I almost got a Trump voter to agree with socialism by pointing out that the concrete plant he and his father worked at, which supported a whole town, could be shut down by someone halfway around the world to save a buck. I asked him “shouldn’t you have a say in that?”
What stopped him from agreeing in the end?
His buddy saying “that’s communism!”
The correct response to that is “what is communism?”
This doesn’t work. They don’t actually care what words mean.
That is absolutely painful
I used to hang out with a few rednecks. Good people, but absolutely indoctrinated. Union workers who didn’t know the history of unions.
We got drunk around a bonfire one night and I started talking about solidarity, unions, workers rights, labor value, personal / private / public property, etc, etc.
By 3am, we were talking about seizing the means of production. If we’d had a few cases of s’mores schnapps, we could’ve changed history
I hung out with the warehouse guys at my job and one of them talked about how good his wife’s nurses union was. I agreed with him, and made a joke about the warehouse guys unionizing.
A few of them got really upset, and couldn’t explain why they were upset. They just kept saying “We didn’t understand”. Like brother, right now - there’s nothing stopping the company from firing you… I think you don’t understand.
It’s like that all around people mostly agree on things or at least want to work together. The problem is our “Leaders” don’t want any part of that.
Fundamental mistake, not good people, indoctrinated bad people.
And I’m sure, within one week, they were right back where they were.
My dad says most people are stupid and shouldn’t own the means of production, since they will fuck it up. And that’s the only intellectual critique of socialism I ever heard. Everyone else is just saying some stupid bullshit about minorities having rights and feeding the undeserving.
And that’s the only intellectual critique of socialism I ever heard
It almost is, until you watch 5 minutes of billionares talking and go “so these are the smarter guys that won’t fuck it up”.
His critique carries the underlying assumption that private owners of the means of production are selected for their merit rather than nepotism, chance, corruption, and sociopathic tendencies.
Exactafuckingmundo
Even so, give the little guy a chance to fuck it up for once.
But they’re not fucking it up. They’re making it better for them. You’re not even on their radar
Right, as if things haven’t already been fucked up entirely in the default of capitalist ownership
When its owned by everyone, one person doesn’t get to mess it up, everyone gets a say. And you still will have people with business minds, mechanical minds, and just let me do labour minds
You should ask your dad if people are stupid why are they allowed to vote?
If the answer is that they shouldn’t be allowed you can go down the rabbit hole of “who is worthy to vote?” and end up with a variation of fascism. Or if everyone should be able to vote the followup is if people are allowed to decide how their government is ran why shouldn’t they be allowed to decide how their work gets done?
The thing with letting people own the means of production is that it heavily correlates with the concept of democracy. It’s contradictory to be pro democracy and against collective ownership of the means of production.
My dad is a teacher with two masters degrees, was the teachers union president for 20 years and is MAGA.
It happens. A friend of mine flipped to MAGA after COVID. He’s a very smart guy that comes from labour on the factory floor to C level now. He gets fed nonsense on twitter and tiktok and just accepts it. Like missing a critical thinking aspect now.
your dad is short sighted and needs to read about labor and union history.
He’s not wrong, per se.
People that are closer to production are less likely to see the business holistically. That’s not their fault…I think many CEOs don’t want employees talking about the big picture. They want silos. An us vs. them mentality between support and developers…between accounting and purchasing…between human resources and Chad in sales…etc.
Of course, that goes for an individual person. When you have all departments represented and conferring, then you’ve got the whole picture, and that changes the calculus significantly.
You’re the first person ever that is correctly defined socialism that I have seen on this platform.
Thank you so much.
According to Helen Cox Richardson, socialism was a thought-stopping buzzword as far back as the antebellum 19th century as objectionable because it was about giving benefits to the poors who owned nothing and therefore deserved nothing. The US has been about the preservation of hierarchy from the beginning despite the alleged promise of the American dream, an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.
We’ve only begun to develop fundamental infrastructure and social safety nets for the public since FDR’s New Deal, and that still didn’t include women or blacks until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and Women’s Lib in the 1970s.
