Social welfare capitalism is a good mix but over time the social aspect got burried
Social welfare capitalism is good in theory. But social welfare is in direct opposition to capitalism, and there is no way to actually contain the corrupting power of capitalism. The social aspect will always get buried.
It wont get burried if its enshrined and untouchable to make it worse
As current events have proven nothing is untouchable even if enshrined
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One, no reason to be so aggressive.
Two, wrong. Laws only matter if they are enforced. If the courts are stacked and the legislature are complicit then the law starts to not matter. Which is basically where the US is right about now.
Unfortunately systems created by people can likewise be destroyed by people. It would be nice if we could make societal collapse illegal
I dont know why my comment got removed. But the Ewigkeitsklausel is not in need of court decision. It in itself says that “Any amendment to this Basic Law which affects the division of the Federation into States, the fundamental participation of the States in legislation or the principles laid down in Articles 1 and 20 is inadmissible.”.
It also takes a 2/3 majority to change anything in the basic law (which is basicly our constitution).
Seperation of power and the federalism is so big that one would have to take over EVERY COURT and EVERY STATE and federal with a single majority. The elections are also very set appart that there basicly is always an election somewhere from how i experience it. The courts arent appointed by politicians. Not even the consitutional court, that got changed last year with heavy disagreement from AfD and BSW
Welfare capitalism was better than the other ones.
And better than real existing what-was-called-communism (as to not trigger the no true Scotsman leftists)
Listen man I know I’m edging pretty close to “no true Scotsman,” but hear me out… it’s not that it wasn’t “true socialism,” but whether something is socialist economically isn’t necessarily tied to authoritarianism. Like, fuck tankies, but also I do think that combining market economics and truly representative democracy with proportional representation and freedom of speech and association with socialist ownership structures (as in the abolition of corporate governance from any input from, frankly, absentee “owners”) is the move. Socialism doesn’t have to be authoritarian, nor does it have to be against market economics. Ya know?
I got a death threat from a tankie today because I suggested that Kamala would have not been as bad as the current administration.
That was fun, don’t worry I was banned shortly thereafter from that community
Accelerationism is a hell of a drug. You would have thought they would learn something from Weimar Germany, but no.
Was it that six-sided ursine one…?
It’s just that that’s not socialism either. You’re no true scotsmaning existing socialism, and idealizing not-socialism. You’re a social democrat, a cooperativist, maybe a mutualist, which is the right thing to be. You seek to manage contradictions, you don’t idealize their synthesis.
That’s true, but i don’t know if it’s fair to say that mandating employee ownership is anything other than socialist. Not Marxist, sure. Certainly leftist. But isn’t employee ownership and governance of the means of production, by definition, socialism?
It is not, by definition, socialism. Socialism has other elements. Marx did not think it was socialism. He thought political economy also likely made it impossible, because it didn’t abolish capitalism. Socialism is the global abolition of capitalism in all its forms, capitalism being the private ownership of the means of production (a group of workers still privately owns a factory, its private unless its public), via all means it might re-emerge, it’s not a spectrum of redistribution of wealth or government intervention.
Socialism has other elements
I think your argument might be more convincing if you actually mentioned these elements.
Marx did not think it was socialism
Other people had other definitions even before Marx, so I’m not sure why his should be the only valid definition.
Just my two cents.
I did in other comments. Usually because he utterly destroyed those other socialists in arguments. Proudhon is basically the main pre marx socialist, invented mutualism, I like him, but it’s just easier to say you’re a mutualist, because Marx wrote against him and most socialists see his ideas as primitive or wrong or “utopian”.
Then there were the Christian socialists. They are somewhat accepted. But you know, in Christian circles.
Ah I see. I definitely have more learning to do than. In that case how is libertarian socialism socialism? Doesn’t that definition invalidate basically everything but vanguardism?
Libertarian socialism is either what people call market socialism, which simply isn’t socialism, or anarchism, which is actually communism. But anarchists, which market socialists see themselves as being on the spectrum of, are actually a different intellectual tradition than Marxism.
Some groups have historical reasons to use the term socialism that are not Marxists, but if you go to a socialist group around the world and claim you are one of those (like I did) you basically will be stonewalled. These days socialist traditions are the Marxist traditions, and the rest are usually anarchist traditions.
yeah I keep hearing how we’re a democracy but I’ve never felt it ever was. We have the technology to do a direct democracy but no one really wants to do it.
