I don’t think death sentences should be a thing.
Neither should billionaires
That I agree on.
Billionaires cause infinitely more problems than death sentences.
I think, though, that it is a simple enough affair for a billionaire to stop being a billionaire, if they are sufficiently motivated to do so.
If we make “acquiring and retaining a billion dollars” a capital offense, the billionaires will get rid of themselves; we won’t actually have to execute anyone.
I don’t really think we need to compare them. Death sentences shouldn’t be a thing. Neither should billionaires. Billionaires are human beings, their wealth is a systemic issue we should do something about.
I disagree. It is not a systemic issue. It is a personal failing. They lack the self control, discipline, empathy, and compassion of fully-functional people. They have no internal sense of the harm that they are causing to all of society, and the only external feedback they get is from sycophants hyping them up to commit ever increasing atrocities.
If there is a systemic failure, it is that we treat them as ordinary decent criminals, protecting them from oppression and discrimination, while ignoring that the only oppression they have ever seen has been the oppression they have perpetrated.
They should be treated as hostile nations, not criminal defendants.
It’s a systemic issue in the fact that the system allows for it to happen. The system shouldn’t nurture such outcomes.
I’m not going to blame a system that works for ten thousand people for having been exploited by one person.
I’m going to declare that one person a criminal exception, rather than rebuilding the entire system to accommodate him.
The threat of the guillotine is the simplest solution to criminal affluence.
I almost agree, as there are only very few crimes, and in absolutely certain circumstances, where I think a death sentence would be appropriate. As an example, cases like Anders Breivik.
Nah, he can rot in isolation. Death is just getting away with it, which is what he would’ve wanted.
The system in Japan is… Let’s say “interesting”. You get sentenced to death, but you might still sit in prison for years or even decades until one morning they carry it out with no warning, so you’ll live the rest of your life not knowing if each day is your last or not.
How barbaric.
All executions are but yeah Japan is particularly so
TIL Japan still has the death sentence.
most countries in asia still do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3ACapital_punishment_in_the_world_2024.svg
Must be a lot less crime there then? Not.
Often it is, but the death penalty isn’t the only thing affecting it - if it did, USA would not be at such a high of a spot for intentional homicides (#55) as most states have the death penalty as well.
For reference, Japan is at spot 196 out of 207 when you sort by victims per 100000 inhabitants.
Which also results in very few people getting the death penalty - just 3 people were executed in 2022, and none last year. US executed 18 and 24.
“Goodnight, inmate. Sleep well. Tomorrow I shall have to kill you.”
As you wish
Wow, way to make you feel alive
Not trying to excuse his actions but read the _Early life and reports of abuse _section.
This guy is a product of a mentally ill mother who abused him. Imagine being 4 years old and your caregiver keeps telling you she wished you were dead. Not a recipe for a well balanced individual.
My point is yes, his place is in prison. But if you want to prevent other acts of this kind, social and mental services need to get better. They clearly failed in this case, more than once.
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Let’s set the sentence for executing an innocent man to, death.
The first barrier to the death penalty is to make sure verdicts are right 100% of the time.
After that you can begin the debate about **whether it’s moral at all.
Let’s set the sentence for executing an innocent man to, death.
There’s no such thing as an innocent billionaire.
It’s true. America’s newest billionaire is ruthless boss of the Nashville underground, Taylor Swift, leader of the Swifties cartel.
you don’t get there without being integral part of that system
She didn’t get there by paying the employees of her business empire the share they deserve of the profits they generated for her. If she had, she wouldn’t be a billionaire.
That doesn’t even touch on the issues of constant private jets around the world, owning multiple homes, etc.
Shhhh. The Swifties can hear you. 🤫🤐 They’re always listening and ready to pounce.
You can’t be certain 100% of the time, so one has to accept there will be instances of injustice.
Or perserve it for instances where it is 100% certain only (video evidence, tons of eyewitnesses). I don’t care which personally, but latter is preferred.
What I don’t want is a drawn out affair where it costs more to execute them than to keep them alive.
