To End Racism and Police Brutality, End Capitalism!

[Igel]

56. That's for you.

Not for most.

There's a difference between "imprecise" and "quite different."

There's also a tendency for some to want everything that is bad to be called by a word that means little more than "bad." The USSR wasn't socialist; it was "state capitalism." Feudalism is "manor capitalism." China is capitalist, everything's capitalist. Well, maybe not Venezuela, it hasn't collapsed yet and we can still blame the US for things, however tenuous the connection.

Because then every problem is "capitalism's".

The flip side of this is also fairly straightforward: If China and the USSR were socialist, then socialism isn't a solution, or at least it's not obvious how to structure socialism to make it a viable solution. In the '90s this was a topic of discussion: With the failure of socialism in the countries that had tried it for decades, what was a socialist to do? After a few moments of hemming and hawing, the solution was found: Socialism hadn't really been tried because they weren't "true" socialism. Whatever socialists had said for the previous 50 years or so. Then, 25 years on, it's possible for pretend that command economies are a good thing because they are a good thing and do good things. Let's leave data out of it--that was then, this is now. We're all existentialists ... and if we weren't before, it doesn't matter.

The idea that morality and behavior is a function entirely of social environments collapsed in the USSR as they tried to re-engineer people and resorted to ever more paranoid excuses as to why it wasn't working.