Socialism
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic and constructive discussion from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
A certain knowledge of socialism is expected, if you are new to/interested in socialism, please visit c/Socialism101 before participating here. Socialism101 will gladly help you by answering questions, providing resources etc.
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Rules
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith discussion is enforced here.
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such,
as well as condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavour.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry.
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Xenial Xerus" when answering question 2)
6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
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(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)
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I strongly believe (it’s a belief, not a fact), that appropriately controlled capitalism would be a good system. Then I look at all EU countries and the same problem pops up all the time: rich people get richer and richer. There should be a wealth cap of sorts. It’s unethical that some can have anything and everything while almost everyone else can’t.
Let’s then not talk about the control of the news/media that obviously follows from people accumulating wealth like literary dragons… or the whole lobbying industry…
So, I believe, but I also see all manners of counter-proofs all around me and I see no real solutions.
I think you might believe in market economy but not capitalism. Market economy is an economic system, capitalism is an ideology.
Capitalism is really the private ownership of production within a market economy. I don't think that commenter was against private ownership, just more oversight in a capitalist system... which I think is workable.
It's more specific even than private ownership. It's about allowing businesses to incorporate as entities with limited liability so that multiple owners can pool capital while shedding risk.
If every shareholder of, say, Nestlé, were criminally liable for every criminal act that Nestlé committed, it would obviously be impossible for such an entity to exist.
The main issue with capitalism is the way it facilitates scale without accountability.
Indeed, I see nothing wrong with private ownership.
I believe it should be workable, but counter examples are uncountable.
Some sort of NG+
Once you reach a certain amount of wealth, you get a parade and then you give up all your wealth, get a new identity, and start over.
Maybe if you go over a certain wealth amount, you're entered into Open PvP mode.
In you reach a billion you get to the submarine level.
I was pointed to Georgism the other day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
I’m starting to get convinced about it, even if there are aspects I haven’t fully wrapped my head around yet…
Georgism is insufficient. It doesn't address the fundamental problem of capitalism: most people work, while a minority of people (capitalists) leech off the profit generated by workers. This doesn't end under Georgism. There's a reason why capitalists have spent 2 centuries creating propaganda against communism, anarchism and socialism but haven't so much as touched Georgism.
Yes, I do indeed see how the capitalist notion of salaried workers that benefit their superior remains intact with Georgism. I can even understand why you might call it “leeching” given that working for a salary is often not much of a choice, since we otherwise have no income and therefore have no way to support ourselves.
But from my still-limited understanding of Georgism, it does also seem to aim for using land-value taxation to be able to provide everyone with a universal basic income. This would mean that salaried working becomes more of a wilful choice and at least some of the excesses of capitalism are successfully avoided. I don’t think I would even necessarily call it “leeching” in such a scenario.
There is a lot of good Marxist critique of Universal Basic Income as opposed to guaranteed labor for everyone. The fundamental issue in my opinion is that class war still exists, so for as long as capitalists exist and are in power, they will not allow for things that harm their profits. They will literally instill a fascist coup before allowing UBI to pass because it would threaten their profits too much, we've seen similar stuff happening to Salvador Allende, Mosaddeq, and a plethora of democratically elected leaders that wanted to reduce exploitation of workers.
Yes, that's a very valid concern indeed. You're right that under Georgism it may still be possible for an elite to corrupt politics in such a way that the Geogist values itself cannot be upheld. But it's still a step in the right direction, and I think that's more a political problem than an economic one. We also don't really know for certain that if a society successfully implements Georgism that they will even let their elite gain such power. After all, it becomes much easier for the common folk to escape the capitalist treadmill. That may be wishful thinking if we would change to Georgism overnight and leave people with a consumerist mindset to their own devices, but maybe paired with an ideological shift in thinking, it could work.
But I would even be open to the idea that maybe it's democracy itself that needs to be revisited.
I don't necessarily disagree, as I said in my initial comment my complaint about Georgism is with it being insufficient, not me being in principle against the morality of it. I just don't see why limit ourselves to taxation of land ownership instead of the, in my opinion fairer and more all-encompassing, collective ownership of land and means of production. We can start by taxing land, sure, but why the hangup with that in particular? We could argue instead for collective ownership of all housing, all means of production, and all land, and this way the exploitation would stop altogether.
As for democracy being revisited, I actually agree but in a different way. I just don't think real democracy is possible in a two-class system where a minority class (capitalists) have the economic power, and hence media power, and hence political power. I love democracy, but I don't think we've had real democracy in the west, in fact we have very much the contrary. We saw it recently in France where the President skipped congress using emergency measure legislation in order to raise retirement age against the democratic will of the people. We saw it in Germany when Berlin had a referendum to cap rent prices and a judge invalidated it saying it was unconstitutional. We saw it in Greece when Syriza carried out a referendum to revisit the sovereign debt but couldn't do it under ECB threat of being left stranded without control over their own currency. We see it in the entire western world whenever austerity policy is applied, because almost everywhere the overwhelming majority of people are in favour of free good quality education, free good quality healthcare and good retirement pensions. I just think that we live in a bourgeois democracy, where there is a democracy for capitalists but not for workers, who actually compose the majority of the population.