I mean state capitalism is by definition not communism. This isn’t a no true Scotsman they’re just two different things.
Sure but words have philosophical pre-definitions and real world usages. It’s also possible that the pre-definitions are impossible, and that all attempts to achieve them lead to something else, it’s natural then that that something else becomes the new meaning of the word.
If I gave a recipe for bread, and it always came out to be shit, that word “bread” would come to mean “shit”, even if the old book said “bread is not shit”
In that case we’d say “X can’t exist”, not “X is Y”. That’s the case for the word utopia, for example. Also non-state capitalism socialism exists and includes for instance the Paris Commune, anarchist Ukraine and for a surviving example Rojava.
Logically you might do that, but linguistically you certainly would not. Words drift in meaning all the time. No other country actively calls itself utopian. Many still actively call themselves communist, and are led by people who call themselves communists, and think they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do.
Think of the term Christian. Christian used to mean people who did what Jesus said to do, or maybe what Paul said Christian meant in that book we all have. But now, academically, Christian means any tradition which claims to be following Jesus, which includes Mormons and Jahovas Witnessess and Catholics and that weird doomsday cult down the road. If you wanted to clarify, you’d say “Pauline Christianity” or more likely “Lutheranism” or something. Only Christians clap back and say things like “true Christianity” because of course they would.
I hate to say it but small and or temporary implementations of “true communism” do not break the trend. Let them fight a war against overwhelming capitalist powers and then call me back.
Because it’s half way to socialism?
It’s the most left of the right-wing scope that is pro-capitalism, but doesn’t address the underlying contradiction and will inevitably backslide to the right. It’ll take longer, but will eventually side with fascism as capitalism historically does
All human systems contain contradictions. They don’t synthesize. The very act of system building by humans is the act of manipulating nature into a box it wasn’t made to fit into. Socialism has contradictions: global planning of the economy vs somehow not centralizing power and being susceptible to oligarchy, the overwork of the “from each according to their abilities” when everyone is motivated to exaggerate “to each according to their needs”. Among many others.
What we need is multipolarity. All systems need to be actively tried and tested in the fire of competition. People need to be allowed to vote with their feet. For instance, European capitalism is CLEARLY superior in every way to American capitalism, while simultaneously being more free than Chinese “communism”.
I’m referring more to as a Mode of Production, where the Socialist Mode is the democratic organization of the workers who together control all aspects of the business such as wages and investment. Richard Wolff explains it well. Socialism doesn’t mean exclusively using central planning or centralization of power.
The contradictions I’m talking about are between the workers and the capitalist owners. That exists whether the capitalism is state or private, and whether the capitalism is laissez-faire or social democracy.
That contradiction will always lead to the capitalists accumulating wealth and using that wealth to improve the mechanisms of which they are able to accumulate wealth. High taxation, while an improvement over laissez-faire, does not change that reality. Wealth will still be accumulated by capitalists, who will then use that wealth to change the laws for their benefit. Democracy will backslide as corporate influence grows year over year. We see this backsliding all over Europe to various degrees, despite them having significantly more social safety nets than America. There is no type of capitalism that won’t lead to Fascism.
China is a mix of capitalism and socialism. Richard Wolff also explains this well. It doesn’t matter if they claim to be communist or not, or if they claim to be on that path or not, the current system is a mix
I think you are talking about cooperativism. That’s a form of capitalism. Again, it would be great to have a multipolar world where we could try that out. But it doesn’t not have contradictions, it just has new ones. Every politicial system has dialectical contradictions, and we simply flow from old ones to new ones as material conditions change. I recommend reading the deluzian criticism of dialectics.
No, I’m talking about Modes of Production. I linked videos explaining it more in depth for a reason.
A workers cooperative is using a socialist mode of production to organize and run a private business.
You didn’t provide what the contradictions of the socialist mode of production are. You gave critiques of planned economy and authoritarianism.
The contradiction of a capitalist mode of production is between the owner, who wants to maximize exploitation, and the workers, who want to minimize their exploitation. A socialist mode of production makes a democratic organization of all the workers replace that capitalist owner. The workers are in full control. There is no contradiction between the owner and workers because the workers are now also the owners.
I recommend reading the deluzian criticism of dialectics.
This is about philosophy, not a critique of marxian economics or dielectical materialism
If we can’t agree on the definitions of Capitalism and Socialism, then we can’t really have a conversation. I provided the videos by Richard Wolff so that the definitions being used are clear.