When people deserve to die, they should be killed with haste, so we can forget they ever existed and move on. I’m not a fan of the slow torturous rot of keeping them alive until they die of natural causes part of the justice system we have come to embrace in western society.
To be fair, I’m focused more on other crimes than the one this article is about. But anything that would end up being the rest of a person’s life, I’m okay with just ending prematurely. I’m morally flexible in this regard.
I agree, but not for financial crimes.
She’s essentially being executed for screwing over, you guessed it, investors.
That’s fucked up. I’d rather execute the investors.
It’s a bank not a hedge fund. The investors would be the regular people that made deposits- you know, the victims of the fraud. So your knee jerk reaction is “investors bad” without thinking about anything?
She is one of the investors.
I am all for billionaires facing consequences for their actions. The death penalty is still deeply immoral though. Locking financial criminals up like for example the American state did with Martin Shkreli or Sam Bankman-Fried though is completely o.K. and should happen more often.
The death penalty is still deeply immoral though.
The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court’s way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.
It appears to be a method the courts are employing to encourage her to surrender overseas assets.
In this particular situation, that $27bn is over 5% of Vietnam’s GDP. This is a very significant hit to the nation’s financial stability and one that will likely result in substantial number of excess deaths entirely due to increased poverty. I can see the threat of execution as a method to compel repayment as necessary.
In a better world, foreign banks complicit in Truong’s 11 year long theft would cooperate to return the stolen money, thereby making this threat unnecessary. But so long as foreign financial institutions can hold a nation’s wealth hostage, all the Vietnamese state leadership can manage is to respond in kind.
5% of GDP is just absolutely insane
Disclaimer: didn’t read the article yet.
But surely someone can’t commit such a huge fraud alone. Nobody at Saigon Commercial Bank is involved or culpable for loaning that amount to a fraudster?
I mean, when you stop and think about it, you’ll realize that it’s probably all a giant mafia, and she crossed the wrong people the wrong way. There’s no way on earth that someone can disappear 10% of a country’s GDP without anyone knowing.
There’s certainly corruption all the way to the top. Everything is controlled by one party, including the banks. Everyone knew for certain
Yes the case involves over 2700 witnesses. The law in Vietnam forbid her from owning more than 5% of the bank shares. Through shell companies and other people, she owned about 90% of the bank. She then hired her own people as managers, and got them to approve loans for the shell companies she had. About 93% of the loans this bank approved were for her/her shell companies. She also had her driver withdraw the equivalent of $4billion usd, which she kept in her house (it weighed 2 tons).
But surely someone can’t commit such a huge fraud alone.
Right. I’m less upset by a single individual facing execution than I am not seeing a dozen other crooks lined up on the docket.
I agree. Truong My Lan could just as well, lose her assets and spend her days repaying her debts to society. You know, on a normal person’s wage, trying to make up for billions upon billions. Should be enough time.
as someone opposed to prison-culture, I would suggest instead forcing them to contribute to society meaningfully through acts of service while losing privileges such as running businesses, sitting on boards, and reducing their ill-gotten gains to something akin to the average income and redistributing their stolen wealth to benefit communities.
Them sitting in a cube doesn’t help society, but if they were forced to solve homelessness or else face The Cube, that would be better.
So you are telling me that we should give them housing, a stable and guaranteed job and a secure income in line with the nation average? Man, I might start thinking about stealing millions, worst it can happen, I’m better off than now. /s
are you sure? the average is sub-40k.
40k a year is very much a different amount in various parts of the world, and even of the US. Regardless, if accommodation is already taken care of, it’s not a bad amount in lots of places (just maybe not NYC or SF)
I agree, but only if they can’t bribe their way out. A billion can hire a lot of people.
Not with their hands, feet and jaws torn off they can’t.
Nah fam certain people deserve gilded intestines
Is this a Game of Thrones reference? I am confuse
No it’s a reference to an old story of a baron being attacked by peasants and having his gold melted down and poured down his throat.
