Socialist countries doesn’t necessarily have to be authoritarian, although some may be. Its an economic system designed to put workers in more direct control, despite western capitalists who love to tell you socialism = dictatorship. Why would we even want that??
Socialist groups in north america also played a big part on why child labour was banned, why we have the right to weekends, why blacks and minorities can be trated like human beings ans so on.
They didn’t actually say they think socialism leads to authoritarianism – you jumped to that assumption. Perhaps they just don’t think socialism to be good economics or some other complaint.
Personally, I’m a Georgist, which I think is simply on more sound economic footing, although I definitely do appreciate the value and potential worker-based coops have as a business model (primarily for avoiding the principal-agent problem).
People usually make that implicit (because of what I assume might be red scare propaganda) when in reality socialism has worked well and failed depending on where you look, like any other system before.
Tell me more about what being Georgist entails in your opinion though. How do you think it would be better?
First, apologies for the wall of text that is about to follow.
I agree that many people are irrationally afraid of socialism due to lingering effects of red scare propaganda. I would however say fear of statist forms of socialism are justified, because concentration of so much power in just the direct hands of the state has universally led to authoritarianism. Just like corps shouldn’t have monopoly power, the state shouldn’t either. (It’s bad enough that the state has a monopoly on violence, but I don’t really know a way around that; best we have so far is accountable democracy.) Imo, the best form of socialism is worker-owned coops.
At a high level, Georgism asks the following question: Why and how, in a time of greater-than-ever labor productivity, is there still so much poverty? More wealth than ever before is being created (including more wealth per capita), and yet the common folk are not feeling it so much. Clearly, the fruits of all those productivity gains are going somewhere, and it ain’t to (most of) the workers.
Georgism’s answer to this question is rent-seeking:
Rent-seeking is the act of growing one’s existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2] risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.
Overall, I see the goal of socialists and Georgists to largely be the same: create prosperity felt by all. But I think Georgism is a better approach for 3 reasons:
Economics
Politics
Ethics
Economics
Where Georgism and socialism differ economically is socialists desire social ownership of the “means of production”, typically meaning land + capital, sometimes meaning land + capital + labor. Georgists desire social ownership of just land – aka the commons – via taxes. Abolish taxes on other things – e.g., labor, consumption – as those are taxes on productive things we don’t want to discourage or distort (and thus cause economic inefficiency), and replace them with full taxes on economic rents, most notably a land value tax (LVT):
A land value tax (LVT) is a levy on the value of land without regard to buildings, personal property and other improvements.[1] It is also known as a location value tax, a point valuation tax, a site valuation tax, split rate tax, or a site-value rating.
Land value taxes are generally favored by economists as they do not cause economic inefficiency, and reduce inequality.[2] A land value tax is a progressive tax, in that the tax burden falls on land owners, because land ownership is correlated with wealth and income.[3][4] The land value tax has been referred to as “the perfect tax” and the economic efficiency of a land value tax has been accepted since the eighteenth century.[1][5][6]
Oil is a kind of economic land – naturally occurring, and of fixed supply. Accordingly, it generates natural resource rents. The key to Norway’s success in oil exploitation has been the special regime of ownership rights which apply to extraction: the severance tax takes most of those rents, meaning that the people of Norway are the primary beneficiaries of the country’s petroleum wealth. Instead of privatizing the resource rents provided by access to oil, companies make their returns off of the extraction and transportation of the oil, incentivizing them to develop the most efficient technologies and processes rather than simply collecting the resource rents. Exploration and development is subsidized by the Norwegian government in order to maximize the amount of resource rents that can be taxed by the state, while also promoting a highly competitive environment free of the corruption and stagnation that afflicts state-controlled oil companies.
But beyond taxes, Georgism is also in favor of several other reforms/policies:
Lowering barriers to entry and eliminating monopolistic/oligopolistic competition
Universal basic income/citizen’s dividend
For (1), this can be things like building free public transit, funding open scientific research, providing free public healthcare, providing free public education, subsidizing free and open-source software, subsidizing regenerative agriculture, subsidizing carbon removal, etc. Just like Pigouvian taxes charge you money for causing harm to society, Pigouvian subsidies give you money for providing public benefit. If something produces positive externalities, we want to publicly subsidize it.
