Arguments I hear are usually something along the lines of "it's going to destroy the economy", "it destroys jobs", "I'm rich and they'll tax me a lot" (said by people who aren't actually rich). Also, confusing social democracy (Germany, Nordic countries) with what the Soviet Union and China were doing.
Yeah, capitalism has conspired to make us believe, as a group, that resources are somehow incredibly limited while a small cabal of elites gobble up insane quantities of resources for themselves while depriving the majority of those same resources.
Pure altruistic socialism would evenly redivide those resources, giving to those who need what they need.
It is anathema to capitalism, but it is the only society that would actually work in a post-scarcity world, which we might actually be approaching, assuming that the capitalists don't destroy it first.
Oh it has always been will. Let‘s not pretend like capitalism has the better logistics and therefore a better world wouldn‘t have been possible sooner. That’s only romanticizing capitalism.
I think the estimate I've seen that tries to compute this out has people showering once every 3 weeks and using the internet for ~1 hour a week. Is this the post-scarcity lifestyle you had in mind, am I confused, or have we tipped past the point of being able to do much better?
even before modern logistics we were broadly post-scarcity, that's kind of the whole reason why humans are so successful, after we invented stone tools and fire we had basically won.
I think very few of the ruling elite would support a post scarcity world. Elon Musk keeps talking about it the most and he is one of the guys I trust the least to intentionally bring it about.
A socialist society where everyone is more or less equal. Yeah, Musk and his company of wannabe trillionaires are going to fight that to their last breath.
I think this is the biggest one. It's the word, but it doesn't matter which word is used. All the propaganda machines will fuck with it as quick as they can.
Also, confusing social democracy (Germany, Nordic countries) with what the Soviet Union and China were doing.
And unfortunately this conflation was also exploited by the Soviet Union and CCP to point their state capitalism as the only alternative to (neo)liberal capitalism.
People don't know what socialism actually means because of propaganda...
you can ask someone who is against "socialism" whether they like it by talking about elements of it without explicitly mentioning the word "socialism" and they will probably agree with it.
seriously, do this! it's extremely fucking depressing!
Get a list of policies for a socialist party, read it to someone, then at the end say "and that's the policies the socialist party want to implement" and watch the killswitch in their brain activate.
The people who hate it are those who think themselves better than their peers. They think they deserve more than their peers, and that socialism transfers their superior effort to the benefit of their inferiors.
They see socialism not as everyone helping everyone, but as they, the successful being forced to support them, the lazy.
Think about free public libraries. They're fairly popular, and not controversial outside of fringe libertarian types and assholes. People like that you can borrow books and other media for free. Usually there's a bit of a backlash if there's a movement to shut down libraries or limit their services.
Imagine if free public libraries didn't exist, and someone tried to invent them today. People would be having screaming fits about communism. It's stealing from the authors. it's ruining publishing. We don't need tax dollars for this when we have amazon. Blah blah blah.
It's the same with other things we could socialize. health care is a privatized nightmare. If we somehow got a public option in, eventually people would start reflexively defending it.
So what I'm saying is many people don't really have a set of internally consistent beliefs. They just don't like change.
Such a good point. Every once in a while I come across a particular social policy in a European country that someone from there is astonished doesn't exist in other countries and on paper you think this would be great but you would know it would be such a hard sell in your / other countries. I think on a city / regional level there is a lot more about looking what other places are doing well top adopt them but don't see it as much on an international level (outside of the EU anyway)
People often confuse socialism with communism. The confusion is deliberate by a lot of right wing propaganda. When talking about socialism with Americans, you have to explain to them that the fire department is an example of socialism. As are other public services, like roads, police, libraries, and some utilities.
Of course in America, some people think profit is more important, so they are doing everything they can to privatize services. For example, in Texas they are slowly killing public education, and toll roads have taken over normal highway construction.
As I mentioned, people are being conned and scared of the word so that they will elect people will be replacing what remains of public services with private ones.
There are exceptions even here in Texas. My city has no toll roads and has a publicly owned power company.
We don't have private power companies in this county. What are they gonna compete on? Price? They would buy the power from the public company. Service? The service is honestly good.
I dream of moving to a different. State but I thank my lucky stars I grew up in this city.
But also, communism isn't bad either.
It's basically advanced socialism, not whateverthefuck stalin and mao were doing. It's like how the full name of the nazi party was "national-socialist worker's party", obviously the nazis aren't actually socialists, the only reason they use that word is because people at the time actually wanted socialism.
Fire departments aren't socialism, they're social services. Socialism is when the whole economy is social services. Social-ism. A capitalist economy with lots of social services (like Norway) is called a social democracy.
Socialism is great as a concept, basically means putting people before capital. Capitalism is the reverse. Even the staunchest capitalist countries practice socialism to some degree. Raw capitalism would be hell.
It’s the same with communism, where the workers were supposed to own the means of production, which means money wouldn’t gravitate around a few ones. Even the staunchest communist countries didn’t practice real communism, deforming it into feudalism.
TL;DR: Socialism is a great concept, just consider that everything we hear about it comes from a culture ruled by capitalists.
Socialism has several different lineages. All of which used different strategies for accomplishing socialism (workers own the means of production) and maybe eventually communism (stateless, moneyless, classless society). (I often use "socialism" interchangeably as both the movement for and the desired end state, which I think Marx used to do, too, iirc).
The Marxist-Leninist/Maoist version is what most folks are familiar with - create a "vanguard party", leverage that political power to take over the government in a workers' revolution, and then use the power of the state to accomplish socialism and eventually transition to communism. That strategy was how we got the USSR and Communist China, loosely speaking. How much that strategy actually fulfilled the promises of socialism/communism is up for debate.
But there were other socialist movements in other areas of the world. The European version tends to be either democratic socialism (use standard political power to ease a transition to socialism, sans revolution) or social democracy (use government to implement the desired economic egalitarianism without the precise goal of the workers owning the means of production). (I hope I got those right, I often get them mixed up.)
I would agree with you that no European state has reached the end state of socialism or communism, as they're still pretty dang capitalist, but a good number of EU states are a lot closer to the promises of socialism than the rest of the world, as far as I understand things.
Socialism is great as a concept, basically means putting people before capital. Capitalism is the reverse.
That's not even slightly true, but human nature makes it end up being that way. We're real good at coming up with isms incompatible with our nature, so they never work as planned, often with irony too.
As a species we have evolved with certain traits. These traits are the reason we are the top.species. Try as we may, with society, we cannot just blink these traits away,; no living thing can evolve that fast.
So whenever someone comes up with a great idea of how things could be in society, they often ignore our species' traits of ruthless ambition, persistent survival, tribalistic loyalty, etc. It is like when people get border collies thinking they'll be great pets, but then realise their true nature and how much work and.effort has to be put into them every day to get.the most.out of them.
Idiots think we're somehow different and beyond the other animals, but we're not. How society is today is exactly how we are. If someone wants to change it, they need to factor human nature, else it won't work.
The ultra rich have successfully convinced a lot of people that they, too, could become ultra rich some day - but there's no place for ultra rich under socialism.
Then further, a lot of people have been convinced that only the very very poor would be better off and everyone else would be worse off. That is of course also untrue.
The hate against socialism is the idea that someone who doesn't work as hard as you, gets the same benefits as you, and that's not fair.
Something like that could never work under capitalism. Everybody knows that rich people work extremely hard to be rich. I work hard, and I'll be rich some day too.
It's propaganda. The reality is that much of our system is already Socialized. In fact, some of the best stuff in our society is Socialist.
Schools, libraries, fire departments, police, military, parks, roads, etc. are all Socialist concepts at their foundation.
Fire Departments used to work by subscription. A building owner would pay a local fire brigade for protection. He would get a small cast iron badge that he'd place next to his doorway. If a building caught fire, the fire brigade would show up, and if there was a a "fire mark," they'd fight the fire. If there wasn't a fire mark, they'd let it burn down. That is a strictly Capitalist concept.
It was eventually decided that public tax money would be used to protect EVERYBODY from fire, which is a Socialist concept. The old subscription-based fire brigade concept evolved into the predatory insurance industry, a Capitalist concept which has been preying upon us ever since.
Like most political philosophies, Socialism has its positives and negatives. Any political philosophy, taken to its most extreme ends, would be a disaster. The best governments take the most successful parts of any philosophy, and rejects the bad parts. A pure Democratic/Republican/Socialist government would be terrible, but a combination of the best elements, could be really great.
MAGA is not a legitimate political philosophy. it's core tenets include treason, corruption, racism, bigotry, violence, pedophilia, misogyny, intolerance, ignorance, and incompetence. MAGA is a criminal enterprise disguising itself as a legitimate political movement, and it's influence must be fully purged from our government and our society.
Socialism threatens capitalists -> Capitalists spend money in media and politics to ensure support for capitalism by spreading fear about socialism -> People are scared of socialism.
It's really that simple honestly. I generally hate oversimplifications but there's not that much more to it
Years of propaganda from oligarchs, their think tanks and their propaganda spreaders. This has been an attack for many decades but especially after WW2 during the red scare and then after 1970 when the Powell Memo was issued. That is the origin of all of our messes, including Reagan and Trump.
Many of the same right wing think tanks are from the same oligarchs from decades ago and/or their heirs. Think Timothy Mellon or Birch Society (Koch Brother father). Even then, there was “the business plot” where the oligarchs of the 1930s wanted fascism because of the threat FDR had to their wealth and power.
If you're going to repeat yourself, I will too. "Capitalism, at its best, benefits a few people (the capitalists) and screws over everyone else (the workers)."
You already said to ask about the ideal. So why bring up Bulgaria? Quit arguing with yourself.
Again, we agree. Your ideal is that anyone has a chance in capitalism. Great. And everyone else, well, they get screwed. That's your logic. Fortunately, billions of people around the world think we can do better than that, and that treating others well is a moral imperative.
Authoritarian socialism, or socialism from above, is an economic and political system supporting some form of socialist economics while rejecting political pluralism. As a term, it represents a set of economic-political systems describing themselves as "socialist" and rejecting the liberal-democratic concepts of multi-party politics, freedom of assembly, habeas corpus, and freedom of expression, either due to fear of counter-revolution or as a means to socialist ends.
That ideology does not respect & protect inherent individual rights & liberties recognized since the Enlightenment.
Authoritarian socialism is hated for abusing human rights, and it's often incorrectly assumed that all socialism is authoritarian.
That explains the hatred.
Kinds of socialism that respect & protect human rights do exist, however, and they have a better claim to a system of self & mutual care.
There's little reason to hate those.
It would seem the common problem in any political system is always authoritarianism? Is there historical case where a king or similar actually helped the people that I can study more?
I mean i'd imagine there were quite a lot of kings that were much like the modern king of e.g. Norway, where they really don't do much other than PR and rubber stamping decisions.
Any ruler needs support from other powerful people, and since crowns were usually hereditary that means sometimes the new king won't be a miserable sack of shit.
I mean put yourself in the position of some medieval prince whose dad was poisoned by an advisor or something, yeah sure you can live in luxury but it's fucking risky, so if you don't just opt to flee 5 countries over in hope of peace you'd probably try to be as inoffensive as possible and just gently nudge things in a non-shitty direction whenever possible.
So granted, not "good" kings, but considering how many rulers have and continue to be absolutely horrible i'd be pretty happy to live under a king who does nothing..
People dislike socialism because they often feel like their hard work and effort does not get fairly rewarded. Why would you work your whole life away to become a doctor and save lives when someone else wastes their time lost in vice.
Well you're 5 you piece of shit and your efforts at not pissing the bed have been pretty minimal at best. But do you still eat? Do you have a roof and a bed to piss all over? Who cleans that mess every time? People hate socialism because it sucks to be the provider. It also sucks to suffer. And in life we often forget this. We forget it takes all of us. We forget what it is to be helpless. We forget those who provided for us. And we get angry when we have to provide for others when we feel so left out of the party.
In short dont forget. Don't forget what you have been given and don't forget to share. Dumb kids.
To me the hate is quite simple to understand. Socialism means that the extremely rich will be worse off financially. The 1% have an unnatural love for money, and the idea of being less wealthy for the greater good is totally abhorrent to them.
For generations they've been able to demonise socialism using their disproportionate influence through the media, to the extent that the majority of the population now fear it.
We've really not moved on that far intellectually from the witch trials. People are collectively ignorant and fearful, and with the right nudges are easy to control to the point where they'll literally vote against their own good. They are the proverbial Turkeys voting for Christmas and I honestly don't know how we will ever get past it.
Thankfully, we're now reaching a turning point where PragerU will be used to teach directly in schools, letting kids know why socialism is bad and capitalism is good. Wait, that's the opposite of what we want, fuck!
We’ve really not moved on that far intellectually from the witch trials.
Cognitive biases seem to be unavoidable. Even if you are well-educated about a particular bias, it often takes reflection (internally or externally motivated) to recognize it in your decisions / behavior.
Fallacious reasoning is often just as good at convincing an audience, which is one of the reasons they are still in use despite many or most being documented and named in ancient times.
Individual training in critical thinking skills can help, but theocrats (in specific) and authoritarians (in general) spend a lot of effort making sure that public education is robbed of that. But, that's not enough to "intellectually move on"; even with that training, bias occurs. So, we have to build systems for bias detection and remediation if we want a just global society.
Yes, it's the red scare, but most translations of Karl Marx do use the word "socialism" for the state he described as a precursor to capitalism. And the name of the Russian communist federation was generally translated as "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."
Because some of the worst dictators of all time said they were communist and socialist, despite dictatorship being fundamentally antithetical to both.
Then a bunch of idiots watched a dictatorship, the USSR, burn up their economy with a space and arms race, so now they think socialism kills economic progress. It wasn't that the USSR didn't invest properly in the populace, or infrastructure, or that they were fundamentally a kleptocracy with a massive military, it's that they called themselves socialist. That's what killed them.
Note that the reason they called themselves socialists and communists is because a lot of people at the time considered this good, it's like how many countries these days have "democratic republic" in their name, despite obviously being neither of those things.
Evil people can't call themselves evil, they have to lie about what they are for people to get tricked into accepting them.
It's mostly thanks to USA propaganda and the whole "Red Scare" that began in the 1950s
I mean doesn't it mean a system where the people take care of themselves and neighbors?
Not really, the system is supposed to be about a government and economy that cares about the well being of its people first, such that several wealth distribution methods would be applied to ensure minimal inequality.
What happens if capitalism works perfectly? A few people have great lives (the capitalists) and everyone else is screwed (the workers). That's the entire point of capitalism.
What happens if socialism works perfectly? Everyone has decent lives.
(What you wrote about corruption is true, of course, but your first claim was simply false.)
If capitalism works perfectly, by design- anyone has a fair shot.
I don't believe "fairness" is a defining characteristic of Capitalism. Can you please provide a definition of Captialism so that I can be sure we are talking about the same thing?
You tried to compare socialism at its best against capitalism at it worst.
I think you are confused. I don't believe I've tried to make a comparison between socialism and capitalism in this thread. Perhaps that was someone else?
Actually you seem to agree with me. Capitalism gives people a chance to become the capitalists, I agree ... and that screws over everyone else. That's your view of perfection.
I think that's a shitty world to try to build. I think it's selfish and destructive. But you seem to like it... How sad.
Try talking to a person who grew up in a primarily black neighbourhood in America. Or a poor person who had to skip school so they could work to afford food.
Almost every rich person now had rich parents and rich grandparents. Even the "self-made" rich people had access to opportunities not available to poor people.
It's easy to risk everything to try starting your own business when failure means going back to your parents for food and housing. It's so much harder to justify trying when failure means starving on the street, and not trying means continuing to live in a house.
Capitalism does not give people a fair shot. It takes wealth from people with capital to give to people with capital, and by necessity, oppresses people to stop them from gaining capital.
The vast majority of people simply do not have a fair shot.
People who defended capitalism at this point in time are in constant denial. Capitalism only works well for everyone in highly competitive new fields/markets.
Once the monopoly sets in it no longer serves a useful function to the rest of society but does enrich a minority.
An awful lot of capitalistic practice is rent seeking nowadays. It doesn't add any value and instead creates it out of thin air.
There has never been an effective small businesses capitalism economy that every capitalists uses to justify capitalism. It always ends up as game of monopoly.
The issue is also that people seem to be quite polarised in their groupthink. Socialism and capitalism aren't mutually exclusive, and they are only destructive if they are adopted as a pure ideology which disallows any discussion of the possibilities of the other system. In my opinion, an ideal system has protected elements of both. Healthcare, education, prisons, public services: socialised. Supermarkets, car sales, beauty products: a free market.
At the moment our society is far too capitalist, and socialism is seen as suspicious at best. This is causing harm and suffering.
Some people, who bake a birthday cake with their mom and dad, want the entire cake for themselves. If mom or dad take a piece anyway, they think that's not "sharing" but "stealing". Even though mom and dad helped bake the cake too. They think cake being taken from them is socialism.
long form:
When "socialism" started, it started in a BLOODY way. I mean, the Russian revolution, before that it was mostly just theory, but still "the poors" doing it, so that was ew for history writers. The Russian revolution itself did achieve some kind of no longer aristocratic system, but for many many people, the outcomes were not positive. There were some positive outcomes on average, literacy and food supply improved a lot over time. But we're talking about the negatives here. Then the whole stuff Stalin did and being in power for decades in a system that's supposed to be democratic didn't exactly improve the reputation. Don't forget that for a long time, world domination was the literal declared goal of the international communist party. They were legit "coming for you" because they were coming for everyone. So that's one whole topic covered.
Have you ever worked in a group project and someone didn't pull their weight? "The" argument against socialism is that that is going to be everyone. And then nothing gets done. But because society still does need some things to function, like food supply, electricity, etc. society will collapse, because nobody will do what's necessary. Because the mindset of people against socialism, is that external reward is always necessary for people to do things. If everyone has the same, unconditionally, there is no reward and no punishment. To finance the system anyway, the fear is that "socialism" would just tax everything or seize your property and redistribute it.
So when someone says "that's socialism", they fear that they will be robbed or killed or at least threatened. And to be fair, the thought of being robbed or harmed is scary.
The first failures of socialism can be sort of traced back to before Karl Marx even, to the French Revolution, in fact. The ideas were refined somewhat after that obviously, but the practical applications did not seem to improve at all.
The vast majority of the hate for socialism is decades long propaganda and indoctrination, which is mostly false. Socialism is a threat to the wealthy, so they programmed people to hate it.
With socialism or socialism-like policies, the general population gets more, at the expense of the wealthy elites who would get less. The wealthy control or lobby or have a say in our education system, media, entertainment, etc.
One reason I can think is we haven't yet seen a working socialist society, which often fail for external reasons.
For example, the socialist government in Cuba was severely undermined by the USA imposed blockade.
A more recent example is Venezuela, while you can think what you want about its current government, I don't think USA should interfere with any sovereign nation.
There's almost like a pattern, like someone, somewhere doesn't like the idea of socialism to succeed.
China needs Taiwan to fail because the Chinese Communist Party maintains that democracy is incompatible with the Chinese culture. Having a very successful Chinese democracy shows that Chinese culture is compatible with democracy.
In a similar way, capitalists do everything they can to scuttle socialist countries, because a working socialist country would show that it was viable. Hence endless embargoes, wars, and a steady stream of propaganda. This was true for the entire life of the Soviet Union, and continues to this day for socialist countries.
There are plenty of surviving socialist states, and Cuba and Venezuela and Vietnam for that matter still exist despite extensive US meddling so it's weird to call them non-surviving.
Whether you want to call China socialist is a whole different kettle of worms, but I think it demonstrates rather handily that socialism's second greatest burden beyond the necessity of fighting off capitalists is the authoritarianism of Marxists.
Sure, and they do plenty of capitalist hellscape shit in general and I'll shitpost about that all day. They've also raised nearly a billion people out of poverty since 1978 and one of the original conceits of Marxism is that capitalism might be necessarily to build the industrial foundation for socialism to be viable in the first place so... We'll see what happens as they come closer and closer to undeniably a society that could enact true socialism if it wanted to.
