[2/2] What really made the former USSR actually collapse, was the neoliberal shock therapy applied after its illegal dissolution, supervised and directed by “prestigious experts” from MIT and by the IMF. There, the GDP fell as dramatically as it does in war times, and the situation was so dire that the population loss due to alcoholism, suicide, lowering standards of life and healthcare, missing births, depression, unemployment, etc. are numbered in millions of lives lost, and many millions more ruined. That’s the moment when good’ol capitalism auctioned the entire country to a few corrupt oligarchs because the priority was to privatize everything as quickly as possible, and which led to the modern fascist oligarchic kleptocratic government in Russia. But these millions of lives lost and ruined by capitalism don’t count, do they? These were somehow a necessity, unlike Holodomor, a famine in a preindustrial society.

Europe has achieved the highest quality of life in the world not by a planned economy, but by mediating the inherent problems of capitalism (monopolism, elitism, class warfare) and complete socialism (government overreach, lack of freedom, lack of democracy).

Europe has achieved the highest quality of life through a combination of imperialism and resource, wealth and labour extraction from underdeveloped countries (look up the concept of unequal exchange if you’re interested), and last century’s worker movements which achieved significant improvements in the quality of life of people, and obviously due to technical and scientific progress. But these worker victories were achieved DESPITE capitalism, not because of it.

And the technical and scientific improvements that happen under capitalism, funnily enough, are funded mostly by public research, in which universities and pulic institutions will do the brunt of the research, and then a few companies will cherrypick whatever they deem profitable, study a bit further, patent it, and then sell it to the rest of the world at exorbitant prices, as we see blatantly and glaringly with medicine and pharma. I’ll remind you which country in the world was the first to double-vaccinate 95%+ of its population against COVID: Cuba. With state-funded research, and state-funded vaccine production, with the goal of vaccinating as many as possible as soon as possible, instead of the objective of maximizing profit. Or just look on how much governmetns spent funding big pharma to develop the vaccines. This progress isn’t BECAUSE of the private sector and capitalism, it’s DESPITE it.

hould include some international cooperation, and if it isn’t possible (and seems it isn’t)

This was already obvious to Lenin in his 1917 work “Imperialism: the highest stage of Capitalism”, where he extensively criticises the idea of “ultraimperialism” or long-term collaboration between different capitalist world powers as impossible (again a successful prediction more than 100 years ago, how lucky is that?).

Corruption is indeed something that must be fought, and it wouldn’t disappear in a socialist society, as it didn’t USSR (where you could get anything for favors if you knew the right people).

Obviously corruption happens everywhere, but it’s a very different problem systemically when the means of production are owned collectively. Because, suddenly there are no private companies with the private interest of maximizing profit at all costs. So you don’t have the car factory paying the goverment official to be able to dump waste in the river, or the construction firm paying the local town hall to requalify their lands and allow for a construction plan. Embezzling and favors still exist within socialism, but without a profit motive, many other types of corruptions disappear. If there’s no wealthy ruling class whose existence and profit depends on the exploitation of the working class, suddenly there’s no wealthy powerful people doing everything legally and illegally possible to maximize their profits.

The 20th century period across Europe was indeed a rough one, many countries went fascist (Spain, Portugal, Russia

Russia went fascist? Excuse me? The USSR is the ONLY country in Europe which supported the Republicans in Spain in their fight against ACTUAL fascism, while Britain and France looked at the Nazis and the Italian Fascists supplying weapons to the reactionaries and literally bombing republican Spain, and claimed “best we can do is non-intervention and a volunteer corps” (brigadas internacionales, my utmost respect to all who participated in them)

Still, I don’t think it’s a novel example. And it’s also not an example against the current state of Europe, it’s an example of the inequality and volatility of European countries at the time.

Again, you’re failing to have a proper understanding of the reasons for fascism to exist. Fascism is a reactionary movement which takes place when the wealthy elites of a country see themselves threatened by the mobilization of the working class. It happened like this in Spain, it happened like this in Germany, it happened like this in Italy, and it attempted to happen in Russia as well (look up what the Black Hundreds were, and how Bolsheviks eliminated them). One of the most explicit purposes of fascism is to eliminate socialism and anarchism from society, for the most part through violent means. Fascism isn’t a consequence of “instability”, it’s a response to socialist movements and worker coordination.

The idea behind representative democracy is that I cannot do the work of a law-maker, deal with tax policy details while also living a life, so I elect someone whom I think I can trust.

Elected representatives aren’t a bad idea in itself, they’re just proven not to be democratic in western capitalist systems, in the sense that they don’t make decisions that represent the majority, but instead make decisions which represent a wealthy minority. Again, how many people in the EU wanted to apply austerity policy after the 2008 crisis, whose consequences we suffer to this very day? If you want an example of what real democracy looks like to me, I recommend you have a look at Pedro Ross’ book “How the workers parliaments saved the Cuban Revolution”, which details how after the dismantling of the USSR, Cuba was immersed in a deep economic crisis after losing its main trade partner, and how democratic participation by millions of people in the island was capable of saving people from the worst of the crisis.

If I have no trust in the system, I will go to the streets, as it was always the case. And yes, in this sense, we hold a lot of thankfulness for those that went to the streets before us to bring us to where we are now.

You hold them in high esteem, but then proceed to basically insult their legacy when you say that living conditions in western Europe are due to capitalism, instead of honoring the worker movements of the past century.