Failed Examples of capitalism and democracy?

[Dimitri Molotov]

please post examples of capitalism and democracy when they fail, i would love to use them in a debate, but i cant think of any:/

[Tatarin]

Turn on the news and watch for 1 hour. :)

[Dimitri Molotov]

lol i wish i could use that because i agree that capitalism and democracy has failed us before and is failing us now, but are there any other examples? because if i try and use this in a debate i get the close minded "we're the best! we have never failed! look at cuba!"

[Broletariat]

lol i wish i could use that because i agree that capitalism and democracy has failed us before and is failing us now, but are there any other examples? because if i try and use this in a debate i get the close minded "we're the best! we have never failed! look at cuba!"
If someone tells you to look at Cuba then start telling them how awesome Cuba is. Point out the fact that the candidates with the most funding are, as a rule, the ones that win the election, that this is no real democracy, but a way to choose a specific ruler from the ruling class.

[NoOneIsIllegal]

Look around you. By asking for examples of capitalism failing, are you also acknowledging capitalism also works in other examples? Capitalism has only worked for a few lazy men at the expense of countless workers.

[Dimitri Molotov]

you are right, instead of looking for examples of countries where capitalism has failed, i can just look outside and see the homeless or the poor and hungry in this country, and that is much harder to dispute than our economy as a whole. and yes i do tell them how awesome cuba is:) i absolutely love telling people all the stuff castro did to improve it.

[ContrarianLemming]

please post examples of capitalism and democracy when they fail, i would love to use them in a debate, but i cant think of any:/

do you mean capitalism WITH democracy or seperately?
you are surrounded by capitalisms failure

see Switzerland for a failure in democracy, they recently banned violent video games through direct democracy.

[NoOneIsIllegal]

see Switzerland for a failure in democracy, they recently banned violent video games through direct democracy.
What the fuck?

Switzerland is weird/messed up. Women could not vote in federal elections until 1971.
No wonder Switzerland is known for "brotherly love"... it ain't got no love for the sisters!

[Adil3tr]

please post examples of capitalism and democracy when they fail, i would love to use them in a debate, but i cant think of any:/

Stop calling the system of bourgeois corrupt republic with wavering rights "Democracy." We are MUCH closer to democracy.

[Red Commissar]

Haiti and Somalia.

[Proletarian Ultra]

(not exactly what you were looking for, but...)

The Tangyanika Groundnut Scheme is a classic wingnut example of failed state plainning:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanganyika_groundnut_scheme

BUT the Jari Project is a contrary example of equally or more disastrous private enterprise:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jari_project

[TwoSevensClash]

Obviously most people on this site think all capitialist countries are failures (which they are) but for examples of of failed democracy the Russian Federation and Weimar Germany. I would list the USA but most non-commies would disagree.

[Tavarisch_Mike]

Try to first describe the true natures of both systems, simplify by saying that democracie is wen the vast majority got the power and that capitalism is when a few gets to exploit and control the masses. Frome there give examples like when Salvador Alliende got democraticly elected and wanted to creat a new socialist society, he threated the capitalists, so they reacted by overtrow him, stop the attemps of building socialism and replaced it with a fascist system.

[Adi Shankara]

I can think of a number examples; capitalism is inherently undemocratic, so it would be impossible to find such a state that was both capitalist and a failed democracy. however, capitalist dictatorships exist-a-plenty:

*Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay: Strongly free market, 90,000 people "disappeared" in a country that had only 2.3 million at the time, mass graves were found near the Chaco River

*Antonio Salazar of Portugal: Totalitarian, people who criticized him simply "dissappeared", highly xenophobic, strongly pro-colonialism

*Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire: Totalitarian, robbed the entire country of Zaire's wealth, directly responsible for the 2nd Congo War by proxy of the USA

*Rafael Trujillo of Dominican Republic: capitalist; tens of thousands of people dissappeared during his regime)

*François "Papa Doc" Duvalier of Haiti: killed tens of thousands of people in his small island country, cult of personality, preferred to be worshipped as a god,
strongly anti-communist, strongly pro-market

*Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam: Catholic dictator, harassed/tortured/executed Buddhists and Buddhist clergy, Buddhists were arrested for practicing their religion in public, suspected communists were tortured and executed, hundreds of thousands were tortured and executed in capitalist purges.

*Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines: thousands murdered, thousands more "dissappeared", close to 120,000 tortured and imprisoned, billions of dollars stolen from the Filipino economy

*Anastazio Somoza Debayle of Nicaragua: autocratic ruler, he introduced the term "death squads" into the common vernacular; in 1975, tens of thousands were executed, tens of thousands more "dissappeared", hundreds of thousands were tortured and jailed in capitalist purges, elections suspended, mass malnutrition and disease, corruption, etc. etc.

[Comrade Marxist Bro]

This thread is difficult to answer because it is unclear what you mean by "failure."

[gorillafuck]

Millions upon millions upon millions dying in the third world every year from starvation.

[RedSonRising]

It's Capitalism that makes democracy fail, they are not ideologically intertwined or even compatible. The lack of democracy in the hierarchy of capitalism can be seen every day- every time you walk through the doors of your job, school, turn on the news, or make choices at the supermarket or mall. The illusion of choice is there on a large scale as you go to the polls and vote for your preferred elite-funded decision-maker every four years. Democracy works fine if everyone is a free individual in the same class as everyone else.

[durhamleft]

If you want an example of proportional representation failing look at the rise of Nazism in Germany in which Hitler was voted into power.

[Alaric]

USA man. Our economy is a roller coaster of fail with massive economic disparities and a mounting deficit, presided over by greedmongering sluts of money who deserve nothing but scorn and ruin. And to say democracy is a joke in the US is a vast, galling understatement, the Democrats are nothing but pseudo-populist capitalists and the republicans are brainless, jingoistic twatbags.

[McCroskey]

I understand your difficulty to come up with a good example. That is because there isn´t a capitalist country that has failed. All capitalist countries are successes. The reason for this is that you are searching for "failures" in the capitalist sense of the word. The idea of success for a capitalist country is to be open to the international markets and investors, so the top people in that country (ruling class), can control the resources and can modify the conditions of the majority to maximise their profits. In a capitalist society, you have to guarantee a steady regular consumption of tradeble goods from the population, in order to mantain the profitability of the market. The peculiarity of the capitalist system is that this comsumption is not measured on people, but on money, so if 40% of the country live in utter misery, as long as products are bought in acceptable quantities by the other 60% of the population (helped by marketing and burguoise control on the concept of "necessary goods"), they are still making profits, so the 40% of people living in misery and starving can simply be ignored. Communists and left wing tendencies in general consider that a system is successful when it can guarantee equality, and the basic needs of 100% of the population can be guaranteed, by intelligent planning of the economy towards the needs of the whole of the population. So, as far as capitalist "theory" is concerned, Cuba is not a successful country, because central planning to make sure that everybody lives with dignity, that there is universal healthcare, education, work, etc, is not profitable, it can't generate unlimited private profit, and it doesn´t allow someone to became rich at others' expense (which is a right guaranteed in capitalist idea of "democracy"). Thus it's a "failure". On the other hand, capitalist countries can guarantee that a bunch of people seeking to be filthy rich have the power to do so while deciding on job creation, social welfare, etc, depending on their rate of profit. Because the capitalist democracies allow for a percentage of the population living in misery to be ignored and seen as a "normal", "everyday" occurrance that is inherent to the world we live today, etc, then where is the failure? It's a success! Obviously in the capitalist sense of "success". Capitalists don't talk about human beings, they talk about statistics, so if in a country, 50% of the population have no food, and the other 50% eat twice as much as a normal person`s food consumption, statistically, in that country everyone eats properly. That's the main answer to your question: you cannot find a valid example because capitalists define failure in statistical terms, not in real human terms.

The capitalist idea of a successful country is one where the fact that any percentage of its citizens lives in misery and hunger does not interfere in the private profits that the ruling class can get. So, USA, with 50000 people a year dying from treatable diseases only for not having medical coverage, is a success, but Cuba, with universal care, is a failure. Guatemala, where big owners and transnational corporations can make huge profits despite a big chunk of the population living in a hell of hanger and violence, is a success, but Venezuela, where profits are limited by social welfare schemes, is a failure.

