I feel like no one talks about Laos. They did Doi Moi-style market reforms with help from the IMF (cringe IMF forced them to liberalize) and are growing incredibly fast, like they're really getting up there. They still assert socialism as their goal in the constitution, and like Vietnam/China they make large efforts to relieve poverty, provide healthcare, etc. much more than your average developing capitalist states. Poverty dropped about 20-30 percent since 1992. Worker rights are unusually good for a developing country. Seriously, retirement age is less than America's, wtf. Anyways that's all the positives. There's probably a lot more negatives than positives, but overall I like the direction they are headed in, especially for a country that was bombed to hell and back.
Everyone forgets Laos because there's neither a controversial war named after it nor an event of mass killing you can point to to "prove" socialism is evil.
When talking about the Doi Moi reforms I think it’s important to note that it wasn’t just a case of capitalism creating economic growth, Vietnam had been almost completely cut off from the global economy and only started being able to take out loans/engage in trade again after accepting much of the IMF-imposed reforms, which is why they’re economy started growing so rapidly afterwards. I imagine it was a similar situation with Laos.
Not to say that capitalism isn’t useful for developing the productive forces and all that, but I think it’s being way too generous to capitalist propaganda to attribute the growth of any developing country entirely to economic liberalization when in reality their economies were literally being held hostage by global capital
no conception of what actual freedom is
that tulpa Lizzo made the most Walmart neoliberal song I've ever heard which claims "I'm free" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrygiUaJXOs
lockdown for months
Lockdowns, regardless of how much they last, are bloody useless when they are not enforced in a thorough manner and you have nothing resembling a comprehensive public-health plan to keep the virus under control when you start to open things back up.
Reminder that earlier this year when the PRC decided to lockdown Wuhan and the Hubei region people in the west started decrying their actions as 'authoritarian' and ultimately pointless in fighting against the virus (the same rhetoric was also deployed against the SRV)—and in the coming months, when their approach to dealing with the virus was validated through visible results and after they could not simply be dismissed as fake any longer, they started whingeing instead about how the evil CPC 'tricked' the West into locking down for the sake of destroying their economies.
Good memory. I forgot how the original lockdowns in china were all framed as an example of the authoritarianism of the CCP and their lack of "fReEdOm".
yeah people were against a full lockdown bc "then we'll always have to be in lock down every couple months" which is exactly what's happening when you don't fully lock down :agony-4horsemen:
The marx side of the dialectic is a pathway to many abilities, some considered to be unnatural
It's a pretty small country (Vietnam has 14x the population) and it's landlocked which I think helps, that and all of these countries really have more than the confirmed amount. Still I don't doubt they've done very well
They are also surrounded by countries with few cases and solid responses to the virus; china and vietnam.
If there is little international travel going on and they locked down early, then maybe that's possible.
We're in lockdown in LA, but not until after the busy shopping weekend. And then stores can operate but just not at full capacity. No more dining outside, aside from cities who opted out.
LA is a fucked up agglomeration of neighborhoods that operate semi-automonously. It's a nightmare.
Pasadena was the city I was referring to. Evidently four got forcibly shut down yesterday. The city has four restaurants a block. Not enough people to enforce the shutdown.
Article if anyone is interested.
Because i was high as shit when i made this and it was 2-3 am but its 0 in all the slots anyhow maybe ill redo this well and try to spread it beyond here obviously if anyone wants to dothat go ahead
