First, please define what you mean by socialism. That word encompasses a lot of very different forms of government, even when it’s used “correctly”, and it’s typically not.
The Nazis called themselves socialists, and I’m not moving there.
When many people say socialism, what they mean is capitalist democracy with a strong social safety net, strong government regulation, and highly progressive taxation.
Edit: for the love of god, please do a little bit of reading about socialism before reinforcing my point that this word is used terribly. We won’t take the wiki as ultimate truth, but please read. Be better. Read and think first. Comment later.
When many people say socialism, what they mean is capitalist democracy with a strong social safety net, strong government regulation, and highly progressive taxation.
Let’s go with that definition since that’s what most people think of as socialist.
The question doesn’t need to be hypothetical. I am moving to a country exactly like that. From the US.
Lack of modern health care coverage alone is enough to justify it. A bonus is that the quality of life across the board is significantly higher.
That is objectively not socialism (any definition of socialism that begins by defining it as a form of capitalism is fundamentally confused)
That said, I’d agree that it is a widespread misunderstanding today. And what people mean when they say socialism is usually actually social democracy (which despite sounding like the word socialism is a mixed system based on capitalism)
Using that misunderstanding as the definition I would definitely live in many of those countries. Many have some of the highest qualities of life in the world, low rates of poverty, universal access to good healthcare and education, and good social mobility.
E.g Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Germany
Provided there is an appropriate amount of technocracy (decisions made by experts rather than politicians), it’d be hard for me to think of a better form of government.
Anyway, this was largely the US until Regan. Social safety net could’ve been stronger, but that had to evolve. Same as in Europe.
Except , racism. Addressing that is not a part of any definition of socialism that I’m aware of. Equality is certainly going along with the spirit of this definition of “socialism”
@nodsocket @PetDinosaurs > OP: what socialist policies would you implement?
> commenter: what do you mean by socialism?
> OP: let’s go with an incorrect definition of socialism. what social democrat policies would you implement?
No, “most people” do not consider that to be what socialism is. Particularly those of us who live in countries with the aforementioned policies. Here we’ve had real socialists who wanted to take away our fundamental individual rights, amongst them the right to ownership, which frankly is a scary idea.
A lot of our regulations and limits on the free market don’t have a socialist bent at all, but are intended to defend our individual liberties against large corporations, which if left unchecked can become corporate institutions, something the US has fallen victim to.
I’d consider these policies as important, if not moreso than our social welfare systems. The social mobility and safety provided by these are meaningless if an arbitrary decision by google, amazon or some bank can singlehandedly ruin your life.
Why couldn’t that what you just described be called something different other than “socialism” then? Sounds like a bad move to make it fall under that same umbrella especially since that term is very frowned upon if not straight out forbidden in a few European countries for example.
It is, the term for this type of system is called Social Democracy which is not a synonym for socialism, but people (Americans at least) confused and conflate the two terms to the point that they’ve become one and the same in the minds of many people who don’t really understand the terms or their origins.
Because we’re too busy categorizing this stupid shit into bins of “good” and “bad” when reality is a greyscale between these two. These are fairly reasonable points and should be viewed as a more centrist POV, but since we (read: primarily North America) have a tribal “us vs. them” animosity about it we lump many reasonable ideas together on each end of the spectrum. Things like not having to go bankrupt when you or a loved one needs an emergency hospital visit somehow automatically gets lumped in with the other extreme “socialist” ideas just to solely argue against it and not budge from their end of the extreme.
Words, used in non technical contexts, mean what people mean when they use them.
Descriptive. Not proscriptive.
“If you hate the Death Star so much, why don’t you go live on Alderaan?”
The notion that free* healthcare, free* education, subsidised transport, government provided unemployment supports etc is even labelled “socialist” strikes me as particularly American.
Having lived for quite a long time in canada, I think most Americans would love the it.
Semi related - The USA is already socialist if you consider they have more spent per capita on healthcare, and pay for things like roads, police, fire departments, schools and the like. On the last point, they pay all the way through High School and then significantly subsidize universities as well. It’s all a matter of degree. In the usa, we socialize on many fronts, and then pay companies more than we would pay to socialize the same service and consider that better. Imo, it’s very much not.
I’m not sure if spending more per capita means “socialize” healthcare. Isn’t the problem with US healthcare is that “accessing healthcare at any time without the worry of financial burden” is not currently true for everyone?
I think your definition is a fine one. I think the Nuance I was trying to make and perhaps did poorly was that the US already pays a huge amount for healthcare but we pay it to companies to do research that they then use to make profit worldwide. Not to provide services for everyone. It’s a matter of priority
Socialism isn’t a welfare state, socialism is when the workers own the means of production.
No no no
Socialism is when the government does things, and when the government does a lot of things, that’s communism.
That meaning of support is a non-countable noun, like water or happiness (or Lego, but lots of people get that one wrong). There is no plural of non-countable nouns.
You might use (for example) “bodies of water”, “levels of happiness”, “pieces of Lego”, or “sources of support” etc.
There are no countries with socialist policies.
Can you name a country that has workplace democracy? No? Then there isn’t a socialist country out there.
Would I move to the social democracies of the world? I love norway and whatnot politically (as much as a communist can love the state of any country)… but I love having warm air and nature I can enjoy without a coat much more.
Doesn’t any country with cooperatives have workplace democracy?
Norway is cheating because they have many natural resources to sell.
Yes, they have a tiny, insignificant amount.
An entire country has to have workplace democracy for the country to be socialist.
