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DarthMetaKnight
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13 Jul 2017, 2:01 pm

Hi all.

I’m making this thread because too many conservatives and libertarians seem to think that all forms of socialism are equal and identical. I’ve already made it abundantly clear that I’m a social democrat. Today, I want to criticize other forms of socialism so y’all can see the difference.

Racist Socialism: I want to get this one out of the way fairly quickly. Hitler was not automatically a socialist just because he called himself one. I suppose there are plenty of racial separatists who want to create racially homogenous societies with socialist economies … but what would be the point of doing that? Race is a social construct. It’s not a scientific way of classifying human beings. Racism is a system that classifies human beings based on superficial differences.

Communism: The words “socialism” and “communism” were originally used interchangeably … but most people nowadays use the word “communism” when they are referring to authoritarian socialism … so I’ll use the term that way.

Authoritarian socialism doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because authoritarianism doesn’t work. It only benefits the authoritarian in question. We need a system that votes out bad leaders every few years or so. This is a buffer against tyranny.

Authoritarian socialists will usually criticize democratic socialism by saying “Democratic socialism is just light capitalism.” It is true that many people who call themselves social democrats support capitalism to a certain degree … but I still think that a fully socialist society with a truly democratic government would be possible and desirable.

Anarchism: Anarchists have a lot of good ideas. The stereotypes about them are wrong. They tend to be decent people. I still disagree with them though.

I will admit that a social anarchy would be a nice place if it actually existed, but creating such a place would be a challenge. We couldn’t just remove the state right now. The earth’s natural resources would still be owned by private corporations. Without a military to protect them, they would just hire mercenaries. Many of these mercenaries would be former US army soldiers looking for a new career after the death of the state. In other words, anarchy would just take us back to where we started.

Some anarchists have told me “We’ll create little anarchist communities. If the state tries to stomp us out, we’ll fight back!” Yeah… Good luck with that. Anarchists of this sort tend to be fond of Homage to Catalonia. What happened to the Catalan anarchists? They were crushed by Franco. Anarchist societies tend to be very bad at defending themselves. We can’t even consider social anarchy until capitalism doesn’t exist anywhere.

Some SJW anarchists have told me “We need to purge ourselves of all our subconscious prejudices that lead to oppression.” Yeah. Good luck with that one. A political movement will never succeed unless either Average Joe likes it or the ruling class likes it. Average Joe doesn’t want to search his soul all day long. He wants action. He wants policy changes that will benefit him. He wants to fight against the people who are making his vote meaningless.
Furthermore, a true social democracy would be so free that it would render social anarchism practically irrelevant.

Primitivism: I’m not sure if this is a type of socialism, but I’ll address it anyway. Primitivism will never work because Average Joe doesn’t want it and he never will. This philosophy is impossible to sell to the average person or the ruling class, so it can’t work.

I hope I have made myself clear. Thank you for your time.

Resist.


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techstepgenr8tion
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14 Jul 2017, 12:34 am

To bring up the 'human nature' quip in the other thread and I'll try to unpack the meaning of it's contents here:

It's not about whether or not Adam and Eve bit into an apple that Yahweh told them not to eat. We do, irrevocably - regardless of what we want to debate - have over 3 billion years of compiled evolutionary instinct. We get to see how strange our subconscious minds are anytime we sleep or feel adventurous enough to dose. What we're compiled on top of, as self-referencing as reasoning and logical beings, pulls our strings and gives us our thoughts quicker than we can rationalize or pretend deliberate ownership of them or tell our neighbor how dyed in the wool we are as staunch believers in free will. At best we can pre-filter and stop some of the wacky stuff from coming up but enough of it catches and that adds up to the forces that move history.

That's where authoritarian socialism clearly failed - it had so little faith in the strength of that alien giant, the submerged bulk of the iceberg, that its leaders believed they could coerce the terrain to fit the map. Even outside of that though - the myth of technological progress being our Lord and savior, the iceberg rolled that one off and what happened in the first half and even middle of the 20th century - in Europe then across Asia - still has us stunned, speechless, and unable to process what the heck it meant. That puts us in a stranger spot still because we're moving into the future without any goalposts that we can agree upon and if anything is coagulating forces much these days its that same collective unconscious mass; it's why so much of political action looks like neolithic atavism.

For any form of socialism to work I think it would have to incorporate not only a profound understanding of what it means for us to be compiled on top of such a vast alien iceberg, pragmatic as well as human ways of dealing with emergencies that arise from it, but the government of such a state would need to have deep humility with regard to its gross limitations in terms of calculating such a behemoth and fight any urge toward central planning - otherwise they're likely to tread right along the same path as Venezuela.


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RetroGamer87
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14 Jul 2017, 12:43 am

I've heard a lot of people using socialism to describe certain services being run or funded by the government within an otherwise capitalised society.

This leads to people describing countries such as Norway and Sweden as socialist when they are capitalist countries. Remember, Ikea is a company and Nokia is a corporation. They couldn't exist in Sweden if Sweden didn't have capitalism.