We do know their state has absolutely no qualms about disappearing billionaires as is. Or, you know, millions of Muslims.
This is a great perspective and it always helps me with gloom and doom. There are billions of people infinitely better off than twenty years ago in regards to access to food, electricity, and clean water.
You don't need to wonder what will happen as China has already embraced fascism. Once wealthy individuals and their corporations gather enough power China will be no different than the rest of the world. I would love for them to prove me wrong.
Capitalism always results in the same outcome and China is no different. Such is life.
Marxism posits that socialism is best achieved through a command/centralized economy. There's plenty of room for interpretation and of course being a Marxist doesn't mean you have to agree with 150 year old socioeconomic theories on every point but generally that's the form Marxist governments have assumed, probably because it is in the interest of the people running a government to take all the power they can.
If the government controls production from the ground up there's just no other model to call it but authoritarian, everything within that society can only happen by their consent or by breaking the law.
Socialism as outlined in Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto is a little sketchier because it makes a lot of unrealistic assumptions about human nature and is just generally super hard to implement without creating a power vacuum.
Socialism as in the USSR's Socialism is a century old practice of the cruellest and most war hungry culture imagineable, having taken advantage of the afforementioned power vacuum to starve and torture millions at home, ally with the Nazis in WWII and then change sides halfway through, tear down democracies around the globe, and push us all the closest we have ever been to thermonuclear annihilation. A threat so great that even 30 years into its grave is still a great stone over our heads, having crafted a world power balance that will threaten our destruction for generations to come.
My dad was Finnish, and I think it helps to remember, Finns were fighting Russians before and during the time Russia called itself Communist and Socialist. The western side of that divide, the Nordic countries, practiced a very different version of "socialism", with democracy, and they seem to be reaping a lot of benefits.
Socialism as outlined in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is a little sketchier because it makes a lot of unrealistic assumptions about human nature and is just generally super hard to implement without creating a power vacuum.
Marx's general proposals for the implementation of a socialist government:
Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Abolition of all right of inheritance.
Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries: gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc., etc.
Which of those do you think is hard to implement or makes unrealistic assumptions about human nature?
A) An Authoritarian state who controls all property with no method to implement such state.
... what?
Abolition of private land ownership in favor of state land ownership is not inherently 'authoritarian', nor is it particularly impossible to implement.
B) An Anarchy where, since nobody owns anything, the influential will go wherever they want and take whatever they want.
You... you do realize that public lands does not mean "First come first serve", right?
Man, this is basic pre-modern society shit. Read up on medieval village commons. Shit, read up on public lands today.
Let me put it this way: in many places around the world the people are allowed to challenge the state's claim to properties in courts with varying success. Your step one would take that away, so it is leaning in the direction of authoritarian.
But I'm pretty sure Marx was more interested in Option B, I don't think he was interested in using politics to build a strong democracy but rather wanted to topple any current system and hope a firect democracy pops up over night.
"It would perhaps be as well if things were to remain quiet for a few years yet, so that all this 1848 democracy has time to rot away."
"...it happens that society is saved as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an assault upon society and is branded as Socialism."
"...the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy."
These are three separate Karl Marx quotes and they're extremely vague, but he has been somewhat consistent that any form of government that is not direct democracy must be "overthrown" or "fought" or "toppled".
Let me put it this way: in many places around the world the people are allowed to challenge the state’s claim to properties in courts with varying success. Your step one would take that away, so it is leaning in the direction of authoritarian.
Bruh, in state societies without widespread private land ownership there remains a distinction between state and public lands, and the state can be challenged with regards to ownership or usage rights in courts.
But I’m pretty sure Marx was more interested in Option B, I don’t think he was interested in using politics to build a strong democracy but rather wanted to topple any current system and hope a firect democracy pops up over night.
Reformism was not his first choice, but he mused at several points that bourgeois democracies with strong workers' movements, like the USA and the UK at his time (big RIP to our labor movements), could potentially reform without mass revolution.
“It would perhaps be as well if things were to remain quiet for a few years yet, so that all this 1848 democracy has time to rot away.”
I'm unfamiliar with that quote or its provenance, but considering that the entire point of the disappointments of 1848 was that the revolutions, both liberal and socialist factions failed, and the 'concessions' offered in response by the established authoritarian regimes were nothing more than window dressing (with executions for flavor), thinking that the sheen of that farce needed to fade before further action could be taken is not unreasonable.
“…it happens that society is saved as often as the circle of its ruling class is narrowed, as often as a more exclusive interest asserts itself over the general. Every demand for the most simple bourgeois financial reform, for the most ordinary liberalism, for the most commonplace republicanism, for the flattest democracy is forthwith punished as an assault upon society and is branded as Socialism.”
How is that in any way in opposition to democracy or even reform?
“…the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy.”
I repeat the second statement.
These are three separate Karl Marx posts and they’re extremely vague, but he has been somewhat consistent that any form of government that is not direct democracy must be “overthrown” or “fought” or “toppled”.
In the long term, sure. If your goal is direct democracy without a state ("Communism"), then the goal is to eventually get there. But Marx was always very clear that intermediate steps were not fucking nothing, and in many cases were necessary.
You may need to jump over the gap on a broken bridge, but better a broken bridge to jump over than the whole goddamn river.
It actually wasn't. The comment I responded to was posing socialism as being at the root of these issues. It's hardly the cause of any of these, much like how capitalism itself also isn't the cause of toppling foreign democracies or threatening thermonuclear annihilation, which is what I was contrasting.
Not Socialism, I specifically said tbe USSR in this example.
I didn't call it the root, I don't think Joseph Stalin invented being a King, I just think he has forever stained the word Socialism.
When people talk about an apple that is rotten because somebody specifically asked about it, talking about all the rotten oranges and pears in the world is top of the line whataboutism.
You mean to say you weren't actually talking about socialism, just like I wasn't actually talking about capitalism, but instead the US hegemony in particular? 😝
Yes, you have several EmAiLs to complain about instead of actually addressing anything. I doubt anyone here thinks the US is perfect, but that's not the question.
Socialism as outlined in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto is a little sketchier because it makes a lot of unrealistic assumptions about human nature and is just generally super hard to implement without creating a power vacuum.
And is still pretty vague. There was a lot of colouring in for the Bolsheviks to do.
Socialism as in the USSR’s Socialism is a century old practice of the cruellest and most war hungry culture imagineable, having taken advantage of the afforementioned power vacuum to starve and torture millions at home, ally with the Nazis in WWII and then change sides halfway through, tear down democracies around the globe, and push us all the closest we have ever been to thermonuclear annihilation. A threat so great that even 30 years into its grave is still a great stone over our heads, having crafted a world power balance that will threaten our destruction for generations to come.
I'm glad it fell (plz don't ban), but there's hella artistic licence there.
The power vacuum came from the Tsar. They were always enemies of the Nazis, although they did temporarily agree not to fight them, and then afterwards they basically won the war themselves. The US went first with the nukes. I don't even know what you mean about the current power balance - Russia is laughably weak, China is behind where it would have been if it took the Japan path. And, the thing about their cruel culture just sounds like bigotry.
The Bolsheviks literally couped the democratically elected and socialist post-Tsar government of Russia, kickstarting several years of civil war.
It was itself months old. Just like in France a century and a bit earlier, revolutions have a way of getting overthrown. And the one that stuck was itself autocratic.
If the Tsars had made actual concessions to liberalism earlier, maybe history would have developed differently. But, as it is, they waited until the late 19th century to abolish actual tied-to-the-land serfdom, were similarly reluctant to stop being autocratic feudal dicks in other ways, and set up the Duma right as revolutionaries of various stripes were trying to knock in their door. With the unpopularity of WWI and the necessity of having a lot of angry soldiers running around during it, instability became fait accompli.
Funny, then, that they invaded Poland and the Baltics in tandem with the Nazis and spent several years supplying the Nazi war machine.
The Nazis saw communism as right up their with the Jews as their main nemesis, and invented the term Judaeo-Bolshevik to describe how they're actually the same. Yes, they did agree to not fight each other and split up some weaker nations (and trade? I'm not sure what you mean by supplying), but calling that an alliance seems like a stretch. I can't believe both sides weren't gauging when to break it off and attack the other from the start. Stalin spent that time shifting his defense production base to the Urals in preparation, even.
Compare Britain and France, or Italy and the Nazis, who were definitely allies.
Fucking what.
Even Stalin regarded the Soviet position as unwinnable without the Western Allies.
Yes, it would have been a very different war if the Nazis weren't already fighting. But, as it was, they were in a stalemate circa 1941 when they started Barbarossa, and the Soviets ended up taking the lion's share of casualties tipping the balance hard against them. Being a history student, I'm sure you as well have seen actual historians explain that human wave tactics weren't a thing - Soviets died in spades because they were fighting hard against an enemy that saw them as subhuman.
In a few words "they basically won it themselves" is the best I could do. Since there were many topics at play I didn't want to start pulling out statistics and narrative to explain the nuances behind that, or talk about counterfactuals relating to it being a 1-on-1 fight.
It was itself months old. Just like in France a century and a bit earlier, revolutions have a way of getting overthrown. And the one that stuck was itself autocratic.
"It's just the nature of revolutions" rings a little hollow when two revolutions had occurred without kicking off a civil war until the Bolsheviks dissolved the democratically elected assembly. Feels rather like creating a power vacuum.
Yes, they did agree to not fight each other and split up some weaker nations (and trade? I’m not sure what you mean by supplying), but calling that an alliance seems like a stretch.
What do you call it when two countries agree to cooperate on military matters, including offensive military actions, up to an including performing a joint invasion of a country with the intention of annexing and genociding it?
Yes, it would have been a very different war if the Nazis weren’t already fighting.
No, as in, "Stalin believed that without American Lend-Lease alone, the Soviet Union could not have survived the war, even with the Western Allies being in the fight"
But, as it was, they were in a stalemate circa 1941 when they started Barbarossa, and the Soviets ended up taking the lion’s share of casualties tipping the balance hard against them. Being a history student, I’m sure you as well have seen actual historians explain that human wave tactics weren’t a thing - Soviets died in spades because they were fighting hard against an enemy that saw them as subhuman.
The Soviets inflicted approximately 50% more casualties on the Nazis (though a roughly equivalent number of total losses due to Nazis being more willing to surrender to Western forces), but suffered roughly ten times the number of casualties as Western forces, or five times if PoW deaths are excluded.
It doesn't have to be human wave tactics to be a staggering display of incompetence that nearly lost them the war.
“It’s just the nature of revolutions” rings a little hollow when two revolutions had occurred without kicking off a civil war until the Bolsheviks dissolved the democratically elected assembly. Feels rather like creating a power vacuum.
I don't think you can separate it like that given just a few months passing in between. Once they had power, they were pretty single-minded about reinforcing it and leaving nothing to chance.
Sure, the provisional government was democratic, to the extent it could be in such a short time. I never said the Bolsheviks were cool, so that's not really relevant.
What do you call it when two countries agree to cooperate on military matters, including offensive military actions, up to an including performing a joint invasion of a country with the intention of annexing and genociding it?
I mean, didn't Spain and Portugal do something similar with South America? If they were actually fighting together you'd have a point, but what happened is that they drew a line on a map through Poland, independently expanded to it, and then didn't cross it for a little while.
No, as in, “Stalin believed that without American Lend-Lease alone, the Soviet Union could not have survived the war, even with the Western Allies being in the fight”
Oh, you meant the US. Sure, Soviet blood, American steel.
I don’t think you can separate it like that given just a few months passing in between. Once they had power, they were pretty single-minded about reinforcing it and leaving nothing to chance.
"They tried to make their own reign stable" isn't really an argument against them creating a power vacuum, no more than the Tsarist obsession with autocracy as a means of stability counts against the Tsar's incompetence leading to a power vacuum.
Almost a year passed, in which Russia remained cohesive enough to maintain participation in WW1 and have radical, nationwide elections.
I mean, didn’t Spain and Portugal do something similar with South America?
Fighting very separate polities.
If they were actually fighting together you’d have a point, but what happened is that they drew a line on a map through Poland, independently expanded to it, and then didn’t cross it for a little while.
'Independently expanded to it' is a funny way of saying "Invading within two weeks of each other, causing the sudden dissolution of the Polish war plan, then meeting in the middle and having a joint victory parade".
Oh, you meant the US. Sure, Soviet blood, American steel.
And without Britain staying in the fight, the US wouldn't have gotten involved in Europe at all. And without Britain staying in the fight, a massive amount of air power would have been available for Operation Barbarossa.
Do you really think the provisional government would have just lasted if Lenin had stayed home, so to speak? From where I'm standing it seems someone else from some faction somewhere would have started their own coup.
Yes, WWII was a joint effort. I probably should have said "the most decisive contribution". I'm sorry, my bad.
"Socialism by its barest definition is great." That's what I thought too until I learned about the USSR's Socialism and how it led to starvation, torture, war, and nearly caused a nuclear apocalypse. It's easy to romanticize socialism in theory, but we must remember the horrors it has caused in practice.
I think one of the reasons things are as bad as they are is almost no one engages with things with which they disagree. I'd be surprised if many folks on Lemmy had several good friends who voted (or would have) for trump.
In this case, how many folks have had a good honest conversation with someone whom they respect who also vehemently disagrees with them about socialism? Probably next to zero.
We instead substitute the worst takes from the "other" side and then generalize it about everyone with whom we disagree.
While there's some amount of separation and avoidance, it is also interesting that we have publicly available polling (sometimes with open ended questions!) and data which is likewise ignored/not referenced. Instead we see people asking in places like this.
I think it is also worth noting that capitalism/socialism isn't actually the biggest thing for most Trump voters. A solid portion care about very different issues, and simply do not care about the economic theory. We have a 2 party system in the US (and many places use winner-take-all elections), so any of a dozen issues could be the single issue that matters for a particular person.
capitalism/socialism isn’t actually the biggest thing for most Trump voters
Oh absolutely, especially at the Presidential level. I just meant it as a simple shorthand for folks with whom we disagree.
Though, on one that I'd argue was more a referendum on more or less socialism, I'd imagine the same was true in NYC, I'd guess the number of people who voted Mamdani and had close Cuomo voting friends would be pretty small, though I admittedly haven't looked for much data on that.
Also, great use of polling. I just wish the Dems could take it and run on the shit with which everyone agrees instead of getting bogged down in online culture war fights.
Ah, your point is understood. Thank you. The NYC mayoral race is a good example too.
At one time I understood why no party can run on common sense in truth, though I forget the argument now. I know parties exist first to win elections, and only secondarily to change things. But I don't see how that stops the Dems from running an extremely 'common-sense-reform' campaign.
Only thing I have against it is the air-headed, simple-minded take of most on lemmy. I've asked a dozen times how socialism stops money from funneling to the top and into the hands of a few. Never once got an answer. Look in this thread right now! There's not one real definition, just the usual capitalism bad, socialism good, take.
Best government and economic system I've seen in human history is a capitalist economic model with serious guard rails and "socialism" for the government. I put socialism in quotes because the word means to lemmings whatever they want it to mean, so the term is wishy washy.
I’ve asked a dozen times how socialism stops money from funneling to the top and into the hands of a few.
"Without capitalism the elite won't feel the need to enrich themselves! They'll work for the common good, obviously!" /s because, well, this is Lemmy. I love it but...
Socialism, communism, whatever other utopian ideologies, require that people be invested and actively participating in it. The way wealth stops being funneled to the top is that people are invested (and informed enough) to stop it from happening. How that would happen in a practical sense would depend entirely on how these ideologies were implemented. Anyone who tells you it's all just very simple and easy would be lying to you. The main factor would be active participation by the vast majority of the populace. Without that, any attempts would be doomed to failure.
Those who are educated on the matter and oppose socialism do so because of a belief that continuing high-intensity development of the economy is preferable, for one reason or another.
Many of us would argue that, with the economy in developed countries at the point where everyone could very easily be guaranteed a good quality of life without further improvements, and that, in fact, further improvements at this point are more likely to come from the cultural and technological development enabled by a more equal and less labor-intensive society, capitalism has overstayed its welcome.
Well, over here hard-line socialism is tied directly to Soviet attempts of taking away our independence through military force after us being occupied for well over a thousand years.
So yeah, a hard sell. But we have softer socialist policies these days, but I don't see a shift towards a fully socialist system.
The people who own, run, operate and manage all information systems from education, news services to schools are all or mostly private corporations, businesses or wealthy benefactors who all base their wealth on capitalism. So they spend all their time and energy using the services and organizations they control to convince everyone everywhere that capitalism is the only option and that socialism in any form is not good or does not work or is not practical.
Conservative reactionaries since the French Thermidor Reaction opposed it, believing communalism and eventually socialism undermines their existing hierarchical, feudal system. Stalin also did not help matters at all.
This is also why I can't stand tankies. Worshipping the Soviet Union, China and even modern day Russia. Clearly the "is not The West(tm)" is the important part for them, not socialism or communism. Also, I've had interactions with people on reddit where they said that the mass deportations were absolutely justified, etc.
Look, I also want a lot of the things socialism offers, without necessarily going full communist. But I'll argue all day that Nordic countries do it better. Not perfectly of course, there's still billionaires and there are still issues. But people are by and large much more free than they are or were in any of the countries tankies love, and those who aren't well-off still have it much better than they do in, say, the US.
The most common gripe I hear is that because not all labor is similar[EG: Healthcare vs Mining] there is no easy way to make sure that people are putting in the same value into the system. For people that already mistakenly believe there is a large group of "lazy immigrants" draining resources in the current system, this is a deal breaker. The internal logic isn't too much to swallow its just a hurdle to get people to sit long enough to hear the answer. They would rather fight over the crumbs than share the whole because somehow thats more "fair".
If everyone does better, then you're doing worse by comparison.
I want 10% unemployment and 0% interest rates. That's the magic formula where I can sexually harass my au pair and she has no choice but to put up with it.
The term "socialism" was poison since the Russian revolution and the red scare that followed. The rich/capitalists used all powers available to poison it so that even the mildest western EU forms didn't threaten the tiny amount of their exploitation of the working classes.
No, its means workers control the means of production.
Edit: Im getting really tired of people conflating socialism with social programs.
Its not socialism when the government does something, stop saying it is.
Because it is opposed to clasical liberalism. that is the idea that humans can choose their own direction and control their own persuit of life. 'life, liberty and property'.
socalists like to talk about capitalisn because that is an easy strawman to beat up. the fundamentals of liberty are very differnt from their conception of capitalism though and they don't want you to know just how messed up their theory realy is.
don't confuse clasical liberalism from what modern language calls liberal.
I feel like this doesn't engage with the point above. Any implementation of a system will have mistakes and rough spots, and do harm. If we wish to propose a new system, we must also explain what it is, and why it will do less harm and more good.
The harm mentioned here is specifically the freedom to own and use property. Capitalism allows many people this freedom. Losing it would make some people sad. Poster would like to know how socialism deals with this harm/loss of privilege.
“Property” is both a heavily propagandized and culturally variable concept.
Freedom, in both definitions and practices, is heavily affected by the concept of property.
Firstly, property as defined in common usage in the west is a denial of the rights of the many in favour of a single entity. It exists as a loss of freedom in order to provide exclusivity. This is most obvious with land, and the ongoing enclosure and expropriation of the commons. It results in homeless people camped outside of empty homes, and a net loss of freedom.
Further, property as a system can easily enough be swapped out with relational concepts like stewardship and tenure, while giving up some choices to gain others. Earning the right to live on a chunk of land through merit, rather than by debt, is an example. Sharing access to expensive tools, because the employees own the company, also creates a greater amount of freedom.
Generally, people get confused in this discussion about what property is being referred to, and worry about losing their stuff, or chattel. But we’re talking about land and buildings and companies and machinery, big things that don’t make sense for one entity to control.
The harm mentioned here is specifically the freedom to own and use property. Capitalism allows many people this freedom. Losing it would make some people sad.
