> You might as well insist America was Socialist during the New Deal.
People did. And the new deal is exactly what democratic socialists in the us are trying to evoke. E.g. “the green new deal”.
I don’t think we have to deal in absolutes. You can be partially socialist, with some private corporations and some state owned. It’s not black and white, it doesn’t have to be.
> Well, it would have to be a better alternative than what we have now.
That's one issue. Another is having a feasible way to transition from what we have now. The latter is probably the trickier one.
> I'm not sure what you mean by modern takes on democratic socialism. Sanders is most certainly not a socialist, if that's what you mean, despite being for a progressive welfare state.
I mean democratic socialism roughly as Sanders describes it, although there's obviously a big range even within the modern definition. So yes, just western democracy with the government doing lots of social programs. Not real socialism.
> I thought socialism had a relatively strict definition.
It does. It is social ownership of the means of production. As a democratic socialist AOC believes in worker ownership and democratically controlled market entities. Accordingly, she is very pro-union and pro government jobs programs. The GND has many aspects of a socialist jobs program. Free trade and higher education is a socialist position as well as a welfare position. Medicare for all is socialized insurance. 70% marginal tax rate is a way to limit the concentration of individual wealth and market/political control and while it is not inherently socialist it is extremely consistent with socialist values.
> Let's define socialism as the collective control and ownership of the means of production and their profits
> I care deeply about individual freedom and not having some collective telling me how I should live my life
Indeed, you're critiquing an inherent characteristic of socialism, that you even mentioned in your own definition in the first quote. Good so far.
> capitalism as the private ownership of these things
> I care a lot about social justice and not having the rich and powerful grind the poor for personal profit.
... Wait what? Capitalism doesn't prevent social justice and doesn't mean that the rich and powerful grind the poor for personal profit.
This is a textbook false equivalency.
> At some point the state has to intervene to enable some redistribution of wealth.
Not really, in a true capitalist society the producers would know that they need consumers or else they'll lose their income, it's self-correcting. A state is tangential to that.
The reason the USA might or might not be going into a totalitarian oligarchy is because of the state, not in spite of it.
> Are you comfortable with a socialist leading a capitalist society?
The US isn't a capitalist society, and hasn't been even approximately for most of a century. Like most advanced Western countries, its a modern mixed economy, which features some elements of capitalism -- a system named by its nineteenth century socialist critics for its focus on the interest of the capital-holding class -- but also mixes in many elements of socialism specifically to mitigate the very problems with capitalism that were identified by the critics that named it. This model has -- in a process that, while it started earlier and never really ended, was focused in the early-to-mid-20th Century -- displaced capitalism as the dominant system of the advanced economies of the world.
I'm not sure why a socialist would be less appropriate a leader for a country with a modern mixed economy than a capitalist.
> There’s an old saying that in America we have socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.
Yes, and it's an extremely dumb saying that only makes sense within a particular misunderstanding of what “socialism” means that derives from hostile mischaracterization by capitalists.
(Socialism about collective, rather than private, ownership of the means of production, whereas capitalism is about private ownership of the means of production. The rich in America very much enjoy the benefits of private ownership of the means of production.)
>I just find it alarming that when people criticize capitalism, they usually advocate for some variety of full blown socialism, which has been tried many times before and failed disastrously every single time.
And yet something less than full blown socialism seems to work fine just about everywhere.
> They very much want capitalism, but not a corrupted form of it.
Let me clarify and demonstrate that we basically agree. The difference is inclusivity vs exclusivity.
They want exclusive socialism - as in guaranteed high base living standards - for an ethnic elite, built on the labor and deprivation of an subservient ethnic underclass working natural resources that the ethnic elite hold own over.
There will still be those who own more capital and less, but importantly they will be limited to the ethnic elite.
There are plenty of historical examples of this: slave economies in the Americas, extractive colonialism, apartheid, Jim Crow and so many other examples.
I would agree that liberal capitalist democracy runs counter to all of those goals, because it is (at least in-theory) inclusive.
> Most of the world has some amount of socialism mixed in.
Why do people keep misusing the definition of socialism. Do workers own the means of production? If not, it's not socialism. Now I'm not a socialist but I'd like the words we use to have meaning so that we all know what we're collectively talking about.
Social benefits and social democracy != socialism, people should just use that term instead.
Socialism is about social not state ownership of the means of production. This does not prevent the state being involved either, and even then they can be a joint-stock corporation's.
> No mainstream US politician is proposing socialism in the Marxist sense or the authoritarian mold.
They're not proposing it, they've been implementing it.
The bloated Federal Government is socialism. The Federal Reserve System is socialism. Student loans, Freddie and Fannie, FDA... That's all socialism, it's just not evenly distributed.
Almost all mainstream parties and politicians in the US are socialists.
Where he's wrong is here:
> "We have to recognize that some of the progressive insights are important, and they shouldn't go away
None are important and they shouldn't be forced upon people by politicians. Who finds them valuable should practice them with own money.
It was literally developed by socialists (in late 19th century it meant the same with 'communist') and advocated in the First Socialist International at the end of 19th century. To top that, it was the president of the first socialist international who revealed the new system. Every single plan and method that you equate with 'capitalism' above, comes from that advocacy.
In the cold war era when Western countries were also using social democracy, the cold war propaganda allowed people to get self-deceived into thinking that all of those were the fruits of capitalism. But Reagan & co knew what was what. They spent no time in discarding all those pesky socialist practices and bringing back good old fashioned capitalism. The dystopian hellhole that you are experiencing today is capitalism itself.
Well, obviously there is still some ways to go until child labor, 14 hour workdays, total removal of labor protections, abolition of weekend vacation, social security etc are completed, but hey - they sure will get rid of those pesky socialist stuff in no time.
> A government can create full employment by creating jobs and forcing people to work. Why don't modern socialists support that?
I am myself a politically active Marxist and we do say this, but we also understand that this isn’t going to happen. Keynesianism was not a sustainable solution. It only bought time. Ultimately states in capitalist societies are in service of capital. In the US, realize the 1970s financial overhaul, including the Bretton Woods System, was the capitalist response to the New Deal giving workers too much power. 1960s inflation hit the ruling class and they responded by brutalizing the economy. See: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com
> Everyone wants socialist benefits for themselves and free-market benefits for everyone else.
I don't. I'm fine being self-employed and handling all my own stuff, but I do want the poor of the world to get more of the opportunities that I enjoy.
> I still contend socialism is about central planning.
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.
People did. And the new deal is exactly what democratic socialists in the us are trying to evoke. E.g. “the green new deal”.
I don’t think we have to deal in absolutes. You can be partially socialist, with some private corporations and some state owned. It’s not black and white, it doesn’t have to be.
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