For (2), exactly how best to achieve this is still a matter of discussion amongst Georgists, but we want to eliminate possession of IP such as patents as a key to economic rent-seeking and monopolism. I’m personally in favor of eliminating patents and replacing them with a combination of a public prize system, publicly-funded research grants, and big projects like the Apollo mission or ITER fusion reactor or Large Hadron Collider. Patents would never incentivize those latter projects anyways.
For (3), this actually covers things like IP reform, but also things like eliminating onerous regulations like restrictive zoning (one of the primary causes of the housing crisis in North America). How will landlords protect their investments if not through artificially limiting supply through high artificial barriers to entry? In general, any onerous regulations that are the result of regulatory capture should be eliminated, as should as many barriers to entry for businesses as possible. Much like Norway subsidized exploration, so as to lower barriers to entry, then taxed exploitation. Monopolism is bad.
For (4), well, I think you’ll probably agree that a UBI is good policy. It eliminates means-checking (meaning it creates no active disincentives to being productive), and it allows people to take more risks (e.g., starting a business) or invest in themselves (e.g., to pursue higher education).
Historically, as well as in my experience online, Georgism and Georgist policies have gotten a lot of wide political support, ranging from free-market libertarians to socialists. The book that started Georgism, Progress and Poverty, was the second-best selling book of 19th-century America – second only to the Bible. Henry George himself had the second-most attended funeral in American history – second only to JFK. Many historians credit the publication of Progress and Poverty as the start of the Progressive Era that brought an end to the Gilded Age. The board game Monopoly is a rip-off of a Georgist game, The Landlord’s Game, by a Georgist named Elizabeth Magie. To get a sense for how insanely popular this guy and his ideas were – including their broad appeal – just read through the Legacy section on his wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George#Legacy
Further, there are aspects of Georgism that can appeal to a lot of people. Urbanists tend to love LVT because it encourages denser cities and less sprawl. Environmentalists tend to love carbon taxes. Capitalists tend to love free trade, no corporate taxes, lower barriers to entry. Socialists tend to love citizen’s dividend + socialization of the commons. Libertarians tend to love eliminating income taxes and high freedom. Economists tend to love that it’s rooted in good economics. The main people who dislike Georgism are the monopolists and rent-seekers it disrupts.
Finally, Georgism can be achieved (and its impacts felt!) incrementally. For example, many places already have some form of LVT, although none have the “full” version envisioned by Georgism. Nonetheless, even milquetoast LVTs have positive effects:
It reveals that much of the anticipated future tax obligations appear to have been already capitalised into lower land prices. Additionally, the tax transition may have also deterred speculative buyers from the housing market, adding even further to the recent pattern of low and stable property prices in the Territory. Because of the price effect of the land tax, a typical new home buyer in the Territory will save between $1,000 and $2,200 per year on mortgage repayments.
No risky socialist revolution needed. (Revolutions typically don’t turn out well for the common folk.)
Ethics
This is where it gets deontological. The thing that separates land and capital is you make capital, but you don’t make land. If I make a tool, I spent my own labor and resources to make it. If I use land, I did not create the land; rather, I deprived the rest of society from that land. This difference is why LVT works economically, but it’s also why I think Georgism is a more ethical and fair system.
I have two degrees. I didn’t have to pay for them out of pocket, but I did have to spend significant time, effort, and opportunity cost. In addition, I still had to pay for rent and groceries while getting them. The output of all that, my two degrees, is a form a capital. Does it seem right or fair for society to usurp the value from those degrees? If it does, doesn’t that also decrease the incentive for me to even get degrees in the first place? That capital wasn’t taken from anyone; rather, I created it, and society is better off for me having created that new capital.