The core critique of capitalism is that a diminishing number of people enjoy the privileges of the owner class. Concentration of wealth is inevitable when the economy is organized around this principle of unfettered property rights for individuals.
While human society has no inherent need to be based on zero-sum transactions, simping for oligarchs to have any freedom they can buy, just codifies zero-sum outcomes into reality.
One of the more obvious issues to discuss is the balance between rights and freedoms of the person as opposed to the people. You can’t have people shitting upstream in the river, so you curtail shitting rights even on one’s own property, to give even greater freedoms to water drinkers. At what point do your freedoms steal from the freedoms of others?
If we wish to propose a new system, we must also explain what it is, and why it will do less harm and more good
There is a vast array of alternative economic systems proposed over the last century, and much of it can be labelled socialist—it’s a big ask to expect someone to describe a fully realized alternative in a forum comment, when they can just refer to the body of work on the topic.
There is a vast array of alternative economic systems proposed over the last century, and much of it can be labelled socialist—it’s a big ask to expect someone to describe a fully realized alternative in a forum comment, when they can just refer to the body of work on the topic.
I mean, this is ELI5. I also don't think it's reasonable to ask the 5 year old to read all of marx? The task is to teach, even if slowly. Maybe we can talk about specific small examples? Like you mention how capitalism has failed to put the homeless in the houses they sleep next to. How would your favorite flavor of government solve this?
As an example, capitalism tries to manage empty houses by making it inefficient to buy land and have it sit empty: others who use their land while they let it appreciate will get ahead of you, and as you fall behind the market you'll eventually be compelled to sell. (I'm not saying this is a good system, and I don't particularly care about how it's wrong; this example gives a floor for other theories to compare against and shows a bit of the system can be explained in a short forum post.)
I didn't engage because I don't see any evidence of a good faith argument.
They put effort into their possessions and want to keep them. Fine, socialism is workers owning the means of production, the only thing you can't own under socialism is a business that employs other people in a hierarchical fashion. You can still own a business where you are self employed. You can still own property, goods, purchase services, etc. you can even hire contractors to help your business.
But this poster seems to be operating on the less well defined "socialism is when the government does things to help people." I think being against that is cruel to the point of psychopathy. But you can't reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into, so instead I made a sarcastic comment.
I personally like to remember that people reading might hold the bad faith point (or something near it) in good faith, and answer to that. I think ELI5 as a community really shouldn't have much sarcasm or dunking on folks, see rule 3 (and if you feel something is so bad faith it deserves it, maybe report it for rule 3?).
I think there are libertarians who hold this particular view without psychopathy: they might reason that governments are usually at the wrong scale to do things to help people, and that other systems outside of government should fill those gaps. There are plenty of libertarians that like/endorse/support people helping people in trade guilds, service organizations, and churches. I think there are leftists that make similar arguments sometimes, especially those that dislike hierarchy.
I think it’s fear. People fear that their country doesn’t produce enough and isn’t wealthy enough to support an army that is capable enough to keep any real or imagined enemies at bay. Add a good amount of corruption and propaganda to it, and you get a perpetual cycle where this fear needs continuous fuelling.
The worst part of it is that the fear isn’t entirely unjustified. As the Ukraine war shows, predators will try to pray on the weak, and Europe has been complacent about its own defence.
That doesn’t mean I think capitalism is the answer of course, but it is a horribly delicate balancing act to consider all concerns.
I think the general idea of those against it is that they assume it is zero sum. Meaning, for everyone to be taken care of, the person must lose or have less.
That still doesn't make sense for people who aren't billionaires, though ... if it's zero sum, billionaires are even more problematic than they already are.
As Ronald Wright said , A Short History of Progress (2004): "John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." (note, John Steinbeck never said that)
Capitalism is the ideology that puts increase of the capital as the number one goal. It's usually is the meta strategy to make more and more goods.
To rephrase, if you do something else, it's gonna be less effective at multiplying the total wealth of society. And it might not always be a wrong thing to do, but the benefits need to outweigh the costs of scaling slower.
So, it's not wrong. Socialists often think about having a fair share of the cake instead of thinking how to make the cake bigger.
Every politically charged term ends up having highly disputed definitions, but I think most of those will acknowledge that the term has way more baggage than just the idea of taking care of yourselves and neighbors.
Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems[1] characterised by social ownership of the means of production,[2] as opposed to private ownership.[3][4][5] It describes the economic, political, and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems.
It represents a whole set of beliefs about how the world works, in addition to political goals. Someone might broadly agree with the idea that people should be taken care of, but have strong objections about the specifics. One of those beliefs that I'll object to is the idea that just about everything should be understood as being about class conflict; I don't think that's always accurate.
Personally, I think it isn't just class conflict that is at issue. IMO, a major problem with current economies and their understanding, is that they are built from inherited knowledge, wealth, and institutions.
They aren't deliberate systems, they are more like evolution: No planning, just inherited features from whatever came before. So long as those features don't prevent the animal from having offspring, evolution doesn't care. This can result in wonderful, confused, or niche creatures that are on their way to extinction. So the same goes for our economics.
To escape this state of affairs, we need to make deliberately constructed economies. I not saying a 'planned economy' like the Soviets or Chinese 5-year plans, but rather how each aspect of an economy interacts with other pieces. Like a tabletop RPG ruleset, where the specifics exist to facilitate the complexities that can arise. By specifying each element, we can create floors and ceilings for what any given action can do, which in turn makes it harder for the players to meta-game their way to dictating how everything goes.
To sum up: economic regulations, but as a clean sheet design and implementation.
I think socialism is awesome but capitalism, when highly restrained, is more effective at generating capital.
I think a few fairly simple steps can merge the best of both.
Limit personal net worth to, say, 01 million dollars. Companies can have a networth of, say, 1 billion tops. Below that, put like 10 or so tax brackets, the more you're worth, the more you pay tax. Anything over those limits goes 100% to tax
This favors many smaller companies working together instead of one huge monster that can't even take care of itself and requires regular bailouts
The tax income will be more than enough to support a large socialist system that can take care of free education, free healthcare, etc, hell, even universal basic income
I would take it a step further and say all corporations must be worker-owned. Every employee has an equal share, and maybe there is a probationary period along with that to weed out the bad eggs. This alone naturally encourages organic growth (among other, greater benefits) because any new hire will divide the pie further.
Mmmm, sort of, I guess, depending a little on who does what different percentages maybe? A guy who does 4 hours vs a girly that works 8 hour day, for example, but yeah, there should be something like that
I still want to reward founders too, you need people to start something new, give them a bigger % or something, but those are details
Either way, if nobody can be filth rich anymore we should be able to get to a stable point where all people can work way less, where we focus less on consumerism, focus more on life.
Unfortunately the 1 million dollar net worth would have to be modified by location. If the average house is hitting a half million most places, and passing $1 some places, they need to at least be able to be worth slightly more than their residence.
Oh yes the myth of the small business capitalism. The reality is there was once thousands of car manufacturers in the US and now there is maybe fifty with a big three making the vast majority.
Same goes for about every sector there is in every country. The ideal of a capitalist society that uses great restraint is just a fantasy. Concentration of wealth and the wealth gap is high in every single country in the world.
There is no real example of capitalism effectively addressing wealthy inequality or creating a small business form a capitalism for any significant length of time before it starts concentrating. It may start out with small businesses, but monopolies quickly develop.
You may ask why is it bad to have wealthy people. The problem is representation. All nations policies almost always exclusively favor those with capital. They get unequal representation.
One only has to look at the mega corporations to see the concentration and do a policy review to see the majority of laws passed directly benefit them.
I would like to see a country actually implement what you say to prevent concentration of wealth. It probably will never happen though.
You need a definition. You didn't define it, and people who hate it rarely define it. If nobody knows what everyone is talking about, then it's all a waste of time.
Socialism’s critics believe that people who receive government aid become reliant on it and cease making an effort to become self-sufficient.
As someone who works in community mental health, I sadly have to admit that those criticisms aren’t entirely false. Ironically, I think the fact that the government organizations that implement these social safety nets being underfunded contributes to the problem. Because it takes so long to obtain benefits like disability (SSD/I in America), people don’t want to risk getting a job, potentially losing it, and having to go through the long, arduous disability application process again. So they just learn to be content living on disability pay and food stamps.
But that’s disability. I don’t think the same applies to just public assistance (which you can’t live off of) and SNAP.
Anyway, despite there being a kernel of truth in said criticisms, they’re largely off-base. I think a lot of the critics also confuse socialism with communism, and don’t realize that all most socialists desire is a system like European countries have, which is proven to work and not threaten capitalism. Then there are the really sick fucks who believe in social Darwinism and genuinely think poor people deserve to be so, and that it would be just for them to die off. But thankfully, those are in the extreme minority.
This reminds me of my friend's dad. He got crippled at a machanic job, so he's on disability, but he still wants to be useful in his life and use his skills, so he does machanic stuff on the side. Some people might think this is cheating, but he can only reasonably work on cars like 15hrs a week, or it'll fuck up his back so much he can't walk for a couple of days.
A messed-up situation that some people get into is that some of these programs have a cut-off if you make too much money, but if you actually make that much money in income, you'll have less than you would if you were slightly under that amount, because you have to pay for what those benefits would have given you otherwise.
It basically makes people stuck near the poverty line because these programs don't really give that much assistance. In my state if you're a family of three, the most you can earn is $915 a month in household income and the average payment is $221. This isn't counting the other benefits you'd get booted off of if you reached different income brackets.
I'm looking at this living wage site right now https://livingwage.mit.edu/states/39 and from this page you can see that 2 working adults can't both work your average Food Preparation & Serving Related, Building & Grounds Cleaning & Maintenance or Personal Care & Service job and be above to cover your average annual expenses if you have a single kid. So it's really not worth it to get off these benefits unless you find a significantly better job than what's available. Most of the other employment opportunities need some sort of education or experience as well.
No, that sounds pretty on-point to me. The only additional thing I’d mention is that when you’re working, you’re paying into social security through your taxes, which—if you do it for long enough—sets you up much better for retirement than you will be if you’re still reliant on disability when you’re 65. So, that’s an additional incentive to work, which I tell my clients all the time, but for most of us, planning that far into the future is actually kind of difficult.
The people who don't like socialism mean something else. To them, socialism is when the government takes care of you and your neighbors. This is scary and can go badly: sometimes the government does not know your needs, isn't paying good attention, or is making choices in a bad way. There are examples of governments that said they would take care of everything for everyone, and then many many people didn't get enough food.
People also worry about a little socialism, because when the government takes care of some things automatically, it means local communities don't have to worry about those things. Then the people in the community forget how to do them (imagine tasks like building houses) themselves, and that makes them more dependent on the government. This is also scary, because in an emergency (like after a flood) you might not be the governments first priority. It also means that you can more easily live in a place without being part of a local community (like a church), and that loss of close friends makes everyone more lonely and sad.
It's not clear that the people with these worries are right. Other systems also have problems, and so even if there are good concerns here, maybe socialism is still best.
Remember to look for nice people who disagree with you, and listen to their fears, needs and dreams. It is easy to end up in echo chambers, and feel like everyone who disagrees with you is dumb, evil, or crazy. But usually we only see the loudest (not the smartest or kindest) voices that disagree with us. Algorithms and popularity contests online really like to reward things that make you angry.
People hate socialism because they believe it is a right/freedom be able to privately own and control the "means of production" from tools to assembly lines to mines and groves.
Thatcher said it best: "There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty." and by economic liberty she means that ability to own / exclusively control any (non-sentient) thing.
(end LI5)
Personally, I think authoritarian socialism (sometimes called "communism") is problematic due to the authoritarian part. I think libertarian socialism (often called "anarchism") is problematic because "warlords" (selfish people willing to use violence to hoard property) will naturally arise from any sufficiently large group and I think they are best opposed via a State with a "monopoly" on violence. But, I am convinced that rent-seeking behavior has been choking Capitalism for a while and it's only gotten worse since I was born (1980)... something needs to rein it in, and I think that something has to be very democratic and significantly socialist, but I don't really have a name for it myself.
People hate socialism because they are propagandized to full stop. Most people will never own actual capital so why would they be afraid of not being able to privately control it. This conflates the idea of private ownership and ownership of capital. This in itself is also propaganda.
Thatcher's actual policies hurt working class and benefited corporations. Strange people would bring her up in a conversation meant to portray socialism negatively.
On to your points. Rent seeking existed long before the term ever existed just like fascism. It has always been bad, think of company towns back in 1800's being the very definition of extreme rent seeking behavior. I had thought we were done with that concept but the unbelievable concentration of wealth has brought it back.
There is no one to reign it in because the systems are completely captured by the wealthy through their proxy corporations. Fascism spread like wildfire across the globe and the dominate social structure is now corporations, not governments.
There is no answer to this because all the answers threaten this dominance. We have (non wealthy people) been checkmated before I was ever born.
But hey, life is not so bad. You can always take advantage of your fellow man to get a leg up and it is highly encouraged by a legal system that is designed to protect the wealthy and not punish white collar crime.
Rent seeking existed long before the term ever existed just like fascism. It has always been bad
IIRC, Adam Smith (from "Wealth Of Nations") decried rent-seeking behavior and implicitly defined a "free market" as one without (free of) rent-seeking, as a form on monopoly, among other things.
So, yes, it was a recognizable problem in Capitalism before it was ever given name, and I wasn't trying to deny that, just to note that the whole time I've been alive it's consistently gotten worse.
As it has gotten worse my whole life. Adam Smith could have never have conceptualized mega corporations. In fact, corporate law at that time would have never allowed for them to exist.
There is no such thing as authoritarian socialism, that is a paradox. Marx and Lenin argued that the only viable path to communism as an ends, which involves the withering away of the state, required a transitionary period.
Marx proposed something akin to direct democracy — which he called dictatorship of the proletariat — while Lenin proposed the idea of a centralized, rightist vanguard party that would seize power on behalf of the people and oversee the transition. Rightist means to leftist ends. It was a gamble that did not succeed as Lenin’s illness and death, and the rise of Stalinism, remade the vanguard into a permanent new ruling class in direct conflict with Marx’s stated ethos.
Capitalism seems to turn into cronyism. Maybe the issue is that none of the above can lead to a permanent or long term solution that is without abuse or unnecessary hardship. David Graeber fought the idea that authority and governments have to exists by giving examples of ancient civilizations that had no ruler. What if all the modern forms of government since then are just a huge transitionary period for humanity that exist until we reach a more civilized state in our evolution that doesn't include paralysing greed and constant war?
“Withering away of the state” and “it’s like, how much more STATE can you get? The answer is none. None more state” are extreme opposites.
Did the state wither away? No. Then communism was not accomplished.
Stalinism was as communist as Hitler’s National Socialists were socialist. False branding is a hallmark of rightism. Their propagandized, muddied, impoverished use of language does not magically turn their little hand-carved lies into real boys.
I'm using the standard meaning of authoritarian socialism: "Academics, political commentators and other scholars tend to distinguish between authoritarian socialist and democratic socialist states, with the first represented in the Soviet Bloc"
I know what you are using. It’s capitalist propaganda and always has been. We need to stop using paradoxical terminology that was designed deliberately to confuse and terrify. What you are describing is literally known as “state capitalism.” Funny how that, like all the intentional-by-design failings of capitalism, gets rebranded as “socialism” in an effort to preserve capitalism’s entirely-gaslit reputation.
Socialism demands equality and equity, which fundamentally cannot exist in a stratified society. If there is a ruling class, they own and control the economy and nothing belongs to the people. So like I said, it’s paradoxical.
Socialism, as far as Marx was concerned, is a transitional stage to Communism. This is why it gets a lot of push back. Because of that connection. Worse, youve got generations of people conflating the two. And worse still, you have a few examples of people who were claiming to be socialist, who were really just using socialism for their own ends.
The reality is that Socialism is about everything being about the betterment of the people. That assets are a shared ownership, rather than privately owned. This in turn creates a fairer distribution of the wealth generated. So everyone's lives improve.
The issue, the real issue, is that socialism needs a very large government in order to work. The fear is that this would create out of control bureaucracy. With middle mangers everywhere doing middle manger things that would create a system that was slow and worse far easier to corrupt. On top of that, you have the issue of competition not being the driving force of innovation. The government would control and mandate investment and innovation. Which again comes back to the middle mangers. There is also an issue with free speech. After all, if the government controls everything, where do you go if that government doesnt see the issues that its created? And worse still, how might it handle those dissenting voices?
The reality is that no one system is "the best" and really what would work best is a mixed system. One that builds a well regulated economy while maintaining a safety net for the people. So you would have private businesses, competition, innovation combined with free healthcare, free education, unemployment support, worker rights, high taxes, and high transparency and accountability.
Any time I put forward concepts of a hybrid between socialism, capitalism, UBI, and all of that, there is a lot of push back. While it is possible that it is because my ideas suck, I get the feeling it is more because it doesn't fit into the worldview of existing systems.
Say, for example, the idea of giving everybody free mattresses. Someone says that is unrealistic, because people would try to sell the beds they receive. Or that fixed income from UBI and jobs would promote corruption...despite it all about preventing the existence of billionaires and huge wealth gaps. They say it would make people lazy, because there is no reward for working harder. Also, for some reason, eliminating wealth gaps, workers voting on leadership pay rank, and making education a paid job promotes a caste system. And so on.
Mind, there has been helpful input, it is just that many of the criticisms seem to be based on not fitting into what we had.
the argument against it that I see the most is that governments are inherently corruptible and bad at managing taxpayer money and so it's destined to become a big scam.
Perhaps a comment against it could be something like “why should I pay for someone else’s health care?”.
I guess if your beloved leader has told you enough times that socialized health care is bad (communism?), then you won’t investigate what that kind of health care really looks like, and you’ll parrot the statement in belief and acceptance.
Could also be, "because we live in a society" which is a structure where a group of people help each other. That sentence falls apart quickly if applied to anything else: "why should I pay for someone else's road/water pipe/utilities poles"
Because if someone needs healthcare and can’t afford it, you’re going to pay for it anyway.
Unless you want a system where medical emergencies are turned away at the hospital door. It will be less expensive for you to pay for society’s preventative holistic care than it will be to pay for emergency room visits once the problems have gotten worse.
We already pay for other people's healthcare, car accidents, house fires. That's how insurance works. We all pay into it, and some people have their claims paid, while others never make a claim.
To be fair to liberals, liberalism is also a system to take care of your neighbors.
Liberalism is basically capitalism with patches. Public option health care, government contractors, food stamps, tuition assistance, bus vouchers, child tax credits.
Socialism is a capitalism replacement. Universal health care, government organizations, free government grocery stores, free education, free public transportation, free day care.
Both groups on the left care about their neighbors.
Nothing you listed there is liberalism. Those are all things liberals fought tooth and nail against. They were forced on liberals who decided it was better to allow them to exist because otherwise we would tear down capitalism which is what Liberals are actually about.
It really doesn't. That's just something Americans liberals try to sell so people they don't realize how liberals are always working against their interests.
My comment was absolutely applied to American politics.
I mean you aren't wrong when it comes to American liberal politicians. That's just the differences between liberalism and socialism in theory, the actual differences in practice is another story.
In short? Capitalists. Liberals are capitalists. The birth of liberalism goes hand in hand with the birth of capitalism. The liberal revolutions were capitalist revolutions. Everything stems from that inescapable fact of history. It's the one aspect of liberals that dominates everything about them and colors every single decision they make. Everything else is just window dressing that can be thrown away at their leisure. If you want to understand liberals you have to understand that.
So, you're a communist is what you're saying. Name one communist country in the history of the world that has lasted longer than 10 years. You introduce greeds, it's impossible.
You should know that you are making a very ideologically based argument, since as far as anyone can tell the self-labelled communist countries through history were degraded into authoritarian dictatorships immediately, and so mislabeled. Cuba is called communist, and while they too slid immediately into authoritarianism, they call themselves socialist.
