Welfare capitalism was better than the other ones.
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Listen man I know I’m edging pretty close to “no true Scotsman,” but hear me out… it’s not that it wasn’t “true socialism,” but whether something is socialist economically isn’t necessarily tied to authoritarianism. Like, fuck tankies, but also I do think that combining market economics and truly representative democracy with proportional representation and freedom of speech and association with socialist ownership structures (as in the abolition of corporate governance from any input from, frankly, absentee “owners”) is the move. Socialism doesn’t have to be authoritarian, nor does it have to be against market economics. Ya know?
I got a death threat from a tankie today because I suggested that Kamala would have not been as bad as the current administration.
That was fun, don’t worry I was banned shortly thereafter from that community
Accelerationism is a hell of a drug. You would have thought they would learn something from Weimar Germany, but no.
Was it that six-sided ursine one…?
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That’s true, but i don’t know if it’s fair to say that mandating employee ownership is anything other than socialist. Not Marxist, sure. Certainly leftist. But isn’t employee ownership and governance of the means of production, by definition, socialism?
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Socialism has other elements
I think your argument might be more convincing if you actually mentioned these elements.
Marx did not think it was socialism
Other people had other definitions even before Marx, so I’m not sure why his should be the only valid definition.
Just my two cents.
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Ah I see. I definitely have more learning to do than. In that case how is libertarian socialism socialism? Doesn’t that definition invalidate basically everything but vanguardism?
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yeah I keep hearing how we’re a democracy but I’ve never felt it ever was. We have the technology to do a direct democracy but no one really wants to do it.
I mean state capitalism is by definition not communism. This isn’t a no true Scotsman they’re just two different things.
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In that case we’d say “X can’t exist”, not “X is Y”. That’s the case for the word utopia, for example. Also non-state capitalism socialism exists and includes for instance the Paris Commune, anarchist Ukraine and for a surviving example Rojava.
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Because it’s half way to socialism?
It’s the most left of the right-wing scope that is pro-capitalism, but doesn’t address the underlying contradiction and will inevitably backslide to the right. It’ll take longer, but will eventually side with fascism as capitalism historically does
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I’m referring more to as a Mode of Production, where the Socialist Mode is the democratic organization of the workers who together control all aspects of the business such as wages and investment. Richard Wolff explains it well. Socialism doesn’t mean exclusively using central planning or centralization of power.
The contradictions I’m talking about are between the workers and the capitalist owners. That exists whether the capitalism is state or private, and whether the capitalism is laissez-faire or social democracy.
That contradiction will always lead to the capitalists accumulating wealth and using that wealth to improve the mechanisms of which they are able to accumulate wealth. High taxation, while an improvement over laissez-faire, does not change that reality. Wealth will still be accumulated by capitalists, who will then use that wealth to change the laws for their benefit. Democracy will backslide as corporate influence grows year over year. We see this backsliding all over Europe to various degrees, despite them having significantly more social safety nets than America. There is no type of capitalism that won’t lead to Fascism.
China is a mix of capitalism and socialism. Richard Wolff also explains this well. It doesn’t matter if they claim to be communist or not, or if they claim to be on that path or not, the current system is a mix
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No, I’m talking about Modes of Production. I linked videos explaining it more in depth for a reason.
A workers cooperative is using a socialist mode of production to organize and run a private business.
You didn’t provide what the contradictions of the socialist mode of production are. You gave critiques of planned economy and authoritarianism.
The contradiction of a capitalist mode of production is between the owner, who wants to maximize exploitation, and the workers, who want to minimize their exploitation. A socialist mode of production makes a democratic organization of all the workers replace that capitalist owner. The workers are in full control. There is no contradiction between the owner and workers because the workers are now also the owners.
I recommend reading the deluzian criticism of dialectics.
This is about philosophy, not a critique of marxian economics or dielectical materialism
If we can’t agree on the definitions of Capitalism and Socialism, then we can’t really have a conversation. I provided the videos by Richard Wolff so that the definitions being used are clear.
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What about bioregionalism? A system that is designed primarily around fitting in to nature, instead of trying to manipulate it?
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I don’t see psychology, sociology etc. as something separate to nature. They are part it of it, because they are aspects of us humans, and we are part of nature.
None of these things are true, yet we build systems assuming they are.
Agreed. Or perhaps I’d say some of us build systems using those unrealistic abstractions as excuses for oppression and extractivism.
I don’t think fact that those approaches have been dominant for centuries (millenia in a few locations) means that they are the only approach. It seems that, given we have the ability to reflect on those and realise how unrealistic they are, now would be a good time to try building systems that are NOT based on unrealistic assumptions.
And yes, I realise we’ll never have a perfect understanding of our place in the world, and there will always be flawed assumptions of varying degrees of importance underlying our world view. But we can absolutely do better, and a perfect place to start would be to avoid the assumptions that we’ve just spent a long time testing and found to be untrue.
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Social welfare capitalism is a good mix but over time the social aspect got burried
Social welfare capitalism is good in theory. But social welfare is in direct opposition to capitalism, and there is no way to actually contain the corrupting power of capitalism. The social aspect will always get buried.
It wont get burried if its enshrined and untouchable to make it worse
As current events have proven nothing is untouchable even if enshrined
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One, no reason to be so aggressive.
Two, wrong. Laws only matter if they are enforced. If the courts are stacked and the legislature are complicit then the law starts to not matter. Which is basically where the US is right about now.
Unfortunately systems created by people can likewise be destroyed by people. It would be nice if we could make societal collapse illegal
I dont know why my comment got removed. But the Ewigkeitsklausel is not in need of court decision. It in itself says that “Any amendment to this Basic Law which affects the division of the Federation into States, the fundamental participation of the States in legislation or the principles laid down in Articles 1 and 20 is inadmissible.”.
