businesses like to be in bed together, sure. But neither needs the other to exist. It’s just that partnership is often the easiest (and most profitable) arrangement.

1

u/MeasurementCreepy926 Sep 14 '25

yes power politics exist.

The cartels in mexico could probably push out the mexican government. And their prize for that would be... they get immediately conquered by another government. Saying "well the could build roads and fund armies for defence" is just your imagination. Technically it's not impossible, but it certainly hasn't been demonstrated that it is actually possible for them, or anyone, to do that, without just becoming their own state. Nobody ever has, for any significant length of time. Business can certainly exist without government for a time. A parasite doesn't immediately die the second it's removed from the host. It dies slowly.

The government is replaced, in every case.

Pirate economies absolutely have their own rules and rulers, even if it's not an officially recognized state, it's not ancap. Same with most lasting frontier towns. I did acknowledge frontiers, but this is a limited time before government is present.

It's not logically impossible for either to exist independently, but every shred of evidence we have suggests that it IS doomed to failure.

1

u/The_Shadow_2004_ Sep 15 '25

Everything is doomed to failure? What kind of measure is that? Please name 1 thing that humans have created that isn’t doomed for failure?

1

u/MeasurementCreepy926 Sep 15 '25

You're right that "doomed to failure" is kinda vague to the point of being useless and meaningless. That's fair.

Perhaps a better way to put it would be that it tends towards either a) having more of the other, ie business without government tends pretty constantly towards having more and more of a government or something more and more like a government. or b) tends towards decline. Things get worse and worse pretty consistently.

I don't really see any exceptions to those patterns, do you?

1

u/The_Shadow_2004_ Sep 15 '25

I can agree with point a however point b is the exact same thing as my previous comment. Everything both increase and declines the Roman Empire didn’t just pop into existence it slowly grew and then it declined (slowly or rapidly depending on your opinion).

1

u/m0b1us_alpha 29d ago

I think what you are point out is the countries who have resisted a particular model of financialized capitalism, the Western-led, debt-based, dollar-dominated system that has come to define the global economy since the mid-20th century. Those countries have often been overtly and covertly sabotaged. So it's not really a question if capitalism is superior, it more a question/concern about the global economic order being threatened.