You seem to be using the word in a colloquial rather than an academic way.
In addition, consider the massive economic war of the last 150 years, exemplified by the CIA-backed murder of a million or so people in Indonesia, to stamp out so-called communism. Pretty tough to get anything going, between the pressures of violence and lies.
Liberalism isn't an economic system.
It's a political & moral philosophy from the Enlightenment that holds governments exist for the people & authority is legitimate only when it protects inalienable/fundamental/inherent rights & liberties of individuals.
The people have an inherent right to obtain a government with legitimate authority, and when their government lacks or loses legitimacy, the people have a right & duty replace or change that government until it obtains legitimacy.
Liberal governments can & do include some with social market economies (eg, social democracies in Europe).
But I mean an EL5 version is that liberals and socialists on the left both care about their neighbors. The disagreement is just how much of life should be handled by markets vs public/collective systems.
Which liberalism lacks an essential position on, because it's not an economic philosophy.
Liberalism is essentially the position that individual human rights & liberties are fundamental.
It can even combine with socialism.
Whatever disagreements you claim these philosophies have may be between particular variants you're not specifying rather than their most general forms.
Economically, modern liberalism accepts a role for government to protect against market failures, protect competition and prevent corporate monopolies, and supports labor rights.[2] Its fiscal policy supports sufficient funding for a social safety net, while simultaneously promoting income-proportional tax reform policies to reduce deficits. It calls for active government involvement in other social and economic matters such as reducing economic inequality, expanding access to education and healthcare, and protection of the shared natural environment.[3]
Right, and modern US liberalism isn't general liberalism.
Plus, those distinctly modern elements absent from general liberalism of active non-market interventions by the government to protect the market from failure, provide a safety net, provide access to education & healthcare, provide public services to reduce inequality, protect the environment, etc, are social departures from capitalism, are they not?
That position aligns better with social democracy
a social, economic, and political philosophy within socialism
social democracy aims to strike a balance by advocating for a mixed market economy where capitalism is regulated to address inequalities through social welfare programs and supports private ownership with a strong emphasis on a well-regulated market
If anything, modern US liberalism conflicts more with your earlier assertion that
Liberalism is basically capitalism
Whereas general liberalism is largely indifferent to economic system, modern US liberalism favors a form of socialism.
You are right, but 99% of the time when people on this site talk bad about liberals, they mean modern liberalism in the US. Not classical or general liberalism.
It's mostly thanks to the worst real world attempts to create socialism in the 1900s, which ended up being not terribly different from plain fascism. In core USSR cities things were probably kind of fine for most people, but the farther away you got from the large cities and the motherland, the worse it got. Ukraine had a man-made famine that killed 3-10 million people. China has similar horrible hunger waves due to human mistakes or malevolence in planning. Gulag Archipleago, Stasi, KGB. When people attempted to free themselves from communism, the attempts were brutally crushed. Oppression was everywhere.
If you want to meet people who hate socialism most, go to places that used to be socialist. Sure, USA had some counter-propaganda against communism, but it 100% is not the only reason why people don't like it.
Just because it has failed miserably in the past might not mean that it must fail in the future too if somebody is dumbbrave enough to try again. But there are some important differences between now and then and those differences might be important if put to good use. For instance, we have significant computer capacity today that didn't exist back when communism was really tried the last time. Perhaps those difficult allocation problems can be worked out. Perhaps. Perhaps AI can be an impartial divider of resources. Just let me build the model, I'll make it fair, I promise.
I wonder how Lemmy would explain the apparently much more blatant hatred towards free market capitalism though.
A sizable portion of Lemmy's userbase is in a country that aggrandizes free-market capitalism, and we're getting to the point with it where its flaws are becoming impossible to ignore. Meanwhile, most of us grew up well after the peak of anti-socialist sentiment.
i’d say that fascism is one form of dictatorship, whereas Marxism requires a transition phase of a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat… which then becomes permanent because temporary dictators don’t tend to just quit being dictators.
they’re usually fascist in the way they hunt and exterminate any western educated people and such… but then it just goes to brutal authoritarian dictatorships…
yeah i guess not terribly different.
At the national level it’s because they(the federal government) is taking your tax money to pay someone hundreds of miles away for existing. At the local level it’s because “private charity already does that.”
It benefits those in power to make average citizens fear socialism.
We already live in a system with numerous socialist programs. Many of the people who have been brainwashed to hate the concept of socialism already benefit from some of these socialist programs.
As with pretty much everything in life, you have to find a happy medium. That goes for socialism too. A full on 100% socialist society may not function well. Just like how we're witnessing the failures of the ultra-capitalist society we live in.
But the brainwashed don't want to meet in the middle. They fear socialism and don't want any trace of it in our society....despite the fact that there are already many socialist aspects present.
It's the PR and marketing campaigns. Capitalism concentrated the wealth with the bosses so they can send a coherent message. A message people can buy into.
Socialism marketing makes it sound like a MLM scheme. The lack of centralization puts different unions against each other.
The kind we know from history and China has the problem of giving some individuals way too much power over others. But so does capitalism in the long run, in way meaner ways.
here in the us we opperate like a socialist country pretending to be capitalist. "Distributing things evenly" is hard when no one agrees what evenly is
The rest of the commenters here are correct. Although, socialism means differently under different contexts. Socially yes, it means helping others and each other; but socialism in economic context typically means either the workers run the means of production, or the state. The wealth generated is then distributed as equally as possibly among the members.
How can a person who resolves their conflicts with hate feel comfortable about socialism if socialism creates a space without hate? Some people want to fight and can only fight. Removing fights removes their ability to gain status and respect.
The entirety of civilization is based on socialism to one degree or another. Even dictators depend on socialism. The tipping point is where that socialism becomes leveraged for personal ambitions.
Then it’s some form of dictatorship. And that can happen in any form of government, however “socialism” is usually used by wannabe authoritarian types as bait to get the population on their side during upheaval and regime change.
I just want to note that "A system where people take care of themselves and neighbours" is called Mutualism, and is absolutely the single best concept in the world.
Basically everyone can and should practice it in their daily lives, just be kind to and try to greet or at least acknowledge those you meet, and if anyone needs help then do the best you can.
We tend to instinctively engage in mutualism with our family and friends, so just extend that feeling towards as many people as possible.
A lot of people mix up “socialism” with “people being good neighbors.” That’s not actually what the term means. Socialism is specifically about who owns the big stuff, the means of production. In a socialist setup, people still work jobs, they still get paid, and daily life still involves employment and compensation. The difference is that major industries aren’t privately owned by large corporations. They’re controlled collectively by the public or by the workers themselves.
Small private businesses can still exist; they’re not eliminated outright. What changes is the ownership of large-scale systems: energy, manufacturing, transportation, resources, things on that level. These are shifted away from private corporate control and toward collective control.
The fundamental issue of socialism and why it doesn't and has not worked historically is because of human nature. A corporateocracy or a capitalist based society aligns much better to human nature than socialism does which is why it's significantly more "successful".
Because people have been repeatedly trained since the decline of Imperialism to believe that “socialism” is “when capitalism.” When the populace is afraid of the label, the label can be used as a blunt instrument to keep them enslaved to the parasitic Capitalist rulers.
People are scared of it because every incarnation of it has been hellish shit show. No matter how many times people moralise about it that simple truth is always looming.
Socialism. Production and distribution is owned by the community (government).
It has nothing to do with "Handouts". Or helping your neighbor really.
There is no redistribution of wealth. That is communism.
Socialism with handouts is communism.
You could have a completely Socialistic society that let's some of it's people starve because it benefits the majority.
A great example to look at socialism is the nazi party creating Volkswagen.
People in Germany needed an affordable car. They created the production and distribution of affordable cars, owned and operated by the controlling government party.
Now, you can debate all you want on if it was a good or bad idea.
Average German looking for simple affordable car? Probably would think it was a good idea.
Rich German looking for a Duesenberg? Probably hates the idea of Volkswagen and spending their tax dollars on it.
Poor German? They aren't getting a car anyways
A large government can easily have a monopoly on a good or service.
If that's a good or bad thing is debatable
For example, say America was 100% Socialistic.
Government would gain access to all satalites and towers and issue the Volkstelefon. Affordable phone and internet for everyone!
Sounds great?
Imagine if tomorrow Trump issued his phone in that style.
Probably not a good idea?
So why all the hate?
ELI5: Because socialism is not always the right answer just like capitalism isn't always the right answer.
I think you might be confusing socialism and state capitalism here.
Socialism. Production and distribution is owned by the community (government).
This is a somewhat inaccurate definition. Socialism is the social ownership of means of production that does not necessarily mean the government. It comes in many forms such as democratic ownership by the employees (worker cooperatives), community ownership like utility providers being owned by the town and townsfolk, or state ownership if the state is democratically elected and accountable to the working class.
The concept of democratic and social ownership would be lost in an authoritarian state.
It has nothing to do with "Handouts". Or helping your neighbor really.
There is no redistribution of wealth. That is communism.
Socialism with handouts is communism.
Both socialism and communism are concerned with redistribution of wealth. They just disagree on the method. Socialists believe that by eliminating capitalism and with progressive taxation wealth redistribution becomes inevitable, whole communists thinks this will only be achieved with a powerful state to oversee the redistribution process.
You could have a completely Socialistic society that let's some of it's people starve because it benefits the majority.
This scenario contradicts the core moral and political goal of socialism which is ensuring the wellbeing of all member of the community by ending the exploitation inherited in capitalism. A system that allows this scenario is just unethical authoritarianism regardless of what people call it or think it is.
A great example to look at socialism is the nazi party creating Volkswagen.
The nazi party was socialist in name only. It was essentially a fascist regime that crushed actual socialist and communist movements, and imprisoned and murdered labour leaders. They also didn't nationalize the majority of industry and relied heavily on forced labour.
Again this fits state capitalism better than socialism. It's essentially the state controlling corporates instead of the social and democratic ownership by the working class that socialism seeks.
A large government can easily have a monopoly on a good or service.
For example, say America was 100% Socialistic.
Government would gain access to all satalites and towers and issue the Volkstelefon. Affordable phone and internet for everyone!
Imagine if tomorrow Trump issued his phone in that style.
thats a valid point but primary against state control not socialism itself.
In an ideal socialist system this Volkstelefon would be owned by a democratic entity rather than an elite group of politicians in a flawed democratic government. This entity would probably consist of worker and consumer representatives with the common goal of providing affordable high quality service that's also fair to both the workers and consumers.
Your concern here is also shared with most socialists.
While yes socialism can some time manifest itself in the form of state ownership that's never the ideal situation since it can easily transform into state capitalism if the state decisions weren't representative of the workers' will (which is usually the case in non-direct democracy systems).
Yeah, you show some spirit, but no, that's not what those words mean, you even use them with different meanings - wiki/Socialism, wiki/Communism.
You misrepresented the two terms so badly I was looking for funny sarcasm/parody/trolling (eg "100% socialistic", "hangouts/wealth redistribution is communism and socialism is communal ownership", etc). Same with VW example.
And alleging "socialism" (actually 'communism', the communal ownership of production factors) is less secure for your personal freedoms than private companies owning your data is just lol. The gov has the same access. Atm private companies control a lot of gov too so you just don't really have a gov of the people anymore.
Not to mention that socialism/communism is not incompatible with democracy.
You can have 0 private (mega)corps (for simplicity sake: that just means no stock markets) and still have a perfectly normal & representative democracy.
In fact, with people more engaged & putting the work into governance (not voting like a sports fan), that's how you safeguard from fascism.
And yes, Trump can issue a phone in that style, since nobody is overthrowing him (is there even a codified procedure for that?).
You could have a completely Socialistic society that let's some of it's people starve because it benefits the majority.
Besides the word "socialistic" not meaning that (unless you meant that the choice was between 'everybody starving' and 'a minority starving') a majority can always outvote the minority, that is their moral prerogative. That is the opposite of a minority rule where the majority can starve (or be otherwise hindered/stolen from/enslaved/etc).
The difference is that with communal wealth the food production isn't motivated by profit, but way more by food production quantity (bcs the owners want to eat, not profit).
It turns out that actually living in a socialist state is oppressive to the point where millions upon millions were starved because that was what was needed to give socialism the chance to take off in a capitalist world.
In case you're not aware, lemmy.world has (pre-emptively) defederated from the two instances that have the vast majority of socialists and communists on Lemmy, hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml.
If you want a lot more socialists to read your question and provide more informative answers, you may want to post in a community on lemmy.ml or lemmy.zip, which don't defederate those instances.
People will downvote my message and complain that hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml are "tankie" instances, which I interpret to mean that they hate people who want to make socialism happen in real life some day.
No, we hate people who want to execute others. We hate people who think that authoritarianism is in any way connected to anything resembling communism.
We hate people who worship mass murderers. So no, socialism sounds nice, what the wannabe communists on tankie instances are doing on the other hand sounds just idiotic.
Instances defederated from hexbear and lemmygrad because a few dozen users from those instances were terminally online trolls. They'd relentlessly harass users they didn't like (i.e. most people), spam threads with gross images, and were generally obnoxious shitheads.
Going by your figure, a few dozen users out of nearly 2,500 combined monthly active users behaved badly. It seems to me that defederating was/is an overreaction when user-level blocks and community-level bans exist.
You weren't around for it, but it was bad -- you couldn't avoid them. A few dozen trolls doesn't sound like much, but they were coordinated and relentless. Blocking users didn't work because they were constantly making alts, including on other instances.
Calls were made for instances hosting them to ban those users: most did, some refused to or couldn't. Blocking instances in user settings wasn't a thing yet, so those instances were mass defederated from. Lemmygrad and hexbear were the big two and home of the dirtbags that were upset their "fun" was over.
Thanks for the context. Still, it seems that whatever happened back then is no longer the case now that we can block users, communities, and instances ourselves. I don't see a good reason to keep those instances defederated now.
I think the standard thing at this point is to agree it's a nice idea, but also say it doesn't work in practice. Edit: And sometimes a certain kind of person will turn a simple disagreement into tribalistic hate.
A version was tried a few times from 1917 on, and it went poorly. So, if you're still for collective ownership of the means of production, you either need to be a denialist about that history, or explain why your version would be better.
There's also people who use a weaker definition not mutually exclusive with capitalism.
It hasn't existed anywhere before - the OG fascist countries were built on top of fairly typical market economies for the time, with actually had much more interventionism than now, maybe China-level.
You didn't give a third option, so I guess we're done.
So, if you’re still for collective ownership of the means of production...
Note that most self-described "socialists" aren't literally suggesting we ban the ownership class, declare the value of all stocks to be $0, and force every corporation to operate as employee-owned collectives. They're usually arguing for things like "expand our old-age health-insurance program to just cover everyone" or "make the city buses not charge a per-ride usage fee."
The hate against "socialism" is precisely because Karl Marx and some 20th century communists used it to mean something different, and then the right wing of United States used that label to try and smear every social program since the ban of slavery. Now we have two entirely different and incompatible meanings, and both a lot of bad-faith actors who intentionally conflate the two and a bunch of good-faith actors who aren't even aware there's a difference.
But this is Lemmy, where there's lots of communists, so that's how I interpreted OP's question. (Also, the Marx definition came first)
I think most self-described socialists don't have a very specific idea what they want, but more an idea of who they think is good (public servants) and who they think is bad (corporations). Which is like most voters in general.
But for me the issue is that I work hard to have, and to continue having a nice life for my family and I. I took the risk, I invested in myself, and made the right choices over and over again. There should be a reward for that.
And while I don't think people should be homeless and starving, I'm realistic enough about the current politics (of both parties) to know that the wealthy won't be the ones to pay for it, it will be weaponized to drive the wealth gap further apart.
Sure in a perfect world billionaires would be taxed (and actually have to pay), and we could provide all this wonderful socialism everyone here wants, but that's never actually going to happen and I don't feel like paying even more taxes to watch the funds disappear into the already massive (and misused) budget.
I think most of the hate is from hard working people who are afraid "lazy ones" will get benefits that they themselves deserve.
I dont disagree. The amount of people on lemmy that say they just wanna sit on their ass and smoke weed is quite high, and im convinced if they had their way all our infrastructure would crumble in a week (no one thinks about the sewer/wastewater, the electricity, and the food plants that need to keep running for your comfortable lazy life)
We would need a way to keep people working crap jobs, while also supporting them. We cant all be influencers and movie stars. Someone has to shovel shit.
I dont disagree. The amount of people on lemmy that say they just wanna sit on their ass and smoke weed is quite high, and im convinced if they had their way all our infrastructure would crumble in a week (no one thinks about the sewer/wastewater, the electricity, and the food plants that need to keep running for your comfortable lazy life)
We would need a way to keep people working crap jobs, while also supporting them. We cant all be influencers and movie stars. Someone has to shovel shit.
Socialism isn't "everyone gets free shit and smokes weed all day". It's usually something along the lines of public ownership of the means of production under democratic control. Like, the factory is owned by the people who work at the factory instead of some rich guy that collects a check despite contributing no labor.
The shit people worry about is actually happening under capitalism, it's just they get to pretend they deserve it because their parents were rich, or they got lucky, or they scammed someone (like their workers).
However, wouldn't this kind of ruin any hard work towards a goal like owning your business or moving up in a company from doing hard labor to an easier office job as you get older?
I know you'll say "people already work hard labor jobs at 80 years old because of capitalism keeping them down!" But thats not everyone. A lot of people have worked hard and succeeded. If you're only rewarded for your labor and not owning anything to gain money off of it, you will be working hard labor jobs forever. Because we can all agree hard labor jobs deserve more pay than any other job (programmers, youre out of luck now, thats a cushy job).
Im being an ass on purpose, because these are real world arguments you need to convince real people of why capitalism is actually bad, because many people are not convinced it is.
Im being an ass on purpose, because these are real world arguments you need to convince real people of why capitalism is actually bad, because many people are not convinced it is.
I'm not sure which sentences are you trying to be an ass and which are legitimate ignorance. You literally said you don't disagree? I'm happy to try to counter ignorance, even feigned ignorance, but it is a waste of time if you trying to be an ass or are just going to reply "Well I know that but..."
If you think the majority of people would do things to better society rather than be lazy if they were given handouts...you dont know humanity all too well.
If you think the majority of people would do things to better society rather than be lazy if they were given handouts...you dont know humanity all too well.
See, I don't think you're "being an ass on purpose". I think you are either just an ass or purposely being difficult to no productive end.
Im trying to show the lemmings in their left wing bubble how the real world works and how the working people think.
I'm totally on your side, but I like to offer arguments I hear every day from working class people who are vehemently right wing Trump super capitalist/authoritarians
but I like to offer arguments I hear every day from working class people who are vehemently right wing Trump super capitalist/authoritarians
If they are "vehemently right wing Trump super capitalist/authoritarians" then they aren't going to listen and, as I said, you achieve nothing but antagonism.
"I totally agree with you but I'm going to pop your bubble and remind you that people who disagree with you to the extreme offer ignorant talking points and won't agree with you. I totally agree with your answers to but those people don't."
It sounds like you are trying to demoralize the left while pretending to be an ally. What are you hoping to accomplish?
That just makes no sense at all. You can tell because so many people are not just doing the bare minimum to survive and sitting on their arse for the rest of their time.
People have desires and ambitions. Making sure that basics such as food, shelter, education and healthcare are covered won't change that.
Propaganda works.
Arguments I hear are usually something along the lines of "it's going to destroy the economy", "it destroys jobs", "I'm rich and they'll tax me a lot" (said by people who aren't actually rich). Also, confusing social democracy (Germany, Nordic countries) with what the Soviet Union and China were doing.
Yeah, capitalism has conspired to make us believe, as a group, that resources are somehow incredibly limited while a small cabal of elites gobble up insane quantities of resources for themselves while depriving the majority of those same resources.
Pure altruistic socialism would evenly redivide those resources, giving to those who need what they need.
It is anathema to capitalism, but it is the only society that would actually work in a post-scarcity world, which we might actually be approaching, assuming that the capitalists don't destroy it first.