Pretty sure GoT got that idea from this story
Oh thanks, in that context the Baron story is way cooler.
They were arrested for ripping off people who were already rich. Nobody cares if a billion poors get ripped off.
I say turn them over to the Mechanicum and have yourself a new servitor loyal to the empirium.
In America they would likely do time in a country club prison if they didn’t only get fined for less than they profited in the fraud.
The only time they would get punished at all in the US is if they fucked over other billionaires. Even then, only maybe.
I bet that’s part of why she’s in this situation, rich people lost money. Lots of corrupt government officials also want the spotlight to stay on her. I mean of course in addition to the fact that she did ruin many people’s lives…
“I sentence to you ten years, with 9 years 360 days credit for time served, and a $25 fine. Your incarceration shall consist of checking in once weekly via Zoom.”
…“which we just did. You are now free to go.”
Depends on who they defrauded. Millions of poors? That’s just a mild case of affluenza, set her loose with a big tax cut and an interest-free loan.
She can appeal still, and they are doing it as an incentive for her to return 27b. I imagine she will attempt to return a large portion, appeal and then just be given life in prison.
Don’t kill them. Redistribute their wealth.
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Bingo. Both is good. Not all life is precious.
In this particular case, she’s hidden money overseas and the death penalty is being used to compel her to recover and return it.
Redistribute their wealth, then set their parole parameters: hold an average job in food service or retail; live in an average apartment off those wages; keep that up for a set number of years, without external assistance from any third parties.
Let them experience how the rest of us live.
Anything made in excess of that in any way is seized and applied towards repaying the fraudulent debt.
Plus constant checks to verify their life style is conforming to that, and seize one fifth of their salary until the debt is paid off
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Normally I’d say that if you empower the state to execute a certain class of person you can look forward to the state changing that definition so that inconvenient people who did nothing wrong meet it, but I’m unlikely to be mistaken for someone who has committed 10s of billions of dollars in fraud and I can’t help but feel like maybe if just one robber baron is held responsible for the enormous suffering they cause in pursuit of an amount of wealth so vast that it can never be spent and essentially only functions as a high score then the rest will realize that there is the sharp, distinct possibility that they can be held responsible as well.
Now do the other billionaires.
More seriously though, this is fucked up.
Fucked up is the amount of suffering inflicted on others is required to amass billions of dollars. I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir, though.
I’m not for the death penalty. She should be in prison for the rest of her life without a chance of getting out. Can’t say I don’t understand why they’re opting for the death penalty though. 44 billion is a fuckload of money. Like more than the gdp of 84 countries.
It’s been widely reported that the death sentence may be a plot to get her to return the money. If she does this she may have her sentence commuted on appeal.
Anyone worth more than a billion dollars is guilty.
Some are more guilty than others, and she’s definitely near the top of the list.
Still, curious to see what a Socialist country like Vietnam does when its prosecutors catch a person like Truong My Lan red handed. Its such a far cry from what American prosecutors did with offending bank managers after the 2008 Financial Collapse or the UK prosecutors who investigated the Wirecard scandal or the SEC/FCC responded to countless instances in which Elon Musk got caught manipulating stock prices.
Goes to show you what happens when your country has a tyrannical government and its billionaires don’t enjoy any freedoms.
cool to see white collar crime actually fucking punished, for once in my lifetime.
IDK much about Korea, but in Japan higher ups are held accountable a lot more.
japan is kinda wild from what i’ve heard. so that’s not surprising to me.
But she was a good person otherwise. /s
she was a good person except for all the times she did bad things
She’s actually Paul Manafort’s distant Vietnamese cousin.
no clue who that is, and frankly, i don’t care.
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I really don’t know. I think for certain types of crimes, I’m ok with it. Like rapists of young children. They have zero contribution to society and are unable to be repaired. I don’t know if this crime fits that threshold. 47 billion is ridiculous.
The possibility/certainty of intentional or accidental false convictions doesn’t affect your acceptance of the state meting out permanent punishment?
