Socialist states tend to be stifled at birth by capitalists

The vast sums that governments have invested in research aid to find a vaccine swiftly is another story.

It is Michael’s comments on the failure of socialist states that has unusually prompted me to pen a reply. Throughout my lifetime of 70-plus years, any fledgeling “socialist” governments elected, “by the people for the people”, have been stifled at birth by the agents of the world’s so-called capitalist democracies.

The most glaring examples have been in South/Latin America where any election of a people’s democracy in any nation state was immediately undermined and destroyed by that bastion of democratic accountability, the USA’s CIA, alongside punitive trade sanctions.

In that respect, only Cuba has survived the US onslaught on their socialist state. Mainly because ordinary people still supported the basic concepts of their cause. This despite the efforts of the very vocal exiles in Miami and the USA, who abandoned Cuba for whatever reasons.

I fail to see how Michael can assert that “capitalism is still the best way to improve humanity” when so much of the world’s capital is owned and controlled by a tiny percentage of that humanity. The acquisition of ever more capital and the resultant power and influence over governments seems to be their overriding ambition. I don’t see this powerful clique ever relinquishing their hold on power, or their ability to avoid paying tax on their vast wealth, in the near future.

What do you think, Michael?

John Angus

Roslin

I ENJOY reading Michael Fry’s columns, which often make a rare attempt to defend right-wing economics in a way which our right-wing politicians often fail to do. In this week’s column he claims that only three countries are socialist and the rest are all capitalist. He is falling for the same simplistic black-and-white categorisations as many socialists he hopes to prove are wrong. In reality all countries have some markets, as government-run monopolies and others as competition-based capitalism and most have a mix of both.

Taking the vaccines he writes about, it’s very impressive that Pfizer and Moderna have created novel vaccines against Covid but both did so with massive government funding. The US and other governments pre-bought vaccine doses and paid for trials, which removed all the risk from the process.

It’s also impressive that AstraZeneca has created a vaccine that is far cheaper than those made by the US companies and does not require complex refrigeration. But that vaccine was made with the publicly owned and run Oxford University. Importantly, that vaccine is part of the WHO COVAX programme, meaning it will be distributed worldwide, a vital part of solving the pandemic. This is a real success for social capital.

He says he doesn’t think many people would want to live in Cuba, but I can assure him many people love living in Cuba. Cuba is also currently trialling two Covid vaccines, while keeping the incidence of Covid in the country at near-zero levels.

The economic arguments shouldn’t be if socialism or capitalism is better but which is most effective to be used in a given market, and the answer is usually some aspect of both.

Jonathan Riddell

Gorebridge

MICHAEL Fry doesn’t really understand capitalism still less socialism (Race for vaccine shows capitalism is still best way to improve humanity, November 24). Neither on their own are solutions and the best of these is a mix of the two, as something akin to the approach of the SNP.

Mr Fry’s problem is that he thinks that communist states are socialist, but they aren’t. They are invariably autocratic dictatorships, which because they do not have a hereditary monarchy or effective democracy actually run a form of capitalism but with even fewer oligarchs than we have in our Western cultures.

Our current democracy is being distorted by the rise of a capitalist dictatorship where the leaders shamelessly favour their wealthy chumocracy with lavish contracts paid for from our taxes and further borrowing also paid for by our

taxes. All the while expecting wider society to put up with what will be Austerity Mark II while the same oligarchs and chumocracy get to pay less and less tax. The public sector is not a drain on society, but the foundation and bedrock of society on which the oligarchs themselves are part of and feed off.

Without an effective society the wealthy wouldn’t have any wealth, wouldn’t have anything spend it on and certainly wouldn’t have people around to support them. This last equally applies to Mr Fry’s idea of socialist states.

None of these arguments mean that people shouldn’t have wealth or reap the benefits of their hard work, as after all that is what we all aspire to anyway, but that they have a responsibility to contribute fairly to the society in which they are a integral part. Denying the public sector fair reward for their labours while awarding themselves massive and completely disproportionate increases based on the labour of others is an obscenity. We are not all in it together if these disgraceful disparities are allowed to continue. If one part (the majority) of society is expected to suffer future austerity then so should the other.

Nick Cole (prospective NEC candidate)

Meigle, Perthshire