The world has had enough resources for post-scarcity for decades, if not centuries. Before, the problem was logistics, now it's will.
Oh it has always been will. Let‘s not pretend like capitalism has the better logistics and therefore a better world wouldn‘t have been possible sooner. That’s only romanticizing capitalism.
I'm talking about methods of transport and storage. Food isn't likely to rot before it gets where it's going, like it was a couple hundred years ago.
You can eat Southafrican oranges in Europe. Food could go wherever it's needed but rich people doesn't want it.
I think the estimate I've seen that tries to compute this out has people showering once every 3 weeks and using the internet for ~1 hour a week. Is this the post-scarcity lifestyle you had in mind, am I confused, or have we tipped past the point of being able to do much better?
Ah, we can't produce water, can we? Better we check consumption, especially corporate.
I'm not sure what you mean.
But yes, desalination and cleaning are very expensive still afaik. We pipe water quite far between states, which seems crazy to me.
even before modern logistics we were broadly post-scarcity, that's kind of the whole reason why humans are so successful, after we invented stone tools and fire we had basically won.
I think very few of the ruling elite would support a post scarcity world. Elon Musk keeps talking about it the most and he is one of the guys I trust the least to intentionally bring it about.
A socialist society where everyone is more or less equal. Yeah, Musk and his company of wannabe trillionaires are going to fight that to their last breath.
I think this is the biggest one. It's the word, but it doesn't matter which word is used. All the propaganda machines will fuck with it as quick as they can.
yes socialism means a lot of things to a lot of people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism#Etymology
it was invented a long time ago in association with a utopian fantasy
IMHO remnants from the cold war indoctrination.
Probably US-Americans confusing anything that's not predatory capitalism with Russia and China.
Confusing or deliberately conflating, depending on whether they're the fraudster or the mark.
And unfortunately this conflation was also exploited by the Soviet Union and CCP to point their state capitalism as the only alternative to (neo)liberal capitalism.
Propaganda.
People don't know what socialism actually means because of propaganda...
you can ask someone who is against "socialism" whether they like it by talking about elements of it without explicitly mentioning the word "socialism" and they will probably agree with it.
People don't know what socialism actually is beyond literally defining it as bad and scary. It's insane how uneducated and stupid most of us are.
seriously, do this! it's extremely fucking depressing!
Get a list of policies for a socialist party, read it to someone, then at the end say "and that's the policies the socialist party want to implement" and watch the killswitch in their brain activate.
The people who hate it are those who think themselves better than their peers. They think they deserve more than their peers, and that socialism transfers their superior effort to the benefit of their inferiors.
They see socialism not as everyone helping everyone, but as they, the successful being forced to support them, the lazy.
People don't really like change.
Think about free public libraries. They're fairly popular, and not controversial outside of fringe libertarian types and assholes. People like that you can borrow books and other media for free. Usually there's a bit of a backlash if there's a movement to shut down libraries or limit their services.
Imagine if free public libraries didn't exist, and someone tried to invent them today. People would be having screaming fits about communism. It's stealing from the authors. it's ruining publishing. We don't need tax dollars for this when we have amazon. Blah blah blah.
It's the same with other things we could socialize. health care is a privatized nightmare. If we somehow got a public option in, eventually people would start reflexively defending it.
So what I'm saying is many people don't really have a set of internally consistent beliefs. They just don't like change.
Such a good point. Every once in a while I come across a particular social policy in a European country that someone from there is astonished doesn't exist in other countries and on paper you think this would be great but you would know it would be such a hard sell in your / other countries. I think on a city / regional level there is a lot more about looking what other places are doing well top adopt them but don't see it as much on an international level (outside of the EU anyway)
People often confuse socialism with communism. The confusion is deliberate by a lot of right wing propaganda. When talking about socialism with Americans, you have to explain to them that the fire department is an example of socialism. As are other public services, like roads, police, libraries, and some utilities.
Of course in America, some people think profit is more important, so they are doing everything they can to privatize services. For example, in Texas they are slowly killing public education, and toll roads have taken over normal highway construction.
As I mentioned, people are being conned and scared of the word so that they will elect people will be replacing what remains of public services with private ones.
"liberators"? Did you mean Libraries?
No that's socialism.
Corrected. (But libraries are liberators!)
100% true!
There are exceptions even here in Texas. My city has no toll roads and has a publicly owned power company.
We don't have private power companies in this county. What are they gonna compete on? Price? They would buy the power from the public company. Service? The service is honestly good.
I dream of moving to a different. State but I thank my lucky stars I grew up in this city.
Socialism and communism have a lot more in common than communism and what the soviets (and those they inspired) did.
But also, communism isn't bad either.
It's basically advanced socialism, not whateverthefuck stalin and mao were doing. It's like how the full name of the nazi party was "national-socialist worker's party", obviously the nazis aren't actually socialists, the only reason they use that word is because people at the time actually wanted socialism.
Fire departments aren't socialism, they're social services. Socialism is when the whole economy is social services. Social-ism. A capitalist economy with lots of social services (like Norway) is called a social democracy.
:(
Socialism is great as a concept, basically means putting people before capital. Capitalism is the reverse. Even the staunchest capitalist countries practice socialism to some degree. Raw capitalism would be hell.
It’s the same with communism, where the workers were supposed to own the means of production, which means money wouldn’t gravitate around a few ones. Even the staunchest communist countries didn’t practice real communism, deforming it into feudalism.
TL;DR: Socialism is a great concept, just consider that everything we hear about it comes from a culture ruled by capitalists.
The EU has a lot of socialism. Just look at them for how to do it.
None of that is socialism.
"we need socialism like Nordic countries!"
"Nordic countries are Capitalist they just have robust social welfare programs!"
" Then let's implement those programs!"
"No! That's socialism!"
That would be capitalism's arguments, yes.
Socialism has several different lineages. All of which used different strategies for accomplishing socialism (workers own the means of production) and maybe eventually communism (stateless, moneyless, classless society). (I often use "socialism" interchangeably as both the movement for and the desired end state, which I think Marx used to do, too, iirc).
The Marxist-Leninist/Maoist version is what most folks are familiar with - create a "vanguard party", leverage that political power to take over the government in a workers' revolution, and then use the power of the state to accomplish socialism and eventually transition to communism. That strategy was how we got the USSR and Communist China, loosely speaking. How much that strategy actually fulfilled the promises of socialism/communism is up for debate.
But there were other socialist movements in other areas of the world. The European version tends to be either democratic socialism (use standard political power to ease a transition to socialism, sans revolution) or social democracy (use government to implement the desired economic egalitarianism without the precise goal of the workers owning the means of production). (I hope I got those right, I often get them mixed up.)
I would agree with you that no European state has reached the end state of socialism or communism, as they're still pretty dang capitalist, but a good number of EU states are a lot closer to the promises of socialism than the rest of the world, as far as I understand things.
That's not even slightly true, but human nature makes it end up being that way. We're real good at coming up with isms incompatible with our nature, so they never work as planned, often with irony too.
Ah yes, the biblical "human nature is flawed so we can't ever make the world better" argument.
Ignoring the 1000's of years of humans making the world better.
We used to have child sacrifice and we don't anymore. We used to have chattel slavery and we don't anymore.
Our economies can get better and if someone tells you otherwise they are lying to preserve their own power.
genuinely what does that even mean? can you try rephrasing that?
As a species we have evolved with certain traits. These traits are the reason we are the top.species. Try as we may, with society, we cannot just blink these traits away,; no living thing can evolve that fast.
So whenever someone comes up with a great idea of how things could be in society, they often ignore our species' traits of ruthless ambition, persistent survival, tribalistic loyalty, etc. It is like when people get border collies thinking they'll be great pets, but then realise their true nature and how much work and.effort has to be put into them every day to get.the most.out of them.
Idiots think we're somehow different and beyond the other animals, but we're not. How society is today is exactly how we are. If someone wants to change it, they need to factor human nature, else it won't work.
The ultra rich have successfully convinced a lot of people that they, too, could become ultra rich some day - but there's no place for ultra rich under socialism.
Then further, a lot of people have been convinced that only the very very poor would be better off and everyone else would be worse off. That is of course also untrue.
The hate against socialism is the idea that someone who doesn't work as hard as you, gets the same benefits as you, and that's not fair.
Something like that could never work under capitalism. Everybody knows that rich people work extremely hard to be rich. I work hard, and I'll be rich some day too.
It's propaganda. The reality is that much of our system is already Socialized. In fact, some of the best stuff in our society is Socialist.
Schools, libraries, fire departments, police, military, parks, roads, etc. are all Socialist concepts at their foundation.
Fire Departments used to work by subscription. A building owner would pay a local fire brigade for protection. He would get a small cast iron badge that he'd place next to his doorway. If a building caught fire, the fire brigade would show up, and if there was a a "fire mark," they'd fight the fire. If there wasn't a fire mark, they'd let it burn down. That is a strictly Capitalist concept.
It was eventually decided that public tax money would be used to protect EVERYBODY from fire, which is a Socialist concept. The old subscription-based fire brigade concept evolved into the predatory insurance industry, a Capitalist concept which has been preying upon us ever since.
Like most political philosophies, Socialism has its positives and negatives. Any political philosophy, taken to its most extreme ends, would be a disaster. The best governments take the most successful parts of any philosophy, and rejects the bad parts. A pure Democratic/Republican/Socialist government would be terrible, but a combination of the best elements, could be really great.
MAGA is not a legitimate political philosophy. it's core tenets include treason, corruption, racism, bigotry, violence, pedophilia, misogyny, intolerance, ignorance, and incompetence. MAGA is a criminal enterprise disguising itself as a legitimate political movement, and it's influence must be fully purged from our government and our society.
Socialism threatens capitalists -> Capitalists spend money in media and politics to ensure support for capitalism by spreading fear about socialism -> People are scared of socialism.
It's really that simple honestly. I generally hate oversimplifications but there's not that much more to it
Years of propaganda from oligarchs, their think tanks and their propaganda spreaders. This has been an attack for many decades but especially after WW2 during the red scare and then after 1970 when the Powell Memo was issued. That is the origin of all of our messes, including Reagan and Trump.
Many of the same right wing think tanks are from the same oligarchs from decades ago and/or their heirs. Think Timothy Mellon or Birch Society (Koch Brother father). Even then, there was “the business plot” where the oligarchs of the 1930s wanted fascism because of the threat FDR had to their wealth and power.
The red scare is a huge factor that continues to this day.
It is due to lobbying and astroturfing.
Simple as.
It's definitely not based in data, because that overwhelmingly shows massive economic and happiness growth happens in these states
Where in the world has socialism been successful in the past?
I'll wait.
decades of red scare propaganda and purposefully sabotaging public education
Ask a typical American what they hate about socialism and they will perfectly describe capitalism
And ask them what policies they want to see enacted, and they'll give you a list that looks suspiciously like that of a socialist party.
If you're going to repeat yourself, I will too. "Capitalism, at its best, benefits a few people (the capitalists) and screws over everyone else (the workers)."
You already said to ask about the ideal. So why bring up Bulgaria? Quit arguing with yourself.
Again, we agree. Your ideal is that anyone has a chance in capitalism. Great. And everyone else, well, they get screwed. That's your logic. Fortunately, billions of people around the world think we can do better than that, and that treating others well is a moral imperative.
There are various kinds of socialism. Some "take care of themselves and neighbors" & some merely claim to.
One of the merely claims types is authoritarian socialism, which includes Marxism–Leninism.
That ideology does not respect & protect inherent individual rights & liberties recognized since the Enlightenment. Authoritarian socialism is hated for abusing human rights, and it's often incorrectly assumed that all socialism is authoritarian. That explains the hatred.
Kinds of socialism that respect & protect human rights do exist, however, and they have a better claim to a system of self & mutual care. There's little reason to hate those.
It would seem the common problem in any political system is always authoritarianism? Is there historical case where a king or similar actually helped the people that I can study more?
bhutan maybe?
I mean i'd imagine there were quite a lot of kings that were much like the modern king of e.g. Norway, where they really don't do much other than PR and rubber stamping decisions.
Any ruler needs support from other powerful people, and since crowns were usually hereditary that means sometimes the new king won't be a miserable sack of shit.
I mean put yourself in the position of some medieval prince whose dad was poisoned by an advisor or something, yeah sure you can live in luxury but it's fucking risky, so if you don't just opt to flee 5 countries over in hope of peace you'd probably try to be as inoffensive as possible and just gently nudge things in a non-shitty direction whenever possible.
So granted, not "good" kings, but considering how many rulers have and continue to be absolutely horrible i'd be pretty happy to live under a king who does nothing..
Maybe Juan Carlos, because he abdicated to transition the government from dictatorship to democracy.
ELI5
People dislike socialism because they often feel like their hard work and effort does not get fairly rewarded. Why would you work your whole life away to become a doctor and save lives when someone else wastes their time lost in vice.
Well you're 5 you piece of shit and your efforts at not pissing the bed have been pretty minimal at best. But do you still eat? Do you have a roof and a bed to piss all over? Who cleans that mess every time? People hate socialism because it sucks to be the provider. It also sucks to suffer. And in life we often forget this. We forget it takes all of us. We forget what it is to be helpless. We forget those who provided for us. And we get angry when we have to provide for others when we feel so left out of the party.
In short dont forget. Don't forget what you have been given and don't forget to share. Dumb kids.
To me the hate is quite simple to understand. Socialism means that the extremely rich will be worse off financially. The 1% have an unnatural love for money, and the idea of being less wealthy for the greater good is totally abhorrent to them.
For generations they've been able to demonise socialism using their disproportionate influence through the media, to the extent that the majority of the population now fear it.
We've really not moved on that far intellectually from the witch trials. People are collectively ignorant and fearful, and with the right nudges are easy to control to the point where they'll literally vote against their own good. They are the proverbial Turkeys voting for Christmas and I honestly don't know how we will ever get past it.
Thankfully, we're now reaching a turning point where PragerU will be used to teach directly in schools, letting kids know why socialism is bad and capitalism is good. Wait, that's the opposite of what we want, fuck!
Cognitive biases seem to be unavoidable. Even if you are well-educated about a particular bias, it often takes reflection (internally or externally motivated) to recognize it in your decisions / behavior.
Fallacious reasoning is often just as good at convincing an audience, which is one of the reasons they are still in use despite many or most being documented and named in ancient times.
Individual training in critical thinking skills can help, but theocrats (in specific) and authoritarians (in general) spend a lot of effort making sure that public education is robbed of that. But, that's not enough to "intellectually move on"; even with that training, bias occurs. So, we have to build systems for bias detection and remediation if we want a just global society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
It's pretty much all US propaganda that makes people hate socialism
Yes, it's the red scare, but most translations of Karl Marx do use the word "socialism" for the state he described as a precursor to capitalism. And the name of the Russian communist federation was generally translated as "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."
Because some of the worst dictators of all time said they were communist and socialist, despite dictatorship being fundamentally antithetical to both.
Then a bunch of idiots watched a dictatorship, the USSR, burn up their economy with a space and arms race, so now they think socialism kills economic progress. It wasn't that the USSR didn't invest properly in the populace, or infrastructure, or that they were fundamentally a kleptocracy with a massive military, it's that they called themselves socialist. That's what killed them.
Note that the reason they called themselves socialists and communists is because a lot of people at the time considered this good, it's like how many countries these days have "democratic republic" in their name, despite obviously being neither of those things.
Evil people can't call themselves evil, they have to lie about what they are for people to get tricked into accepting them.
Minor massive correction: The world is run by very rich people who benefit from the current system
Well, not entirely... One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders..It's mostly thanks to USA propaganda and the whole "Red Scare" that began in the 1950s
Not really, the system is supposed to be about a government and economy that cares about the well being of its people first, such that several wealth distribution methods would be applied to ensure minimal inequality.
What happens if capitalism works perfectly? A few people have great lives (the capitalists) and everyone else is screwed (the workers). That's the entire point of capitalism.
What happens if socialism works perfectly? Everyone has decent lives.
(What you wrote about corruption is true, of course, but your first claim was simply false.)
I don't believe "fairness" is a defining characteristic of Capitalism. Can you please provide a definition of Captialism so that I can be sure we are talking about the same thing?
I think you are confused. I don't believe I've tried to make a comparison between socialism and capitalism in this thread. Perhaps that was someone else?
Actually you seem to agree with me. Capitalism gives people a chance to become the capitalists, I agree ... and that screws over everyone else. That's your view of perfection.
I think that's a shitty world to try to build. I think it's selfish and destructive. But you seem to like it... How sad.
Try talking to a person who grew up in a primarily black neighbourhood in America. Or a poor person who had to skip school so they could work to afford food.
Almost every rich person now had rich parents and rich grandparents. Even the "self-made" rich people had access to opportunities not available to poor people.
It's easy to risk everything to try starting your own business when failure means going back to your parents for food and housing. It's so much harder to justify trying when failure means starving on the street, and not trying means continuing to live in a house.
Capitalism does not give people a fair shot. It takes wealth from people with capital to give to people with capital, and by necessity, oppresses people to stop them from gaining capital.
The vast majority of people simply do not have a fair shot.
Anyone has a fair shot at being a wage slave
People who defended capitalism at this point in time are in constant denial. Capitalism only works well for everyone in highly competitive new fields/markets.
Once the monopoly sets in it no longer serves a useful function to the rest of society but does enrich a minority.
An awful lot of capitalistic practice is rent seeking nowadays. It doesn't add any value and instead creates it out of thin air.
There has never been an effective small businesses capitalism economy that every capitalists uses to justify capitalism. It always ends up as game of monopoly.
Yeah I agree, that was a ridiculous thing to say.
That is a strawman argument. I did not say that, and it is not relevant to what I did say.
The issue is also that people seem to be quite polarised in their groupthink. Socialism and capitalism aren't mutually exclusive, and they are only destructive if they are adopted as a pure ideology which disallows any discussion of the possibilities of the other system. In my opinion, an ideal system has protected elements of both. Healthcare, education, prisons, public services: socialised. Supermarkets, car sales, beauty products: a free market.
At the moment our society is far too capitalist, and socialism is seen as suspicious at best. This is causing harm and suffering.
The rich don't want equality. They need people to be suffering and in dire want, so they have exploitable people to profit from.
Actual five year old explanation:
Some people, who bake a birthday cake with their mom and dad, want the entire cake for themselves. If mom or dad take a piece anyway, they think that's not "sharing" but "stealing". Even though mom and dad helped bake the cake too. They think cake being taken from them is socialism.
long form:
So when someone says "that's socialism", they fear that they will be robbed or killed or at least threatened. And to be fair, the thought of being robbed or harmed is scary.
The first failures of socialism can be sort of traced back to before Karl Marx even, to the French Revolution, in fact. The ideas were refined somewhat after that obviously, but the practical applications did not seem to improve at all.
The vast majority of the hate for socialism is decades long propaganda and indoctrination, which is mostly false. Socialism is a threat to the wealthy, so they programmed people to hate it.
With socialism or socialism-like policies, the general population gets more, at the expense of the wealthy elites who would get less. The wealthy control or lobby or have a say in our education system, media, entertainment, etc.
One reason I can think is we haven't yet seen a working socialist society, which often fail for external reasons.
For example, the socialist government in Cuba was severely undermined by the USA imposed blockade.
A more recent example is Venezuela, while you can think what you want about its current government, I don't think USA should interfere with any sovereign nation.
There's almost like a pattern, like someone, somewhere doesn't like the idea of socialism to succeed.
China needs Taiwan to fail because the Chinese Communist Party maintains that democracy is incompatible with the Chinese culture. Having a very successful Chinese democracy shows that Chinese culture is compatible with democracy.
In a similar way, capitalists do everything they can to scuttle socialist countries, because a working socialist country would show that it was viable. Hence endless embargoes, wars, and a steady stream of propaganda. This was true for the entire life of the Soviet Union, and continues to this day for socialist countries.
Indeed my friend... Sad state of affairs.
