Yaron Brook

Yes, Communism works. Yes, it worked in USSR. Yes, it works in Cuba. Yes, it works in free Korea. Yes, it works in China. Yes, it works in Laos. Yes, it works in Vietnam. Yes, Communism works every single time it's tried. And anyone telling you otherwise is either lying or repeating a lie they aren't willing enough or smart enough to sniff out. Let's go over how well it works: China: 🇨🇳1. The largest poverty reduction in recorded history. China went from widespread mass poverty to eliminating extreme poverty by the World Bank's international standard. The World Bank recognizes that China had eradicated extreme poverty by 2020. 2. Transformation from a devastated agrarian country into an industrial superpower. In 1949 China was overwhelmingly rural, poor, war-ravaged and technologically backward. Today it possesses an enormous manufacturing base spanning steel, shipbuilding, machinery, electronics, chemicals, automobiles, telecommunications and increasingly advanced technology. 3. An extraordinary increase in human longevity. Life expectancy was roughly 35–40 years around the Revolution; World Bank data now puts it around 78 years. 4. Mass literacy and education. The revolution inherited enormous illiteracy, particularly in the countryside. China subsequently created a nationwide educational system reaching a population of more than a billion people. 5. Infrastructure on a gigantic scale. China constructed the world's largest high-speed rail system, huge electrical grids, ports, metros, highways and modern cities—effectively physically integrating a continental-sized country. 6. Technological independence. A country once dependent on foreign industrial technology now builds nuclear reactors, satellites, supercomputers, advanced telecommunications equipment, commercial aircraft and its own space station, and has carried out increasingly sophisticated lunar missions. 7. The Revolution itself created the foundation for the later boom. This gets lost when Chinese development is reduced to "Deng introduced markets." The Mao period unified the country, redistributed land, greatly expanded literacy and basic health care, created heavy industry and infrastructure, and developed a technically educated population. Beyond the fact that markets do not equal an entire society revolving around the accumulation of a handful of aristocrats, Reform and Opening Up operated upon this already transformed social foundation, rather than upon the China of 1949. China may be the single strongest example because we can watch the entire historical trajectory: semi-colonial agrarian catastrophe → revolutionary state → basic industrialization → mass education/infrastructure → advanced industrial economy. 🇨🇺 Cuba's accomplishments are remarkable because we're talking about a small Caribbean country with limited natural resources situated only 90 miles from the country of a ruling class that is actively trying to destroy it. 1. Universal health care. Cuba constructed a nationwide primary-care system with unusually strong preventive medicine. WHO material has specifically highlighted how Cuba achieved health outcomes resembling substantially wealthier countries. 2. Near-universal literacy. The 1961 Literacy Campaign mobilized enormous numbers of young people to teach throughout the countryside. WHO historical material reports literacy around 96.7%, compared with roughly a quarter of Cubans being illiterate before the revolution. (To say nothing of comparing it to Cleveland, where I'm from, today. Which has much less literacy.) 3. Developed-country-level longevity despite much lower income. World Bank data puts Cuban life expectancy at about 78 years, approximately the same headline figure as China. 4. Medical internationalism. Cuba has deployed doctors and medical personnel across Latin America, Africa and elsewhere during disasters, epidemics and chronic shortages of physicians. 5. Medical and biotechnology capacity. For a country of Cuba's size and income, its ability to maintain indigenous pharmaceutical, vaccine and biotechnology research is particularly notable. 6. Education became effectively universal. Free education, mass rural schooling and expanded university access fundamentally changed the educational composition of Cuban society. The Cuban achievement isn't "Cuba became richer than America." It didn't. It's that a relatively poor country deliberately converted a remarkable proportion of its limited social surplus into health, education and human development - all while basically being under siege. 🟥The Soviet transformation is arguably even more historically dramatic. 1. Industrialization at extraordinary speed. The USSR transformed a predominantly agrarian former empire into one of the world's two principal industrial powers within several decades. That meant enormous expansion of: - steel - electricity - machine tools - mining - chemicals - railroads - automobiles and tractors - aviation - heavy engineering 2. Defeating Nazi Germany. Whatever judgment one makes about Soviet politics, this is impossible to remove from the historical balance sheet. The USSR bore the overwhelming bulk of the European land war against Nazi Germany and suffered roughly 27 million deaths in the process. The Red Army went from the catastrophe of 1941 to taking Berlin in 1945. 