Matt is joined by Gary from Texas Boxing Scene to answer his questions on Communism.
1. Why has the USA always used communist countries to be their fake enemies? (USSR, Cuba, China, Vietnam, etc) there are other types of government equally as repressive, corrupt, violent, etc that the USA doesn't make their fake enemy
-I would say that communist countries like the ones you listed aren’t as “repressive, corrupt, violent” as Western bourgeois democracies let alone fascistic dictatorships or neocolonial comprador autocrats.
-The US, especially post the two world wars, become the hegemonic capitalist empire. Therefore communism was a direct threat to that hegemony. For example, J Edgar Hoover was a large shareholder of the Ruso-Asiatic Steel corporation in Tsarist Russia and if the Russian Revolution didn’t happen, Hoover would have been one of the richest men in the world. He then went on to say his life goal was to strangle Bolshevism and communism as later US president and FBI director. This is a specific example but it was a mass-scale concern for the ruling class in the US that now was heavily engaged in the imperialist economy over the global south. The idea of former colonies or current neo-colonies rejecting capitalism and thus US hegemony meant a direct hit to the profits and control of the US capitalist class.
2. Is there a communist country in recent history that you think gets it right? As a Libertarian there's not one country that I would point at and say "yea they get liberty" Is there any country, in recent history since the 20th century let's say, that you think is a model of what communism should look like?
-How communism/socialism develops where be an uneven geographical development just like any societal system, and is very much based on the relative material conditions of the places we can talk about. For example, China circa the early 1900s has a different set of material conditions than the 2023 US. If socialists and the working class were to gain political power in the US we are starting from an entirely different place than China in 1949 or Russia in 1917, Cuba in 1959, etc.
-I would say every socialist society except for one, which we can perhaps get into later, had major successes and failures that we can learn from. No system is perfect, scientific socialism is not utopian and we don’t expect the road to communism to be without setbacks, mistakes, zigs, and zags.
-Some clear successes of socialist states are:
—Cuba only country in Latin America to eliminate child malnourishment, the lowest child death rate in Latin America, housing is a right, and have eliminated homelessness, developed 4 vaccines for cancer
—USSR raised life expectancy by 65%, and increased real income by 370% (housing, income, insurance, and medicine, accounted for 15% of family income compared to 50% in the US), Eliminated homelessness, and unemployment (a job was a guaranteed right), healthcare was a right, full literacy, raised school enrollment by 460%, secondary education was a right, eliminated the gender pay gap.
—PRC under Mao increased life expectancy from 36 to 67 (while the population doubled in size), achieved 93% literacy from 20%, and universal free education and healthcare as a right, both the USSR and PRC dismantled gross exploitive feudal class structures that had remained.
-Since Mao, China has lifted 850 million people from extreme poverty and eliminated extreme poverty and is near the elimination of all poverty in the country.
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