There are plenty of surviving socialist states, and Cuba and Venezuela and Vietnam for that matter still exist despite extensive US meddling so it's weird to call them non-surviving.
Whether you want to call China socialist is a whole different kettle of worms, but I think it demonstrates rather handily that socialism's second greatest burden beyond the necessity of fighting off capitalists is the authoritarianism of Marxists.
I agree, that's why I called them non-working socialist states.
My point is we haven't yet seen how well (or bad) could a socialist state work if left alone.
China produced more billionaires than the US this year.
Sure, and they do plenty of capitalist hellscape shit in general and I'll shitpost about that all day. They've also raised nearly a billion people out of poverty since 1978 and one of the original conceits of Marxism is that capitalism might be necessarily to build the industrial foundation for socialism to be viable in the first place so... We'll see what happens as they come closer and closer to undeniably a society that could enact true socialism if it wanted to.
We do know their state has absolutely no qualms about disappearing billionaires as is. Or, you know, millions of Muslims.
This is a great perspective and it always helps me with gloom and doom. There are billions of people infinitely better off than twenty years ago in regards to access to food, electricity, and clean water.
You don't need to wonder what will happen as China has already embraced fascism. Once wealthy individuals and their corporations gather enough power China will be no different than the rest of the world. I would love for them to prove me wrong.
Capitalism always results in the same outcome and China is no different. Such is life.
I'm a total lamen but what makes Marxism authoritarian?
Marxism posits that socialism is best achieved through a command/centralized economy. There's plenty of room for interpretation and of course being a Marxist doesn't mean you have to agree with 150 year old socioeconomic theories on every point but generally that's the form Marxist governments have assumed, probably because it is in the interest of the people running a government to take all the power they can.
If the government controls production from the ground up there's just no other model to call it but authoritarian, everything within that society can only happen by their consent or by breaking the law.
Socialism by its barest definition is great.
Socialism as outlined in Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto is a little sketchier because it makes a lot of unrealistic assumptions about human nature and is just generally super hard to implement without creating a power vacuum.
Socialism as in the USSR's Socialism is a century old practice of the cruellest and most war hungry culture imagineable, having taken advantage of the afforementioned power vacuum to starve and torture millions at home, ally with the Nazis in WWII and then change sides halfway through, tear down democracies around the globe, and push us all the closest we have ever been to thermonuclear annihilation. A threat so great that even 30 years into its grave is still a great stone over our heads, having crafted a world power balance that will threaten our destruction for generations to come.
But Socialism by its barest definition is great.
My dad was Finnish, and I think it helps to remember, Finns were fighting Russians before and during the time Russia called itself Communist and Socialist. The western side of that divide, the Nordic countries, practiced a very different version of "socialism", with democracy, and they seem to be reaping a lot of benefits.
Marx's general proposals for the implementation of a socialist government:
Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Abolition of all right of inheritance.
Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries: gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc., etc.
Which of those do you think is hard to implement or makes unrealistic assumptions about human nature?
So right around step 1 you've got either
A) An Authoritarian state who controls all property with no method to implement such state.
B) An Anarchy where, since nobody owns anything, the influential will go wherever they want and take whatever they want.
... what?
Abolition of private land ownership in favor of state land ownership is not inherently 'authoritarian', nor is it particularly impossible to implement.
You... you do realize that public lands does not mean "First come first serve", right?
Man, this is basic pre-modern society shit. Read up on medieval village commons. Shit, read up on public lands today.
Let me put it this way: in many places around the world the people are allowed to challenge the state's claim to properties in courts with varying success. Your step one would take that away, so it is leaning in the direction of authoritarian.
But I'm pretty sure Marx was more interested in Option B, I don't think he was interested in using politics to build a strong democracy but rather wanted to topple any current system and hope a firect democracy pops up over night.
These are three separate Karl Marx quotes and they're extremely vague, but he has been somewhat consistent that any form of government that is not direct democracy must be "overthrown" or "fought" or "toppled".
Bruh, in state societies without widespread private land ownership there remains a distinction between state and public lands, and the state can be challenged with regards to ownership or usage rights in courts.
Reformism was not his first choice, but he mused at several points that bourgeois democracies with strong workers' movements, like the USA and the UK at his time (big RIP to our labor movements), could potentially reform without mass revolution.
I'm unfamiliar with that quote or its provenance, but considering that the entire point of the disappointments of 1848 was that the revolutions, both liberal and socialist factions failed, and the 'concessions' offered in response by the established authoritarian regimes were nothing more than window dressing (with executions for flavor), thinking that the sheen of that farce needed to fade before further action could be taken is not unreasonable.
How is that in any way in opposition to democracy or even reform?
I repeat the second statement.
In the long term, sure. If your goal is direct democracy without a state ("Communism"), then the goal is to eventually get there. But Marx was always very clear that intermediate steps were not fucking nothing, and in many cases were necessary.
You may need to jump over the gap on a broken bridge, but better a broken bridge to jump over than the whole goddamn river.
Yeah, and capitalism has never lead to the toppling of foreign democracies or threatened thermonuclear annihilation
Ah, shit wait
Top of the line Whataboutism
It actually wasn't. The comment I responded to was posing socialism as being at the root of these issues. It's hardly the cause of any of these, much like how capitalism itself also isn't the cause of toppling foreign democracies or threatening thermonuclear annihilation, which is what I was contrasting.
Not Socialism, I specifically said tbe USSR in this example.
I didn't call it the root, I don't think Joseph Stalin invented being a King, I just think he has forever stained the word Socialism.
When people talk about an apple that is rotten because somebody specifically asked about it, talking about all the rotten oranges and pears in the world is top of the line whataboutism.
You mean to say you weren't actually talking about socialism, just like I wasn't actually talking about capitalism, but instead the US hegemony in particular? 😝
I mean to say you're talking about shit that nobody asked about and saying I made claims which I clearly didn't.
BuT hER eMaILs!
Yes, you have several EmAiLs to complain about instead of actually addressing anything. I doubt anyone here thinks the US is perfect, but that's not the question.
No, the question was about the Soviet Union. That's why talking about the US is a cop-out.
And is still pretty vague. There was a lot of colouring in for the Bolsheviks to do.
I'm glad it fell (plz don't ban), but there's hella artistic licence there.
The power vacuum came from the Tsar. They were always enemies of the Nazis, although they did temporarily agree not to fight them, and then afterwards they basically won the war themselves. The US went first with the nukes. I don't even know what you mean about the current power balance - Russia is laughably weak, China is behind where it would have been if it took the Japan path. And, the thing about their cruel culture just sounds like bigotry.
The Bolsheviks literally couped the democratically elected and socialist post-Tsar government of Russia, kickstarting several years of civil war.
Funny, then, that they invaded Poland and the Baltics in tandem with the Nazis and spent several years supplying the Nazi war machine.
Fucking what.
Even Stalin regarded the Soviet position as unwinnable without the Western Allies.
I didn't expect to end up arguing with you, Pug.
It was itself months old. Just like in France a century and a bit earlier, revolutions have a way of getting overthrown. And the one that stuck was itself autocratic.
If the Tsars had made actual concessions to liberalism earlier, maybe history would have developed differently. But, as it is, they waited until the late 19th century to abolish actual tied-to-the-land serfdom, were similarly reluctant to stop being autocratic feudal dicks in other ways, and set up the Duma right as revolutionaries of various stripes were trying to knock in their door. With the unpopularity of WWI and the necessity of having a lot of angry soldiers running around during it, instability became fait accompli.
The Nazis saw communism as right up their with the Jews as their main nemesis, and invented the term Judaeo-Bolshevik to describe how they're actually the same. Yes, they did agree to not fight each other and split up some weaker nations (and trade? I'm not sure what you mean by supplying), but calling that an alliance seems like a stretch. I can't believe both sides weren't gauging when to break it off and attack the other from the start. Stalin spent that time shifting his defense production base to the Urals in preparation, even.
Compare Britain and France, or Italy and the Nazis, who were definitely allies.
Yes, it would have been a very different war if the Nazis weren't already fighting. But, as it was, they were in a stalemate circa 1941 when they started Barbarossa, and the Soviets ended up taking the lion's share of casualties tipping the balance hard against them. Being a history student, I'm sure you as well have seen actual historians explain that human wave tactics weren't a thing - Soviets died in spades because they were fighting hard against an enemy that saw them as subhuman.
In a few words "they basically won it themselves" is the best I could do. Since there were many topics at play I didn't want to start pulling out statistics and narrative to explain the nuances behind that, or talk about counterfactuals relating to it being a 1-on-1 fight.
"It's just the nature of revolutions" rings a little hollow when two revolutions had occurred without kicking off a civil war until the Bolsheviks dissolved the democratically elected assembly. Feels rather like creating a power vacuum.
What do you call it when two countries agree to cooperate on military matters, including offensive military actions, up to an including performing a joint invasion of a country with the intention of annexing and genociding it?
No, as in, "Stalin believed that without American Lend-Lease alone, the Soviet Union could not have survived the war, even with the Western Allies being in the fight"
The Soviets inflicted approximately 50% more casualties on the Nazis (though a roughly equivalent number of total losses due to Nazis being more willing to surrender to Western forces), but suffered roughly ten times the number of casualties as Western forces, or five times if PoW deaths are excluded.
It doesn't have to be human wave tactics to be a staggering display of incompetence that nearly lost them the war.
I don't think you can separate it like that given just a few months passing in between. Once they had power, they were pretty single-minded about reinforcing it and leaving nothing to chance.
Sure, the provisional government was democratic, to the extent it could be in such a short time. I never said the Bolsheviks were cool, so that's not really relevant.
I mean, didn't Spain and Portugal do something similar with South America? If they were actually fighting together you'd have a point, but what happened is that they drew a line on a map through Poland, independently expanded to it, and then didn't cross it for a little while.
Oh, you meant the US. Sure, Soviet blood, American steel.
"They tried to make their own reign stable" isn't really an argument against them creating a power vacuum, no more than the Tsarist obsession with autocracy as a means of stability counts against the Tsar's incompetence leading to a power vacuum.
Almost a year passed, in which Russia remained cohesive enough to maintain participation in WW1 and have radical, nationwide elections.
Fighting very separate polities.
'Independently expanded to it' is a funny way of saying "Invading within two weeks of each other, causing the sudden dissolution of the Polish war plan, then meeting in the middle and having a joint victory parade".
And without Britain staying in the fight, the US wouldn't have gotten involved in Europe at all. And without Britain staying in the fight, a massive amount of air power would have been available for Operation Barbarossa.
Do you really think the provisional government would have just lasted if Lenin had stayed home, so to speak? From where I'm standing it seems someone else from some faction somewhere would have started their own coup.
Yes, WWII was a joint effort. I probably should have said "the most decisive contribution". I'm sorry, my bad.
"Socialism by its barest definition is great." That's what I thought too until I learned about the USSR's Socialism and how it led to starvation, torture, war, and nearly caused a nuclear apocalypse. It's easy to romanticize socialism in theory, but we must remember the horrors it has caused in practice.
Lmao thats just the short version of my comment
Asking this on Lemmy is like asking a priest "why do people hate the Church?"
Every answer is going to assume the system in question is the best and everyone is either benighted or misanthropic.
Yeah, a real failure of imagining what the socialism haters actually hate.
Points about propaganda are probably true, but none of them are very fleshed out or specific.
I think one of the reasons things are as bad as they are is almost no one engages with things with which they disagree. I'd be surprised if many folks on Lemmy had several good friends who voted (or would have) for trump.
In this case, how many folks have had a good honest conversation with someone whom they respect who also vehemently disagrees with them about socialism? Probably next to zero.
We instead substitute the worst takes from the "other" side and then generalize it about everyone with whom we disagree.
While there's some amount of separation and avoidance, it is also interesting that we have publicly available polling (sometimes with open ended questions!) and data which is likewise ignored/not referenced. Instead we see people asking in places like this.
I think it is also worth noting that capitalism/socialism isn't actually the biggest thing for most Trump voters. A solid portion care about very different issues, and simply do not care about the economic theory. We have a 2 party system in the US (and many places use winner-take-all elections), so any of a dozen issues could be the single issue that matters for a particular person.
Oh absolutely, especially at the Presidential level. I just meant it as a simple shorthand for folks with whom we disagree.
Though, on one that I'd argue was more a referendum on more or less socialism, I'd imagine the same was true in NYC, I'd guess the number of people who voted Mamdani and had close Cuomo voting friends would be pretty small, though I admittedly haven't looked for much data on that.
Also, great use of polling. I just wish the Dems could take it and run on the shit with which everyone agrees instead of getting bogged down in online culture war fights.
Ah, your point is understood. Thank you. The NYC mayoral race is a good example too.
At one time I understood why no party can run on common sense in truth, though I forget the argument now. I know parties exist first to win elections, and only secondarily to change things. But I don't see how that stops the Dems from running an extremely 'common-sense-reform' campaign.
Only thing I have against it is the air-headed, simple-minded take of most on lemmy. I've asked a dozen times how socialism stops money from funneling to the top and into the hands of a few. Never once got an answer. Look in this thread right now! There's not one real definition, just the usual capitalism bad, socialism good, take.
Best government and economic system I've seen in human history is a capitalist economic model with serious guard rails and "socialism" for the government. I put socialism in quotes because the word means to lemmings whatever they want it to mean, so the term is wishy washy.
"Without capitalism the elite won't feel the need to enrich themselves! They'll work for the common good, obviously!" /s because, well, this is Lemmy. I love it but...
Socialism, communism, whatever other utopian ideologies, require that people be invested and actively participating in it. The way wealth stops being funneled to the top is that people are invested (and informed enough) to stop it from happening. How that would happen in a practical sense would depend entirely on how these ideologies were implemented. Anyone who tells you it's all just very simple and easy would be lying to you. The main factor would be active participation by the vast majority of the populace. Without that, any attempts would be doomed to failure.
Those who are educated on the matter and oppose socialism do so because of a belief that continuing high-intensity development of the economy is preferable, for one reason or another.
Many of us would argue that, with the economy in developed countries at the point where everyone could very easily be guaranteed a good quality of life without further improvements, and that, in fact, further improvements at this point are more likely to come from the cultural and technological development enabled by a more equal and less labor-intensive society, capitalism has overstayed its welcome.
Well, over here hard-line socialism is tied directly to Soviet attempts of taking away our independence through military force after us being occupied for well over a thousand years.
So yeah, a hard sell. But we have softer socialist policies these days, but I don't see a shift towards a fully socialist system.
The people who own, run, operate and manage all information systems from education, news services to schools are all or mostly private corporations, businesses or wealthy benefactors who all base their wealth on capitalism. So they spend all their time and energy using the services and organizations they control to convince everyone everywhere that capitalism is the only option and that socialism in any form is not good or does not work or is not practical.
Conservative reactionaries since the French Thermidor Reaction opposed it, believing communalism and eventually socialism undermines their existing hierarchical, feudal system. Stalin also did not help matters at all.
Yeah Stalin was like "You want to see totalitarianism with socialist window dressing?"
This is also why I can't stand tankies. Worshipping the Soviet Union, China and even modern day Russia. Clearly the "is not The West(tm)" is the important part for them, not socialism or communism. Also, I've had interactions with people on reddit where they said that the mass deportations were absolutely justified, etc.
Look, I also want a lot of the things socialism offers, without necessarily going full communist. But I'll argue all day that Nordic countries do it better. Not perfectly of course, there's still billionaires and there are still issues. But people are by and large much more free than they are or were in any of the countries tankies love, and those who aren't well-off still have it much better than they do in, say, the US.
The most common gripe I hear is that because not all labor is similar[EG: Healthcare vs Mining] there is no easy way to make sure that people are putting in the same value into the system. For people that already mistakenly believe there is a large group of "lazy immigrants" draining resources in the current system, this is a deal breaker. The internal logic isn't too much to swallow its just a hurdle to get people to sit long enough to hear the answer. They would rather fight over the crumbs than share the whole because somehow thats more "fair".
If everyone does better, then you're doing worse by comparison.
I want 10% unemployment and 0% interest rates. That's the magic formula where I can sexually harass my au pair and she has no choice but to put up with it.
If you don’t define it, lots of things can be wrong with it. Or right.
Which is why almost no one defines it.
The term "socialism" was poison since the Russian revolution and the red scare that followed. The rich/capitalists used all powers available to poison it so that even the mildest western EU forms didn't threaten the tiny amount of their exploitation of the working classes.
No, its means workers control the means of production.
Edit: Im getting really tired of people conflating socialism with social programs. Its not socialism when the government does something, stop saying it is.
Because it is opposed to clasical liberalism. that is the idea that humans can choose their own direction and control their own persuit of life. 'life, liberty and property'.
socalists like to talk about capitalisn because that is an easy strawman to beat up. the fundamentals of liberty are very differnt from their conception of capitalism though and they don't want you to know just how messed up their theory realy is.
don't confuse clasical liberalism from what modern language calls liberal.
It's only a strawman if it's fiction. Capitalism as a system is doing real harm every day.
I feel like this doesn't engage with the point above. Any implementation of a system will have mistakes and rough spots, and do harm. If we wish to propose a new system, we must also explain what it is, and why it will do less harm and more good.
The harm mentioned here is specifically the freedom to own and use property. Capitalism allows many people this freedom. Losing it would make some people sad. Poster would like to know how socialism deals with this harm/loss of privilege.
“Property” is both a heavily propagandized and culturally variable concept.
Freedom, in both definitions and practices, is heavily affected by the concept of property.
Firstly, property as defined in common usage in the west is a denial of the rights of the many in favour of a single entity. It exists as a loss of freedom in order to provide exclusivity. This is most obvious with land, and the ongoing enclosure and expropriation of the commons. It results in homeless people camped outside of empty homes, and a net loss of freedom.
Further, property as a system can easily enough be swapped out with relational concepts like stewardship and tenure, while giving up some choices to gain others. Earning the right to live on a chunk of land through merit, rather than by debt, is an example. Sharing access to expensive tools, because the employees own the company, also creates a greater amount of freedom.
Generally, people get confused in this discussion about what property is being referred to, and worry about losing their stuff, or chattel. But we’re talking about land and buildings and companies and machinery, big things that don’t make sense for one entity to control.
The core critique of capitalism is that a diminishing number of people enjoy the privileges of the owner class. Concentration of wealth is inevitable when the economy is organized around this principle of unfettered property rights for individuals.
While human society has no inherent need to be based on zero-sum transactions, simping for oligarchs to have any freedom they can buy, just codifies zero-sum outcomes into reality.
One of the more obvious issues to discuss is the balance between rights and freedoms of the person as opposed to the people. You can’t have people shitting upstream in the river, so you curtail shitting rights even on one’s own property, to give even greater freedoms to water drinkers. At what point do your freedoms steal from the freedoms of others?
There is a vast array of alternative economic systems proposed over the last century, and much of it can be labelled socialist—it’s a big ask to expect someone to describe a fully realized alternative in a forum comment, when they can just refer to the body of work on the topic.
I mean, this is ELI5. I also don't think it's reasonable to ask the 5 year old to read all of marx? The task is to teach, even if slowly. Maybe we can talk about specific small examples? Like you mention how capitalism has failed to put the homeless in the houses they sleep next to. How would your favorite flavor of government solve this?
As an example, capitalism tries to manage empty houses by making it inefficient to buy land and have it sit empty: others who use their land while they let it appreciate will get ahead of you, and as you fall behind the market you'll eventually be compelled to sell. (I'm not saying this is a good system, and I don't particularly care about how it's wrong; this example gives a floor for other theories to compare against and shows a bit of the system can be explained in a short forum post.)
I didn't engage because I don't see any evidence of a good faith argument.
They put effort into their possessions and want to keep them. Fine, socialism is workers owning the means of production, the only thing you can't own under socialism is a business that employs other people in a hierarchical fashion. You can still own a business where you are self employed. You can still own property, goods, purchase services, etc. you can even hire contractors to help your business.