All the while, the industrialists who supported Hoover were super sore about the New Deal and have been striving to gut those programs from day one, even though the US thrived with them in place in the 1950s and 1960s, our ownership class wanted to own everything, and to Hell with the worker class.
They got their in-road with the election of Reagan, thanks to Falwell’s Moral Majority and the US evangelical movement (an early white Christian nationalist movement) uniting behind a single issue: abortion access. They didn’t care about Reagan’s gutting of social services, deregulation of businesses (who’d already shown they can’t be trusted to self-govern), and the normalization of corruption in politics. They were just terrified that women were (allegedly) killing their own babies.
Anyway, Communism and socialism got a bad rap thanks to the USSR which was an honest effort at command economics during Lenin’s rule, but got trashed by corruption with Stalin. It didn’t help that since Wilson, the US and Europe had been sanctioning the Soviet Union just for trying to do a communism.
And, sometimes in the name of containment the US would seek to sabotage any other efforts at socialist democracy, first with CIA subterfuge and sometimes with military intervention.
If the only thing you disagree about is terminology, why insist on using terms that other people are opposed to? Find a common ground.
it sounds like that’s what was happening
In the Twitter screenshot, sure. But in the title OP wrote? And the rhetoric I overwhelmingly see on Lemmy?
What are the actual downsides to socialism?
And don’t say corruption. We have that in capitalism as well.
Also don’t say parasites too lazy to work taking advantage of the system. We have that in capitalism also. They own mega yachts instead of a shopping cart.
People hear socialism and immediately think Stalin, that’s one problem. Another problem is thinking having a capitalistic system and socialist services are somehow necesarily mutually exclusive.
Capitalism works fine in some area’s. Socialism is needed where it won’t. Healthcare is a case in point. Everybody needs it when they need it, so there’s really no reason to leave that shit to any “market” and therefore chance. Investments in public transport, taking care of the livability at the bottom end of the economic ladder are other examples.
Capitalism is dogshit whenever you have deal with things you just can’t, or morally shouldn’t, attach an ROI to.
Basic neccesities (healthcare, including mental healthcare, nutrition, electricity, clothing, heating, water, communication, housing, transport, etc.) should be covered by default.
Then, less basic neccesities (like entertainment, fashion, safe drugs) could be profited from.
I’m assuming you want to abolish money and free markets altogether, because otherwise we’re just talking about capitalism with social safety nets a la most of Europe.
So: Depends. Are we making working voluntary, or are we forcing everyone into jobs they may or may not like?
If it’s the former, then there’s no reason to work jobs that don’t seem interesting or fulfilling. Good luck keeping the garbage service running.
If it’s the latter, then well, economically everything’s great, but the downside is that people will be forced to do jobs they don’t like.
If you DON’T want to abolish money and free markets altogether, then there’s still going to be private property, so then that’s the downside. It’s the exact same one we already have from capitalism. Just less of it, because more capital is redistributed via taxation.
One name: Stalin!
He’s dead.
Jim.
Non-ironically: the fact that it’s not liked by groups of people capable of sabotaging it. For example, is the USA at fault for the embargo on Cuba and all the hardships it goes through? Yes. Is it still a problem for people living in Cuba? Also yes.
Unfortunately, some things may not be your fault, but they are your problem. And as long as there will be entities who don’t like you and are able to make your life worse (so basically forever as long as there exist powerful non socialist nations), that’s a problem you have to deal with.
And I don’t say this as a critique of socialism itself, yet it’s still a downside of it. Unfortunately, being liked by the bullies is an advantage and not being liked by the bullies is a downside, since they will bully you. And at the level of nations, there isn’t a bigger authority you can go to. It’s just school kids with bullies but there is no supervisor teacher. You could make the bullies unable to bully you by either becoming stronger then them or banding together with others who are against the bullies. But just like in a street fight, playing dirty is an advantage, so the bullies are at an advantage.
Again, this is not the fault of socialism, but it is one of its problems.
It’s hard to distil into three words, so it fails to win elections.
Every single thing that people criticize socialism or socialist countries for is literally just a description of capitalism.