Billionaires wear their verdict on their sleeve
If it’s marginal of course. I’m talking about the real psychopaths that either admit it or are caught on camera with witnesses.
Consider what your thresholds are for what constitutes witnesses and admissions of guilt. For example, confessing to crimes that weren’t actually performed by them, do you honor the claim anyway?
And does a group of police witnessing a suspect or conversely a group of the suspect’s friends witnessing a police officer do something heinous count?
Remember any mistakes cannot be remedied.
I am. There are some truly sick people out there. I’m talking about some one off that is in a bad situation without any evidence.
But people like Dahmer, Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, I’m ok with those going away as a message to society. I don’t think it’s unnecessarily a bad thing.
I’m not going to try to convince you otherwise but I just want you to recognize that your position is that you’re ok with “bad” people being killed as a form of punishment and mine is that ensuring that label is always appropriately applied is an impossibility.
I don’t like the thought of terrible people getting to continue to live if they’ve done irreparable harm to others, but I’m also not ok with saying that we totally need to burn THAT WITCH because Goody Constance totally witnessed them communing with the devil.
Osama/Hitler getting killed in military action - fine. An abused child/person killing their attacker - look the other way. Giving Edward Snowden lethal injection because he totally deserves it for endangering Americans - not acceptable.
Yea. It’s more like if this person can’t be studied or has no use here except to haunt the living, sure. Get rid of them. Some of them want that. Some psychos know how bad they are to society.
But then you have a lot to weigh in on. You said it shouldn’t exist at all. Which for the most part I do agree with. But there are some that I am ok with going away.
Hitler was not killed in action. He killed himself. People like Dr. Death or the rest of his inner cronies can be executed as well.
in socialism rich people have way less influence to snake out of consequences. good on them.
Political power projection and the manuevering to hide corruption is the ‘rich’ equivalent in highly socialist systems. Smart adaptive people are not necessarily moral or ethical people, so regardless of economic system or government types, you will always have the worry of unscrupulous opportunists.
“Highly socialist” systems do not have billionaires.
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whats important is the end result of better quality of life overall
i do see many corrupt politicians getting the same treatment on say china though
If Vietnam has billionaires then why the f*ck were they fighting against capitalism in the Vietnam War? North Vietnam might as well have just asked to join South Vietnam and they could have skipped 20 years of wars. Looks like all they were really fighting against was democracy.
They were not fighting against capitalism, they were fighting for independence. They didn’t care who supported them, they just needed support. Because France was in the West, and had Western support, the only external support they could easily find was communist. So they put on the Communist hat, but they really cared about independence
The history is fascinating
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Minh
the Việt Minh established itself as the only organized anti-French and anti-Japanese resistance group.[6] The Việt Minh initially formed to seek independence for Vietnam from the French Empire. The United States supported France. When the Japanese occupation began, the Việt Minh opposed Japan with support from the United States and the Republic of China. After World War II, the Việt Minh opposed the re-occupation of Vietnam by France, resulting in the Indochina War, and later opposed South Vietnam and the United States in the Vietnam War.
They were not fighting against capitalism, they were fighting for independence.
Both North Vietnam and South Vietnam gained their independence in 1954. So whatever they were fighting for in the 1960’s, it was definitely not “independence”.
The history is fascinating
Yeah, but I was talking about the Vietnam War against north and south of the 1960’s. Not the separate colonial war against France in the 1950’s.
That isn’t how they saw the situation. Colonial powers drawing lines on maps has famously been a way to make people happy with outcomes
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdUa84NB-3eiXhRtECg8mwCr6JDwgPtty&si=yC8tKjh058A9uxZo
Here is some fun documentaries to watch
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Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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That isn’t how they saw the situation
“They” == North Vietnamese propaganda. The actual facts are that colonialism ended 10 full years before the US sent troops to protect South Vietnam. This was a civil war, not a colonial war. It doesn’t matter what North Vietnamese propaganda wants you to think. It matters what reality is. If all your information is coming from youtube you are definitely getting your information from the wrong sources.
