I used to hang out with a few rednecks. Good people, but absolutely indoctrinated. Union workers who didn’t know the history of unions.
We got drunk around a bonfire one night and I started talking about solidarity, unions, workers rights, labor value, personal / private / public property, etc, etc.
By 3am, we were talking about seizing the means of production. If we’d had a few cases of s’mores schnapps, we could’ve changed history
Memes like this are beyond dumb because different ideologies could share similar concepts. The idea of people owning their workplace is not exclusive to socialism. Capitalism is founded on the same idea, just a different interpretation.
Do you even know what Capitalism means?
Do you? Capitalism is quite literally the idea that private individuals can own and control the means of production.
So not the same as all the workers owning the factory…just one guy maybe.
No every business is a factory or a corporation, most businesses aren’t.
Go a step further and argue Monarchies are really capitalism as well because the king is a private individual owning the means of production.
Monarchy is a system of government. Are people on this site allergic to basic information?
According to Helen Cox Richardson, socialism was a thought-stopping buzzword as far back as the antebellum 19th century as objectionable because it was about giving benefits to the poors who owned nothing and therefore deserved nothing. The US has been about the preservation of hierarchy from the beginning despite the alleged promise of the American dream, an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.
We’ve only begun to develop fundamental infrastructure and social safety nets for the public since FDR’s New Deal, and that still didn’t include women or blacks until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and Women’s Lib in the 1970s.
All the while, the industrialists who supported Hoover were super sore about the New Deal and have been striving to gut those programs from day one, even though the US thrived with them in place in the 1950s and 1960s, our ownership class wanted to own everything, and to Hell with the worker class.
They got their in-road with the election of Reagan, thanks to Falwell’s Moral Majority and the US evangelical movement (an early white Christian nationalist movement) uniting behind a single issue: abortion access. They didn’t care about Reagan’s gutting of social services, deregulation of businesses (who’d already shown they can’t be trusted to self-govern), and the normalization of corruption in politics. They were just terrified that women were (allegedly) killing their own babies.
Anyway, Communism and socialism got a bad rap thanks to the USSR which was an honest effort at command economics during Lenin’s rule, but got trashed by corruption with Stalin. It didn’t help that since Wilson, the US and Europe had been sanctioning the Soviet Union just for trying to do a communism.
And, sometimes in the name of containment the US would seek to sabotage any other efforts at socialist democracy, first with CIA subterfuge and sometimes with military intervention.
I almost got a Trump voter to agree with socialism by pointing out that the concrete plant he and his father worked at, which supported a whole town, could be shut down by someone halfway around the world to save a buck. I asked him “shouldn’t you have a say in that?”
That is absolutely painful
What stopped him from agreeing in the end?
His buddy saying “that’s communism!”
The correct response to that is “what is communism?”
My dad says most people are stupid and shouldn’t own the means of production, since they will fuck it up. And that’s the only intellectual critique of socialism I ever heard. Everyone else is just saying some stupid bullshit about minorities having rights and feeding the undeserving.
When its owned by everyone, one person doesn’t get to mess it up, everyone gets a say. And you still will have people with business minds, mechanical minds, and just let me do labour minds
And that’s the only intellectual critique of socialism I ever heard
It almost is, until you watch 5 minutes of billionares talking and go “so these are the smarter guys that won’t fuck it up”.
His critique carries the underlying assumption that private owners of the means of production are selected for their merit rather than nepotism, chance, corruption, and sociopathic tendencies.
Exactafuckingmundo
Even so, give the little guy a chance to fuck it up for once.
But they’re not fucking it up. They’re making it better for them. You’re not even on their radar
Right, as if things haven’t already been fucked up entirely in the default of capitalist ownership
You should ask your dad if people are stupid why are they allowed to vote?
If the answer is that they shouldn’t be allowed you can go down the rabbit hole of “who is worthy to vote?” and end up with a variation of fascism. Or if everyone should be able to vote the followup is if people are allowed to decide how their government is ran why shouldn’t they be allowed to decide how their work gets done?
The thing with letting people own the means of production is that it heavily correlates with the concept of democracy. It’s contradictory to be pro democracy and against collective ownership of the means of production.
