Memes

Ok, first of all you clearly know a lot about this than I do and I would love to learn more, where do you find information related to socialism and socialist nations? Obviously I cannot expect to learn all of this from you.

I learned a lot of the history from Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds and Vijay Prashad's Darker Nations. You don't have to read the entire books, they have lots of lectures on YouTube. Here's Parenti's Yellow Lecture.

You can also could read China Has Billionaires, it's a good essay that explains why China is the way it is and why socialists should understand it.

First of all many European nations such as Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands have a progressive multi party system which prioritize good urban planning and privacy laws (the latter I am not 100% sure about but believe to be true) And the European union as a whole regularly enforce regulations ensuring fare practices among big companies such as recently they enforced apple to require side loading and meta to remove the consent or pay advertising model. As well as when apple was required to use usb-c on there iphones. This is just my limited knowledge so feel free to prove me wrong and two examples may not be enough evidence.

Those are good things, but they're really just regulations. The urban planning is clearly miles ahead of NA, but it's still comparable to Japan and we could probably all agree Japan is not a socialist country.

The main difference between those countries and a socialist country like Cuba or China is that in Europe, owners of industry, financiers, real estate moguls, and other capitalists have a lot of influence and political power as a function of the capital they own. They move the capital around to where it will make them more money. They will move capital across borders to colonies and neocolonies where labor and resources are cheap. The state responds to their needs.

Meanwhile, in socialist countries, the state takes the capital under its democratic control. In China, for example, the state is growing its control of private companies and steadily implementing more measures to reduce the power of their capitalists. Even when Deng liberalized their economy a great deal, they never stopped regulating the flow of capital, still having strict controls on investments.

"absolute power corrupts absolutely" and therefore find it difficult to believe that any dictator can be better than a democracy.

I think there's 2 levels to this quote. First, how could power be held non-absolutely? Through a constitutional republic with a balance of powers where each branch of government keeps the others in check? What Marx shows us is that, make the political system how you will, if the state remains a bourgeois state the ruling class will keep using political power to protect the interests of capital. There is no way around that, all regulations will be stripped away as the rate of profit falls and the capitalists go hungry. They'll descend into fascism if their profits are threatened enough. So ask yourself, doesn't capital already hold absolute power?

Secondly, if I take it at face value that the way a state is organized makes a big difference and it matters how much control any given individual has (which I think is true, even though it kinda contradicts the previous point that all power is class power) that's still not a reason to say European and North American democracies are less dictatorial than any socialist democracy. Check the link I put in my first comment to see how China's system works. The USSR had a similar system with soviets making up the democratic structure, with democratic power over each workplace and each community, which would go up in levels up to the CCCP. People think that these countries aren't democratic because they're one party states, but the truth is that they just make their limitations on what ideologies are not allowed to take control explicit, instead of implicit like they are in the liberal democracies.