But the commons no one has created. I didn’t create the atmosphere nor the air we breathe, so it is just that I compensate society (via carbon taxes) for the carbon I emit. I didn’t create the land, so it is just that I compensate society (via LVT) for the land that I occupy. I didn’t create the earth’s minerals, so it is just that I compensate society (via severance taxes) should I extract the earth’s finite minerals.
I think you suffer from a common problem in the US. Political ideology shouldn’t be used as an affiliation like a sports team. It shouldn’t be treated as a thing where it’s one “system” vs another.
They are nothing of the clean-cut published and established ideals you or most people imagine. They are all merely attempts at solving different specific issues with slightly greater priority.
While you might say, “no duh”, I’d say then stop treating it like these are different frameworks to program a government with. They should not be prescriptions for the government, but instead viewed as a library of different ideas to tackle different problems.
This constant blather in the US of, “well, I’m not a socialist, I’m a +3 wizard of anarchy!” is just… draining. Draining for no good reason.
I mean, I’m incredibly pragmatic in my ideology. Georgism at its core is rooted in pragmatic arguments. Notice how I led first and foremost with the economic arguments in favor of specific policies, followed by political pragmatism, and not some deontological argument. At the end of the day, what I want most is good, effective, technocratic policy. Sure, the full Georgist system as described above is my ideal, but I said as well that one of the key advantages I see in it as an economic ideology is that it can be implemented (and positive effects felt!) in increments. Will we ever achieve a “full” LVT? Probably not. But can we get places to replace property taxes with LVT as well as pass carbon tax-and-dividend schemes? Absolutely!
And trust me, I’m not just doing mental gymnastics so I can avoid the spooky scary socialist label. For several years I was quite into more socdem, leaning towards demsoc politics. It was really only in the last year or two that I learned of Georgism, and I simply think its policy goals are better and more pragmatic, with the nice bonus of having a nicer deontological argument imo. I’ll gladly ally with libertarians, socialists, and others to achieve any policies that I think will improve the status of things.
That is hilariously untrue. The USSR and PRC are the biggest and worst examples. Every other historically socialist country was generally more bad than good. Yes, there have been some tendencies in socialist countries to e.g. dramatically improve education and literacy, but generally at the cost of the people’s political liberties, the government taking political prisoners, mass killings, speech being censored, etc.
I didn’t say a word about leftists. Socialist and Communists are not leftists, even though they market themselves this way. So, what do you need to be explained exactly?
I know you aren’t arguing in good faith, but I suggest you look into the life and writings of Peter Kropotkin and Nestor Makhno. Also do some research on Revolutionary Catalonia.
Some of successful implementations of Socialist policies is via Social Democracy, which is still a Capitalist country, but with a strong social safety net and a lot of regulations, and Democracy still exists (Eg: Norway). Then there’s Democratic Socialism, which seeks to establish Socialism via democratic means.
I believe that a socialized democracy is a best of both worlds approach. We need stronger safety nets for people. People shouldn’t have to live paycheck to paycheck and worry about if they are going to have a home if they lose their job. People shouldn’t have to worry about losing everything if they have to go to the hospital. Education should 100% be free - we should be investing in a smarter, more educated population. I believe that we’re seeing exactly what happens when we don’t properly invest in education.
Leaving capitalism even partially intact means there is room for it to claw back power from the people. The Nordic model is a temporary measure that is already being weakened in different areas. Not to mention countries like Norway and Sweden are able to keep their own wages, cost of living, etc reasonable by exploiting developing countries in the global south. Capitalism can’t be regulated into obedience, it’s an oppressive and coercive power structure that will always do what it can to survive unless.totally eradicated. Same for the state
I personally view Social Democracy as one of the stages you have to go through before achieving Socialism. Violent revolutions cause too much instability and is breeding ground for authoritarianism, and violence should be avoided as long as there is still a democratic system to achieve your goals. (Violence is a last resort, obviously if your country is a dictatorship, that might be unavoidable) Socialism is compatible with Democracy, and some might even argue that Socialist societies require Democracy. To prevent regression to Capitalism, we can write a new constitution that has Socialist ideals as an entrenched clause and such a country would also need to practice Defensive Democracy and ban political parties that are anti-egalitarian (basically like Germany’s Defensive Democracy, with with added Socialism). But it’s going to be a challenge to get it just right that it doesn’t regress into Capitalism, but also doesn’t become authoritarian. The biggest challenge is to convince a majority of the people to support Socialism, because forcing a country to become Socialist isn’t going to work if most people are against it. And because of the past failed attempts at Socialist/Communist ideologies and the totalitarianism that resulted from those attempts, it’s going to be difficult to convince people to try it again, because people would fear that this time, it would also result in totalitarianism again.
