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.
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.
If you don’t define it, lots of things can be wrong with it. Or right.
Which is why almost no one defines it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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, liberators, 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.
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 and communism have a lot more in common than communism and what the soviets (and those they inspired) did.
“liberators”? Did you mean Libraries?
No that’s socialism.
Corrected. (But libraries are liberators!)
100% true!
The rich don’t want equality. They need people to be suffering and in dire want, so they have exploitable people to profit from.
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.
and we could provide all this wonderful socialism everyone here wants, but that’s never actually going to happen
lol they said the same thing about kings and empires…
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.
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.
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.
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.
The world has had enough resources for post-scarcity for decades, if not centuries. Before, the problem was logistics, now it’s will.
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.
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.
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
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.
Liberalism is basically capitalism
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
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.
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 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.
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 the successful being forced to support the lazy.
Yes. My one note would be that it may be more to the root of it to say that they see it as the good (anything they like) having to help the bad (anything else). These sorts almost always reduce down to good/bad, me/them, clean/dirty because they (like all of us in our own ways) simply desire understanding and the surety it provides. Framing things as 0/1 is much easier to understand than actually facing the grey of reality. It’s easy to want easy. Not often good or helpful, but just so dang easy to abide by.
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.”
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.
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.
Unless you want a system where medical emergencies are turned away at the hospital door.
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.
why should I pay for someone else’s health care?
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”
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.
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.
Down voting because, indeed, I don’t want socialism to happen with fascism. Those instances are places that I do not want to visit.
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.
