101–110 of 124 posts
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It's a shame Marxism/communism/socialism ends up a tyrannical dictatorship every time :D
If you really think that’s a useful description of Gorbeschev, where are you getting your history from? Is Cuba a “tyrannical dictatorship”? How did Pinochet fall?
It is a shame Marxsim/communism/socialism is so much associated with tyranny and dictatorships.
Up until 10,000 years ago, the entire world was communist. The remaining hunter gatherer bands in the Amazon and elsewhere are communist. Marx said "I am not a Marxist" and "I do not write recipes for cookshops of the future", so there is no Marxist society other than the one he envisioned in the far future (certainly not a nearer term socialist future) which had the banner "From each according to ability, to each ac…
Secondly, tribal human society roved in bands of approx 100+ people which, by virtue that it usually had leadership, was not entirely classless, despite the fact that the groups were small enough not to require political representation or monarchs. You're dreaming if you think individuals were always free to act against a tribe leader's wishes.
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If you really think that’s a useful description of Gorbeschev, where are you getting your history from? Is Cuba a “tyrannical dictatorship”? How did Pinochet fall?
Gorby appears to be the sole exception. Might have something to do with having close family killed in the famines, and tortured in the Gulags. Every European other regime fell under pressure from the streets. Cuba is a tyranny. They've soften up to get European investment and tourists, but they're brutal in their indoctrination, imprisonment of dissidents, etc. They're also an important (and beloved) backstop prevent…
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A collectivistic society expects everyone to do their part to reach a good standard of living for everyone. 8 hours/day, as was common, to rebuild destroyed countries and economy is less than countless people in capitalist nations have to work today. The biggest difference is, is that this amount of labour is necessary for their own survival, that there is no collective sense, without authorities trying to reward the…
>a revolution is a lot of hard work, but the work is done for the collective good, not to make a few even richer. Does this ever happen in reality though?
Even the American Revolution was essentially a tax evasion scheme by the wealthy merchant class.
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It's a shame Marxism/communism/socialism ends up a tyrannical dictatorship every time :D
Democracies never end up in dictatorships? How much historical data do we have on that? I'm pretty sure at least brazil was democratic and then was ruled by military dictatorship (juntas) for a long time. 1940s Germany as well right? I just realized I've never seen the breakdown on that for any length of time, lets say going back to the first republics? I don't know, it seems like a lot of European countries with a p…
Nazi (national-socialist) Germany was totally socialist.
P.S. Your description of „socialism“ is a veeeery weird one. Apparently everything is socialist.
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But it is - they could because the party leadership wanted to/ decided it was important. My point isn't that communism can't achieve anything, it's that you can't have private initiative that's against the party line - and that's not an accident of one particular implementation, that is a "feature" of communism itself. "Unanimous" agreement on the collective good/collective interests only works, at all, in small grou…
A person (or persons) with sufficient power/influence decided to pursue space flight and it happened. Which example does the previous sentence refer to?
Also, a lot of USSR space advancements were made thanks thanks to captured Nazi scientists. If they had to rely purely on homegrown science, they'd have had much harder time.
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UBI isn't socialist at all; socialism is about central planning – large bureaucracy making decisions. UBI mostly removes the bureaucracy and decision making power of how to spend government proceeds. This is why in the 21st century the most prominent promoters of UBI (sometimes called negative income tax) were libertarians.
> UBI isn't socialist at all It is consistent with socialism, but not essentially socialist. > socialism is about central planning No, it's not. Central planning may be part of some versions of socialism, though there are serious arguments within socialism that central planning in the strong sense is incompatible with socialism, and instead a degenerate single-capitalist form of capitalism. Socialism is about common/…
I still contend socialism is about central planning. Common ownership and participation in the means of production via democracy is central planning in practice, since people end up pooling their decision making power.
Representives then implement policies decided by the collective, which all people are subject too.
It's opposed to the libertarian vision, which would be for each person to make more of their own decisions individually, with voting less relevant.
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UBI isn't socialist at all; socialism is about central planning – large bureaucracy making decisions. UBI mostly removes the bureaucracy and decision making power of how to spend government proceeds. This is why in the 21st century the most prominent promoters of UBI (sometimes called negative income tax) were libertarians.
Nor is "central planning" a socialist concept. The only remotely consisent throughline in the vast spectrum of socialist thought has been democratic ownership or control of one's workplace. In fact, many strains of leftism explicitly reject central planning of an economy, which they would see as a result of an unjustified hierarchy.
The hierarchy is unavoidable at scale.
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Democracies never end up in dictatorships? How much historical data do we have on that? I'm pretty sure at least brazil was democratic and then was ruled by military dictatorship (juntas) for a long time. 1940s Germany as well right? I just realized I've never seen the breakdown on that for any length of time, lets say going back to the first republics? I don't know, it seems like a lot of European countries with a p…
Thing is, marxist-communist-socialist countries don't even stay non-dehumanizing-regimes. Revolution happens, then terrible things kick in.. And then regime flames out over a loooong time. Usually accepting at least some parts of free market and plural democracy. Nazi (national-socialist) Germany was totally socialist. P.S. Your description of „socialism“ is a veeeery weird one. Apparently everything is socialist.
There are no Marxist regimes; all “Communist” regimes are (or are derived from) Leninism which introduces vanguardism and other changes to avoid the prerequisite of developing proletarian class consciousness through mature capitalism in Marxism, and feature a (theoretically) transitional initial phase to replace development through private capitalism, which none have ever escaped from to anything that was supposed to be beyond it (though China rewrote the plan to include authoritarian quasi-private capitalism.)
There's a wide array of arguably socialist non-“Communist” regimes, but all of them are democratic/market socialism that explicitly accepts plural democracy and regulated (not “free”) markets as important elements.
> Nazi (national-socialist) Germany was totally socialist.
This is true to about the same extent as “the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is totally a democratic republic” is true.
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> UBI isn't socialist at all It is consistent with socialism, but not essentially socialist. > socialism is about central planning No, it's not. Central planning may be part of some versions of socialism, though there are serious arguments within socialism that central planning in the strong sense is incompatible with socialism, and instead a degenerate single-capitalist form of capitalism. Socialism is about common/…
I did mean 20th century. I still contend socialism is about central planning. Common ownership and participation in the means of production via democracy is central planning in practice, since people end up pooling their decision making power. Representives then implement policies decided by the collective, which all people are subject too. It's opposed to the libertarian vision, which would be for each person to mak…
Actual socialists, for the whole history of socialism, disagree, but please, don't let that distract you.
> Common ownership and participation in the means of production via democracy is central planning in practice,
When the common ownership is done through the state which directly controls industry, sure, you get central planning. When it's done through democratic worker control of firms, it is no more central planning than when firms are jointly controlled by their capital owners. And there are lots of variations of socialism besides those two.
> It's opposed to the libertarian vision
The idea that socialism is opposed to the libertarian vision is news to libertarian socialists.