Oh but the state! If the lovely corporations were only free from bureaucracy…
Even the state is inherent to capitalism. Capitalists rely on the state to stifle competition and enact imperialism. States are a fundamental feature of capitalism, and “free markets” are a myth.
And why do so many people not know what it is?
I suspect, in largest part, because:
Rule 239: Never be afraid to mislabel a product.
Or have lived in it
EDIT: so memes/jokes about socialism are bad and suddenly it’s serious business? Obviously I know what the person with wall of text is talking about down below, stop over-analyzing this people
Which socialist country did you live in?
Baltics
Memes like this are beyond dumb because different ideologies could share similar concepts. The idea of people owning their workplace is not exclusive to socialism. Capitalism is founded on the same idea, just a different interpretation.
Do you even know what Capitalism means?
Do you? Capitalism is quite literally the idea that private individuals can own and control the means of production.
So not the same as all the workers owning the factory…just one guy maybe.
No every business is a factory or a corporation, most businesses aren’t.
Most businesses have atleast one employee who has no ownership stake in the company
And? You understand that socialism is antithetical to the concept of ownership, right? Of course you don’t. You don’t even understand what it is.
The concept of ownership? Do you think socialistes aren’t allowed to own, say, the clothes they wear?
No, socialism is antithetical to the concept of non worker ownership.
Go a step further and argue Monarchies are really capitalism as well because the king is a private individual owning the means of production.
Monarchy is a system of government. Are people on this site allergic to basic information?
More than that, we’re capable of ignoring the personal attacks and push the point further. Capitalism is sociopolitical so dismissing comparisons to other political arrangements is silly
Capitalism is not sociopolitical, it’s an economic system. You don’t even have a point to push because you clearly don’t even understand what capitalism is, let alone make valid comparisons for it. Comparing capitalism to monarchy is like comparing luggage to airplanes, it’s just not the same thing.
You pointed out how capitalism depends on private property, that is a social relationship that is backed by political power to enforce said property rights. You can try to redefine economics but you can’t escape observed reality. But please continue to insist I don’t know what i am talking about, it truly adds value to the debate. You should actually require payment before making such statements
No. Marx, who defined Capitalism was clear that it was a state of the world where most wealth was controlled by a select few.
Marx didn’t define capitalism moron
Fair. It was defined by a French socialist apparently. Still, capitalism was defined by the left.
No, you’re still wrong. There is not single person who made or defined capitalism. It’s a concept that evolved through through the contributions of multiple philosophers and economists in different times. Kind of like the internet. It’s not like Marxism where it has specific inventors that you can point to.
I meant the term
the word “people” is doing some atlas level heavy lifting here lmfao
Care to explain?
One issue: Socialism doesn’t work
Holy shit I immediately regret looking at your post history. Time for a nice “avoid” tag.
Works when it’s not a tankie doing it
Oh hey you’re the guy showing us life under socialism, with poor people living in tents, and medical bills destroying people’s lives.
There is no political idea that cannot be shown from positive side so that anyone would agree.
I don’t believe this : show nazism so that anyone would agree !
Most left-leaning ideologies can, but not all political ideas.
How do you think it rose to such prominence in the first place?
Displaying naivety to this, suggests higher susceptibility to it.
Ed Bernays’ “Crystallising Public Opinion” inspired Hitler and generations of advertisers alike.
[Edit: PS, and no, I’m not going to do what you command.]
Ok, I agree, and thanks for not doing what I suggested !
“We should put our country and people of our nation first. Foreign corporations must adhere to our law or their local branches will be taken over by government. No foreign influence shall hold sway over our free and democratic elections, and thus we must put foreign-owned media under direct scrutiny to curb any misinformation and propaganda.”
It starts like this. And honestly, I can ask AI to re-write this in incoherent deranged vocabulary to sound more like modern politicians.
“Yeah but not in a woke way. So, it’s totally different!”
Isn’t there a leap from “workers should own their workplace” to “the people should own the workforce”? Like the difference from Steam’s business model, and full blown USSR communism?
The problem will always be rules for thee not for me.
They’d have sparkling socialism while we have dirt individualism.