The ultimate goal of socialism, in any form it may take, is to democratize every aspect of collective society. Be it the work place, government, industry, schooling, etc. Socialism is fundamentally against one person having unjust power and influence over others. I’d say that’s the major thread that ties all of the different socialist ideologies together.
Revolution and revolutionary action takes many forms and is often a long process. The violent overthrowing of the powers that be that is often associated with revolution nowadays but we ignore the less dramatic and showy ways it operates before that. Not to say violence isn’t going to be necessary. For example, the state has power because of its monopoly on violence. The state says who they use their force against and for what reasons, regardless of the wishes or consent of their citizens. Radical democracy inherently involves taking the power of violence, oppression and coercion from the state.
In the same way the capitalist will not readily give up their wealth because we told them to pay their fair share, a state will not give up it’s monopoly on violence because we told them we don’t want them to kill us any more.
As an anarchist, many of us believe in a balance of means and ends. Which is what I feel you’re alluding to moreso than the use of political violence. We think that the situation you’re in limits the means available to you, and therefore the ends you can achieve. Your means MUST justify your ends. And if you’re looking for a specific end (i.e. the abolition of capitalism and the state) you need to work to provide the correct means to meet it. Anarchists have many ideas on how to avoid the pitfalls and are doing work every day to see that through.
If you’re interested, I’d be happy to provide some reading/listening material on the subject. Many people.much more eloquent than myself have dedicated their lives to addressing the very things you’re worried about and I wouldn’t want to misrepresent.them as I’m still learning the ins and outs myself.
Do you know what another term of anarcho communism is? Libertarian socialism. Please tell me how a LIBERTARIAN ideology is about destroying individual rights
My problem with Demsoc is that it doesn’t work in 3rd world countries to really address the issues, only to improve on them a little bit (see south america).
I think it only really works that well in europe because of imperialism.
I’d bet a fair amount of money that you have no idea what actual hard work looks like, and I find it insane that you’d rather countries just stay poor forever than allow people to work to change their lives.
It’s a liberal ideology based on sound economic policies (primarily land value tax, but also things like carbon tax-and-dividend are very Georgist policies), which seeks to maximize freedom, minimize monopolism, and maximize prosperity for all.
Why? Also why group land and capital together under “the means of production”? Economically speaking, the fact you can create more capital but not more land makes them very different.
Let’s not go too far, now. I could be tripping on acid while listening to a tankie buzzword lecture and still not reach the sheer incomprehensible dribble of a Trump speech.
Fuck statists, all my homies hate statists
Statistically speaking, of course.
Statists or Tankies. Can we just find a nice happy middle ground ffs?
The amount of actual socialist communities on Lemmy is fucking absurd. I hate capitalism, but straight socialism isn’t any better.
Socialist countries doesn’t necessarily have to be authoritarian, although some may be. Its an economic system designed to put workers in more direct control, despite western capitalists who love to tell you socialism = dictatorship. Why would we even want that??
Socialist groups in north america also played a big part on why child labour was banned, why we have the right to weekends, why blacks and minorities can be trated like human beings ans so on.
They didn’t actually say they think socialism leads to authoritarianism – you jumped to that assumption. Perhaps they just don’t think socialism to be good economics or some other complaint.
