Democratic control over the means of production by workers
Yeah, it’s just lacking the more global “democracy”, so it’ll attract all those power hungry grifters. Social democracy is not that bad.
It provides a safety net by pooling the resources of the community to support the less fortunate. This prevents people from having to sacrifice their long term goals because their short term needs may not be otherwise met.
Also in contrast to capitalism that treats society as a zero sum game (“I can’t get ahead unless I take something from someone else”) socialism is a benefit multiplier (“I’m part of the community. By making the life of everyone in the community better I’m also improving my own life”).
Few movements self-identify as “Socialist”, at best it’s a taxonomical label. Attempting to talk about the finer points of socialism is akin to debating the pros/cons of “Animals” – it’s an overly broad topic and doomed to spiral into bike-shedding over semantics as soon as the conversation starts to look interesting.
With that being said, let’s talk about some more concrete terms – apologies in advance for wielding only slightly less clumsy terminology in my bullets:
- Socialized Medicine: Healthcare is a human right. I am pro human rights.
- Unions: Mostly positive. Nothing’s perfect, but come on… you’d have to be blind not to see and feel for how exploited lower-class workers are without them
- Democratic Socialists of America: I’m a member – that means I like them. I think their platform represents the ideal incrementalist approach to improving the current status quo
- European Welfare States (e.g.: Denmark): Too fuzzy to have a solid opinion on, but certainly a battle-tested template. I like most of their ideas most of the time
- Marxism: A genius body of economic philosophy, but increasingly out of place as time marches onward. I’d be for a by-the-book implementation (insofar as that’s possible) in 1923, but not 2023
- Maoism/Leninism: Not exactly success stories. It’s easier to appreciate their noble ideas & intentions with the distance lent by history, but that’s altogether different from “liking”
- Communism: As a whole? I think the template holds promise and can be made to work in a modern context, but viability =/= realizability. The world would have to get turned upside-down first and it’s questionable exactly how many of us would live through that… but never say never.
Well, the biggest political party in Denmark for my entire life is called Socialdemokratiet, which is social democracy coming from socialism.
I think it’s a pretty big movement.
I’ve lived in a country with socialism for my entire life, and have studied the laws in my own and other countries without socialism.
I will talk about socialism as it is in Scandinavia, more specifically Denmark. Here’s a few things other than paid education and free healthcare:
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Getting paid to study: You get paid to study as soon as you turn 18. In that way you don’t need a job while you studying. Basic salary when living away from parents: 1.000 USD/month.
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UBI: In Denmark we have UBI for people being poor, basically. If you don’t have a job, is sick and can’t work, or any other reason you might be screwed, you get paid by the government to… well yeah, exist basically. You have to meet some requirements and actively trying to get better or find a job though, which seems fair I think. If the government thinks it’s not possible to get better, you can get the money permanently for the rest of your life without doing anything. (this is used for people with disabilities, both mental and physical, both born with it or obtained later in life)
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Shared heating system: This is maybe the biggest “socialism” thing I can mention. In Denmark your house or apartment can be hooked up to a country wide heating system, which means we all share the same heat. This is a way to make heat distribution centralised, which has major advantages such as; price, availability, maintenance. (Fun fact: every data center build in Denmark needs to be hooked up to this system, as they will “donate” all their excess heat from their servers to the central heating system)
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Flex jobbing: If you are no longer able to work 37 hours a week, you can be a flex worker. This basically means that you can work 15 hours a week and still get paid a full salary. The government will cover the rest of the pay and also cover some expenses for the company having the flex worker. This system is great for peoples mental health, as they still can feel a part of society even though they can’t work full time. While they still can live a worthy life because their pay is fine. It’s a win-win for the country, the companies and the people needing this.
I could go on, but I don’t want to be that guy praising my own country all the time. We Scandinavians tend to do that.
Sounds like the Danish welfare system is more robust than the one we have here in Sweden - however, I would like to point out that what we have is not socialism. The central ethos of socialism is the collective ownership of the means of production (usually through the government), and our economies are first and foremost rather successful capitalist mixed market economies with strong regulations and a certain degree of government ownership in limited (usually critical) areas of society. With the help of our capitalist economies, we create and tax the wealth and productivity needed to fund a rather robust welfare system.
In general Sweden and Denmark is mostly run the same way. Non of the countries are pure socialism, but they are sure very successful on physical and mental well-being for their citizens, and giving them a high living standard because of this welfare driven from ideologies of socialism.
Yeah but it’s scary seeing the radical stuff starting to creep in the cracks. I moved to Denmark from the US and reading the news sometimes on politics raises an eyebrow or two.
I love how people think that benefits are now called UBI.
I guess the billionaires successfully stamped that idea out.
I think it’s right to call it UBI when you get a basic income. The universal part is maybe not true though.
And I don’t get what you mean about billionaires.
The universal part is basically the point of UBI. It’s income for everyone, no strings attached. So calling it UBI is definitely misleading I’m afraid
Aah, okay mb. