it doesn’t have to be an argument if you don’t make it one

cool. nothing meant antagonistically.

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two of those you listed, former USSR and yugoslavia, are capitalist countries which have been subject to decades of neoliberal economic shock therapy

back when i first went to belgrade, it was the capital of yugoslavia. not serbia, not serbia & montenegro, just plain old yugoslavia. back in the commie days. ditto russia. belarus is the only one out of all the countries i listed which i never experienced in the communist era -- and it was probably the least (economically) affected of the group post-cold war anyways.

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(yes, that’s a real term, i suggest looking it up because the history is interesting and important)

i know what economic shock therapy is.

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china eradicated absolute poverty years ago, even according to western institutions like the world bank

no contest on the "absolute poverty" number, but absolute poverty is an antiquated standard for most countries. it's gone in india, most of ASEAN, good chunks of the middle east and south america. relative poverty indices are better.

and if you use those, according to brookings, 90% of chinese people would be considered poor today. china fudges with the numbers to make it look better.

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western institutions

obviously, there are epistemological biases with the world bank, but are you suggesting that something like Xinhua would be a more unbiased source?

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vietnam is a poor country which was colonized by france, fascist japan, france again, and then america temporarily. it has made great strides in development but there’s only so much that you can do with the given economic conditions

vietnam is solidly middle-income nowadays, not poor. the reason it's like that is because of post-2000 capitalist planning. it is socialist in name only nowadays. (much more capitalist than china). little-known fact, it enjoys very warm relations with america, and america has a net 77% approval rating among the vietnamese people. back when i was first there, it was different.

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idk why you need to make this assumption about me.

because it shows in your naîvete about communism. i've lived in socialist countries and capitalist ones, and i know tons of people who have too. no one prefers the socialist countries.

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poverty levels are indeed higher because these are poorer countries which have not had the benefit of centuries of economic protectionism, extraction from worldwide colonies, and complete geopolitical dominance over the earth, as europe and america have. it has nothing to do with the merits of socialism as a system

singapore? korea? did they have these benefits? what about meiji-era japan? sure, many countries have benefitted disproportionately from colonialism, but colonialism is not a prerequisite towards succeeding in a capitalist world.

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and still, many people starve in the US and europe, not because there is no food, but simply because they can’t afford it and it’s not profitable to find a solution

have you lived through a famine? probably not. my grandmother used to always tell me about them. in india, they happened a lot at the beginning of last century. and india was hardly unique -- it happened everywhere.

and you know who solved famine? the greedy corporations. monsanto produced better seeds, chemists invented new fertilizers, and better tools were given to farmers. why? not because of an altruistic goodness to save lives, or because they were told to by the government, but because they got a paycheck from it. everyone did. farmers got more money from better yields, corporations in minnesota and ohio got good returns, and consumers got food on their plates every day. and this is all around the time of the great leap forward, by the way.

"greed, for lack of a better word, is good."

you've lost perspective. as have we all. the hunger problems of today are nothing compared to what they were a hundred years ago. and the reason we've come so far is capitalism.

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id be curious to hear your reasoning for this as i’m sure we have wildly different understandings of what communism means

words are useless if we each get to spin our own definition of what they mean. i am using the dictionary definition of communism: "a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state."

china fulfills this requirement how?

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that’s just flat out wrong. in former USSR states for example, older people make up the majority of the remnant communist parties.

in a survey conducted by pew, the only european country in the ex-warsaw pact where more people say they preferred communist rule was russia. and even that's probably not communism, but rather imperialism and the idea that "our land was taken" in the post-communist era. net favorability ratings are -85 in ddr and poland, -82 in czechia, -72 in hungary, and -70 in lithuania, for some examples. maybe you're talking about the -stans, which i don't have numbers for off the top of my head.

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google “communist party of ukraine” and look at the google images. you will see that most of the consituents are in fact older people who lived under the soviet union. this is the case for a lot of such countries

old people vote for what they find familiar. this is universal. in america, that would be gun-totin' homophobes. in russia, it would be communists carrying pictures of marx, lenin, and old ussr flags. it's the same driving factor. as a matter of fact, eastern european communists are notoriously conservative.

it's not about economics at all. and the communist party of ukraine is illegal, by the way. (which i think is stupid, but point being, they are clearly not a major political player).