Personally, I’m a Georgist, which I think is simply on more sound economic footing, although I definitely do appreciate the value and potential worker-based coops have as a business model (primarily for avoiding the principal-agent problem).
People usually make that implicit (because of what I assume might be red scare propaganda) when in reality socialism has worked well and failed depending on where you look, like any other system before.
Tell me more about what being Georgist entails in your opinion though. How do you think it would be better?
First, apologies for the wall of text that is about to follow.
I agree that many people are irrationally afraid of socialism due to lingering effects of red scare propaganda. I would however say fear of statist forms of socialism are justified, because concentration of so much power in just the direct hands of the state has universally led to authoritarianism. Just like corps shouldn’t have monopoly power, the state shouldn’t either. (It’s bad enough that the state has a monopoly on violence, but I don’t really know a way around that; best we have so far is accountable democracy.) Imo, the best form of socialism is worker-owned coops.
At a high level, Georgism asks the following question: Why and how, in a time of greater-than-ever labor productivity, is there still so much poverty? More wealth than ever before is being created (including more wealth per capita), and yet the common folk are not feeling it so much. Clearly, the fruits of all those productivity gains are going somewhere, and it ain’t to (most of) the workers.
Georgism’s answer to this question is rent-seeking:
Overall, I see the goal of socialists and Georgists to largely be the same: create prosperity felt by all. But I think Georgism is a better approach for 3 reasons:
Economics
Where Georgism and socialism differ economically is socialists desire social ownership of the “means of production”, typically meaning land + capital, sometimes meaning land + capital + labor. Georgists desire social ownership of just land – aka the commons – via taxes. Abolish taxes on other things – e.g., labor, consumption – as those are taxes on productive things we don’t want to discourage or distort (and thus cause economic inefficiency), and replace them with full taxes on economic rents, most notably a land value tax (LVT):
LVT is progressive, basically impossible to evade, encourages efficient use of scarce urban land (thus helping to solve the housing crisis, both by incentivizing housing development and by eliminating land speculation), can grow the economy, can’t be passed on to tenants (both in theory and in practice), doesn’t encourage capital flight, and has been shown to be capable of funding the entire government.
Beyond just LVT, however, Georgists support Pigouvian taxes (taxes on negative externalities, e.g., carbon tax) and severance taxes (taxes on extraction of finite natural resources, e.g., minerals). Regarding Pigouvian taxes, there’s a reason carbon tax-and-dividend is widely considered the best climate policy by economists. And regarding severance taxes, the Norwegian model has shown to be an incredible way to manage finite natural resources for the public good:
But beyond taxes, Georgism is also in favor of several other reforms/policies:
For (1), this can be things like building free public transit, funding open scientific research, providing free public healthcare, providing free public education, subsidizing free and open-source software, subsidizing regenerative agriculture, subsidizing carbon removal, etc. Just like Pigouvian taxes charge you money for causing harm to society, Pigouvian subsidies give you money for providing public benefit. If something produces positive externalities, we want to publicly subsidize it.
For (2), exactly how best to achieve this is still a matter of discussion amongst Georgists, but we want to eliminate possession of IP such as patents as a key to economic rent-seeking and monopolism. I’m personally in favor of eliminating patents and replacing them with a combination of a public prize system, publicly-funded research grants, and big projects like the Apollo mission or ITER fusion reactor or Large Hadron Collider. Patents would never incentivize those latter projects anyways.
For (3), this actually covers things like IP reform, but also things like eliminating onerous regulations like restrictive zoning (one of the primary causes of the housing crisis in North America). How will landlords protect their investments if not through artificially limiting supply through high artificial barriers to entry? In general, any onerous regulations that are the result of regulatory capture should be eliminated, as should as many barriers to entry for businesses as possible. Much like Norway subsidized exploration, so as to lower barriers to entry, then taxed exploitation. Monopolism is bad.
For (4), well, I think you’ll probably agree that a UBI is good policy. It eliminates means-checking (meaning it creates no active disincentives to being productive), and it allows people to take more risks (e.g., starting a business) or invest in themselves (e.g., to pursue higher education).