But this poster seems to be operating on the less well defined "socialism is when the government does things to help people." I think being against that is cruel to the point of psychopathy. But you can't reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into, so instead I made a sarcastic comment.
I personally like to remember that people reading might hold the bad faith point (or something near it) in good faith, and answer to that. I think ELI5 as a community really shouldn't have much sarcasm or dunking on folks, see rule 3 (and if you feel something is so bad faith it deserves it, maybe report it for rule 3?).
I think there are libertarians who hold this particular view without psychopathy: they might reason that governments are usually at the wrong scale to do things to help people, and that other systems outside of government should fill those gaps. There are plenty of libertarians that like/endorse/support people helping people in trade guilds, service organizations, and churches. I think there are leftists that make similar arguments sometimes, especially those that dislike hierarchy.
Thank you for explaining honestly.
Decades of fox news propaganda, that's all. They tapped into the cold war talking points when it came to anything Obama campaigned on.
Some of these idiots are rooting for Russia in Ukraine, and are vehemently opposed to socialism. That only squares with propaganda.
I think it’s fear. People fear that their country doesn’t produce enough and isn’t wealthy enough to support an army that is capable enough to keep any real or imagined enemies at bay. Add a good amount of corruption and propaganda to it, and you get a perpetual cycle where this fear needs continuous fuelling.
The worst part of it is that the fear isn’t entirely unjustified. As the Ukraine war shows, predators will try to pray on the weak, and Europe has been complacent about its own defence.
That doesn’t mean I think capitalism is the answer of course, but it is a horribly delicate balancing act to consider all concerns.
I think you meant to say unjustified.
Fixed, thank you.
I think the general idea of those against it is that they assume it is zero sum. Meaning, for everyone to be taken care of, the person must lose or have less.
That still doesn't make sense for people who aren't billionaires, though ... if it's zero sum, billionaires are even more problematic than they already are.
As Ronald Wright said , A Short History of Progress (2004): "John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." (note, John Steinbeck never said that)
It makes sense if you don't think the billionaires can ever lose, so anyone else getting more means some other poor person has to get less.
Capitalism is the ideology that puts increase of the capital as the number one goal. It's usually is the meta strategy to make more and more goods.
To rephrase, if you do something else, it's gonna be less effective at multiplying the total wealth of society. And it might not always be a wrong thing to do, but the benefits need to outweigh the costs of scaling slower.
So, it's not wrong. Socialists often think about having a fair share of the cake instead of thinking how to make the cake bigger.
Every politically charged term ends up having highly disputed definitions, but I think most of those will acknowledge that the term has way more baggage than just the idea of taking care of yourselves and neighbors.
From Wikipedia:
It represents a whole set of beliefs about how the world works, in addition to political goals. Someone might broadly agree with the idea that people should be taken care of, but have strong objections about the specifics. One of those beliefs that I'll object to is the idea that just about everything should be understood as being about class conflict; I don't think that's always accurate.
Personally, I think it isn't just class conflict that is at issue. IMO, a major problem with current economies and their understanding, is that they are built from inherited knowledge, wealth, and institutions.
They aren't deliberate systems, they are more like evolution: No planning, just inherited features from whatever came before. So long as those features don't prevent the animal from having offspring, evolution doesn't care. This can result in wonderful, confused, or niche creatures that are on their way to extinction. So the same goes for our economics.
To escape this state of affairs, we need to make deliberately constructed economies. I not saying a 'planned economy' like the Soviets or Chinese 5-year plans, but rather how each aspect of an economy interacts with other pieces. Like a tabletop RPG ruleset, where the specifics exist to facilitate the complexities that can arise. By specifying each element, we can create floors and ceilings for what any given action can do, which in turn makes it harder for the players to meta-game their way to dictating how everything goes.
To sum up: economic regulations, but as a clean sheet design and implementation.
I think socialism is awesome but capitalism, when highly restrained, is more effective at generating capital.
I think a few fairly simple steps can merge the best of both.
Limit personal net worth to, say, 01 million dollars. Companies can have a networth of, say, 1 billion tops. Below that, put like 10 or so tax brackets, the more you're worth, the more you pay tax. Anything over those limits goes 100% to tax
This favors many smaller companies working together instead of one huge monster that can't even take care of itself and requires regular bailouts
The tax income will be more than enough to support a large socialist system that can take care of free education, free healthcare, etc, hell, even universal basic income
Best of capital generation,best of socialism.
I would take it a step further and say all corporations must be worker-owned. Every employee has an equal share, and maybe there is a probationary period along with that to weed out the bad eggs. This alone naturally encourages organic growth (among other, greater benefits) because any new hire will divide the pie further.
Mmmm, sort of, I guess, depending a little on who does what different percentages maybe? A guy who does 4 hours vs a girly that works 8 hour day, for example, but yeah, there should be something like that
I still want to reward founders too, you need people to start something new, give them a bigger % or something, but those are details
Either way, if nobody can be filth rich anymore we should be able to get to a stable point where all people can work way less, where we focus less on consumerism, focus more on life.
Unfortunately the 1 million dollar net worth would have to be modified by location. If the average house is hitting a half million most places, and passing $1 some places, they need to at least be able to be worth slightly more than their residence.
My idea requires some more work
I think this only works on a world wide scale. Make salaries all the same everywhere, one world coin.
Houses are currently extremely overvalued, real value for most houses is easily 3X less than they go for now
Most houses could go for under a million. Two people live there, a 10M cap gets you very nice house with loads of room to spare, still.
If anything, the 10 million cap seems too high still
Oh yes the myth of the small business capitalism. The reality is there was once thousands of car manufacturers in the US and now there is maybe fifty with a big three making the vast majority.
Same goes for about every sector there is in every country. The ideal of a capitalist society that uses great restraint is just a fantasy. Concentration of wealth and the wealth gap is high in every single country in the world.
There is no real example of capitalism effectively addressing wealthy inequality or creating a small business form a capitalism for any significant length of time before it starts concentrating. It may start out with small businesses, but monopolies quickly develop.
You may ask why is it bad to have wealthy people. The problem is representation. All nations policies almost always exclusively favor those with capital. They get unequal representation.
One only has to look at the mega corporations to see the concentration and do a policy review to see the majority of laws passed directly benefit them.
I would like to see a country actually implement what you say to prevent concentration of wealth. It probably will never happen though.
You need a definition. You didn't define it, and people who hate it rarely define it. If nobody knows what everyone is talking about, then it's all a waste of time.
So, what do you think it means?
Socialism’s critics believe that people who receive government aid become reliant on it and cease making an effort to become self-sufficient.
As someone who works in community mental health, I sadly have to admit that those criticisms aren’t entirely false. Ironically, I think the fact that the government organizations that implement these social safety nets being underfunded contributes to the problem. Because it takes so long to obtain benefits like disability (SSD/I in America), people don’t want to risk getting a job, potentially losing it, and having to go through the long, arduous disability application process again. So they just learn to be content living on disability pay and food stamps.
But that’s disability. I don’t think the same applies to just public assistance (which you can’t live off of) and SNAP.
Anyway, despite there being a kernel of truth in said criticisms, they’re largely off-base. I think a lot of the critics also confuse socialism with communism, and don’t realize that all most socialists desire is a system like European countries have, which is proven to work and not threaten capitalism. Then there are the really sick fucks who believe in social Darwinism and genuinely think poor people deserve to be so, and that it would be just for them to die off. But thankfully, those are in the extreme minority.
This reminds me of my friend's dad. He got crippled at a machanic job, so he's on disability, but he still wants to be useful in his life and use his skills, so he does machanic stuff on the side. Some people might think this is cheating, but he can only reasonably work on cars like 15hrs a week, or it'll fuck up his back so much he can't walk for a couple of days.
A messed-up situation that some people get into is that some of these programs have a cut-off if you make too much money, but if you actually make that much money in income, you'll have less than you would if you were slightly under that amount, because you have to pay for what those benefits would have given you otherwise.
It basically makes people stuck near the poverty line because these programs don't really give that much assistance. In my state if you're a family of three, the most you can earn is $915 a month in household income and the average payment is $221. This isn't counting the other benefits you'd get booted off of if you reached different income brackets.
I'm looking at this living wage site right now https://livingwage.mit.edu/states/39 and from this page you can see that 2 working adults can't both work your average Food Preparation & Serving Related, Building & Grounds Cleaning & Maintenance or Personal Care & Service job and be above to cover your average annual expenses if you have a single kid. So it's really not worth it to get off these benefits unless you find a significantly better job than what's available. Most of the other employment opportunities need some sort of education or experience as well.
Please correct me if I'm off base on any of this
No, that sounds pretty on-point to me. The only additional thing I’d mention is that when you’re working, you’re paying into social security through your taxes, which—if you do it for long enough—sets you up much better for retirement than you will be if you’re still reliant on disability when you’re 65. So, that’s an additional incentive to work, which I tell my clients all the time, but for most of us, planning that far into the future is actually kind of difficult.
The people who don't like socialism mean something else. To them, socialism is when the government takes care of you and your neighbors. This is scary and can go badly: sometimes the government does not know your needs, isn't paying good attention, or is making choices in a bad way. There are examples of governments that said they would take care of everything for everyone, and then many many people didn't get enough food.
People also worry about a little socialism, because when the government takes care of some things automatically, it means local communities don't have to worry about those things. Then the people in the community forget how to do them (imagine tasks like building houses) themselves, and that makes them more dependent on the government. This is also scary, because in an emergency (like after a flood) you might not be the governments first priority. It also means that you can more easily live in a place without being part of a local community (like a church), and that loss of close friends makes everyone more lonely and sad.
It's not clear that the people with these worries are right. Other systems also have problems, and so even if there are good concerns here, maybe socialism is still best.
Remember to look for nice people who disagree with you, and listen to their fears, needs and dreams. It is easy to end up in echo chambers, and feel like everyone who disagrees with you is dumb, evil, or crazy. But usually we only see the loudest (not the smartest or kindest) voices that disagree with us. Algorithms and popularity contests online really like to reward things that make you angry.
People hate socialism because they believe it is a right/freedom be able to privately own and control the "means of production" from tools to assembly lines to mines and groves.
Thatcher said it best: "There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty." and by economic liberty she means that ability to own / exclusively control any (non-sentient) thing.
(end LI5)
Personally, I think authoritarian socialism (sometimes called "communism") is problematic due to the authoritarian part. I think libertarian socialism (often called "anarchism") is problematic because "warlords" (selfish people willing to use violence to hoard property) will naturally arise from any sufficiently large group and I think they are best opposed via a State with a "monopoly" on violence. But, I am convinced that rent-seeking behavior has been choking Capitalism for a while and it's only gotten worse since I was born (1980)... something needs to rein it in, and I think that something has to be very democratic and significantly socialist, but I don't really have a name for it myself.
People hate socialism because they are propagandized to full stop. Most people will never own actual capital so why would they be afraid of not being able to privately control it. This conflates the idea of private ownership and ownership of capital. This in itself is also propaganda.
Thatcher's actual policies hurt working class and benefited corporations. Strange people would bring her up in a conversation meant to portray socialism negatively.
On to your points. Rent seeking existed long before the term ever existed just like fascism. It has always been bad, think of company towns back in 1800's being the very definition of extreme rent seeking behavior. I had thought we were done with that concept but the unbelievable concentration of wealth has brought it back.
There is no one to reign it in because the systems are completely captured by the wealthy through their proxy corporations. Fascism spread like wildfire across the globe and the dominate social structure is now corporations, not governments.
There is no answer to this because all the answers threaten this dominance. We have (non wealthy people) been checkmated before I was ever born.
But hey, life is not so bad. You can always take advantage of your fellow man to get a leg up and it is highly encouraged by a legal system that is designed to protect the wealthy and not punish white collar crime.
IIRC, Adam Smith (from "Wealth Of Nations") decried rent-seeking behavior and implicitly defined a "free market" as one without (free of) rent-seeking, as a form on monopoly, among other things.
So, yes, it was a recognizable problem in Capitalism before it was ever given name, and I wasn't trying to deny that, just to note that the whole time I've been alive it's consistently gotten worse.
As it has gotten worse my whole life. Adam Smith could have never have conceptualized mega corporations. In fact, corporate law at that time would have never allowed for them to exist.
There is no such thing as authoritarian socialism, that is a paradox. Marx and Lenin argued that the only viable path to communism as an ends, which involves the withering away of the state, required a transitionary period.
Marx proposed something akin to direct democracy — which he called dictatorship of the proletariat — while Lenin proposed the idea of a centralized, rightist vanguard party that would seize power on behalf of the people and oversee the transition. Rightist means to leftist ends. It was a gamble that did not succeed as Lenin’s illness and death, and the rise of Stalinism, remade the vanguard into a permanent new ruling class in direct conflict with Marx’s stated ethos.
Capitalism seems to turn into cronyism. Maybe the issue is that none of the above can lead to a permanent or long term solution that is without abuse or unnecessary hardship. David Graeber fought the idea that authority and governments have to exists by giving examples of ancient civilizations that had no ruler. What if all the modern forms of government since then are just a huge transitionary period for humanity that exist until we reach a more civilized state in our evolution that doesn't include paralysing greed and constant war?
Which became "communism" / authoritarian socialism.
“Withering away of the state” and “it’s like, how much more STATE can you get? The answer is none. None more state” are extreme opposites.
Did the state wither away? No. Then communism was not accomplished.
Stalinism was as communist as Hitler’s National Socialists were socialist. False branding is a hallmark of rightism. Their propagandized, muddied, impoverished use of language does not magically turn their little hand-carved lies into real boys.
I'm using the standard meaning of authoritarian socialism: "Academics, political commentators and other scholars tend to distinguish between authoritarian socialist and democratic socialist states, with the first represented in the Soviet Bloc"
I know what you are using. It’s capitalist propaganda and always has been. We need to stop using paradoxical terminology that was designed deliberately to confuse and terrify. What you are describing is literally known as “state capitalism.” Funny how that, like all the intentional-by-design failings of capitalism, gets rebranded as “socialism” in an effort to preserve capitalism’s entirely-gaslit reputation.
Socialism demands equality and equity, which fundamentally cannot exist in a stratified society. If there is a ruling class, they own and control the economy and nothing belongs to the people. So like I said, it’s paradoxical.
Capitalist propaganda, the Nazi party's title, and the cold war. That's to keep it short.
Socialism, as far as Marx was concerned, is a transitional stage to Communism. This is why it gets a lot of push back. Because of that connection. Worse, youve got generations of people conflating the two. And worse still, you have a few examples of people who were claiming to be socialist, who were really just using socialism for their own ends.
The reality is that Socialism is about everything being about the betterment of the people. That assets are a shared ownership, rather than privately owned. This in turn creates a fairer distribution of the wealth generated. So everyone's lives improve.
The issue, the real issue, is that socialism needs a very large government in order to work. The fear is that this would create out of control bureaucracy. With middle mangers everywhere doing middle manger things that would create a system that was slow and worse far easier to corrupt. On top of that, you have the issue of competition not being the driving force of innovation. The government would control and mandate investment and innovation. Which again comes back to the middle mangers. There is also an issue with free speech. After all, if the government controls everything, where do you go if that government doesnt see the issues that its created? And worse still, how might it handle those dissenting voices?
The reality is that no one system is "the best" and really what would work best is a mixed system. One that builds a well regulated economy while maintaining a safety net for the people. So you would have private businesses, competition, innovation combined with free healthcare, free education, unemployment support, worker rights, high taxes, and high transparency and accountability.
Any time I put forward concepts of a hybrid between socialism, capitalism, UBI, and all of that, there is a lot of push back. While it is possible that it is because my ideas suck, I get the feeling it is more because it doesn't fit into the worldview of existing systems.
Say, for example, the idea of giving everybody free mattresses. Someone says that is unrealistic, because people would try to sell the beds they receive. Or that fixed income from UBI and jobs would promote corruption...despite it all about preventing the existence of billionaires and huge wealth gaps. They say it would make people lazy, because there is no reward for working harder. Also, for some reason, eliminating wealth gaps, workers voting on leadership pay rank, and making education a paid job promotes a caste system. And so on.
Mind, there has been helpful input, it is just that many of the criticisms seem to be based on not fitting into what we had.
What you have to remember is that socialism means everyone paying their fair share, and some people don't want to do that.
WKUK-Backseat
the argument against it that I see the most is that governments are inherently corruptible and bad at managing taxpayer money and so it's destined to become a big scam.
fair enough, to be honest
yeah but it does that shit anyway under Capitalism. XD
Perhaps a comment against it could be something like “why should I pay for someone else’s health care?”.
I guess if your beloved leader has told you enough times that socialized health care is bad (communism?), then you won’t investigate what that kind of health care really looks like, and you’ll parrot the statement in belief and acceptance.
I can't even.
IT GOES BOTH WAYS!
Could also be, "because we live in a society" which is a structure where a group of people help each other. That sentence falls apart quickly if applied to anything else: "why should I pay for someone else's road/water pipe/utilities poles"
Because if someone needs healthcare and can’t afford it, you’re going to pay for it anyway.
Unless you want a system where medical emergencies are turned away at the hospital door. It will be less expensive for you to pay for society’s preventative holistic care than it will be to pay for emergency room visits once the problems have gotten worse.
A lot of people definitely want that, especially if it's brown people or LGBT+ people having the emergencies.
Since the fall of Roe, some hospitals with strict abortion bans have been doing exactly just that to pregnant women experiencing emergencies.
We already pay for other people's healthcare, car accidents, house fires. That's how insurance works. We all pay into it, and some people have their claims paid, while others never make a claim.
It gets really hard to make money and exploit people when they don't fear for their livelihoods.
To be fair to liberals, liberalism is also a system to take care of your neighbors.
Liberalism is basically capitalism with patches. Public option health care, government contractors, food stamps, tuition assistance, bus vouchers, child tax credits.
Socialism is a capitalism replacement. Universal health care, government organizations, free government grocery stores, free education, free public transportation, free day care.
Both groups on the left care about their neighbors.
Nothing you listed there is liberalism. Those are all things liberals fought tooth and nail against. They were forced on liberals who decided it was better to allow them to exist because otherwise we would tear down capitalism which is what Liberals are actually about.
I guess I should specified Modern Liberalism in the United States. Since liberalism means something else outside the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_liberalism_in_the_United_States
It really doesn't. That's just something Americans liberals try to sell so people they don't realize how liberals are always working against their interests.
My comment was absolutely applied to American politics.
I mean you aren't wrong when it comes to American liberal politicians. That's just the differences between liberalism and socialism in theory, the actual differences in practice is another story.
I think you should give a definition of what you think a liberal is. You're just confusing the issue by not saying what you mean.
In short? Capitalists. Liberals are capitalists. The birth of liberalism goes hand in hand with the birth of capitalism. The liberal revolutions were capitalist revolutions. Everything stems from that inescapable fact of history. It's the one aspect of liberals that dominates everything about them and colors every single decision they make. Everything else is just window dressing that can be thrown away at their leisure. If you want to understand liberals you have to understand that.
So, you're a communist is what you're saying. Name one communist country in the history of the world that has lasted longer than 10 years. You introduce greeds, it's impossible.
You should know that you are making a very ideologically based argument, since as far as anyone can tell the self-labelled communist countries through history were degraded into authoritarian dictatorships immediately, and so mislabeled. Cuba is called communist, and while they too slid immediately into authoritarianism, they call themselves socialist.
You seem to be using the word in a colloquial rather than an academic way.
In addition, consider the massive economic war of the last 150 years, exemplified by the CIA-backed murder of a million or so people in Indonesia, to stamp out so-called communism. Pretty tough to get anything going, between the pressures of violence and lies.
Liberalism isn't an economic system. It's a political & moral philosophy from the Enlightenment that holds governments exist for the people & authority is legitimate only when it protects inalienable/fundamental/inherent rights & liberties of individuals. The people have an inherent right to obtain a government with legitimate authority, and when their government lacks or loses legitimacy, the people have a right & duty replace or change that government until it obtains legitimacy.