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DarthMetaKnight
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25 Jul 2017, 12:51 pm

Relevant Video

Does Noam Chomsky ever get tired of being right all the time? 8)


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Sweetleaf
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25 Jul 2017, 2:37 pm

RetroGamer87 wrote:
I've heard a lot of people using socialism to describe certain services being run or funded by the government within an otherwise capitalised society.

This leads to people describing countries such as Norway and Sweden as socialist when they are capitalist countries. Remember, Ikea is a company and Nokia is a corporation. They couldn't exist in Sweden if Sweden didn't have capitalism.


Actually they are mixed economy countries....they have features of socialism and capitalism.

So not really capitalist countries, but not absent of capitalism either the key I think is a balance between the two.


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DarthMetaKnight
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25 Jul 2017, 2:55 pm

RetroGamer87 wrote:
I've heard a lot of people using socialism to describe certain services being run or funded by the government within an otherwise capitalised society.

This leads to people describing countries such as Norway and Sweden as socialist when they are capitalist countries. Remember, Ikea is a company and Nokia is a corporation. They couldn't exist in Sweden if Sweden didn't have capitalism.


Yeah. The term "socialism" is used far too broadly.

Perhaps we should only use the term "socialist" to describe governments that are free from corporate corruption. We should emphasize that socialists aren't trying to re-create an old country. We're trying to create a system that has never existed before, using technology that has only recently come into existence.

I've described Scandinavia as a "socialist" place in the past, but I was wrong. If a country is still heavily influenced by lobbyists, then it's still a capitalist country. If this country has universal health care, I would call that "liberal capitalism" ... but I wouldn't call it socialism.

New Rule: We shall use the terms "conservative capitalism" and "liberal capitalism" to describe the American and Scandinavian systems. The term "socialism" should only be used to describe pure socialism.

Some right-libertarians go the other way and only use the term "capitalist" to describe "pure capitalism". In my opinion, this is totally unnecessary because "pure capitalism" can't exist. In any capitalist society, the rich will bribe the government in order to cement their position of power. That's inevitable. That's human nature.


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DarthMetaKnight
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25 Jul 2017, 6:33 pm

Watch Noam Chomsky Destroy a Leninist as*hole 8) :lol:

Vladimir Lenin called left communism "an infantile disorder". The guy was a raging douchebag.


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LoveNotHate
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25 Jul 2017, 7:02 pm

The criticism is the same.

"You can't trust people".

Capitalists proudly acknowledge this is why capitalism is superior; because human greed is used to fuel productivity.



DarthMetaKnight
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25 Jul 2017, 7:08 pm

LoveNotHate wrote:
The criticism is the same.

"You can't trust people".

Capitalists proudly acknowledge this is why capitalism is superior; because human greed is used to fuel productivity.


... and start wars.
... and ban harmless plants that can be used as painkillers.
... and deprive people of healthcare.
... and destroy democracy.

By the way, if you think that greed is good then you don't have the right to call socialists "greedy" ever again.


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LoveNotHate
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25 Jul 2017, 7:59 pm

DarthMetaKnight wrote:
LoveNotHate wrote:
The criticism is the same.

"You can't trust people".

Capitalists proudly acknowledge this is why capitalism is superior; because human greed is used to fuel productivity.


... and start wars.
... and ban harmless plants that can be used as painkillers.
... and deprive people of healthcare.
... and destroy democracy.

By the way, if you think that greed is good then you don't have the right to call socialists "greedy" ever again.

I believe in psychological egoism .. that all actions are based on greed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_egoism

"humans are always motivated by self-interest, even in what seem to be acts of altruism."

This is why socialism fails; it fails to account for human nature.



RetroGamer87
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27 Jul 2017, 5:12 am

Sweetleaf wrote:
RetroGamer87 wrote:
I've heard a lot of people using socialism to describe certain services being run or funded by the government within an otherwise capitalised society.

This leads to people describing countries such as Norway and Sweden as socialist when they are capitalist countries. Remember, Ikea is a company and Nokia is a corporation. They couldn't exist in Sweden if Sweden didn't have capitalism.


Actually they are mixed economy countries....they have features of socialism and capitalism.

So not really capitalist countries, but not absent of capitalism either the key I think is a balance between the two.
Norway and Sweden are mixed economies? I suppose by that logic the United States is also a mixed economy unless the United States has privatised it's postal service, water works, road maintenance and police force.

A socialist country is one in which the people own the means of production. The Norwegians and Swedes do not own the means of production, they just get things like free education and health care provided.

Whether or not it's worth having a high rate of income tax to provide these things is not my concern because in a real socialist country there wouldn't be income tax. All factories would be owned by people but controlled by the government. The government collects all revenue generated and then uses a portion of this for wages. There's no need to tax wages when the government already took their cut before they pay your wages.

Saying "mixed economy" is like saying half pregnant.


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