Socialism For Absolute Beginners

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Since the media and angry right-wingers keep getting it wrong, here's a video to really explain it for those who hate it, but cannot accurately define it.

All of the world's most successful economies have been mixed economies, neither purely socialist nor purely capitalist/free-market.

Neither pure capitalism/free-market nor any attempts at pure socialism seem to have worked well.

So to me the question is: What is the best mixture?

"Socialism is a society in which the means of production -- factories, farms, offices (basically the things that produce for the economy) -- are held by all in common and subject to democratic decision-making rather than that of a few individuals; nothing more." -- from the video

Good video, even though it was as much anti-Feudal-Capitalism as pro-Social-Capitalism.

At least everything said seemed to be correct (or at least make sense).

But did it change my mind?

No.

My first lesson about socialism was the 1st century church in Acts that sold everything and had everything in common.Then centuries later Karl Marx came up with modern socialism and communism.Communism is a command economy where the government owns the means of production.I love Christian socialism so much just not Marxism.I think Jesus was a proto-socialist because He told people to sell everything and give it away.

I don't think that can be clearly answered. The problem is that there seems to be a runaway of "socialist" policies that try to make us so equal and utopian, especially with the "Social Justice" kind of neo-leftism (this is just not human nature) that it in fact might make inequality or the problems worse. I wonder if it is not so much the outcome per-se as the execution of the policies and means to achieve the end. The "Social Justice" is even more unbearable because they are pretty much trying to rewrite all of human nature (yes, two sexes biologically speaking, and all that). I don't bang against gay or trans people as they can do what they want, but it is getting to a ridiculous point where we are losing what it even means to be human.

Then you have many examples of your countries which pure socialism has been tried and eventually collapsed into an epic cluster-you-know-what of totalitarianism and violence as in the recent crisis in Venezuela.

The difference between Jesus and socialism is that Jesus didn't mention that the government should enforce it by coercion, in fact I think there are a few parts in the Bible where he condemns that way.

Socialism unfortunately is an ideal that is yet to be accommodated by our species since our biological and psychological drivers propel us toward selfish desire/wants/needs but also toward parochialism toward in-groups.

We aren't that evolved (yet), I think space colonies offers us the first opportunity to create proper socialist communities. But even then the candidates need to be hand picked to conform to that type of mindset.

Did you miss the fact that the book of Acts church socialist experiment was an abysmal failure? A husband and wife were struck down by the Almighty for their greed. The words of Jesus must be re-examined in light of this.

Hint: If you are called to spread the gospel, you are most effective when you travel light.

But as a member of restorationist movement I think the church should be done exactly how it was done in Acts.I dont read about the church in Acts failing in the Bible.I think that Jesus came to abolish private property as part of Christianity for people who are Christians.I am trying to dispose of my property.Jesus told us to give everything to the church.But I do admit that all the churches in the Bible eventually failed.But I believe it is wrong to change His teaching.I will never reexamine Jesus core teachings about His gospel.I believe that Jesus intended everyone to be Christians who live together and have everything in common.People in the 1st Century spread the Word Highly effectively when they are living in house churches.

Last edited by Texasmoneyman300 on 07 May 2022, 11:45 pm, edited 2 times in total.

well the first church was informal communism and socialism not Marxism.

You aren’t changing His teaching. ALL of the Bible is true and correct from Genesis to Revelation.

The church described in Acts failed because greed and envy festered within it. That’s what happens every time a cooperative sacrifices trade on the altar of altruism. Ananias and Saphyra pledged all their possessions to the community and declined to hold up their end of the promise. The community now knew that reneging on promises might result in death, leading to an examination of whether making such promises and holding others to theirs was wise. The socialist experiment in Acts didn’t fail because Ananias was selfish. It failed because socialism is immoral.

If socialism is immoral, then Jesus could not have advocated for it. Selling all your possessions and giving to the poor is not redistribution of wealth. First, it shows that you intrinsically value other human beings as fellow image-bearers of God. People who possess wealth also possess the strength and intellect to acquire wealth through meaningful trade. Elon Musk bought Twitter at a considerable risk. He doesn’t NEED the money. He could lose everything tomorrow and still come out on top because he has innovative ideas and an entrepreneurial spirit.

