Social safety nets were stronger and income inequality was lower, largely thanks to the post-war economy retaining a lot of its state planning towards full employment, and largely due to the expansion in safety nets under FDR as a response to the Soviet Union’s massive improvement in safety nets. Time was good, if you were a hetero white man. The US was also emerging as the clear imperial hegemon.

Reactionary rhetoric tries to turn the clock backwards, to when the contradictions of society weren’t as sharpened. It’s usually a petite bourgeois conception, but can also be a part of other classes. It’s the opposite of progressive movement, trying to move the clock forward into the next mode of production, socialism in the case of the US.

During the space race, sure, from what I can find.

That what? That the US sent animals into space?

American and Russian scientists utilized animals—mainly monkeys, chimps and dogs—in order to test each country’s ability to launch a living organism into space and bring it back alive and unharmed.

Per NASA.

Am I making up that the US sent animals into space? What claim do you think I’m making up? I already linked my source 2 comments ago.

Both sides sent animals into space, and many didn’t return. Animal testing in particular isn’t something unknown to science, nor was it done out of intentional cruelty nor for the purpose of profits, like the cosmetics industry. I feel like you’re narrowing in on something that ultimately isn’t an equivalent comparison, especially when compared to the scale of the food industry and its systematized mass brutality every second of every day.

The world’s bravest and first true cosmonaut.

Not actually true, both sides used animal testing.

Spaceflight rockets are ICBMs, if we are being pedantic. The space program was the civilian-facing part of the broader rocketry programs.

Either way, if we exclude them, it is still true, but you can also measure by ratio. It just goes to show that you can manipulate real data to be presented in any way you want, and add or subtract context as needed for your angle.

Nedelin was a part of the millitary rocketry program, not the space program. If you want to include Nedelin, then the ICBM disasters in the US should also be included. The space programs and ICBM programs were very closely related on both sides, but if we strictly keep it to the space program the soviets were safer.

You can certainly blur the space race with missile development as they were intimately tied on both sides, and if you want to include it then the deaths from the US ICBM disasters need to be included as well, but I do think it’s a bit absurd to uncritically report that 100+ people died in Nedelin when official numbers revealed it to be 54. Plus, wherever you sourced this from is clearly generally biased against the soviets beyond the scope of this report.

Way more were semt by both sides.

The US doesn’t have the industrial capacity, there’s a difference between currency and the actual physical industrialization needed to maintain a proxy war.

Yep, the soviet space program took fewer lives overall.

The soviet space program took fewer lives than the US’s program, yet the US constantly made it seem like it was the soviets that didn’t care about human lives.

Socialism has a better track record than capitalism, but either way, my point is that necessary systemic changes need socialism for them to happen. Socialism isn’t a promise, it’s a mode of production. Further, countries like the PRC are rapdily electrifying, at the top of solar panel production and infrastructure initiatives, and combatting desertification, that’s the power of a publicly driven economy.

Why does political content need to be “new” or “fresh?” A lot of the latest events in the world are new developments on very old struggles that have been discussed for a very long time, something fundamentally changing that calculus is rare.

Yes? I don’t really follow what you mean, here.

What do you mean?

To make things short, Marx never observed imperialism being used to bribe the proletariat out of revolution in developed countries. Imperialism is what caused revolution outside of the global north (generally). Imperialism, like capitalism, is a decaying system, though, and has merely bought the bourgeois imperialists more time before revolution. That’s why we will see revolution in the global north, imperialism is in its death throes and the working class within the global north is becoming more radicalized as the bribes run dry.

The disparity is actually skyrocketing moreso now, and steadily has been for the last century. The New Deal, as a response to the USSR, did manage to temporarily lower inequality, but corporations weren’t nearly as monopolized. The status we are in today took a long time, and for hundreds of years, disparity was actually much lower than England and other countries that had started capitalism in earnest. The semi-yeoman worker in the US had bargaining power and land, which slowed down tge process of disparity.

None of this is in defense of settler-colonialism. I bring it up because it points to the class character of the US, and helps explain why it’s so far-right and reactionary, as well as why leftist radicalization is increasing rapidly.