You didn’t provide what the contradictions of the socialist mode of production are. You gave critiques of planned economy and authoritarianism.
I… did… what? The critiques were in the form of contradictory forces: central planning (seeks to centralize power) and democracy (seeks to distribute power), those who work “according to their ability” (incentive to minimize work) those who receive “according to their need” (incentive to maximize receipt of goods) (contradiction comes from the added premise max work -> max goods). These are as contradictory as the class differences between capitalist and worker, even moreso since they are contradictions between the worker and himself. Society and itself.
This is about philosophy, not a critique of marxian economics or dielectical materialism
Which are we talking about again? Philosophy or Marxism? Wait, Marxism and dialectical materialism are philosophies. Wait, Deleuze comments on them. Wait… wtf are you talking about?
A workers cooperative is using a socialist mode of production to organize and run a private business.
Marx didn’t think so. You still produce commodities for the purpose of profit. You just become your own capitalist.
I made this a separate comment because it’s so common and also so absurd. Richard Wolff is wrong about this. A socialist mode of production where workers produce commodities for profit 🤣
What about bioregionalism? A system that is designed primarily around fitting in to nature, instead of trying to manipulate it?
By nature in this case what I assume you mean is the biosphere. What I mean by nature includes psychology, sociology, political science, etc. I do not believe that humans have a primary duty towards the biosphere, that is not what I mean when I say “human systems fit nature into a box”. Humans try to fit themselves into boxes. They are “homo economicus” completely devoid of feeling or passion, purely game theoretic rational actors. Or humans are primitive communists forced into a modern world, altruists of the highest degree except under capitalism. Or humans are tabula rasa, whatever they are socialized to be they become, or whatever material conditions force them to be they become. Or humans are children of god, or one with nature, or whatever. None of these things are true, yet we build systems assuming they are. They each only approach some truth, and then we watch as contradictions emerge and destroy one formalism of nature via its own absurdity.
I don’t see psychology, sociology etc. as something separate to nature. They are part it of it, because they are aspects of us humans, and we are part of nature.
None of these things are true, yet we build systems assuming they are.
Agreed. Or perhaps I’d say some of us build systems using those unrealistic abstractions as excuses for oppression and extractivism.
I don’t think fact that those approaches have been dominant for centuries (millenia in a few locations) means that they are the only approach. It seems that, given we have the ability to reflect on those and realise how unrealistic they are, now would be a good time to try building systems that are NOT based on unrealistic assumptions.
And yes, I realise we’ll never have a perfect understanding of our place in the world, and there will always be flawed assumptions of varying degrees of importance underlying our world view. But we can absolutely do better, and a perfect place to start would be to avoid the assumptions that we’ve just spent a long time testing and found to be untrue.
I don’t see psychology, sociology etc. as something separate to nature.
Yes that’s what I said. Re separating “nature” and “biosphere”
unrealistic abstractions as excuses for oppression and extractivism.
The formalization of things into oppression and extractivist categories is also a system of morals and also contains absurdities. Of course we need to extract food from our environment, and of course we need to oppress oppressors, just for example.
It is already socialism by definition. It just isn’t an eastern dictatorship.
We’re now trying pump and dump capitalism
Just look at life expectancies. Countries with social capitalism do the best and not by a little. By arguing everyone is the same, it’s really supporting the worst.
Don’t look at what came before mercantile capitalism.
But 2 large economies tried to impliment communism… while engaged in a cold war against much more entrenched ideologies, while having corrupt leaders and they didn’t do it well.
The corrupt leaders were inevitable under the ideologies they devised. I swear people think it’s somehow an accident that Stalin and Mao were evil dictators and if only they weren’t we’d have true socialism. No. The system of Leninism is the centralization of power into a vanguard which limits dissent. All Leninist countries are fundamentally dictatorships. Dictatorships transfer power over time via dynastic means, and you always eventually get a power hungry madman when you do that without any checks and balances or democratic recall. And no other Marxist groups can get power enough to actually implement their ideas. QED socialism fails.
I swear people think it’s somehow an accident that Stalin and Mao were evil dictators and if only they weren’t we’d have true socialism.
I don’t know about Mao, but while Stalin being an evil dictator wasn’t an accident, Lenin being an evil dictator was. The Russian revolution wasn’t just the Bolsheviks; there were many different groups of which the Bolsheviks simply happened to come out on top because of a ton of coincidences and bad decisions by everyone else.
