Presumably, people who support whatever “pure socialism” is think that the USSR or Cuba didn’t do it right. Which justifiably raises No-True-Scotsman objections.
But I think the argument on that point is close enough that your pithy one-liner is not responsive to the general point:
Capitalism vs socialism debates generally happen without acknowledging that the vast majority of the world uses a relatively narrow spectrum of hybrid systems. Some free markets, some social safety nets and regulations.
Alternately, one could be looking at their extensive capitalist black markets. Those may have provided an important function without which they would have failed(/ will fail) much quicker. Just because someone says it wasn’t pure communist doesn’t mean that they thought that pure communist would have worked.
This is pretty fair, but there’s a vast spectrum of flavors of socialist economies that have never really been executed, or only existed very briefly. Soviet-style bureaucratic central planning is a very limited slice of the possible permutations.
But the fact that the other flavors (say, anarcho-syndicalism) have never existed and seem unlikely to happen anytime soon, DOES speak volumes. Just as it does in the case of purely imagined “pure capitalism”.
Um, Soviet Union, Cuba.
Presumably, people who support whatever “pure socialism” is think that the USSR or Cuba didn’t do it right. Which justifiably raises No-True-Scotsman objections.
But I think the argument on that point is close enough that your pithy one-liner is not responsive to the general point:
Alternately, one could be looking at their extensive capitalist black markets. Those may have provided an important function without which they would have failed(/ will fail) much quicker. Just because someone says it wasn’t pure communist doesn’t mean that they thought that pure communist would have worked.
Everything you said is very very plausible, but it doesn’t make Eugine’s comment responsive to Punoxysm
I was agreeing with you on the point that Eugene’s comment wasn’t responsive, though for different reasons. Not every reply is a perfect rebuttal.
This is pretty fair, but there’s a vast spectrum of flavors of socialist economies that have never really been executed, or only existed very briefly. Soviet-style bureaucratic central planning is a very limited slice of the possible permutations.
But the fact that the other flavors (say, anarcho-syndicalism) have never existed and seem unlikely to happen anytime soon, DOES speak volumes. Just as it does in the case of purely imagined “pure capitalism”.