Is that supposed to be a serious critique?
People currently own the means of production.
Less people, tiny amount of extremely rich people.
Rich != Smart. Literally 0 correlation. Significant amount of evidence showing that being or becoming extremely rich actually makes you both stupid and a psychopath.
Your dad’s argument can also be applied to the concept of a democratic government.
People are stupid, they shouldn’t be allowed to vote or have rights, they should just be be told what to do by their betters.
… your dad has the social iq of a toddler, or a cult member.
Well, I do agree that people are extremely stupid. But I wouldn’t give the stupidest, most corrupt and controlling people the most power in a society.
But I also understand that socialism isn’t possible under a so called democracy (which just enables the capitalist corruption). If we want a socialist country, the best we can get is the Yugoslavia or Cuba.
Yes, it’s that terrible (or I’m just venting about losing faith in humanity). People are too stupid/selfish (and probably also chauvinists) to consistently oppose the capitalist rule. We could either get an authoritarian dictatorship or a neoliberal dystopia (and I would actually prefer authoritarianism).
Also, while my dad is extremely intelligent, I don’t think he even cares enough about anything to form opinions. And I think I also wouldn’t if occasionally having an inner monologe would take a considerable effort. Life is extremely stupid and painful and I didn’t choose to be born and participate in this shitshow.
Yeah maybe if you lick enough boots it’ll get better 🙄🙄🙄
Socialism is definitely compatible with democracy.
If you wouldn’t want to have the stupidest, most psychotic and authoritarian people in charge of things… you would need a mechanism or mechanisms to prevent that from happening.
Because it is naturally what happens in many or most human hierarchies of organization.
It is what has and is currently occuring, under capitalism.
Socialism is, horrendously oversimplified, the idea that private people should not be in charge of capital, big expensive things that make the economy possible.
They should not be allowed to mold the world and lives of thousands or millions, by fiat.
Capital, infrastructure, those things should be subject to the whims of the people in some manner, via maybe a command and control planned economy, where the government planners are subject to some kind of accountability system, maybe democratic, maybe not…
…or maybe via the anarcho syndicalist approach of sort of merging the labor union and business management hierarchy into a structure more resembling a multifaceted parlimentarian government, where employees are voters, maybe also customers are members and also have some kind of voting rights, where ‘business’ decisions actually are made by elected representatives.
Or maybe many other possible configurations, many other possible meldings of ‘ok this economic sector is non critical, lets just let the “free market” happen there, within regulations, but this other economic sector is extremely critical and thus must be publically, socially, operated.’
Democracy is not possible when people are stupid.
Thus, education must be well made available and provided to the people, lest their ignorance facilitate their own oppression.
Even the classical liberals of the 1700s say this.
But if you have a system that allows public education to be hollowed out and replaced with elitist, preferential, private education… you should not be surprised that society reverts to a rigid class or caste system.
Incuriousness, inequity, poverty, lack of basic human physiological needs, lack of a possible potential future to aspire to… these things traumatize the human mind, and they reinforce themselves, if no one does anything to fight against it.
Therefore, at least as I see it… you have to fight, you have to hope.
Otherwise you are a traitor to the species and, given the extent of modern technology, a traitor to the planet.
My dad is a teacher with two masters degrees, was the teachers union president for 20 years and is MAGA.
It happens. A friend of mine flipped to MAGA after COVID. He’s a very smart guy that comes from labour on the factory floor to C level now. He gets fed nonsense on twitter and tiktok and just accepts it. Like missing a critical thinking aspect now.
He’s not wrong, per se.
People that are closer to production are less likely to see the business holistically. That’s not their fault…I think many CEOs don’t want employees talking about the big picture. They want silos. An us vs. them mentality between support and developers…between accounting and purchasing…between human resources and Chad in sales…etc.
Of course, that goes for an individual person. When you have all departments represented and conferring, then you’ve got the whole picture, and that changes the calculus significantly.
your dad is short sighted and needs to read about labor and union history.
You’re the first person ever that is correctly defined socialism that I have seen on this platform.