Colonial powers drawing lines on maps has famously been a way to make people happy with outcomes
Doesn’t apply at all here. The only ‘border’ they were fighting over was the border between North and South Vietnam. And that border was created by North Vietnam, not by any colonialists.
I’m happy to read better references on the real political situation you can give me.
The South Vietnamese governments were all extremely repressive and pretty much openly fascist. The US pretty much didn’t care so long as they were opposed to communism (a recurring theme in US cold war foreign policy)…
So much of that was wrong. The last government was not “openly fascist” Thanks to the USA, it was democratically elected. North Vietnam was 100x more repressive than South Vietnam in 1975.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Vietnam
Under pressure from the US, they held elections for president and the legislature in 1967. The Senate election took place on 2 September 1967. The Presidential election took place on 3 September 1967
The US should really be congratulated for not installing a fully fascist puppet government that one time.
Even in that last election, 57% of the voting age population voted, which sounds great but it was 84% of those eligible to vote. Huge swathes of the population were not allowed to vote due to their political beliefs or past opposition to the government.
Even in that last election, 57% of the voting age population voted
That was actually better than most countries.
The big picture is that the Vietnamese dictatorship did exactly the wrong thing. Creating a billionaire class proves that they ditched socialism. But they kept the dictatorship. They should have instead entrenched socialism and become a democracy. That would have been a very interesting thing to see. That they did exactly the wrong thing proves that North Vietnam’s entire reason for fighting the war was a farce.
Are they really fair elections if the communist parties, the ones with large rural support, are banned from taking part?
The freedom to run their own country whether that’s into the ground or into prosperity its the right of the vietnamese to self govern. How you correlate colonialism and democracy as the same thing is interesting.
The freedom to run their own country whether that’s into the ground or into prosperity its the right of the vietnamese to self govern.
Huh? Both North and South Vietnam gained independence in 1954. The South Vietnamese had an elected government by 1968. North Vietnam had a dictatorship so the people couldn’t run their own country. Then North Vietnam robbed South Vietnam of the ability to run their own country.
North Vietnam was literally fighting to deny the people to run their own country. To this very day nobody in Vietnam gets to choose their own leaders. The people are not allowed to govern themselves. But South Vietnam got to elect their own leader in 1968.
How you don’t know that French colonialism ended 10 years before Americans arrived is bizarre.
sigh
Do people consider the US to not be capitalist because of SEC regulations, the FDA, FAA, and other organizations impeding the free market? Do people consider the US to not be capitalist because of tariffs on, say, Canadian aluminum?
Why do people consider only end-stage communism to be true communism? Why do people consider only end-stage socialism to be true socialism?
It’s just semantics at the end of the day, so not too important, but I’ll play along because I happen to be someone who will call the U.S capitalist, but doesn’t understand why people call China communist.
First, I’ll start off with some definitions. If you disagree on one, provide your own and we can use those for the sake of discussion.
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.
_
Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterized by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.
_
Communism is a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property, social classes, money and the state (or nation state).
So essentially the easiest way to determine if your society is capitalist or socialist is the existence of private property. If the society is devoid of private property, then the question remains what kind of socialism is it (is there money? Markets? Social classes? A state?).
China isn’t even socialist by this definition, but even if it was, it would still be miles away from communist.
This is a rather reductionist view of capitalism, socialism, and communism. To understand these systems, we need to take a look at the actual literature.
In 1776, Adam Smith published his work “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,” which defined the cornerstones of capital, money, and value theory in the context of the changing economies of the 18th century. Smith’s work is known for concepts such as “the invisible hand” and “competition prevents exploitation” through free market capitalism.
In 1867, Karl Marx published his work “Das Kapital,” which offered a critique on some of capitalism’s theories. This work provided the foundation for work on class theory, class struggle, and the notion of socialist/communist states. The key definitions being that capitalism separates the workers (who contribute labour) from the capitalist class (who contribute capital and thus machines and forces to improve productivity) and that socialist states place increasing control of these productive forces in the hands of the state (as opposed to the capitalist class). The other key work towards these notions is “The Communist Manifesto,” written with Friedrich Engels. The slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is perhaps the most representative.