In the gospels, power structures resembled the Old Testament with Greco-Roman influences. Wealth and power represented God’s blessings, without which heaven is unattainable. The rich young ruler depicts a man who’d inherited wealth and authority rather than having earned it. He turned away sad because he knew he could never earn it back. When the disciples gave up all their possessions, they lamented that they could never enter heaven because not even rich people could get in. Jesus intended for communities of believers to take care of each other for the value God places on every individual. Your possessions are the result of trade not conducted in the context of reaching the lost for God’s kingdom. Instead, do kingdom work and let those you serve decide what you should have in terms of material needs. The sending of the 70 was a training exercise for what was meant to become a habit for missionaries.

And it really didn’t matter if you sold everything you owned and gave away all the money. Paul probably did this, but Paul also ran a business that allowed him to self-fund his missionary work without asking anything of church communities. In fact, if someone was struggling, he reached out to other churches to raise money. He never kept anything for himself. His shrewdness in trade was what kept him going, plus he leveraged bizarre Roman government policies to get free passage to Rome.

It would seem as though Paul was a selfish hypocrite. But I don’t believe he was a hypocrite. Who was right, Paul or Jesus? Well…both. Jesus never intended for everyone to give up everything and make entitled demands of others, as occurs with socialism, but rather to eliminate burdens and barriers to spreading the gospel, using any means God gives you to get there, as with Paul. The New Testament relates stories of wealthy individuals who either were unable to unload their wealth or they leveraged their wealth to support the church and spread the gospel.

These weren’t self-haters, only self-deniers, which only means setting aside envy and greed. Jesus didn’t instruct us to set aside self-interest. Jesus said love your neighbor as yourself. You cannot love others without first loving yourself. If God loves us individually, we should love what God loves—the self—and by doing so show our love for others by taking care of them. Not for their own sake, but because it means something to each of us personally to do so.

Selling all your possessions and giving to the poor, owning property in common is the opposite of what God intended. It’s a breeding ground for greed and resentment. If you choose to sell everything and give away money because YOU think it’s important and YOU get something out of doing it, you have done nothing immoral. If you senselessly do it just because JESUS said so (and who is Jesus, anyway?), it is wrong. Examine what Jesus intended for us first before deciding what you should do to further His kingdom.

[Who is Jesus? Our Lord and Savior. Jesus gave us reasons for doing good things. We can only follow His example if we do so with the same intentions as Him. Too often we fail to examine those intentions and do things for the wrong reasons. That makes us no greater than Pharisees whose only path to God was meaningless ritual. We as Christians need to be on guard that we don’t become guilty of the same thing.]

Corps need to get pretty big to benefit society. All our creature comforts that makes us a developed nation/s would be impossible if large companies where stifled both in size and profit.

The iPhone, Honda, Walmart, McDonald's and Tesla would never exist if it wasn't for companies growing in size and profits.

Nobody can rely on the end products of Elon Musk or Steve Jobs while simultaneously strangling their rise to prominence.

Completely agree.

Socialism means total equality. For someone to be forward thinking and innovative would mean that he is greater than his peers. In Anthem, the main character rediscovers the light bulb and attempts to show community leaders his discovery. They punish him because electricity and the light bulb would obsolete their current method of lighting and put people out of work. Not only that, but he was doing work he wasn’t assigned to do—it was out of his department. If anyone was to ever use electricity, there was a sort of science caste who were responsible for it. To excel above this caste was unacceptable, even punishable by death (extreme paraphrase and summarization, just covering the essentials).

Socialist societies lack the ability to move forward intellectually and technologically. Innovation and progress can only happen by leeching off societies who are progressive in the truest sense of the term (our socialist “progressive” leaders are anything but). The Soviet Union was unable to produce atomic weapons without spies working in the United States. Soviet thermonuclear weapons ripped off the American Ulam-Teller design. By contrast, the American nuclear and space programs were birthed by physicists, mathematicians, and engineers fleeing persecution from National Socialists. They thrived in the United States because the US fosters true progress and competition.