Thank you so much.
If the only thing you disagree about is terminology, why insist on using terms that other people are opposed to? Find a common ground.
I think despite people’s best efforts socialism is becoming less of a dirty word. Every time you correct someone by identifying that what they’re thinking of is authoritarianism or communism you can bring them around to the idea that socialism is just allowing workers to have more of a say in their workplace and decommodifying basic needs, which is much harder to be so hard-line against.
Of course socialism is just a stepping stone to communism but it could never happen without some generations of de-programming our culture from this capitalist mindset.
Okay, but why is terminology so important here? If you could achieve your other goals easier by compromising on terminology, why wouldn’t you?
What would you suggest as alternative terminology? The problem is if you create a new term they media will just demonize that too. Now you got to explain two different concepts to people that mean the same thing.
it sounds like that’s what was happening
In the Twitter screenshot, sure. But in the title OP wrote? And the rhetoric I overwhelmingly see on Lemmy?
Ya that works both ways. The worst part about liking socialism is not knowing what it is.
Only that in this case when people learn to understand what the term actually means that they like it even more.
Yes that’s because it sounds great on paper but in practice it just doesn’t work.
I encourage you to move to any socialist country on earth.
And don’t say china they have one of the biggest free markets on the planet with some of the richest CEO’s.
The question is about extremes. You can have a lot of social aspects and not be full tilt socialist.
Look at the many happy countries that have state heath insurance and so much more.
They still have capitalism running in parallel.
Social market economy. Google it perhaps.
Socialism refers to collective ownership of the means of production. Social democracy refers to a capitalist market economy supplemented by welfare programs, labor protections, and public services. The two terms are not interchangeable despite frequent misuse on the internet. You are describing and advocating for social democracy not socialism.
Literally every other developed nation on the planet is socialist. Coincidentally we happen to rank near last for every meaningful metric among the developed nations.
Literally every other developed nation on the planet is socialist.
No, they aren’t.
This is exactly the problem. People use the word “socialism” to describe anything they happen to like and then wonder why nobody takes the discussion seriously.
Denmark isn’t socialist. Sweden isn’t socialist. Norway isn’t socialist. Germany isn’t socialist.
They all have private ownership of the means of production, private investment, stock markets, billionaires, wage labor, and profit-driven corporations. In other words, capitalism.
What you’re describing is social democracy, which is a capitalist system with varying degrees of welfare spending and regulation.
And the claim that America ranks “near last on every meaningful metric” is just as detached from reality.
The United States consistently ranks among the wealthiest countries on Earth, has some of the highest disposable incomes in the world, produces a disproportionate share of global scientific research, dominates technology, finance, aerospace, entertainment, and higher education, and remains the destination millions of people actively seek to immigrate to every year.
You can certainly find metrics where the U.S. performs poorly compared to peer nations. Healthcare outcomes, life expectancy, and certain measures of inequality are common examples. But “near last on every meaningful metric” is the kind of statement someone makes when they get their understanding of the world from memes and comment sections.
So when I ask to name a successful socialist country and someones response is to redefine capitalist countries as socialist while pretending the world’s largest economy is somehow a failed state, you’re not making an argument. You’re repeating internet slogans.
Yep, exactly the issue.
You see the term socialist and think full tilt communism.
Sweden, Norway and Denmark have strong socialist aspects. They are not socialist or communist like the bad examples of cuba or self proclaimed to be so north Korea.
Socialism can be used in doses, the right amounts.
Just like capitalism is horrific if overdosed like in America, socialism to the extreme is also bad.
It’s about finding the right balance.
Absolutely correct. I’m not in support of what we’re doing in America here. In fact I’m completely against it. We’re no longer capitalists. We’re something entirely different at this point. Something quite terrible.
You named all the shit that actually helps the people in a country, then admitted the US is among the lowest in all of them…and then your singular example for why the US is so “great” is it’s the biggest economy…you literally pulled a Pam Bondi.
As for the complaint about socialism vs social democracy; you need to realize that the vast majority of people (including people in power) do not know the definitions of a god damn thing. Humans use connotation exponentially more than denotation, infinitely more so even.
