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.
Memes go in c/Lefty Memes
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, upvoting good contributions and downvoting those of low-quality!
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.
7. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Queerphobia
- Ableism
- Classism
- Rape or assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)
view the rest of the comments
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.