Yeah, I think we're largely aligned indeed, and I appreciate your detailed response!
I think I could also agree on collective ownership of housing, although I'm not yet certain it's necessary. After all, from what I read about land-value taxation (which admittedly is still not a lot yet), it incentivises development of properties, so the land taxation alone might improve the housing situation too.
But a collective ownership of the means of production is something I'm more sceptical about. Because we want people to own the fruits of their labour, so if they make something, it's theirs, which is the reward for making something in the first place. But then if I make something to improve food production, I become forced to share it with everyone? That de-incentivises people to work on such endeavour. I still agree that sharing improved means of food production is a good thing, but I don't think an overly strict interpretation of shared ownership is the answer. The current practice of a time-limited patent might actually suffice.
Yes, I agree. Though in the proposal that I linked, there is indeed a two-class system but one where the minority class are explicitly prevented from having any personal ownership. This then incentivises them towards preventing capitalist excesses, since capitalists that become too powerful may actually become a threat to their own power. But it's still merely a thought experiment too, so I don't know if it would work out as intended.
Sounds pretty cool, thanks for sharing
In software we say there are people problems and tool problems. You generally can't solve one type with the other.
I think this applies here. Almost all economic models have positives, but given a chance individuals will abuse it to skew things in their favor.
I dont really see a good solution out there unfortunately, so I settle on the one that has worked in the past which is regulation.
At the end of the day, I think that the issue with this sentiment is that in some sense, control over something and ownership of that thing are virtually the same thing. If you have "appropriately controlled capitalism", then you have someone other than the capitalists ultimately deciding what the implements that drive the economy are used for and who the dividends are given to. If that someone is just some individual or small group controlling it to their own interests, then you just have an authoritarian system (and frankly, its not really different from a capitalist system that has become sufficiently consolidated for the number of rich owners controlling things to be very small anyway, since those guys will also run things to their own interest). If theres some kind of collective/societal-wide control mechanism, and its actually sufficient in its influence to prevent the abuses of capitalism, then it isnt really capitalism at all anymore because those private "owners" just have a legal fiction of ownership. At which point, their position is doubly useless, so there is little benefit to keeping up that illusion.
There are mixed marks that seem to work. The one I’m most familiar with is private health insurance in the Netherlands. The market is very strictly regulated, all health insurers need to offer the same basic package - a cheap package that covers all the basics. And there is intense governmental oversight to check that the health insurers cover what they are supposed to. The capitalist aspect and the market economy enter mostly on the non-basic packages.
You can notice how it’s a very slow moving market, but it still generates profits for the owners and profits the society as a whole.
I hope something like this could be implemented more widely, where a strong tax redistribution system and strong regulations in favor of the less rich can counter the evident downsides of capitalism without killing neither private ownership nor market economy. Like we haven’t killed car traffic, we have very strongly regulated it.
Please take a look facts about Finland where people are being equally poor due high taxation and bad economy. If you earn more than 5000€ per month, you will be in top 20% of the population. And besides all of these facts, some people still want to be taxed even more heavily "because rich people have too much".
And yes, while I understand Finnish people are not poor by any means when compared globally, it is still a perfect example how you can keep most of the population "poor" while not producing millionaires or highly profitable business.
I am confused by your comment. What do you define as poor in this context?
It’s a consequence of having money that some people will earn more than others. What I want is that the lowest segment of the population can live with dignity and the highest cannot buy up a state. From what you are saying, Finland actually fills these criteria?
It is like you join new MMORPG and get fuked by 1kkk lvl players where you barely can get to lvl 10
I see you play Ultima Online.
As a thought experiment, let's say we both have a paper route. We are not in direct competition, but I am unable to expand my route because doing so would be treading on your route. I stop being able to do my route. Anyone could pick up my route, but you are in a position to gain more from my route than someone new to the business. Thereby, you pick up an outsized share of the route. This crowds both new and existing potential route owners.
The example is only about capital accumulation and state involvement. There are other problematic issues such as wage labor as addressed by the comic.
But capitalism expect constantly growing capital value right? How is that possible?
Just about any economic system, if it was run perfectly, would be mostly fine.
The problem is people behave unwisely.
The problem is that the capitalist system, by design, rewards people for exploiting others. In Communism that's a rare bug to patch, in Capitalism it's a feature.
It was so unwise of me to be born into the group of people without generational wealth
any solutions?
anything?
anything at all
useless
Every week we hunt and eat the richest one.
What do you mean when you say those words?
Edit: you're wrong about what you think you mean based on a false dichotomy with another profoundly stupid¹ system, but also I dont think you're using the right words for it, because the formal definitions of those words make your comment nonsense word salad.
¹still better than both what I'm guessing you mean and what the words you said usually mean