Socialism is dying

I'm not here to troll, so I'd like some serious responses. How does leftypol feel about the failure of nearly all left-wing revolutions in the past century? The USSR fell apart along with the eastern block, Maoist China embraced capitalism, North Korea went full retard, Venezuela is crumbling, Arab socialism died along with Saddam and Qaddafi, etc.. I'm not even going to mention ancom uprisings which were gone in a flash.

My point is there's very few socialist states on the planet anymore, social democracy and neoliberalism seem to be the preferred global economic systems by most nations. And elections aren't promising either. Bernie and Corbyn will most likely die of old age before they even get close to power, Syriza will get voted out in the next election.

So where do you go from here? What's the plan to energize revolutions in a world where most have food, online porn and endless entertainment? What could possibly motivate people to risk their life comforts to shake up the status quo, especially in the first and second world which have seen little war and poverty in recent decades.

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You are not going to get a proper answer to that here, they are just going to tell you that socialism has never existed and then you get some leftcoms hot take on Marx where they bend his theory in a way that apperently revolution will still happen in the center of capital despite that this should have already happened four times or so according to Marx.

Ecological collapse is coming whatever we do, and global capitalism will collapse or at least degenerate into corporate fascism. That is the time we must strike, or forever lose our opportunity.

maybe I'm wrong but most people DON'T have such luxuries like you stated. or if they do, they have to work their assess of for such luxuries. Class Consciousness is dead and it needs a revival. One of the ways I see this happening is by simply talking to people and trying to explain their economic situation.

of course this is very bare bones and Id love some other anons to help expand my post but hopefully you get the idea.

Hillary Clinton standing for president and 20 years of Blairism?
this actually doubles up because, as was noted for example in the Scottish referendum - "the poor don't care about the denomination of the money they don't have" - i.e. our societies aren't actually as comfortable as we pretend and the people within them are willing to break in surprisingly radical directions as a result. Lest you go "but that's just socdems and demagogues", remember just how shitty the 90s and 2000s were for politics then get back to me. The end of history may well be ending.

It's not about luxeries. For a socialist revolution to happen, the proletariat must be cornered. No matter how shitty the minimum wage is, no matter how low the welfare is, unless it's enough to make ends meet and have access to cheap, imported consumer goods, the status quo is the more comfortable alternative for a first world proletarian than a socialist revolution.

It just shows how the US needs to be destroyed, or at least engulfed in civil war, before socialism can take root in the rest of the world.

Every failed "socialist" state you mentioned has been Marxist-Leninist. Marxism-Leninism has a huge track record of failure, not socialism.

Also your troll graphic is wrong. People have been saying "USSR is not socialism" even way before the USSR started. See *My Disillusionment in Russia* (Goldman, 1923) and Kropotkin and Pannekoek's writings.

Finally, capitalists do this all of the time. Whenever an economy is going well, it's the wonders of capitalism. Then, when there's a crash, it's not real capitalism/crony capitalism.

Cuba and Bolivia seem to be doing fine, and DPRK renounced socialism during the 70's.
what fantasy land are you living in? They barely have any of this if it all.
that's falling apart
lel, disgruntled vets who lose their limbs in war, then get their benefits, job and house taken away haven't seen war. Wealth inequality is already the highest it's ever been in places like America and it's going to get worse.

You're just talking out of your ass, or you're rich and want others to see the world how you see it.

Just need to get one thing out of the way
None of these movements have had as their goal to abolish the capitalist mode of production. I know you're thinking "lmao not real socialism huh???" but it's actually pretty important. Bernie and Corbyn both use the word socialism but in reality don't wanna go further than capitalism with a welfare state ("social democracy"). Same is true of all the above mentioned "socialist" movements. They are all definitely left wing though, so they're relevant to the slightly broader discussion about how the entire left is dying.

However, the USSR, Maoist China, North Korea and ancom revolutions have actually had as their goal to abolish capitalism, and have all eventually failed. The reason for their eventual failure is both internal problems and mistakes, and outside pressures. The thing is, even before there had ever been a socialist revolution it was understood that it would be almost impossible for an "island of socialism" to survive in a world where to dominant mode of production is capitalism. It was always ultimately about replacing capitalism with socialism as the dominant mode of production globally, like capitalism replaced feudalism. I think that's how you should look at it. It took a long ass time for capitalism to replace the previous mode of production and it will take a long time for capitalism to be replaced by something else.

But I kinda agree with you. The communist movement has been absolutely dead in the first world for a long time. I've considered giving up all hope for the communist left to ever be relevant again and just become a social democrat, since social democracy seems to be gaining some support lately, especially in the US where it had been dead for a long time. I haven't lost all hope yet, though. Recent developments suggest that things have stopped getting better and started getting worse in the western countries and things like that tend to make room for changes in the political climate.

One other thing:
most people in the world actually don't.