The problem to your question is, in my humble opinion, that when somebody asks you that question, you are trying to answer using their capitalist (deliberate or not) mindset. And the main problem is in the definition of "failure", so my advise is, next time, you ask them "what would you define as a "successful" country?", and then explain that your idea of a successful country is one that guarantees equality, real democracy, and access for everyone to their basic needs and rights, like education, healthcare, food, etc. And that you don't agree with their idea of a successful country, as a large part of the population are excluded from this success. Everything in this world has a class component to it. "Failure" in capitalist terms is not the same as "failure" in working class terms. The whole world is a big capitalist failure, seeing that it is necessary to have a third world in order to have a first world. As long as one single human being is suffering from social injustice, tell them to stick their "successful" society up their fucking arses.

[NecroCommie]

Chile under Pinochet is propably the "purest" example of Friedmanian free market capitalism. As it happens, it was plagued by massive unemployment, famine, poverty, human rights violations and so on... It must be noted though that on paper it looked nice for the capitalist. Production was up, banks were fat and wealthy, government was doing fine financially and so on.

Research the impact of the so called "Chicago boys" in order to see the direct influence of american intervention and laissez faire ideology on the Chilean economy.

Other latin american dictatorships of the period share similar stories of first having left wing victories in elections, then having a US backed military coup, and repeating the mistakes of Chile with the influence of the very same Chicago boys. These countries include Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil... Although I do not remember the Brazilian details.

[MarxSchmarx]

Of course there are many, many cases where capitalist "democracies" did not survive one crisis or the other (Germany, Chile, Sudan, El Salvador, Thailand, Greece).

As for currently existing capitalist states with relatively liberal elections, India might be a plausible example - the state has failed the vast majority of its citizenry there, despite being capitalist and democratic for several decades.

Another potential, but less obvious example, might be several nominally democratic west African nations - Liberia for example had the basic requirements for a democratic state yet became utterly dysfunctional fairly quickly. Senegal has been frequently democratic, comparatively stable and capitalist for decades but until recently has seen virtually no improvement in people's economic conditions. Israel and Iran are also problematic, but probably reasonable, examples, of basically "democratic" capitalist societies which have also failed considerable portions of the populations overwhich they rule. Also it is not hard to show how life has gotten worse in several former eastern bloc states which are basically democratic and capitalist, such as Kyrgyzstan and, to a lesser extent, Armenia. Finally several Pacific Island countries like Fiji remain basically dysfunctional.

You can also argue that democracy has failed to fix very serious social problems of capitalism in major societies like South Africa and Brazil, medium sized economies like the Philippines and Peru, as well as more minor economies like Namibia and Suriname.

To some extent this these limitations are a reflection of corruption and the legacies of colonialism, and not of capitalism or democracy as such. However, the failure of capitalism and somewhat regular elections to facilitate largescale development and the like are quite apparent globally.

[Red Brigade]

Just look at Russia as a failure of capitalism Yeltsin really fucked Russia up there's so many jobless people.

[Rusty Shackleford]

Germany's "Weimar Republic". 1919/20-1933

bourgeois democratic liberal capitalism failed, fascism took over.

i think Marx Schmarx meant that when he/she noted germany.

[piet11111]

Pakistan seems to hardly have any government in most of the country and seems the most likely country to qualify for "failed state" status.

Iceland is also a good one as its a "Western" state that got in their mess because of the banks.

[AK]

see Switzerland for a failure in democracy, they recently banned violent video games through direct democracy.
It's only a failure of democracy in the specific context of the voting population having been subjected to Bourgeois propaganda, ideals and analyses.
---
e.g. The capitalist (whose voice can reach the entire working class, thanks to the bourgeois media outlets) says that violent crime is the purely the fault of violent video games. This garbage gets spewed out the capitalist's mouth for a few years. The workers eventually agree.