Following Marx, Vladimir Lenin wrote critiques of capitalism and described how revolution could be used to achieve a socialist and (eventually) communist society. Mao Zedong’s writings discuss the ideas of revolution to achieve socialism and communism from a Chinese perspective, rather than the Russian one that Lenin had. Crucially, while Marx had written on the socialist transition as one for the advanced capitalist societies of Germany and England, Lenin and Mao approached it more from the perspective of how socialism could be realized from the predominantly agricultural economies of Russia and China.
In 1936, John Maynard Keynes published his work “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” which looked at savings and consumption in the context of the Great Depression. This work forms the foundation for much of modern fiscal and economic policy in the West. Keynes called for government intervention in support of the economy, deviating from Smith’s notions of a free market.
Perhaps the most relevant ideas on the topic today are from Deng Xiaoping Thought, which provided concrete ideas of developing Chinese socialism in the context of a capitalist global economy and in the context of China’s predominantly agricultural economy. This work was kick-started by “Putting into Effect the Socialist Principle of Distribution According to Work,” which described how China was unable to make progress from the primary stage of socialism due to the lack of productive forces which could be leveraged. Remember that Marx’ writings were written from observations of the great industrialized European powers, not the perceived agricultural backwaters of Russia and China.
The crucial concept of Deng Xiaoping Thought is the idea of a socialist market economy. Crucially, that socialism inherently involves the elimination of poverty (pulling people up) rather than the moderation of productivity (pulling people down). As per Keynes, a planned economy with government intervention does not preclude capitalism, and the lack of one does not preclude socialism. Indeed, per Keynes, public ownership of property did not preclude capitalism, and by extension Deng Xiaoping Thought argues that private ownership of property does not necessarily preclude socialism. Indeed, Engels work on the subject discusses that the abolishment of private property cannot happen immediately, and instead proposes alternatives (progressive taxation, inheritance taxes, development of state-owned enterprises) in the meantime for those countries struggling to get past the primary stage of socialism.
Just as a true Smithian free market capitalist economy does not exist, a true Marxist end-stage socialist economy does not exist. If you’ve any interest in this space, the works of Smith and Keynes on one side and Marx, Engels, and Deng on the other side provide pretty complementary coverage of things. In this framework, Smith, Marx, and Engels can be treated as one group (laying the foundations of the work) while Deng and Keynes can be treated as the ones building on top of those core ideas to adapt them to the realities of the situation (for Deng, China’s agriculturally-dependent economy, and for Keynes, the Great Depression).
In practice, we can see the obvious differences between the American and Chinese economies. Whereas the US economy is led by giant multinationals, China’s is led primarily by SOEs. Whereas US billionaires who hold productive forces are essentially invulnerable to government prosecution, Chinese billionaires are not. Whereas land in China is either owned by the state or by farmer collectives, land in the US is mostly privately held.
I haven’t read all of these, but I have read a good deal of Marx/Engles, and am working through Das Kapital currently.
I have written similar comments to this, going over the history of thought. It’s important, and not something to be taken lightly (though there is a fine line between being thorough and gishgalloping, especially in the context of forums like lemmy/reddit/etc.)
Maybe you’re of the view that communism is such a loaded word that trying to define it in just a few dozen or hundred words is a pointless exercise. That’s fine, but if the word is so loaded and complicated, you probably shouldn’t be attaching it to nation-states to try to succinctly describe part of their economic system. The only people you’d be transmitting information to are the people who have the dozen or so required readings under their belt to truly grasp what you meant by communism. At this point, the word provides no value.
No economic system can actually be totally described by a single word, ever. However, a single word can be used to describe a part of a system, and it can be used in a reliable way. I pointed to very common definitions of the words, ones you seem to disagree with, and even in the ~thousand or so words you wrote you didn’t provide clear alternative definitions. That signals to me you probably need tens of thousands of words to properly define what you mean by the word “communism”, and at that point the utility of the word is just completely lost.