This is kinda like saying “doesn’t any country with a slice of bread have food”
You think a co-op only has a tiny amount of democracy? I think it’s the best form of workers owning the means of production - the definition of socialism.
What is workplace democracy? Would love to finally hear some socialist philosophy from someone that isn’t a goddamn Hexbear user.
Yeah, they’re really indoctrinated by chinese propaganda, I can’t stand them, and I’m a damn communist.
Workplace democracy can work a vast number of ways, and I can’t claim to have figured out what the best way of doing it is, and this is one of the most contentious areas in socialist theory, but I’ll give a relatively easy to understand example:
A business running democratically, instead of having a CEO who decides everything, could have weekly meetings where everyone gets together and decides what is needed, pay structure, schedules, etc, building decisions through consensus, and then falling back to a vote if people disagree, they could also work like a modern democratic republic and have the workers elect people to various positions, and then maintain heirarchy, if the business is far too large for consensus building to work.
The way a business works currently, under capitalism, is often with a CEO at the top, who controls a group of people directly below him, and so forth, this results in bad divergent incentives, due to the keys to power problem (if you’re not familiar, watch this: https://invidious.asir.dev/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs ). One such example is if i’m a walmart employee, do I give a fuck if walmart does well? No. As long as they don’t go out of business, i’ll be paid the same, who gives a fuck how well the business does if I’m not a partial owner and have no say?
“and I’m a communist–”
“Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!).”
In what way? I have yet to hear of a single socialist policy from cuba.
Do note: socialism is worker ownership over the means of production.
afaik, in cuba the means of production isn’t directly controlled by the workers but is controlled by the government which acts as a middle man between the workers and the means of production
What does a “workplace democracy” mean?
I’m envisioning that’s the janitor having a vote in where the brain surgeon makes the next cut.
That’s a possible interpretation of “the people control the means of production”, but that’s just ridiculous.
Well, that is a pretty ridiculous interpretation.
Workplace democracy would most likely and most broadly refer to all employees of a company having a say in how the company is run. Either by voting on policies and changes, or by electing people to various executive/representative roles, much the same way that current Western democracies work.
An example of the janitor voting on where the surgeon makes a cut makes about as much sense as us voting on where the president flies in his helicopter. At best, it doesn’t pass the make sense test, and at worst is a bad faith interpretation of what people mean when they say “workplace democracy”
I’d settle for just having a labor representative in the C-suite at this point.
It’s quite simple, right now businesses are structured in a totalitarian manner, socialism seeks to overthrow that totalitarian regime within your workplace, there’s a number of ways to do this, nobody is suggesting the janitor should decide how a surgeon does his job, we just want to eliminate the useless position of CEO, and replace it with democratic systems managed by the people who work the jobs.
An easy to understand version of this would be if every company was transformed into a worker co-op, but that of course is only one of many models for socialism.
It is important to note that the government is not the worker, and therefore government control over the means of production DOES NOT COUNT.
hat’s a bad faith interpretation of “the people control the means of production”.
I want you to consider the difference between the work needed to complete a task, and the work needed to manage a workplace: for one of those tasks, only the experts in that task can meaningfully contribute to the outcome, whereas for the other, everybody who is part of the workplace has meaningful input.
I don’t know about your experience, but everywhere I’ve worked there have been people “on the ground” who get to see the inefficiencies in the logistics of their day to day jobs; in a good job a manager will listen and implement changes, but why should the workers be beholden to this middleman who doesn’t know how the job works?
I’ve also had plenty of roles where management have been “telling me where to cut”.
So…what if they decide their duties are brain surgery?
Like the nonsense a peer post to yours is spewing. From a person who’s handle is “communist”.
They could have reasonable points, but if your philosophy suggests that brain surgeons can get told what to do by janitors, that’s a problem. I wouldn’t call that “totalitarian”. I would call that sane.
Now, what do we do about brain surgeons and the cost of healthcare (which is and will always be phenomenal, no matter who is paying and how it is being paid for)?
Social Security is a socialist policy.
As is Medicaid and Medicare.
As is SNAP and EBT.
I live in a country with socialist policies already called The United States of America.
But we could use lots more. So I’ll stay here, and I’ll try to make it that way.
I also have a vested interest in furthering the socialist policies in the US. I would very much like to stay here since my life, my family, my friends, etc are all here. I just want this country to improve in ways I only see possible through socialism and moving from an individualist culture to a collectivist one.
Something that is a social policy does not imply that it is a socialist policy
In the way the words are being used here, it absolutely does.
There’s been a lot of propaganda for a long time that “socialist” countries are authoritarian, abusive, and usually dictatorships, so by that measure, of course you would have to make the argument you do, but the fact of the matter is that socialist policies are just policies where we pool resources as a group to provide a public good. It’s opposite would actually be free market capitalism, where you have to subscribe to a fire service to protect your house (it worked that way on the US once, feel free to Google it).
The methods of governing are a completely separate axis, ranging between power vested solely in an individual or small group, and true democracy.
It is absolutely possible to have countries that are democratically socialist, or free market dictatorships. Just because America is still mainly a democracy doesn’t mean we can’t look at it’s policies and see a clearly socialist component of public services. In my mind the truly perplexing thing is how people can label things like a tax to provide everyone access to free books and other media, taxes that support universal fire and police protection, and taxes that support free education for everyone (through high school only!) and say they are just normal non-socialist things, and then look at taxes that would pay for higher level education, for health protection, or for childcare so you are always able to go earn a living, and suddenly they are foaming at the mouth and screaming “socialism!”
But trying to derail an entire conversation by arguing about one word is a lot easier than trying to actually address the points of an argument, so we see that a lot.
