I'll get hate here (this instance/community) but I don't give a fuck.
There's more than one way to skin a cat. I don't care if it's welfare capitalism, UBI, socialism or fucking whatever. SOMEONE needs to do SOMETHING to give people that work less profitable/high class/whatever jobs a decent humane life.
Everyone's work is important, otherwise it wouldn't be done. And they deserve to live a decent life.
Does that mean they go on intercontiental holidays to 5 star hotels? No. Does that mean they can afford food, heat, shelter and the ability to start a family? Yes.
Wait. Why would that get hate here?
I don't want to get any hate here but I think trump sucks.
I only downvoted to make sure you get the hate you expect. Your opinion is not at all controversial.
I agree with everything you said in your comment, but it seems like an odd response to this particular meme.
In this meme we have the same person saying two things:
-
You can't use Norway as an example of Socialism being successful because it's not really socialism.
-
We can't have social safety nets in our country (probably the U.S. in this case) because that would be socialism, and socialism doesn't work.
That person is not interested in helping reduce exploitation and preventing needless suffering.
That person is not arguing in good faith.
-
Does that mean they go on intercontiental holidays to 5 star hotels? No. Does that mean they can afford food, heat, shelter and the ability to start a family? Yes.
Going on intercontinental holidays to 5 star hotels off profits from low wages is how socialism for the rich works. The rich then use this fact to say socialism is bad. I've seen kittens do less to a ball of yarn in a fit of rage than the Plutocrats have done with people's minds with their propaganda.
I don’t care if it’s welfare capitalism, UBI, socialism or fucking whatever.
Shouldn't you? I mean this is pretty basic fucking knowledge for some of the ways to go about it, and they are quite different. And it's also not like you have to go 100% all in one of them either. Seems like what you want, is also the core ideology of social democracy with a strong welfare system. Here's a thought: maybe that's what you want, and you should care? I'm guessing that you live in a country so completely fucked in all available directions of politics, and in that process forgot what workers rights were 50 years ago.
I live in Norway. People in otherwise underpaid professions such as teaching can afford to go on intercontinental holidays. Even more than once a year, if that's what they want to do. Though I will agree that staying at a 5 star hotel would be a silly expense. That stuff still requires the perks of exploitative capitalism, for which teaching is too useful.
Apologies if I'm being a bit rude. But the "I don't want to care about how stuff is and works, but how stuff is and works shouldn't be the way it is!" anti-intellectual attitude is annoying af.
No one thinks that North Korea is a 'republic' and 'Communist' China has a billionaire class. Stop getting caught up in labels.
US politics, often on both ends, semi-purposefully failing to acknowledge the difference between social democrats and socialists is both weirdly sticky and frankly makes it very hard to talk about politics with them at all.
Social democrats in places where this is not the case are so often considered borderline neoliberal, centrist traitors by communists and other far left people, and the distinction between liberalism and social democracy is seen as more a matter of nuance than between social democracy and communism.
Although I guess that's changing because American fascists exported their playbook and now conservatives all over the world talk about "freedom" and push anarchocapitalist ideas they've copy-pasted from the mothership, so if anything everybody else is drifting towards this nonsense now.
Norway is a terrible example for a “country that has socialism”. They have the largest sovereign oil fund except the Saudis. They’re managing it incredibly well. But it’s never the less a country that oil built.
Use Sweden or Denmark or Finland. But Norway is not a good example; anything would work in that country.
At least Norway's oil benefits the nation. The US produces more oil than any other nation but it's not something that feeds into benefiting the nation.
The US produces more oil than any other nation but it’s not something that feeds into benefiting the nation.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alaska-oil-wealth-payments-2022/
Nearly every single Alaskan got a financial windfall amounting to more than $3,000 Tuesday, the day the state began distributing payments from Alaska's investment fund that has been seeded with money from the state's oil riches.
The payments, officially called the Permanent Fund Dividend or the PFD locally, amounted to $2,622 — the highest amount ever. Alaska lawmakers added $662 as a one-time benefit to help residents with high energy costs.
That's not to mention whatever the taxes on the extraction are used for, the economic activity generated by the extraction, and so forth.
It may be possible that socialism and capitalism are just economic tools that can applied to different sectors of the economy depending on which works best in a given context.
But sure, let's all form up into groups that either think only socialism works or only capitalism works and try to misapply these to sectors of the economy where they've already been proven not to work. That makes sense!
It's like one group deciding that hammers are better than screwdrivers and trying to beat a screw into something with a hammer. Then the other group decides screwdrivers are better than hammers and are trying to use a screwdriver to hammer in nails. They'll both kinda work for everything, but for anyone that's not caught up in the argument it all seems kind of silly. Why not just use the screwdriver for the screws and use the hammer for the nails?
Or right, because of ideology.
I don't think you understand why people even want socialism or what it means to be a socialist. Socialism states that we are oppressed by the ruling class which are the capitalists. According to most socialist doctrine the government is controlled in part or entirely by the capitalists.
But sure, let's all form up into groups that either think only socialism works or only capitalism works and try to misapply these to sectors of the economy where they've already been proven not to work. That makes sense!
You also don't know anything about socialist economics. There are many socialist economic theories, a whole toolkit. Socialism isn't a single tool or a single group of people and ideas. Heck even capitalism has different variations, although less diverse than socialist ideology.
