DigitalAudio

Ehem... I'm from Venezuela but my family escaped and moved to Colombia when I was like 15-16

Trust me, I know exactly how the entire shit collapsed, my family saw it first hand.

Trade embargoes or not even ignoring the rampant corruption, the entire government was far too inefficient and bloated. Nothing was managed properly, there was a bunch of waste and eventually not enough administrative oversight. Oil production went to the gutter not just because of trade embargoes but also because PDVSA was just terribly mismanaged. People stopped trying to get into the business and studies on oil and management became less and less common, there were far fewer qualified workers than there were during the initial boom.

I know pro-Socialists from first world countries love to imagine Venezuela went to shit because of US imperialism, and the US absolutely didn't help, but it was bound to happen either way.

I compare Venezuela to Colombia consistently. Colombia has a lot of the same social and cultural issues and structures as Venezuela, but in Colombia if you don't bust your ass working, you're royally fucked. It's brutal, and arguably it means being really poor in Colombia is worse than Venezuela to this day, but also I know Colombians who have found a professional niche and grown into their professions because their work is equivalently rewarded. That is not possible with Venezuela, and it's not because we can't trade with this or that country, it's because there is no infrastructure to push our local economy, there are no mechanisms to protect up and coming businesses, there is no legal recourse to sustain anything viable. The government never managed to redistribute resources or use them to create more wealth. Instead they slowly let our institutions and infrastructure erode, failed to reinvest in education or new infrastructure and let corruption take hold of most official positions. At some point they were just trying to save themselves and the military cúpula.

I really want to believe something like socialism is viable, but I have seen absolutely no proof of it ever managing to be sustainable in the long term. Humans need some degree of incentive to push themselves to improve and to improve their own communities. The belief that humans are inherently motivated to innovation and creativity when they have their basic needs met is just not something I fully believe. Some people are like that, but I don't think it's enough of them to sustain a functional society.

Y si quieres hasta lo podemos hablar en español para que veas que no estoy aquí para hacer propaganda barata ni soy ningún bot ruso ni gringo ni nada.

Then how come every single time a country has attempted to adopt a heavily socialist model it fails to maintain its infrastructure and starts to see constant decay in productivity and wealth after a couple of decades?

It never seems to be able to maintain its initial momentum of a boom in improving living conditions and wealth inequality reduction, and eventually major infrastructure projects and even entire industries start falling into disrepair or cutting down due to lack of maintenance.

You say it's not a big issue, but ask anyone who lived in the USSR between 1970-1990 or in Venezuela or in Cuba, and they'll all say the socialist revolution brought some very needed structural changes at first, but then started letting the infrastructure and services they themselves built decay quickly and by the end almost nothing seemed to work well, everything was poorly maintained and major industries had become small, inefficient and slow.

I'm not advocating for capitalism, I understand what our lives look like and where their shortcomings are, but it doesn't feel like the push for socialism is ever able to address the problems that precisely have turned people away from socialist models in the past. At some point surely it makes sense to learn from the mistakes of others, so, what implementation of a socialist model prevents us from slowly letting everything decay?

I personally think the European and Northern European models of regulated capitalism are preferable over any example I've seen of a socialist model. And I also think it's way better than the bullshit they have in the US. Arguably all those European countries still have far too much concentrated wealth, and it makes sense to redistribute that.

I'm sorry but that sounds almost naive and equally idealistic as what you're criticising. Communities want quality, but people overwhelmingly also don't want to work, because let's be honest, work sucks. What incentive is there for someone to clean and maintain the sewers when they don't have to do it? What incentive is there for someone to fill in inventories? There are a lot of tasks that are needed in any human society but that no one wants to do. The way feudal societies dealt with that was either with slavery or caste systems. Putting people down so they will have no choice but to do what no one else wants to do. Capitalism is no better, it creates castes as well but based on generational wealth. Of course we also have slavery under capitalism. I'm not advocating for these systems, but I think communist and socialist models need to account for this, and so far I have never seen it addressed in any way. How do you even fix that at first?

Who is going to be doing what nobody wants to do? And not just the most extreme examples, but also the most invisible ones. Is someone really going to be checking that the floors of the community centre restrooms will be clean and tidy? Is someone going to be calling in and supervising the workers who need to repaint the walls?

We've seen this even in the USSR but also Cuba and Venezuela. The first few years under socialist systems bring along a very big boom in well-being and social advancements for the country, but with the decades, infrastructure starts decaying, productivity goes down, wealth decreases and food shortages become more frequent. It happened to Allende, the chavistas, Fidel, Mao, the Kims etc. I don't think this inherently means that socialism can't work, but it needs to be less idealistic in some way. Everyone wants a pool at home, but almost no one wants to be the one digging for days under the sun too have it.

Internally for the US, maybe...

But Newsom wouldn't be threatening Canada, Greenland and Venezuela with annexation, or putting tariffs on anyone who insults him. Or threatening the leaders of democratic allied nations with imprisonment and coups d'etat because of personal disagreements, or creating federal concentration camps in Florida and El Salvador, or deporting random Indians and Salvadorans to Uganda, or mocking veterans and the disabled, or threatening to dissolve NATO and most international organisations, or fantasising about stopping elections, or attempting coups d'etat upon losing an election, or stealing classified documents and hiding them in his bathroom after leaving office, or tearing down the White House for personal reasons, or putting his name on every institution and monument...

I think this subreddit needs to realise that although the problem is capitalism, Trump isn't just any old capitalist monster. He's a fucking tyrant.

Not trying to contradict anything you said, I am interested in socialism as a model, generally speaking, but I don't know much about its economic or social model.

As someone very close to socialist countries that have done rather poorly, I have a few questions about it.

What exactly is pushing people and producers from tending towards mediocrity in socialism? I hate capitalism and how it affects us culturally, but the one thing I think it can succeed at (when monopolies are properly combatted), is using competition to push for excellence. Of course, I know nowadays it's not the case because anti-trusts have been gutted so we're full of monopolies and duopolies everywhere. But generally speaking, why would anyone make any effort for excellence under systems that don't reward it or punish mediocrity?

I'm not saying we should trend towards capitalism where mediocrity is punished by starvation or death by exposure to the elements, but isn't mediocrity, lack of consistent maintenance of common goods, etc kind of a huge problem of public and social governments etc?

They seem to be very good at equalising the playing field and providing for the needy, but it seems like persistent deterioration of common goods, infrastructure, etc is a pervasive issue in most communist governments that have been tried. Which leads to a lot of losses, inefficiencies and oversight. How would a new socialist model address these common issues? They're not minor things that should just be hand-waved away either.