And no other Marxist groups can get power enough to actually implement their ideas. QED socialism fails.
The Ukrainians did it until they were invaded by the Soviets, and Rojava’s experiment seems to be mostly successful.
The examples you gave were or aren’t strong enough to survive and spread global revolution, so they don’t count. Literally that’s the criteria.
That’s literally the thing though, and perhaps where the USSR went wrong. There is no magic bullet that would make a small nation able to survive a large attack, asside from strong allies with a ton of bigger nations, and sadly being different, and a possible threat to the status quo, doesn’t help with that.
That’s like saying being a serial killer helps survival over being a law abiding citizen that cares about others. Proof when I put a law abiding citizen and a serial killer in a locked room… the law abiding citizen doesn’t live as long. Of course the reality is, being a serial killer is evolved as the exception rather than the rule in humans, because, with numbers not making enemies is a more succesful strategy than always making them.
That’s why socialist internationals exist.
Socialism never promised to be able to survive an assault by a vastly superior military force, that’s not how that works. It doesn’t promise to spread global revolution either.
Hmmm, then what are all those socialist internationals still lying around…. Marx and Engels literally believe that socialism was the alternative to capitalism, and capitalism is global. Socialism is an international movement, and basically can not exist “in one country” like Stalin tried. It is an era of history not a thing you do in your backyard.
Yes socialist internationals literally tried to end things like WW1 and WW2. They wanted international worker movements to stand up to capitalist militaries at home and stop the fighting, take over all governments all at once, then aide revolutionary struggles around the world, until eventually socialism was achieved in place of capitalism. People like the DSA,PSL,etc and other international socialist participating groups still largely support this plan.
Socialism without an underlying set of morals beyond socialism is doomed to fail. It invites end-justifies-means to implement socialism, which taints it beyond repair.
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Classical liberals were rad. They weren’t laze fair capitalists.
Then what were they?
Agree, but socialism doesn’t have to be Marxist. Like, Rojava is pretty rad and that’s, if anything, just the most modern iteration of libertarian socialism.
I mean it’s cool that this has become internet popular, but you go out into the world and socialist means Marxist. I did that, went to socialist groups, etc, socialist means Marxist. There are just lots of different kinds of Marxists.
I know, but that’s slowly changing. And I think that’s more true among the most politically engaged people. But that’s true of every group, if you go to in person conservative groups you’ll only find the worst of the worst on the farthest right. I’m not convinced it’s not the same phenomenon with socialists. But idk, I’m just talking out of my ass at this point honestly.
We need a new word for non Marxist socialists. Social democrats is that word.
But that inherently means liberal, no? I was under the impression that social democrats supported private ownership of the means of production. If you believe that should be illegal doesn’t that mean you can’t be a social Democrat?
Sure but if you are a cooperativist you don’t think that’s illegal. You think private groups should be able to own the means of production. Shareholder capitalism just where workers are the shareholders.
The end of private property means there is only public property. It means the entire circle of all groups which call themselves socialists collectively vote on how work and distribution are accomplished. Note I didn’t say state, because “true socialism” is international.
It’s a big big BIG philosophy, not a minute change in how things are done relative to the status quo. If you believe in reformism, where you make one change to the status quo, like replacing companies with cooperatives, you likely have more in common with social democrats than socialists.
My only reason for doing all this debating is to try and tell all the “market socialists” on this page, who I used to agree with, to stop using the socialist label, BECAUSE you will go out in the world to socialist groups and find yourself in very radical spaces, not reformist spaces. You will be hanging out with people who want to violently upend the global economic order, not collaborating with others in an attempt to politically change nations.
Instead you want to go hang out with unionists and socdems and cooperativists.
There’s also been quite a few smaller socialist and anarchist societies that have existed under similar external influences. Almost like capitalism is tied up with ideological warmongering or something.
I feel like “socialism and anarchsim always fail or lose to capitalists” isn’t the flex you think it is.
The EZLN is still going. So is Rojava.
But 2 large economies tried to impliment communism… while engaged in a cold war against much more entrenched ideologies, while having corrupt leaders and they didn’t do it well.
And while - which I, personally, think is the biggest reason - starting from pre-capitalist economies, thus materially having to do what capitalism did (rapid industrialisation, disenfranchisement of peasantry, accumulation of capital), and ultimately following what Marxism would have guessed: Their ideology forming around their material reality of having to accumulate capital from labour while trading on the world market. So it basically became its own kind of welfare state/social democratic capitalism, with a bit of “but communism will arrive eventually, we promise!”
