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But "socialism" is a scary word
But "socialism" is a scary word
108 comments
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Thanks for the detailed responses.
Sounds like, to me, that you have a bigger issue with government than Socialism or Communism themselves. Are you much of an anarchist?
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No, I'm more of a social democrat. I'm a believer that the best we've come up with is to have a government who's job is to fill in the holes (economic externalities) of capitalism, while curbing it's worst instincts (monopolies, tragedy of the commons issues like global warming).
Indeed this is the system the most successful and happy countries use. Go too far to the capitalist side or too far to the socialist side and things deteriorate quickly, as history shows over and over.
Right now, especially in the USA, we are experiencing what happens when things go too far to the capitalist side.
Unfortunately it seems that this combined with misinformation leads to fascism which will destroy even capitalism and likely leave us only with war and authoritarianism. Which is what you get at both extremes of the political spectrum.
When it comes to personal liberties, I am more of a libertarian though. I am against the war on drugs or most wars, proxy or otherwise, unless they are in defense. The non aggression principle in libertarianism is something that appeals to me.
How about you? Full blown socialist I'm guessing?
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More Anarchist, I think that we should try to disengage from states and their power structures and treat people with respect and autonomy. Try to bring thee principles into daily life and interactions and live as much of a better alternative as I can.
Devolution of powers is a fine first step to work towards if engaging electorily, but that's a long way from the be all and end all of political ideology.
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I'm definitely on board on the small scale. Unfortunately when faced with issues like health care, education, global warming, and curbing the excesses of capitalism, only a government can solve those issues. At least it's the only mechanism we've found so far.
But yes, government should always be the tool of last resort for things that can be done no other way.
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Those still to be solved problems may also be the result of governments. Those problems would likely shrink (albiet be replaced by others) when there aren't global systems of power and exploitation pushing to keep extracting resources from a corrupted Global South, polluting as processed by an overworked Asia, into commodities to sell to underpaid and liminally employed citizens of the Global North for them to destress and feel a fleeting sense of meaning in our increasingly atomised societies.
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It's a good point. One that is true to some extent for communism as well. If we were operating in a system that was less efficient as extracting resources and using them for production, we would conceivably get more out of the resources we have and avoid the pointless cycles you point out.
Unfortunately in practice it didn't work that well because the resources under communism were just used less efficiently and in a more polluting way which negated a lot of the gains. The net result was just less benefit getting to the end user. Though you could argue that people were freed from the capitalist treadmill of overwork to feed largely meaningless consumption that you mention. They just had to pay in quality of life, occasional hunger and genocides, and personal freedoms.
The other issue is that if one country is operating inefficiently and there is another country operating efficiently, inevitably the other country will overtake the first, as we saw in the Cold War. So such a system would need to be enforced pretty strictly on a worldwide level least it get beaten by a system more streamlined for production and militaristic endeavors.
For anarchy, enforcement isn't strong enough to not get taken over by another system (or at least the requirement for personal buy in of all in the system is too high to be practical)
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I agree with all your points on Communism. At least in terms of how it's been implemented, at least in name, by the Soviet Union and the PRC it has been as extractivist and imperialist as Capitalist nations.
Though one can't really divorce the conditions in countries such as Nigeria or Bangladesh from Capitalism. The Global North's standard of living requires the conditions there to exist, the Socialist with Totalitarian Characteristic nations at least keep their poor conditions mostly in house (albiet with some local imperialism, and the PRC has recently started expanding outside it's borders though mostly infrastructure and resource acquisition so far.)
They're not quite two sides of the same coin as the goals for growth are expressly different but neither cares for social connections, a sense of belonging, society in the real, let alone the environment.
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I agree on your points as well. We are so limited by human nature and lack of consensus that I don't think we can escape these problems without something extreme like genetically modifying the whole population of the world.
It's been very nice discussing politics with you. Such civil political conversations are rare and noteworthy.
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Agreed. Have a good one.
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108 comments