What you are talking about is hybrid economy which is also an ideology. You are also starting with the assumption that democracy is real and the government is acting in good faith. Neither of those are necessarily true especially if you live in the US.
I'll take that one step farther - socialism and capitalism are not even concrete tools - they are abstract values that actual tools and policies can be measured against - "this policy is more capitalist because it satisfies capitalist values X and Y, but it's also a bit socialistic because it contributes to socialist value Z". This is true for many things - like progressivism vs conservatism or deontology vs utilitarianism, to name a few - instead of treating them as the directions on the axes people decided to make them their all ideology.
Imagine if this was done with temperature. Alice likes hot weather and Bob likes it cold, so they decide to join the "Hotist" and "Coldist" camps respectively and fight each other publicly over which side of Mercury the Earth should be terraformed to. All this while the actually difference in their preferences is just a few degrees.
I don't advocate for centrism because I don't think we should always strive for the exact middle of every topic. We should strive for some point in the spectrum, because the very extremes are seldom correct (usually because of diminishing returns which make it, at the very least, not worth the complete dehumanization and destruction of the other side), but that point can be much closer to one of the extremes than centrists would be comfortable to even consider. Finding that point, of course, is not easy - certainly not as easy as picking one side (or picking the exact center) as your dogma.
Nope socialism has an actual definition. Capitalism has a definition. These are criteria for a given system (real or hypothetical) to be counted as capitalist or socialist. These are concrete criteria not values.
For socialism this requires that the means of production are owned by the workers.
For capitalism the means of production are owned privately and operated for profit.
There are multiple systems that could fit into either category, but they are mutually exclusive. A system cannot be both truly socialist and truly capitalist. They also are both compatible with the concept of markets - this isn't technically exclusive to capitalism like some people seem to think. You could have a hybrid economy where some means of production are owned by the workers and in other enterprises they are owned by private capitalists or investors; this is the reality of lots of systems.
I agree 100%. You could have a regulated market in economic sectors where that makes sense. But is it socialist, or is it capitalism? If it works, does it matter?
The relationship between economics and ideology is basically the same as the relationship between engineering and marketing. I guess you have to have marketing to sell the engineering to people, but sure as hell don't want marketing people making engineering decisions. That's how you end up with doors popping out of airplanes.
I don't really believe in the left/right/centrist paradigm. It's only useful as shorthand to describe political parties. I can say in my country party X is left, party Y is center-left, party Z is right and you'll get a general idea of the politics of my country. But it's just a made up thing. Different generations face different issues, different countries face different issues and those issues just get grouped together somewhat arbitrarily and the grouping that feels like it's left wing get called that and those that feel like it's right wing get called that. But taking that left/right thing too seriously just results in people opposing something simply because the other side wants it. Or voting against their own self interst simply because they identify as left or right or socialist or anarcho-libertarian-marxist-anti-colonialist or whatever. It's all really silly isn't it?
We have serious problems these days and it feels like people spend more time debating which team they're on rather than actually discussing the actual issues.
It may be possible that socialism and capitalism are just economic tools that can applied to different sectors of the economy depending on which works best in a given context.
While I wouldn't agree that the ideologies of socialism and capitalism are compatible in determining economic relations within a country, I would say that socialism and even communism are compatible with markets, which is what I would say is the "tool" in that statement. Markets can be designed based on what is useful for that sector.
Except socialism and capitalism are fundamentally different and incompatible.
By using both for their tasks, do you mean state regulated capitalism?
I mean I make a doctor's appointment with an socialist government run system to get medical treatment. This is good because I don't end up going bankrupt if the doctor diagnoses me with a disease that requires expensive treatments.
Then I go to the grocery store which provides me with food. This is good because I don't want stand in some bread line.
It's actually how every system really works, just that people get boxed into some weird false dichotomy ideological reasoning that sometimes results in people in some people getting medicine from a capitalist system (which doesn't work well) or having a grocery store that's run by a socialist system (which also doesn't work well).
Just pick the right tool for the job and stop worrying about ideological purity is all I'm saying.
Isn't socialism by definition a system that's supposed to be able to coexist with capitalism?
No. Where on earth did you get that idea?
@SpaceCowboy @cyu i don't think that's possible. In an economic system private property is either present or it is not present, if it is there it is capitalism if it is not there it is socialism, I don't think there is any middle ground
Then what you consider to be socialism isn't possible.
There are more people that want live on a beachfront than there is beachfront available. There are too many cases of scarcity that are impossible to resolve without some concept of property. Utopia literally translates to "no place" because while it's easy to talk about fictional paradises where there is no need for money or property, it's just something that can't be implemented in the real world.
I am once again telling Westoids that socialism is not when welfare state.
I don't think it's a bad thing that people misunderstand what socialism is. After nearly a century of anticommunist propaganda, people adopting the label of "socialist" for socdem out of ignorance means we can more easily convince people about real socialism.
Basically we encompass everything as black/white socialism/capitalism
When pretty much every country (including the United States currently ) implements both.
And the problem is by demonizing socialism as the main economic structure, politicians basically succeeded in shaming people for any socialist policy they disagree with.
What about socialism for big banks?
Certified classic.
Be like sweden instead... haha