Liberal governments can & do include some with social market economies (eg, social democracies in Europe).
But I mean an EL5 version is that liberals and socialists on the left both care about their neighbors. The disagreement is just how much of life should be handled by markets vs public/collective systems.
Which liberalism lacks an essential position on, because it's not an economic philosophy. Liberalism is essentially the position that individual human rights & liberties are fundamental. It can even combine with socialism.
Whatever disagreements you claim these philosophies have may be between particular variants you're not specifying rather than their most general forms.
Modern liberalism in the US does have a position on economic philosophy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_liberalism_in_the_United_States
Right, and modern US liberalism isn't general liberalism. Plus, those distinctly modern elements absent from general liberalism of active non-market interventions by the government to protect the market from failure, provide a safety net, provide access to education & healthcare, provide public services to reduce inequality, protect the environment, etc, are social departures from capitalism, are they not? That position aligns better with social democracy
If anything, modern US liberalism conflicts more with your earlier assertion that
Whereas general liberalism is largely indifferent to economic system, modern US liberalism favors a form of socialism.
You are right, but 99% of the time when people on this site talk bad about liberals, they mean modern liberalism in the US. Not classical or general liberalism.
It's mostly thanks to the worst real world attempts to create socialism in the 1900s, which ended up being not terribly different from plain fascism. In core USSR cities things were probably kind of fine for most people, but the farther away you got from the large cities and the motherland, the worse it got. Ukraine had a man-made famine that killed 3-10 million people. China has similar horrible hunger waves due to human mistakes or malevolence in planning. Gulag Archipleago, Stasi, KGB. When people attempted to free themselves from communism, the attempts were brutally crushed. Oppression was everywhere.
If you want to meet people who hate socialism most, go to places that used to be socialist. Sure, USA had some counter-propaganda against communism, but it 100% is not the only reason why people don't like it.
Just because it has failed miserably in the past might not mean that it must fail in the future too if somebody is
dumbbrave enough to try again. But there are some important differences between now and then and those differences might be important if put to good use. For instance, we have significant computer capacity today that didn't exist back when communism was really tried the last time. Perhaps those difficult allocation problems can be worked out. Perhaps. Perhaps AI can be an impartial divider of resources. Just let me build the model, I'll make it fair, I promise.I wonder how Lemmy would explain the apparently much more blatant hatred towards free market capitalism though.
A sizable portion of Lemmy's userbase is in a country that aggrandizes free-market capitalism, and we're getting to the point with it where its flaws are becoming impossible to ignore. Meanwhile, most of us grew up well after the peak of anti-socialist sentiment.
i’d say that fascism is one form of dictatorship, whereas Marxism requires a transition phase of a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat… which then becomes permanent because temporary dictators don’t tend to just quit being dictators.
they’re usually fascist in the way they hunt and exterminate any western educated people and such… but then it just goes to brutal authoritarian dictatorships…
yeah i guess not terribly different.
At the national level it’s because they(the federal government) is taking your tax money to pay someone hundreds of miles away for existing. At the local level it’s because “private charity already does that.”
Care? hahahaha. You made me laugh.
It's manufactured hate.
It benefits those in power to make average citizens fear socialism.
We already live in a system with numerous socialist programs. Many of the people who have been brainwashed to hate the concept of socialism already benefit from some of these socialist programs.
As with pretty much everything in life, you have to find a happy medium. That goes for socialism too. A full on 100% socialist society may not function well. Just like how we're witnessing the failures of the ultra-capitalist society we live in.
But the brainwashed don't want to meet in the middle. They fear socialism and don't want any trace of it in our society....despite the fact that there are already many socialist aspects present.
It's the PR and marketing campaigns. Capitalism concentrated the wealth with the bosses so they can send a coherent message. A message people can buy into.
Socialism marketing makes it sound like a MLM scheme. The lack of centralization puts different unions against each other.
The kind we know from history and China has the problem of giving some individuals way too much power over others. But so does capitalism in the long run, in way meaner ways.
https://lemmy.ml/post/39416509
Hold over from Stalin and Mao era, the commies was the big bad. Like after 9/11 it was the Muslims
Only if you're in the military or a billionaire.
here in the us we opperate like a socialist country pretending to be capitalist. "Distributing things evenly" is hard when no one agrees what evenly is
The rest of the commenters here are correct. Although, socialism means differently under different contexts. Socially yes, it means helping others and each other; but socialism in economic context typically means either the workers run the means of production, or the state. The wealth generated is then distributed as equally as possibly among the members.
How can a person who resolves their conflicts with hate feel comfortable about socialism if socialism creates a space without hate? Some people want to fight and can only fight. Removing fights removes their ability to gain status and respect.
Are you an American ?
The entirety of civilization is based on socialism to one degree or another. Even dictators depend on socialism. The tipping point is where that socialism becomes leveraged for personal ambitions.
Where do dictators support workers owning the means of production?
Another person who doesnt understand socialism.
Then it’s some form of dictatorship. And that can happen in any form of government, however “socialism” is usually used by wannabe authoritarian types as bait to get the population on their side during upheaval and regime change.
I just want to note that "A system where people take care of themselves and neighbours" is called Mutualism, and is absolutely the single best concept in the world.
Basically everyone can and should practice it in their daily lives, just be kind to and try to greet or at least acknowledge those you meet, and if anyone needs help then do the best you can.
We tend to instinctively engage in mutualism with our family and friends, so just extend that feeling towards as many people as possible.
A lot of people mix up “socialism” with “people being good neighbors.” That’s not actually what the term means. Socialism is specifically about who owns the big stuff, the means of production. In a socialist setup, people still work jobs, they still get paid, and daily life still involves employment and compensation. The difference is that major industries aren’t privately owned by large corporations. They’re controlled collectively by the public or by the workers themselves.
Small private businesses can still exist; they’re not eliminated outright. What changes is the ownership of large-scale systems: energy, manufacturing, transportation, resources, things on that level. These are shifted away from private corporate control and toward collective control.
The fundamental issue of socialism and why it doesn't and has not worked historically is because of human nature. A corporateocracy or a capitalist based society aligns much better to human nature than socialism does which is why it's significantly more "successful".
What a hilarious place to come ask this lol
Nothing is wrong with socialism except that maybe it doesn't go far enough
The problem that socialism has is that most people support the principle but fuck me if we dont argue about the implementation.
Rich people are selfish sociopaths and poor people imitate the rich thinking it will make them rich, too.
Because people have been repeatedly trained since the decline of Imperialism to believe that “socialism” is “when capitalism.” When the populace is afraid of the label, the label can be used as a blunt instrument to keep them enslaved to the parasitic Capitalist rulers.
People are scared of it because every incarnation of it has been hellish shit show. No matter how many times people moralise about it that simple truth is always looming.
Socialism. Production and distribution is owned by the community (government).
It has nothing to do with "Handouts". Or helping your neighbor really.
There is no redistribution of wealth. That is communism.
Socialism with handouts is communism.
You could have a completely Socialistic society that let's some of it's people starve because it benefits the majority.
A great example to look at socialism is the nazi party creating Volkswagen.
People in Germany needed an affordable car. They created the production and distribution of affordable cars, owned and operated by the controlling government party.
Now, you can debate all you want on if it was a good or bad idea.
Average German looking for simple affordable car? Probably would think it was a good idea.
Rich German looking for a Duesenberg? Probably hates the idea of Volkswagen and spending their tax dollars on it.
Poor German? They aren't getting a car anyways
A large government can easily have a monopoly on a good or service.
If that's a good or bad thing is debatable
For example, say America was 100% Socialistic.
Government would gain access to all satalites and towers and issue the Volkstelefon. Affordable phone and internet for everyone!
Sounds great?
Imagine if tomorrow Trump issued his phone in that style.
Probably not a good idea?
So why all the hate?
ELI5: Because socialism is not always the right answer just like capitalism isn't always the right answer.
I think you might be confusing socialism and state capitalism here.
This is a somewhat inaccurate definition. Socialism is the social ownership of means of production that does not necessarily mean the government. It comes in many forms such as democratic ownership by the employees (worker cooperatives), community ownership like utility providers being owned by the town and townsfolk, or state ownership if the state is democratically elected and accountable to the working class.
The concept of democratic and social ownership would be lost in an authoritarian state.
Both socialism and communism are concerned with redistribution of wealth. They just disagree on the method. Socialists believe that by eliminating capitalism and with progressive taxation wealth redistribution becomes inevitable, whole communists thinks this will only be achieved with a powerful state to oversee the redistribution process.
This scenario contradicts the core moral and political goal of socialism which is ensuring the wellbeing of all member of the community by ending the exploitation inherited in capitalism. A system that allows this scenario is just unethical authoritarianism regardless of what people call it or think it is.
The nazi party was socialist in name only. It was essentially a fascist regime that crushed actual socialist and communist movements, and imprisoned and murdered labour leaders. They also didn't nationalize the majority of industry and relied heavily on forced labour.
Again this fits state capitalism better than socialism. It's essentially the state controlling corporates instead of the social and democratic ownership by the working class that socialism seeks.
thats a valid point but primary against state control not socialism itself.
In an ideal socialist system this Volkstelefon would be owned by a democratic entity rather than an elite group of politicians in a flawed democratic government. This entity would probably consist of worker and consumer representatives with the common goal of providing affordable high quality service that's also fair to both the workers and consumers.
Your concern here is also shared with most socialists.
While yes socialism can some time manifest itself in the form of state ownership that's never the ideal situation since it can easily transform into state capitalism if the state decisions weren't representative of the workers' will (which is usually the case in non-direct democracy systems).
Yeah, you show some spirit, but no, that's not what those words mean, you even use them with different meanings - wiki/Socialism, wiki/Communism.
You misrepresented the two terms so badly I was looking for funny sarcasm/parody/trolling (eg "100% socialistic", "hangouts/wealth redistribution is communism and socialism is communal ownership", etc). Same with VW example.
And alleging "socialism" (actually 'communism', the communal ownership of production factors) is less secure for your personal freedoms than private companies owning your data is just lol. The gov has the same access. Atm private companies control a lot of gov too so you just don't really have a gov of the people anymore.
Not to mention that socialism/communism is not incompatible with democracy.
You can have 0 private (mega)corps (for simplicity sake: that just means no stock markets) and still have a perfectly normal & representative democracy.
In fact, with people more engaged & putting the work into governance (not voting like a sports fan), that's how you safeguard from fascism.
And yes, Trump can issue a phone in that style, since nobody is overthrowing him (is there even a codified procedure for that?).
Besides the word "socialistic" not meaning that (unless you meant that the choice was between 'everybody starving' and 'a minority starving') a majority can always outvote the minority, that is their moral prerogative. That is the opposite of a minority rule where the majority can starve (or be otherwise hindered/stolen from/enslaved/etc).
The difference is that with communal wealth the food production isn't motivated by profit, but way more by food production quantity (bcs the owners want to eat, not profit).
There used to be a country called the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
It was built on the principles of socialism
It turns out that actually living in a socialist state is oppressive to the point where millions upon millions were starved because that was what was needed to give socialism the chance to take off in a capitalist world.
Tell me you're an American without telling me you're an American.
Next up: The Nazis were socialist, it's in the name!
Read a fucking book
Good idea! Books are great. Here are some great classics.
https://www.amazon.com/Gulag-Archipelago-1918-1956-Experiment-Investigation/dp/0813332893
https://www.amazon.com/Execution-Hunger-Holocaust-Miron-Dolot/dp/0393304167
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087
https://www.amazon.com/Animal-Farm-George-Orwell/dp/0451526341
I don’t read many books on fucking, but I read quite a bit of history.
Maybe try some.
Of course it’s easier to thump your chest on the internet if you gas light people and make ad hominem attacks.
Their latest comment only adds to the list of things they obviously don't understand. I hope they have a library card.
In case you're not aware, lemmy.world has (pre-emptively) defederated from the two instances that have the vast majority of socialists and communists on Lemmy, hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml.
If you want a lot more socialists to read your question and provide more informative answers, you may want to post in a community on lemmy.ml or lemmy.zip, which don't defederate those instances.
People will downvote my message and complain that hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml are "tankie" instances, which I interpret to mean that they hate people who want to make socialism happen in real life some day.
No, we hate people who want to execute others. We hate people who think that authoritarianism is in any way connected to anything resembling communism.
We hate people who worship mass murderers. So no, socialism sounds nice, what the wannabe communists on tankie instances are doing on the other hand sounds just idiotic.
Down voting because, indeed, I don't want socialism to happen with fascism. Those instances are places that I do not want to visit.
Instances defederated from hexbear and lemmygrad because a few dozen users from those instances were terminally online trolls. They'd relentlessly harass users they didn't like (i.e. most people), spam threads with gross images, and were generally obnoxious shitheads.
Also, "Tankie" is an insult against the hardcore authoritarian left: people that cheer on repressive dictators and violent supression of dissent. The term was invented by communists out of disgust for some of their "fellows".
Of course, if you ask a tankie they'll try to argue the word is an insult to all communists/socialists/leftists ... it's not.
Going by your figure, a few dozen users out of nearly 2,500 combined monthly active users behaved badly. It seems to me that defederating was/is an overreaction when user-level blocks and community-level bans exist.
You weren't around for it, but it was bad -- you couldn't avoid them. A few dozen trolls doesn't sound like much, but they were coordinated and relentless. Blocking users didn't work because they were constantly making alts, including on other instances.
Calls were made for instances hosting them to ban those users: most did, some refused to or couldn't. Blocking instances in user settings wasn't a thing yet, so those instances were mass defederated from. Lemmygrad and hexbear were the big two and home of the dirtbags that were upset their "fun" was over.
Thanks for the context. Still, it seems that whatever happened back then is no longer the case now that we can block users, communities, and instances ourselves. I don't see a good reason to keep those instances defederated now.
I think the standard thing at this point is to agree it's a nice idea, but also say it doesn't work in practice. Edit: And sometimes a certain kind of person will turn a simple disagreement into tribalistic hate.
A version was tried a few times from 1917 on, and it went poorly. So, if you're still for collective ownership of the means of production, you either need to be a denialist about that history, or explain why your version would be better.
There's also people who use a weaker definition not mutually exclusive with capitalism.
tell me where capitalism works?
Depends what you mean by capitalism. It doesn't have one universally preferred definition either.
If you mean markets, even the USSR had one.
If you mean big corporations running everything, we don't live in capitalism right now.
Feel free to add if you mean something else.
Obviously not markets, everyone has those, also communist countries.
They are simply regulated differently.
That is ultra capitalism, the final step before fascism/corporatism which capitalism ultimately leads to by design.
It hasn't existed anywhere before - the OG fascist countries were built on top of fairly typical market economies for the time, with actually had much more interventionism than now, maybe China-level.
You didn't give a third option, so I guess we're done.
Note that most self-described "socialists" aren't literally suggesting we ban the ownership class, declare the value of all stocks to be $0, and force every corporation to operate as employee-owned collectives. They're usually arguing for things like "expand our old-age health-insurance program to just cover everyone" or "make the city buses not charge a per-ride usage fee."
The hate against "socialism" is precisely because Karl Marx and some 20th century communists used it to mean something different, and then the right wing of United States used that label to try and smear every social program since the ban of slavery. Now we have two entirely different and incompatible meanings, and both a lot of bad-faith actors who intentionally conflate the two and a bunch of good-faith actors who aren't even aware there's a difference.
But this is Lemmy, where there's lots of communists, so that's how I interpreted OP's question. (Also, the Marx definition came first)
I think most self-described socialists don't have a very specific idea what they want, but more an idea of who they think is good (public servants) and who they think is bad (corporations). Which is like most voters in general.
You convinced me. We need to get rid of all these failed socialist policies, institutions, and programs.
Here's a few I think we could start with:
This is you. I wasn't talking about that version of the term.
Personally I don't mind "social safety nets".
But for me the issue is that I work hard to have, and to continue having a nice life for my family and I. I took the risk, I invested in myself, and made the right choices over and over again. There should be a reward for that.
And while I don't think people should be homeless and starving, I'm realistic enough about the current politics (of both parties) to know that the wealthy won't be the ones to pay for it, it will be weaponized to drive the wealth gap further apart.
Sure in a perfect world billionaires would be taxed (and actually have to pay), and we could provide all this wonderful socialism everyone here wants, but that's never actually going to happen and I don't feel like paying even more taxes to watch the funds disappear into the already massive (and misused) budget.
Thisnis why you have to go after the assets directly, wealth tax on fortunes over 10 million.
lol they said the same thing about kings and empires…
I think most of the hate is from hard working people who are afraid "lazy ones" will get benefits that they themselves deserve.
I dont disagree. The amount of people on lemmy that say they just wanna sit on their ass and smoke weed is quite high, and im convinced if they had their way all our infrastructure would crumble in a week (no one thinks about the sewer/wastewater, the electricity, and the food plants that need to keep running for your comfortable lazy life)
We would need a way to keep people working crap jobs, while also supporting them. We cant all be influencers and movie stars. Someone has to shovel shit.
Well...
Socialism isn't "everyone gets free shit and smokes weed all day". It's usually something along the lines of public ownership of the means of production under democratic control. Like, the factory is owned by the people who work at the factory instead of some rich guy that collects a check despite contributing no labor.
The shit people worry about is actually happening under capitalism, it's just they get to pretend they deserve it because their parents were rich, or they got lucky, or they scammed someone (like their workers).
Got it, yes i agree with that mostly.
However, wouldn't this kind of ruin any hard work towards a goal like owning your business or moving up in a company from doing hard labor to an easier office job as you get older?
I know you'll say "people already work hard labor jobs at 80 years old because of capitalism keeping them down!" But thats not everyone. A lot of people have worked hard and succeeded. If you're only rewarded for your labor and not owning anything to gain money off of it, you will be working hard labor jobs forever. Because we can all agree hard labor jobs deserve more pay than any other job (programmers, youre out of luck now, thats a cushy job).
Im being an ass on purpose, because these are real world arguments you need to convince real people of why capitalism is actually bad, because many people are not convinced it is.
I'm not sure which sentences are you trying to be an ass and which are legitimate ignorance. You literally said you don't disagree? I'm happy to try to counter ignorance, even feigned ignorance, but it is a waste of time if you trying to be an ass or are just going to reply "Well I know that but..."
Where is your NON-ANECDOTAL evidence the majority of people don't want to contribute meaningfully to the world around them?
Most people who don't contribute to society, don't do it because they hate it (or hate humanity), not because they love weed.
If you think the majority of people would do things to better society rather than be lazy if they were given handouts...you dont know humanity all too well.
Would you sit on your ass all day and smoke weed, given the chance?
Nope. Id continue to work on my hundreds of projects I have going.
Im not in the majority.
😅👌
Yeah, you're very special. One in a kind.
"I'm not in the majority."
Lol
https://xkcd.com/610/
See, I don't think you're "being an ass on purpose". I think you are either just an ass or purposely being difficult to no productive end.
Im trying to show the lemmings in their left wing bubble how the real world works and how the working people think.
I'm totally on your side, but I like to offer arguments I hear every day from working class people who are vehemently right wing Trump super capitalist/authoritarians
If they are "vehemently right wing Trump super capitalist/authoritarians" then they aren't going to listen and, as I said, you achieve nothing but antagonism.
"I totally agree with you but I'm going to pop your bubble and remind you that people who disagree with you to the extreme offer ignorant talking points and won't agree with you. I totally agree with your answers to but those people don't."
It sounds like you are trying to demoralize the left while pretending to be an ally. What are you hoping to accomplish?
That just makes no sense at all. You can tell because so many people are not just doing the bare minimum to survive and sitting on their arse for the rest of their time.
People have desires and ambitions. Making sure that basics such as food, shelter, education and healthcare are covered won't change that.
IDGAF about your anecdotally derived cynicism, give me actual proof or stop making these claims as if they are undeniably true.
Some of y'all need to go live in a socialist country for a few years and learn something about how it actually works.
Spoiler alert. You don't want any part of it.