Socialism will never work because it’s founded on emancipation, and you can’t force people to emancipate themselves. That would be the opposite of emancipation.
I’m not sure if this is a quote, I can’t remember where I heard it.
“Emancipation” in this case meaning emancipation from wage slavery.
That doesn’t make any sense as a statement. It sounds like you can’t force freedom on people, but yeah you can make them free without consent but I don’t get how that makes sense in this context.
Multiple countries show socialism works perfectly fine for essential and shared services and other things a society needs. It doesn’t work for everything, which is why so many countries are a blend of socialist public stuff like universal healthcare, free education, and those kinds of things whle still having capitalism in the firm of private for profit companies for non-essential stuff like restaurants and clothing stores.
Note that if the country has socialist in the name it probably isn’t actually socialist in practice.
This is a really important take that not enough people understand.
Very few people are asking for universal socialism. Capitalism works fine for some industries, Socialism works great for some industries. The government needs to figure out which ones are which, and implement rules around that.
The big one right now that people are just starting to figure out is that capitalism sucks at real estate. The free market failures there are significant and causing a lot of problems.
IMO land should be strictly owned by the government, and only rented to citizens. This should be the primary source of tax revenue for a country, not income taxes. Use more land, pay more taxes. Use less land, pay less taxes. Land taxes also benefit from being the only thing you can never hide, because you can’t put it under a table or move it offshore.
No. Socialism is not when the government does stuff.
Socialism refers to workers owning the means of production. Free education and universal healthcare are not socialist in themselves.
Free education and universal healthcare are not socialist in themselves.
Sure they are: production is undertaken to fulfill a social need.
Not exactly.
Socialism is defined as:a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
Essentially, the workers should own the means of production. This would involve workers having democratic control over their workplace, and have control over their produce.
Universal Healthcare and free education is not socialist, it’s just government funded.
Why do you have to force people to emancipate themselves to get socialism?
Yeah, it’s not like you can just proclaim emancipation.
If people as a whole felt capable enough and were brave enough to follow and speak about what’s right and good for the world, we wouldn’t need ideological leaders. The reality of things is that people are mostly fearful sheep, going through life thanks to inertia without any major self analysis or existential considerations, fleeing pain and seeking pleasure, and as such they need good shepherds.
That just sounds like it’s saying that any form of emancipation is impossible.
Also, when you have fixed pricing on products, there’s suddenly no reliable feedback on what people really need. Now you can gauge it from how much they are ready to pay for a product, but with fixed pricing that is lost. And then the factories are constantly producing too much of something or too little of it.
And especially when it constantly happens that there is too little of this and that, a black market is practically sure to appear to get people what they need. And that grows corruption that then destroys the rest. Hooray.
Of course you can just ask people if they would want to have __________. But often they answer “yes” to things they won’t bother to get anyway or “no” to things they will actually end up liking once their friends notice how nice they are. So, in reality that doesn’t really help. You can also build some very advanced computer system that follows everyone in realtime and always guesses with a high precision what the people need at each time. But then we have a very horrible system where we are being spied on every moment. Not what I want, either.
If this problem doesn’t get tackled, socialism cannot work.
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No, both should work both ways.
Socialism is everywhere, currently. The American government is socialist, but they do t allow any of those policies to trickle down to you as citizens. They bar it at every opportunity to continue to enrich themselves on your backs. Canada is a socialist society, as is most of the developed world.
UBI would be ideal, it is actually cheaper to pay for people before they become destitute, homeless criminals. But then you don’t have the scaremongering keeping people working shitty jobs for shit pay to stay on the “good” side of society.
You wouldn’t even need to with UBI, shit employers would not be able to find workers, and people inherently want to do things and make a difference/impact on the lives of others.
Disabled people could still house and feed themselves. Mentally ill people could seek the treatment they need to get better. It is cheaper and more effective to deal with problems before they become problems. Cleaning up the mess is far more costly on so many different metrics it’s almost funny we don’t do this already.
Socialism refers to worker ownership of the means of production, not “when the government does stuff”.
While politicians call anything the government does socialism, that doesn’t make it so.No, that’s communism. Socialism is a different ism. Keep trying.
Communism is a stateless classless, moneyless society. Most communists see socialism as a prerequisite for communism
They share some similar ideology. That’s why the west adopted a lot of the good things communism was doing while trying to avoid the worse things. Hence, socialism.
That’s right, “socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.” as MLK Jr. said.
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I think you may be confusing socialism with communism.
Delete my comment because I guess my understanding isn’t as concrete as I’d like it to be.
Isn’t socialism just the way to get to communism?
Could it lead to communism? Sure. Does it have to? No.
As some of the others have commented a lot of countries have had success with a hybrid of capitalism/socialism.
As opposed to the current system where we don’t have enough doctors or teachers, and let’s face it, the prices that plumbers charge suggest there aren’t enough of those either. If free market economics were accurate, prices would tumble if there were more of them, right?