It also takes a 2/3 majority to change anything in the basic law (which is basicly our constitution).
Seperation of power and the federalism is so big that one would have to take over EVERY COURT and EVERY STATE and federal with a single majority. The elections are also very set appart that there basicly is always an election somewhere from how i experience it. The courts arent appointed by politicians. Not even the consitutional court, that got changed last year with heavy disagreement from AfD and BSW
We’re now trying pump and dump capitalism
But 2 large economies tried to impliment communism… while engaged in a cold war against much more entrenched ideologies, while having corrupt leaders and they didn’t do it well.
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I swear people think it’s somehow an accident that Stalin and Mao were evil dictators and if only they weren’t we’d have true socialism.
I don’t know about Mao, but while Stalin being an evil dictator wasn’t an accident, Lenin being an evil dictator was. The Russian revolution wasn’t just the Bolsheviks; there were many different groups of which the Bolsheviks simply happened to come out on top because of a ton of coincidences and bad decisions by everyone else.
And no other Marxist groups can get power enough to actually implement their ideas. QED socialism fails.
The Ukrainians did it until they were invaded by the Soviets, and Rojava’s experiment seems to be mostly successful.
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Socialism never promised to be able to survive an assault by a vastly superior military force, that’s not how that works. It doesn’t promise to spread global revolution either.
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That’s literally the thing though, and perhaps where the USSR went wrong. There is no magic bullet that would make a small nation able to survive a large attack, asside from strong allies with a ton of bigger nations, and sadly being different, and a possible threat to the status quo, doesn’t help with that.
That’s like saying being a serial killer helps survival over being a law abiding citizen that cares about others. Proof when I put a law abiding citizen and a serial killer in a locked room… the law abiding citizen doesn’t live as long. Of course the reality is, being a serial killer is evolved as the exception rather than the rule in humans, because, with numbers not making enemies is a more succesful strategy than always making them.
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Socialism without an underlying set of morals beyond socialism is doomed to fail. It invites end-justifies-means to implement socialism, which taints it beyond repair.
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Classical liberals were rad. They weren’t laze fair capitalists.
Then what were they?
Agree, but socialism doesn’t have to be Marxist. Like, Rojava is pretty rad and that’s, if anything, just the most modern iteration of libertarian socialism.
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I know, but that’s slowly changing. And I think that’s more true among the most politically engaged people. But that’s true of every group, if you go to in person conservative groups you’ll only find the worst of the worst on the farthest right. I’m not convinced it’s not the same phenomenon with socialists. But idk, I’m just talking out of my ass at this point honestly.
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But that inherently means liberal, no? I was under the impression that social democrats supported private ownership of the means of production. If you believe that should be illegal doesn’t that mean you can’t be a social Democrat?
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There’s also been quite a few smaller socialist and anarchist societies that have existed under similar external influences. Almost like capitalism is tied up with ideological warmongering or something.
But 2 large economies tried to impliment communism… while engaged in a cold war against much more entrenched ideologies, while having corrupt leaders and they didn’t do it well.
And while - which I, personally, think is the biggest reason - starting from pre-capitalist economies, thus materially having to do what capitalism did (rapid industrialisation, disenfranchisement of peasantry, accumulation of capital), and ultimately following what Marxism would have guessed: Their ideology forming around their material reality of having to accumulate capital from labour while trading on the world market. So it basically became its own kind of welfare state/social democratic capitalism, with a bit of “but communism will arrive eventually, we promise!”
Once that material dynamic is entrenched, no amount of ideological purity can simply correct it from the top, you can’t change material society by implementing an ideal onto a reality. It has to develop materially and dialectically, through the process of the old system failing (in unbearable ways), necessitating revolutionary changes.
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I do think you could be right, but I also think it is a proper dilemma, that it is impossible to really know. An immature attempt at revolution can be impossible to tell apart from a proper revolutionary moment, and a genuinely well-advised conservative “let’s not hastily break something” can be impossible to tell apart from useful idiots for reactionary movements, while living in the historical moment those things are happening. I think, to some degree at least, we just have to accept that uncertainty, and that the course of history is not simply determinable in the chaos of the lived reality.
Doesn’t mean, that there is nothing at all to be analysed, no visions to be had, just that ultimately, every single historical movement will have to live with the reality of “crossing the Rubicon”-moments, where no amount of knowledge, no amount of theory, no amount of smug analysis can really tell the outcome.
I, personally, think advancements beyond social democracy should be possible already - I think the basic ideas laid out in the Gotha Critique (overcoming of monetary system through non-exchangeable production/distribution with a voucher-like system), in combination with advancements in Cybernetics already made within the 20th century (as well as computers to better implement the Cybernetics on top of that), could provide for a system, in which necessary labour can be jointly coordinated, with the aim of reducing work days and increasing value in everyday lives, along with a richer use of free time (think: education, makerspaces, creative hobbies like art and programming) beyond socially necessary labour.
But can I be certain? No. Do I think it is worth fighting for? Definitely.
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Ones doing quite well, hence why countries are abandoning the US as a trade partner and going for it instead. Dengism is the solution to the failed ideal that you can take an agrarian preindustrial society straight to communism. And given all essential sectors are worker owned, it seems to be working.
What’s that Churchill said about being the worst thing except for everything else that’s been tried?
Churchill was a genocidal war criminal on par with Hitler, he’s not someone one should ever quote: unless you’re just okay with Indians not being people.
Churchill said that about democracy, interesting you interchange the two.
Something that’s incorrect
Just look at life expectancies. Countries with social capitalism do the best and not by a little. By arguing everyone is the same, it’s really supporting the worst.
Let’s go gambling!