You could argue we stole from the Germans. I say what you toss in the dumpster is fair game. The Soviets couldn’t even do that much. German scientists co-opted by Soviets didn’t really
have much say in the matter. Progress by force and coercion isn’t really progressive. Once these scientists are gone, their work goes with them. As I said before, great science is meaningless in a society that imposes equality on everything. There are no great scientists because celebrating achievement injects inequality into the system.

The conquest of space will only be achieved at the end of a long chain of competing ideas of how to get there. Obama’s socialist policies ended the American space program and shifted American space travel requirements to Russia. No significant progress has happened since then. The rise of a private space industry in America has shown promise of restoring American supremacy in space. Only private space entrepreneurs will lead the way in establishing colonies on the moon and Mars, and it will be capitalist values that see them become successful in the long term.

A work of classist fiction and capitalist propaganda does not provide evidence to support an argument.

I think there can be benefits to scale, but I also think you’re putting down the small businesses who really do make our lives better. Without the local corner shop you’d probably have to go a lot further to buy milk, for a fairly easy example.

It’s also worth noting that private companies systematically invest less in R&D than would be socially optimal. That is because R&D doesn’t only benefit the company that does it. Apple invented the iPhone and then everyone copied them. So why bother inventing if you can just steal someone else’s invention? Patents can help, but produce distortions of their own.

If we really want to build the ideal future then we need governments to encourage high levels of R&D, not just leaving the private sector to it.

Philosophy has a long history of using allegory and storytelling to illustrate a point. If you dismiss every view that was explained through storytelling, then you’ll have to give up your precious “evidence,” too.

The topic is Socialism for Absolute Beginners. I can’t think of better texts than Anthem and We the Living for exploring basic socialist concepts from the perspective of someone who witnessed the glorious birth of Soviet communism firsthand.

I don’t see either of those as propaganda. Ok, so there’s Animal Farm by the socialist George Orwell, which described a nightmare scenario that has proved surprisingly accurate in real-life socialist states. NorKo is strikingly Orwellian. Mein Kampf is a textbook case of scapegoating some “other” as the root cause of capitalist evil. The Catholic Church has long promoted altruism and lifelong suffering and misery as a means of perpetuating class struggles and maintaining economic and political control over entire continents.

Socialism requires a perpetual victim class with a common enemy. The populace must believe in equality as a virtue and work collectively to maintain it. Innovation and achievement must be discouraged for the sake of equality. The enforcement of socialist equality requires rule-by-minority in order to enable a hegemonic shift to replace supposed oppressive power structures. Under Critical Theory, the failure of socialism is blamed on a hegemony that appropriated socialism for its own purpose rather than the benefit of “The People.” CRT is a variant of CT that specifies Caucasian people as defining a hegemony that is systemically racist. These are all common elements of socialism—some “other” that bears the blame for all of society’s ills: Monarchy, institutional slavery, capitalists, Mensheviks, Jews, white people, degenerates that dare to defy tradition through achievement. Everyone else are victims—Germans were “victims” of national leaders who colluded with wealthy Jews to stab the imperial government in the back. Soviets were victims of ongoing capitalist infiltration and isolation.

In some cases, there really are victims. French and Russian peasants really were victims of the ruling class. Blacks really were victims of the slave trade. Greedy corporations bribe politicians to avoid competition and create destructive monopolies that ruin consumers for short term profits. The evils that socialism purports to remedy are sometimes real. The problem is that socialism never actually remedies anything. Socialism only enabled evil people to keep being evil.

Anything else goes beyond beginner socialism, so I’ll save that for another time. But yes, Ayn Rand’s Anthem and We the Living, Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, possibly Brave New World, and if you just want great entertainment get Soylent Green. Marx/Engels Communist Manifesto, of course, but that might be a bit heavier than what you’re going for. But if you can read and understand that, read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Virtue of Selfishness. Altogether those will give you a comprehensive view of pre-Critical Theory socialism.