5 Jan 2024 7:48 am
Reactionaries and liberals often assert that socialist societies were failures. However, throughout their respective socialist experiments, workers' lives in the U.S.S.R., the GDR, and other former socialist societies improved immensely. Average life expectancy in the Soviet Union, for example, went from 32 years in 1917 to 68 years by 1975.
Poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, homelessness, and other social ills were virtually and easily eliminated in socialist societies. I say "easily" because those pathologies are all but effortlessly eliminated when doing so becomes a governmental priority, unlike in the U.S.
Interestingly, the lives of American workers also improved because of the Bolshevik Revolution. The progressive achievements won by Soviet workers pressured the U.S. capitalist state to concede reforms for American workers. Reforms including homeownership, desegregation, investments in education, public healthcare, etc.
Concerning homeownership, in a 1917 Washington Post op-ed, New York financier and banker Simon Straus wrote, "Widespread and successful homeowning activities in the U.S. would do more to alleviate social unrest and build a bulwark against the encroachments of Bolshevism than any other development."
The Labor Department then initiated its Own Your Own Home program, later led by Herbert Hoover, which provided liquidity for banks toward the expansion of home loans. In 1933, the New Deal's "Home Owners' Loan Corporation was launched, which granted home loans to workers, making homeownership far more accessible and committing workers psychologically to capitalism.
In response to Sputnik and the education gap between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., the U.S. enacted 1958's National Defense Education Act, which made low-interest student loans, augmenting higher education. While noting the program's success, the late U.S. Senator Stewart McClure said, "I think if there was one thing I did during my work on the hill, it was to focus attention on the opportunity that Sputnik gave all of us who had been struggling for decades to establish a federal program of monetary aid to public education."
But with the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. and, therefore, the elimination of a countervailing system, the U.S. capitalist state began to claw back New Deal programs and other social reforms. Capitalism is, again, free to be as mean as it needs to be.
(Note: Respondents who employ vulgarity and typically desperate ad hominem attacks will be ignored. Thank you.)
Poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, homelessness, and other social ills were virtually and easily eliminated in socialist societies. I say "easily" because those pathologies are all but effortlessly eliminated when doing so becomes a governmental priority, unlike in the U.S.
Interestingly, the lives of American workers also improved because of the Bolshevik Revolution. The progressive achievements won by Soviet workers pressured the U.S. capitalist state to concede reforms for American workers. Reforms including homeownership, desegregation, investments in education, public healthcare, etc.
Concerning homeownership, in a 1917 Washington Post op-ed, New York financier and banker Simon Straus wrote, "Widespread and successful homeowning activities in the U.S. would do more to alleviate social unrest and build a bulwark against the encroachments of Bolshevism than any other development."
The Labor Department then initiated its Own Your Own Home program, later led by Herbert Hoover, which provided liquidity for banks toward the expansion of home loans. In 1933, the New Deal's "Home Owners' Loan Corporation was launched, which granted home loans to workers, making homeownership far more accessible and committing workers psychologically to capitalism.
In response to Sputnik and the education gap between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., the U.S. enacted 1958's National Defense Education Act, which made low-interest student loans, augmenting higher education. While noting the program's success, the late U.S. Senator Stewart McClure said, "I think if there was one thing I did during my work on the hill, it was to focus attention on the opportunity that Sputnik gave all of us who had been struggling for decades to establish a federal program of monetary aid to public education."
But with the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. and, therefore, the elimination of a countervailing system, the U.S. capitalist state began to claw back New Deal programs and other social reforms. Capitalism is, again, free to be as mean as it needs to be.
(Note: Respondents who employ vulgarity and typically desperate ad hominem attacks will be ignored. Thank you.)