The communist (whose voice is ridiculed and can barely reach the working class, thanks to decades of bourgeois propaganda and state oppression) says that there are many factors which cause or influence violent crime (such as murder and armed robbery, etc.) and they can be traced back to social inequality, capitalism or other class-based societies in some way.
---
Switzerland is not a failure of democracy (it is only partially direct-democratic - there is still representative "democracy"); true democracy isn't rigged by ruling classes above us in the social order.

[Rakhmetov]

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_Food.html

From Professor Chomsky's book Year 501: The Conquest Continues

The most phenomenal success story of all is Chile, with its "prospering free-market economy generated by Gen. August Pinochet" (Nash). That is an established truth, repeated everywhere. True, Pinochet was tough, but the "economic miracle" carried out by his Chicago Boys from 1974 to 1989 is there for all to see. To see, if they do not look too closely.
Pinochet's "miracle" turned into the "Chilean catastrophe" in under a decade, David Felix writes; virtually the entire banking system was taken over by the government in an attempt to salvage the economy, leading some to describe the transition from Allende to Pinochet as "a transition from utopian to scientific socialism, since the means of production are ending up in the hands of the state" (Felix), or "the Chicago Road to socialism." The militantly anti-socialist London Economist Intelligence Unit wrote that "the believer in free markets, President Pinochet, had a more comprehensive grip on the `controlling heights of the economy' than President Allende had dared dream of." The government-controlled portion of the economy in 1983 was comparable to the Allende years after the state took over failing enterprises, which it sold off at bargain rates to the private sector when they were resuscitated, along with efficient and profitable public enterprises that were generating 25 percent of the government's revenues, Joseph Collins and John Lear note. Multinational corporations did very nicely in the process, gaining control over large parts of the Chilean economy. Citing Chilean economists, James Petras and Steve Vieux report that "an estimated $600 million in subsidies were provided to purchasers in the 1986-1987 wave of privatizations," including "efficiently run, surplus-producing operations"; the operation is expected to reduce government surplus by $100 to $165 million during 1990-1995.
Until 1980, Chile's GDP per capita did not approach the 1972 (Allende) level, and investment was still below the late 1960s while unemployment was far higher. Per capita health care was more than halved from 1973 to 1985, setting off explosive growth in poverty-related diseases such as typhoid and viral hepatitis. Since 1973, consumption dropped 30 percent for the poorest 20 percent in Santiago and increased 15 percent for the top 20 percent. Private hospitals proudly display their high-tech equipment for the rich, while public ones offer mothers an appointment months away and medicines they cannot afford. College education, free for everyone under Allende, is now for the more privileged; and they will not be exposed to the "subversives" who have been purged, but offered "sociology, political science, and economics courses...more like religious instruction in the revealed truth of free markets and the red peril" (Tina Rosenberg), as in Brazil under the generals, or other places that come to mind. Macroeconomic statistics in the Pinochet years are generally below those for the preceding two decades; the average GNP growth from 1974-1979 was just over half that of 1961-1971, while per capita GNP fell 6.4 percent and per capita consumption 23 percent from 1972-1987. The capital city of Santiago is now "among the most polluted cities in the world," Nathaniel Nash observes, thanks to the free market Friedmanite model with its slogan "Produce, produce, produce," come what may -- what we denounce as the "Stalinist model" when there are points to be scored thereby. What "came" was "the daunting cost of cleaning up, ...and the daunting cost of not cleaning up" in a country with "some of the world's dirtiest factories," no regulations, severe pollution of water supplies, and general environmental ruin with much-feared consequences for the health of the population.
And thanks to the miracle, along with a little US help in "making the economy scream" under the Allende government, the proportion of the population that fell below the poverty line (minimum income required for basic food and housing) increased from 20 percent to 44.4 percent from 1970 to 1987.
"Not much of a miracle," Edward Herman comments.43


http://74.6.239.185/search/srpcache?ei=UTF-8&p=economic+miracle+chomsky+year+501&fr=yfp-t-701&u=http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=economic+miracle+chomsky+year+501&d=4827547659407418&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=dd23f6af,d8cabeda&icp=1&.intl=us&sig=My6cc8alU2Dv2Dndeu56Jw--

http://books.zcommunications.org/chomsky/year/year-contents.html

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6573660441809242121#