3. Mass literacy. The USSR transformed a society containing enormous illiterate and semi-literate rural populations into a highly educated industrial society. 4. Creation of mass technical education. It produced engineers, scientists, physicians and skilled industrial workers on an enormous scale. 5. First satellite in space — Sputnik, 1957. 6. First human in space — Yuri Gagarin, 1961. That achievement deserves more emphasis than it normally gets. A country whose enormous peasant population had lived under the Romanov monarchy only a few generations earlier put the first human being into space. 7. Major achievements in science. Mathematics, theoretical physics, aerospace engineering, chemistry and other scientific disciplines became areas of Soviet strength. 8. Enormous expansion of women's participation in public life. Women entered education, medicine, science, engineering and industrial employment on a scale radically different from prerevolutionary Russia. 9. Rapid reconstruction after WWII. Much of the USSR's most economically important territory had been devastated. Thousands of towns and enormous quantities of industrial infrastructure had been destroyed. Yet the Soviet Union reconstructed itself and emerged as a superpower. So the Soviet development is (roughly): 1917: backward, overwhelmingly agrarian former empire - 1945: defeats Nazi Germany - 1949: atomic power - 1957: first artificial satellite - 1961: first human being in space. That's an astonishing 44-year transformation. 🇻🇳 Vietnam deserves a lot more attention than it usually gets too. 1. Defeated French colonial rule. 2. Survived and defeated the enormously more powerful United States in a devastating war. 3. Reunified the country. 4. Subsequently produced one of the world's major development success stories. The World Bank itself describes Vietnam's transformation from one of the world's poorest countries into a middle-income economy as a "remarkable development success story." Poverty fell from roughly 60% in the early 1990s (after the fall of USSR, which was the largest trading partner in the Communist bloc) to extremely low levels today. If we use the World Bank's $3/day 2021-PPP measure, it was only 1.6% in 2022. 5. Near-universal electrification. Only about 14% of households had electricity in 1993; by 2019 virtually all did. 6. Universal primary education. 7. Huge improvements in health. Life expectancy reached about 75 years, while infant mortality fell from 32.6 per thousand in 1993 to 12.1 in 2023. National health insurance covered about 93% of the population in 2023. 8. Industrialization. Vietnam has become an important global manufacturing center rather than remaining locked into its historical position as an impoverished agrarian colony. 🇱🇦 Laos Laos receives barely attention because of its size (frankly, most people in the US forget it exists), but the baseline matters enormously: it inherited an extremely poor, overwhelmingly rural country devastated by war. Life expectancy increased from roughly 54 years to around 69, while under-five mortality has fallen dramatically. Even during recent economic difficulties, the national poverty rate declined from 24.6% in 2012 to about 15% in 2024, according to the World Bank. We generally get taught to look at this stuff incorrectly. Causation gets removed. Comparisons get jumbled. We judge everything against a mystical USA where everything good is because capitalism, and everything bad because Communism. I don't think I need to tell anyone how childish that is. And how it doesn't properly reflect the actual, real world. To get something reflective of the real world, we must compare societies to the material conditions inherited by their revolutions. Not to the ruling class of a nation attacking them economically. Tsarist Russia was predominantly agrarian and extraordinarily poor. Pre-revolutionary China had endured imperial domination, civil war, invasion and mass rural poverty. Cuba inherited severe inequality, rural deprivation and substantial illiteracy. Vietnam endured colonialism followed by decades of catastrophic warfare. And yet Communist-led development produced: Russia: peasant empire -> industrial/space superpower. China: semi-colonial agrarian country -> world's industrial giant. Cuba: poor plantation economy -> unusually high literacy, medical capacity and longevity. Vietnam: devastated colony -> rapidly industrializing middle-income economy. That is probably the strongest empirical argument that we need to emphasize. The recurring achievement wasn't simply redistribution of an existing stock of wealth. It was the deliberate creation of new productive and human capacities—industry, engineers, electrical grids, hospitals, schools, scientific institutions, transportation networks and an educated workforce—on a scale that the old social orders had demonstrably failed to produce. All that is to say that Communism WORKS. And anyone telling you it doesn't is lying.