Once that material dynamic is entrenched, no amount of ideological purity can simply correct it from the top, you can’t change material society by implementing an ideal onto a reality. It has to develop materially and dialectically, through the process of the old system failing (in unbearable ways), necessitating revolutionary changes.
That means we still have time to wait. Sure socialism is inevitable after full automation and ai which can manage an economy far better than any currency and which brings the value of labor to 0. But until that day social democracy is clearly materially the system of our technological era.
I do think you could be right, but I also think it is a proper dilemma, that it is impossible to really know. An immature attempt at revolution can be impossible to tell apart from a proper revolutionary moment, and a genuinely well-advised conservative “let’s not hastily break something” can be impossible to tell apart from useful idiots for reactionary movements, while living in the historical moment those things are happening. I think, to some degree at least, we just have to accept that uncertainty, and that the course of history is not simply determinable in the chaos of the lived reality.
Doesn’t mean, that there is nothing at all to be analysed, no visions to be had, just that ultimately, every single historical movement will have to live with the reality of “crossing the Rubicon”-moments, where no amount of knowledge, no amount of theory, no amount of smug analysis can really tell the outcome.
I, personally, think advancements beyond social democracy should be possible already - I think the basic ideas laid out in the Gotha Critique (overcoming of monetary system through non-exchangeable production/distribution with a voucher-like system), in combination with advancements in Cybernetics already made within the 20th century (as well as computers to better implement the Cybernetics on top of that), could provide for a system, in which necessary labour can be jointly coordinated, with the aim of reducing work days and increasing value in everyday lives, along with a richer use of free time (think: education, makerspaces, creative hobbies like art and programming) beyond socially necessary labour.
But can I be certain? No. Do I think it is worth fighting for? Definitely.
I actually did a really deep dive into cybernetics, like the actual math involved, which I’m qualified to analyze. It unfortunately would still require a lot of research to get right, and even at the levels of compute we have today it might not be enough. One simply needs to consider the number of types of screws which are necessary to actually fulfill the global demand, and their interchangeability depending on a thousand factors of production, to see the problem. Ultimately, reducing their value to a quantity and optimizing on that quantity based on supply and demand is really easy, compared to some kind of actual graph flow optimization problem based on final product use-demand. The level of democracy at the end would be incredibly complex too, and let’s face it, democracy is not very efficient nor does it even really well reflect the modal persons preferences in a society, let alone representing minority interests.
Ultimately you need a system that can interact with each individuals specific needs and wants (demand), interact with each individual’s abilities, interests, and capacity for labor (supply), even pushing them a bit (incentives), and then balance that interaction with all intermediate necessities to balance the equation, not simply aggregate the averages and expect it to normalize. And even then, think how manipulative, surveillance, and controlling that is.
Ones doing quite well, hence why countries are abandoning the US as a trade partner and going for it instead. Dengism is the solution to the failed ideal that you can take an agrarian preindustrial society straight to communism. And given all essential sectors are worker owned, it seems to be working.
What’s that Churchill said about being the worst thing except for everything else that’s been tried?
Churchill said that about democracy, interesting you interchange the two.
Something that’s incorrect
Churchill was a genocidal war criminal on par with Hitler, he’s not someone one should ever quote: unless you’re just okay with Indians not being people.
ad hominem
Genocide isn’t an ad hominem attack. Hitler wishes he got Churchill’s numbers.
The ultimate genocider could claim “1 + 1 = 2”: that doesn’t make it false. Who they are is irrelevant to their argument, and that’s a classic ad hominem fallacy. Learn to respect logic.
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More irrelevance.
There would be no reason to quote them, period.
No reason not to either, logically.
choice of who to quote taint them themselves
Genetic fallacy: your “taint” concept is irrational. Again, a quote may be mentioned more for its content than who said it.
Like here: the commenter merely wrote that person is known to have said something relevant to the topic. Instead of addressing the substance of that message they’re referring to, responses distract themselves with who said it.
stop quoting fascists if you don’t want people to think you’ve decided to label yourself as a target for righteous violence
ad baculum
Stop pretending your high school debate classes are real life
Start meeting basic standards of logic that don’t fail high school?
How about “respect logic”? It’s pretty simple.
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Let’s go gambling!