(continued in reply)
Politics
Historically, as well as in my experience online, Georgism and Georgist policies have gotten a lot of wide political support, ranging from free-market libertarians to socialists. The book that started Georgism, Progress and Poverty, was the second-best selling book of 19th-century America – second only to the Bible. Henry George himself had the second-most attended funeral in American history – second only to JFK. Many historians credit the publication of Progress and Poverty as the start of the Progressive Era that brought an end to the Gilded Age. The board game Monopoly is a rip-off of a Georgist game, The Landlord’s Game, by a Georgist named Elizabeth Magie. To get a sense for how insanely popular this guy and his ideas were – including their broad appeal – just read through the Legacy section on his wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George#Legacy
Further, there are aspects of Georgism that can appeal to a lot of people. Urbanists tend to love LVT because it encourages denser cities and less sprawl. Environmentalists tend to love carbon taxes. Capitalists tend to love free trade, no corporate taxes, lower barriers to entry. Socialists tend to love citizen’s dividend + socialization of the commons. Libertarians tend to love eliminating income taxes and high freedom. Economists tend to love that it’s rooted in good economics. The main people who dislike Georgism are the monopolists and rent-seekers it disrupts.
Finally, Georgism can be achieved (and its impacts felt!) incrementally. For example, many places already have some form of LVT, although none have the “full” version envisioned by Georgism. Nonetheless, even milquetoast LVTs have positive effects:
https://osf.io/54q68/
No risky socialist revolution needed. (Revolutions typically don’t turn out well for the common folk.)
Ethics
This is where it gets deontological. The thing that separates land and capital is you make capital, but you don’t make land. If I make a tool, I spent my own labor and resources to make it. If I use land, I did not create the land; rather, I deprived the rest of society from that land. This difference is why LVT works economically, but it’s also why I think Georgism is a more ethical and fair system.
I have two degrees. I didn’t have to pay for them out of pocket, but I did have to spend significant time, effort, and opportunity cost. In addition, I still had to pay for rent and groceries while getting them. The output of all that, my two degrees, is a form a capital. Does it seem right or fair for society to usurp the value from those degrees? If it does, doesn’t that also decrease the incentive for me to even get degrees in the first place? That capital wasn’t taken from anyone; rather, I created it, and society is better off for me having created that new capital.
But the commons no one has created. I didn’t create the atmosphere nor the air we breathe, so it is just that I compensate society (via carbon taxes) for the carbon I emit. I didn’t create the land, so it is just that I compensate society (via LVT) for the land that I occupy. I didn’t create the earth’s minerals, so it is just that I compensate society (via severance taxes) should I extract the earth’s finite minerals.
I think you suffer from a common problem in the US. Political ideology shouldn’t be used as an affiliation like a sports team. It shouldn’t be treated as a thing where it’s one “system” vs another.
They are nothing of the clean-cut published and established ideals you or most people imagine. They are all merely attempts at solving different specific issues with slightly greater priority.
While you might say, “no duh”, I’d say then stop treating it like these are different frameworks to program a government with. They should not be prescriptions for the government, but instead viewed as a library of different ideas to tackle different problems.
This constant blather in the US of, “well, I’m not a socialist, I’m a +3 wizard of anarchy!” is just… draining. Draining for no good reason.
I mean, I’m incredibly pragmatic in my ideology. Georgism at its core is rooted in pragmatic arguments. Notice how I led first and foremost with the economic arguments in favor of specific policies, followed by political pragmatism, and not some deontological argument. At the end of the day, what I want most is good, effective, technocratic policy. Sure, the full Georgist system as described above is my ideal, but I said as well that one of the key advantages I see in it as an economic ideology is that it can be implemented (and positive effects felt!) in increments. Will we ever achieve a “full” LVT? Probably not. But can we get places to replace property taxes with LVT as well as pass carbon tax-and-dividend schemes? Absolutely!