I mean, you’re precisely on the right track, which is why no country has ever claimed to be communist. They’ve all claimed to be at various stages of socialism with the end goal of achieving communism. Economic systems are extremely complex, as are the core differentiators between them. There’s rarely a way to cleanly claim “this is true of a capitalist economy but not of a socialist economy” and have that apply to the real world because most economies lie somewhere between free market capitalism and end-stage socialism. The words are horrendously overloaded and have no meaning in comparisons between actual countries. You’re mapping a binary statement onto a spectrum.
Having read Marx/Engels, I really do think Smith is a good place to go from there. Not necessarily because his ideas are great, but because it provides a lot of context for the world in which Marx and Engels were writing from.
Edit: perhaps the cleanest way to differentiate the systems is in their goals. Marx writes “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” implying some degree of central planning to improve the lives of people, while Smith writes “By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it” implying that people are “led by an invisible hand to promote an end [for the betterment of society].”
The goal of semantics, and words in general, are to convey ideas. It was true in the past that socialism was a very concrete, straightforward thing. If you believed in worker control of the means of production, you were a socialist. Now there are people who say they’re socialist, and they advocate for private tyrannies for the foreseeable future (decades or sometimes even a century+). They want entire generations of humans to be wage slaves, serve the interests of capital, pay their reduced wages to land leeches and banks, and then die without having ever seen a better system.
Those systems, systems by which entire generations of people are subjugated to the interests of capital under authoritarian rule, are now called socialist or sometimes communist. And I no longer have the word to describe a system where wage slavery is immediately abolished (much like chattel slavery was), and workers take immediate control over the means of production.
Those societies/institutions were often overthrown and overrun by either conservative Marxists (e.g Lenin) or fascists (e.g Catalonia).
The entire foundation of Marxist thought was that the economies in question were industrialized, productive, and developed. Those were, Marx argued, the circumstances for which the progression towards socialism would be natural.
Look now at when socialist revolutions occurred and the state of those countries at that time. It’s difficult to argue that those countries were industrialized, productive, or developed.
Lenin and Mao were running off script. According to Marx, every country must transform it’s peasants into proletarians. Historically, this had been done through a period of capitalist development. How do you pursue socialist ideals in a country of peasants?
US is more mercantilist than capitalist
Mercantilism and capitalism aren’t mutually exclusive, but the U.S is the opposite of mercantilist. Our imports vastly exceed our exports. China is more mercantilist, but still capitalist.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism
Unless of course you’re using a different definition. If you are, feel free to provide it and then I’ll address your claims on the basis of how you intended to use those words.
We replaced colonies with slave labour countries
Another contributor to the high import are Mexico and Canada which off-paper are completely colonies. The US will import materials to them from the slave countries for assembly. Which lets them avoid the “made in China/Vietnam” sticker. The fact that only the US can but tariffs on trade between these three countries just further pushes that message
If we look at it that way then it can be seen as mercantilist. Moreover the point of calling it as such is to point out that even if you come up with a system to help workers and prevent generational wealth (like capitalism) the people with wealth get to decide how it works
So essentially the easiest way to determine if your society is capitalist or socialist is the existence of private property.
India is considered socialist, even though it has private property.
The only metric that page uses to define India as socialist is “makes a constitutional reference to socialism”. That can mean socialism is some end goal, or they just have policy inspired by socialism.
Words have definitions, so just saying “this country is socialist” is not enough evidence to declare that country is socialist, unless your definition of socialism is “a system which people call socialist”.
By that definition, America is socialist so long as I call it socialist. It becomes tautological and useless.
Well I didn’t create that Wiki page, so I’m only just reiterating what it says on there.
According to that page it is, in whatever way you want to interpret that page as.
The only metric that page uses to define India as socialist is “makes a constitutional reference to socialism”. That can mean socialism is some end goal, or they just have policy inspired by socialism.