You’ve managed to completely miss the point twice in a row.
I never said the United States was great because it has the largest economy. I pointed out that your claim that it ranks near last on every meaningful metric is objectively false. Those are not the same statement.
The US ranks near the top globally in income, wealth creation, technological innovation, scientific output, higher education, military power, and economic productivity. You can argue that healthcare outcomes, life expectancy, or other social metrics are more important. That’s a perfectly valid opinion. What you cannot do is pretend the other metrics stop existing because they undermine your narrative.
What’s especially amusing is that you’ve gone from claiming the US ranks near last on every meaningful metric to claiming that only the metrics you personally care about are meaningful. Those are very different arguments.
As for the socialism point, you’ve essentially admitted that you don’t know the definitions of the words you’re using and don’t particularly care to learn them.
You are arguing that because lots of people misuse a term, the misuse becomes the definition. That is not how language works. Words have meanings independent of how confidently people misuse them.
Socialism has a definition. Social democracy has a definition. Capitalism has a definition.
The fact that politicians, journalists, Reddit users, and random people on the internet routinely confuse those terms does not somehow merge them into one thing. It just means they are using the wrong words.
At this point, your position seems to be that definitions are optional whenever they become inconvenient. Unfortunately, you cannot connotate your way out of what words mean. If you’re discussing political and economic systems, the terms still have definitions whether you like them or not.
Denmark does not become socialist because people incorrectly call it socialist. The United States does not become a failure because you selectively ignore metrics where it performs well. Neither reality nor language changes simply because a lot of people on the internet are confused.
One issue: Socialism doesn’t work
Holy shit I immediately regret looking at your post history. Time for a nice “avoid” tag.
Lmao. Socialism works great. Where I live we have some of the highest taxes but we also have one of the strongest middle classes. We have everything we need. The only sad part is that the far right has gained more power because they made stupid people believe “the immigrants” were taking away our social security. But then the far right took away some of our social security. You can’t make this shit up.
Socialism refers to collective ownership of the means of production. Social democracy refers to a capitalist market economy supplemented by welfare programs, labor protections, and public services. The two terms are not interchangeable despite frequent misuse on the internet. You are describing and advocating for social democracy not socialism.
Wow, you can google things and add nothing to the conversation, good job!
Finally somone who can distinguish the difference. Having some socialist policies doesn’t make whole system socialist
It is amazing to me. How many people don’t know the difference constantly advocating for social democracy under the name of socialism.
It is infuriating.
Works when it’s not a tankie doing it
Or have lived in it
EDIT: so memes/jokes about socialism are bad and suddenly it’s serious business? Obviously I know what the person with wall of text is talking about down below, stop over-analyzing this people
To the surprise of no one the world isn’t black and white.
Some of the most conservative people I’ve met are from former Soviet or Soviet controlled republics. They are so terrified of the word socialism that drift towards fascism more often than not.
Sometimes I wonder if they just crave authoritarianism regardless of the branding.
Anyway, workers can own companies without an authoritarian communist system. You can also have socialism without authoritarianism.
Like many things the black and white framing with all the implied assumptions is not really helpful and a lot of things exist on a spectrum.
To the surprise of no one the world isn’t black and white.
Exactly
Some of the most conservative people I’ve met are from former Soviet or Soviet controlled republics. They are so terrified of the word socialism that drift towards fascism more often than not.
Hi
Sometimes I wonder if they just crave authoritarianism regardless of the branding.
Same
Anyway, workers can own companies without an authoritarian communist system. You can also have socialism without authoritarianism.
Yes, that’s how it works
Like many things the black and white framing with all the implied assumptions is not really helpful and a lot of things exist on a spectrum.
Obviously
But, here is my counter-argument - this is a meme subreddit. I was born in socialist state. I made a meme-like joke about my own experience.
I had to make a reply because people keep downvoting me and I still don’t understand why. Y’all are starting to look religious about socialism where no one can joke about it. Freaks.
Liberals cannot comment about politics without spamming the word “authoritarian” over and over again, example #637282826362.
Which socialist country did you live in?
Baltics
