Why don't we have a communist society yet? I mean we could.

Food for thought :

A lot of factors have contributed to American inequality: slavery, economic policy, technological change, the power of lobbying, globalization, and so on. In their wake, what’s left?

That’s the question at the heart of a new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, by Peter Temin, an economist from MIT. Temin argues that, following decades of growing inequality, America is now left with what is more or less a two-class system: One small, predominantly white upper class that wields a disproportionate share of money, power, and political influence and a much larger, minority-heavy (but still mostly white) lower class that is all too frequently subject to the first group’s whims.

Temin identifies two types of workers in what he calls “the dual economy.” The first are skilled, tech-savvy workers and managers with college degrees and high salaries who are concentrated heavily in fields such as finance, technology, and electronics—hence his labeling it the “FTE sector.” They make up about 20 percent of the roughly 320 million people who live in America. The other group is the low-skilled workers, which he simply calls the “low-wage sector.”

Temin then divides workers into groups that can trace their family line in the U.S. back to before 1970 (when productivity growth began to outpace wage growth) and groups that immigrated later, and notes that race plays a pretty big role in how both groups fare in the American economy. “In the group that has been here longer, white Americans dominate both the FTE sector and the low-wage sector, while African Americans are located almost entirely in the low-wage sector,” he writes. “In the group of recent immigrants, Asians predominantly entered the FTE sector, while Latino immigrants joined African Americans in the low-wage sector.”

After divvying up workers like this (and perhaps he does so with too broad of strokes), Temin explains why there are such stark divisions between them. He focuses on how the construction of class and race, and racial prejudice, have created a system that keeps members of the lower classes precisely where they are. He writes that the upper class of FTE workers, who make up just one-fifth of the population, has strategically pushed for policies—such as relatively low minimum wages and business-friendly deregulation—to bolster the economic success of some groups and not others, largely along racial lines. “The choices made in the United States include keeping the low-wage sector quiet by mass incarceration, housing segregation and disenfranchisement,” Temin writes.

And how is one to move up from the lower group to the higher one? Education is key, Temin writes, but notes that this means plotting, starting in early childhood, a successful path to, and through, college. That’s a 16-year (or longer) plan that, as Temin compellingly observes, can be easily upended. For minorities especially, this means contending with the racially fraught trends Temin identifies earlier in his book, such as mass incarceration and institutional disinvestment in students, for example. Many cities, which house a disproportionate portion of the black (and increasingly, Latino) population, lack adequate funding for schools. And decrepit infrastructure and lackluster public transit can make it difficult for residents to get out of their communities to places with better educational or work opportunities. Temin argues that these impediments exist by design.

Despite the bleak portrait that he paints, he doesn’t believe that the U.S. necessarily has to be like this. He offers five proposals that he says might help the country return to more equal footing. Some are fairly clear levers that many before him have recommending pulling: expanding access to and improving public education (particularly early education), repairing infrastructure, investing less in programs like prisons that oppress poor minorities, and increasing funding for those that can help build social capital and increase economic mobility. But other suggestions of his are more ambitious and involve fundamentally changing the cultural beliefs that have been reinforced over generations. Temin advocates doing away with the belief that private agencies can act in the interest of all citizens in the way that public entities can, and should. His final recommendation is to address systemic racism by reviving the spirit of the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s and 1970s, when civil-rights legislation helped to desegregate schools and give black Americans more political and economic power.

Temin notes that not all of these things need to be accomplished in order for America to reverse the increasingly divided path it’s on. But at the moment, implementing even one of these recommendations would prove a tall order.

https://www.theatlantic.com/busines...sXhyE5_ns-L8VkOA9tnSHwvyuJbIN4SrtHG1w3HA_L2uM

 

Yes but that's I think a lot of nostalgia go in to that. It's strange but people seem work like that. There can be no doubt that Russia today is better than the Soviet Union ever was. Yet, the same people that would have condemned the Soviet Union, want it back ...

Socialism is cancer. I always say that. Even as a leftist.

 

Why do women sometimes return to a husband that used to beat and abuse them? Because we humans work in very strange ways sometimes where emotions take over our way to think rationality and actually analyse a situation correctly, because people sometimes remember things differently, or outright forget things, where they feel that some memories are important and others play no role and so on.

Look up one of the definitions of, Nostalgia is a sentimentality for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.[1] The word nostalgia is learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of νόστος (nóstos), meaning "homecoming", a Homeric word, and ἄλγος (álgos), meaning "pain" or "ache", and was coined by a 17th-century medical student to describe the anxieties displayed by Swiss mercenaries fighting away from home.[2] Described as a medical condition—a form of melancholy—in the Early Modern period,[3] it became an important trope in Romanticism.[1]

There are things people remember fondly and where they tend to forget the stuff that didn't work. Not to mention that systems like the Soviet Union did everything in their power to make people believe, everything was good. It's not like they have been runing around explaining everyone that atrocities their organisations committed, like the torture and killing of dissidents by the KGB or Tscheka. And some people flat out deny that those crimes ever happend because it would mean they lived their whole live in an inhuman system.

What this means is for example, when societies change like the foundation of it, people tend to do a few things. They either start to build up utopian ideas where they look out for improvements from this change or moving it in a direction where it leads to a better future or they engage in what is known as retro-pies. In other words, they try to wind the clocks back to a time where they actually understood things, where they felt things have been in "order". You had clear enemies, clear and simple terms to believe in and so on. This is not a new thing either. During the industrial revolution when the city landscape started to change a lot due to factories, production and huge number of people moving in them, gave actually the birth to the many "environmentalist movements". It was mainly driven by wealthy citizens who felt that the way of life has become unnatural. One side of it was they rejected new technology and developments in general, particularly new ideas and concepts, equality, egalitarianism and the like. To them, a worker could never ever be even remotely on the same level as they are. They wanted to return to a "more simple" life.

Many restauration movements also started with this kind of thinking. That it could be somehow possible to rewind the clocks. Take the French revolution and Napoleons reign. What was the direct result of it? The return of the Bourbon Kings in France, the so called Bourbon Restauration - if only for a short time.

So it really isn't that uncommon that large parts of a population long back for what they saw as the "glorious" years in times of change.
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Yes, yes it is. Millions suffered and died DIRECTLY(!) trough socialist dictatorships and ideology. I am a leftist. But I am not an ideologist. If someone still thinks socialism today is like a magic pill or a good system then he's delusional. After more than 100 years this experiment can be considered a failure.

 

Ever gone to a strip club? Plenty flexible humans there!

 

Soooooo many people confusing Social democracy with socialism and socialism with communism :/.