Having said all that, they are actually declaring they are socialists in their constitution, so even if they don’t get to it to a point where you think it’s socialist, they think they’re are already, or are going towards socialism.
People say things for reasons, and those reasons aren’t always to express the true state of things. For example, it’s powerful to capture positive social sentiment around socialism without having to actually relinquish any power to the working class. It effectively destroys workers’ ability to communicate effectively about what we want to see in the world.
Back in the day, you could simply say “I’m a socialist” and that meant that you advocated for a system where workers owned the means of production, and private property didn’t exist. Now you can say the same thing, and what does it mean? Literally nothing, it’s an incoherent thing to say because it has too many contradictory meanings.
I still identify as a libertarian socialist, but every other person I talk to doesn’t understand what I mean by this (pro-China? pro-Bernie? interested in dismantling private ownership? want to slightly increase taxes on corporations and implement universal healthcare?). Most people that use the label libertarian socialist align with the original definition of socialism, and I find value in that. However for the purposes of communicating to people who don’t agree with the position, it’s effectively useless.
Destroying that avenue to communicate was definitely intentional, it subverts actual organizational efforts. The same thing has happened with unions. Essentially the entire 19th century socialist movement has been systematically destroyed through propaganda and language manipulation.
Well truly, I don’t mean to discredit what you are saying (especially since its being said well), but I gotta just point out again that they think they are socialists, enough so that they put it into their constitution.
“Boots on the ground” reality I agree with you that they are not (though I am an outsider, not a citizen of the nation, so my view is from the external), they seem very capitalistic to me. But again, their stated goals as per their constitution (and that wiki page while we’re at it) says otherwise.
Anyway, good discussion. :)
something something contemplating anything more than the two existing options is too difficult and cannot be done.
Because there is text book pretty and harmonious communism, and there is the read thing in practice which is always bloody, hungry, horrible, and just absolutely terrible
No country in the world has claimed to achieve communism. What are you even trying to say?
This is why citing Wikipedia leads you astray. For example, read more carefully into what the CPC actually claims. They do not claim to have achieved communism.
Because “technically correct but so so wrong”
Uh huh…
Read what the CPC actually claims. It’s rather enlightening.
English language journalists opt for the more sensationalist take rather than the more accurate one.
I consider the US not capitalist because the most important component of the economy, money, is centrally planned by a small committee of insiders. Broken money leads to broken markets. I’d be ok with calling it crony capitalism.
it’s not capitalism because the capital is controlled by few people?
Isn’t that the point of being a capitalist to secure more capital? Why would a pure-capitalist want Market regulation, and not themselves with all the money and everyone else with none?
Capitalism means free markets. Your money is centrally planned, like in the Soviet Union, that’s the opposite of a free market.
capitalism means industry is controlled privately as a mechanism to generate profit
Indeed. State-run centrally planned money isn’t private.
This is a very rare situation that almost never happens.
I Propose we make any Fraud worldwide over a Billion Dollars punishable by Death to!
Man, if you think this is actually about fraud and she had dump trucks of cash in her basement…
Eighty-five others were tried with Truong My Lan
All of the defendants were found guilty.
Uh… either the scale of fraud is huge, at the level of a crime syndicate, or they are convicting some innocent people. Usually the government overcharges people to encourage confessions, leading to some people being found innocent.
Do we really think the Vietnamese prosecutors are the best in the world? Maybe the jury really hated these people.
Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.
They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.
The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank’s lending.
The scale of fraud was huge.
She was a nobody in the 80s. The Mafia wishes they were this successful.
This is only possible with a corrupt system enabling behavior like this. I can see why Prime Ministers were caught up in this.
The Vietnamese government is highly corrupt, the billionaire could probably pay them off.
I read in a separate article that basically that’s how she got to where she is. A bunch of people that took bribes over the years are also going to jail. This is supposedly the Vietnamese government trying to fight that corruption. !remindme 5years to see how it works out…
For the sake of VN and its citizens, I hope they rid all the corruption.