And trust me, I’m not just doing mental gymnastics so I can avoid the spooky scary socialist label. For several years I was quite into more socdem, leaning towards demsoc politics. It was really only in the last year or two that I learned of Georgism, and I simply think its policy goals are better and more pragmatic, with the nice bonus of having a nicer deontological argument imo. I’ll gladly ally with libertarians, socialists, and others to achieve any policies that I think will improve the status of things.
Edit: wording
Like in the Nordic monarchies?
Like almost every socialist country before US intervention. Vietnam is a funny example because they were among the only ones why won the war.
True socialism, not just a mixed economy, will invariably be authoritarian. People will never democratically take it that far; history shows this.
History shows us quite the opposite actually. Socialism goes well most of the time whenever the US can’t interfere too much.
That is hilariously untrue. The USSR and PRC are the biggest and worst examples. Every other historically socialist country was generally more bad than good. Yes, there have been some tendencies in socialist countries to e.g. dramatically improve education and literacy, but generally at the cost of the people’s political liberties, the government taking political prisoners, mass killings, speech being censored, etc.
key phrase being “whenever the US can’t interfere too much”
investigate that correlation because its enlightening.
Any form of socialism is inherently authoritarian. There are no exceptions.
Good to see the quality of conversation is scraping the bottom of the barrel…
If your stanceeaves no room for nuance and discussion, it’s not a stance, it’s dogma & ignorance.
What nuance is there for you? Like some people don’t deserve freedoms? Or maybe not all human rights should be upheld?
How do you possibly believe leftists support that?? You are beyond ignorant about what “the left” even is. Explain to me what you think it is.
I didn’t say a word about leftists. Socialist and Communists are not leftists, even though they market themselves this way. So, what do you need to be explained exactly?
Or maybe you just fundamentally misunderstand the topic at hand.
Someone hasn’t done their homework.
Well, go on, do it!
I know you aren’t arguing in good faith, but I suggest you look into the life and writings of Peter Kropotkin and Nestor Makhno. Also do some research on Revolutionary Catalonia.
So, according to you, the Social Democratic Party of Germany is an authoritarian party… yea sure buddy.
Some of successful implementations of Socialist policies is via Social Democracy, which is still a Capitalist country, but with a strong social safety net and a lot of regulations, and Democracy still exists (Eg: Norway). Then there’s Democratic Socialism, which seeks to establish Socialism via democratic means.
I believe that a socialized democracy is a best of both worlds approach. We need stronger safety nets for people. People shouldn’t have to live paycheck to paycheck and worry about if they are going to have a home if they lose their job. People shouldn’t have to worry about losing everything if they have to go to the hospital. Education should 100% be free - we should be investing in a smarter, more educated population. I believe that we’re seeing exactly what happens when we don’t properly invest in education.
Leaving capitalism even partially intact means there is room for it to claw back power from the people. The Nordic model is a temporary measure that is already being weakened in different areas. Not to mention countries like Norway and Sweden are able to keep their own wages, cost of living, etc reasonable by exploiting developing countries in the global south. Capitalism can’t be regulated into obedience, it’s an oppressive and coercive power structure that will always do what it can to survive unless.totally eradicated. Same for the state
I personally view Social Democracy as one of the stages you have to go through before achieving Socialism. Violent revolutions cause too much instability and is breeding ground for authoritarianism, and violence should be avoided as long as there is still a democratic system to achieve your goals. (Violence is a last resort, obviously if your country is a dictatorship, that might be unavoidable) Socialism is compatible with Democracy, and some might even argue that Socialist societies require Democracy. To prevent regression to Capitalism, we can write a new constitution that has Socialist ideals as an entrenched clause and such a country would also need to practice Defensive Democracy and ban political parties that are anti-egalitarian (basically like Germany’s Defensive Democracy, with with added Socialism). But it’s going to be a challenge to get it just right that it doesn’t regress into Capitalism, but also doesn’t become authoritarian. The biggest challenge is to convince a majority of the people to support Socialism, because forcing a country to become Socialist isn’t going to work if most people are against it. And because of the past failed attempts at Socialist/Communist ideologies and the totalitarianism that resulted from those attempts, it’s going to be difficult to convince people to try it again, because people would fear that this time, it would also result in totalitarianism again.
The ultimate goal of socialism, in any form it may take, is to democratize every aspect of collective society. Be it the work place, government, industry, schooling, etc. Socialism is fundamentally against one person having unjust power and influence over others. I’d say that’s the major thread that ties all of the different socialist ideologies together.
Revolution and revolutionary action takes many forms and is often a long process. The violent overthrowing of the powers that be that is often associated with revolution nowadays but we ignore the less dramatic and showy ways it operates before that. Not to say violence isn’t going to be necessary. For example, the state has power because of its monopoly on violence. The state says who they use their force against and for what reasons, regardless of the wishes or consent of their citizens. Radical democracy inherently involves taking the power of violence, oppression and coercion from the state.
In the same way the capitalist will not readily give up their wealth because we told them to pay their fair share, a state will not give up it’s monopoly on violence because we told them we don’t want them to kill us any more.
As an anarchist, many of us believe in a balance of means and ends. Which is what I feel you’re alluding to moreso than the use of political violence. We think that the situation you’re in limits the means available to you, and therefore the ends you can achieve. Your means MUST justify your ends. And if you’re looking for a specific end (i.e. the abolition of capitalism and the state) you need to work to provide the correct means to meet it. Anarchists have many ideas on how to avoid the pitfalls and are doing work every day to see that through.
If you’re interested, I’d be happy to provide some reading/listening material on the subject. Many people.much more eloquent than myself have dedicated their lives to addressing the very things you’re worried about and I wouldn’t want to misrepresent.them as I’m still learning the ins and outs myself.
The ultimate goal of socialism is to destroy rights and freedoms of an individual.
If you take away everyone’s freedom to murder at will, are you restricting or promoting freedom?
How’s that related?
Do you know what another term of anarcho communism is? Libertarian socialism. Please tell me how a LIBERTARIAN ideology is about destroying individual rights
Do you even know what LIBERTARIAN means?
The only oppressive power structure is socialism.
I know you’re just being an inflammatory dick but please, enlighten me how an ideology built around the abolition of oppression is oppressive?
Abolition of what, sorry?
My problem with Demsoc is that it doesn’t work in 3rd world countries to really address the issues, only to improve on them a little bit (see south america).
I think it only really works that well in europe because of imperialism.
What works really well in developing nations is capitalism (i.e. outside investment).
You never been to a developing nation have you?
Yes, I absolutely have.
I doubt so. You sound like someone who would fold under the conditions of the working class in most of these “capitalist utopia” sweatshops.
I’d bet a fair amount of money that you have no idea what actual hard work looks like, and I find it insane that you’d rather countries just stay poor forever than allow people to work to change their lives.
Yes, the Kingdom of Norway
Would gay socialism do it for you? Or fully-automated luxury gay space communism?
Can I get a Lesbian Inter-Galactic Anarcho-Communist Federated United Front?
It’s a free universe, innit?
Oooh…I never considered that lol.
Big whoops on “straight socialism”.
How does Georgism sound to you?
It’s a liberal ideology based on sound economic policies (primarily land value tax, but also things like carbon tax-and-dividend are very Georgist policies), which seeks to maximize freedom, minimize monopolism, and maximize prosperity for all.
Land and the means of production should be held in common, not taxed.
Why? Also why group land and capital together under “the means of production”? Economically speaking, the fact you can create more capital but not more land makes them very different.
No.
The shit on hexbear makes Trump look sane, and thats no easy feat.
Let’s not go too far, now. I could be tripping on acid while listening to a tankie buzzword lecture and still not reach the sheer incomprehensible dribble of a Trump speech.
Okay, maybe a little hyperbole, but I got my point across.
Tankie buzzword lectures always end up in praising genocides. If you’re tripping on genocide, you’re the problem as well.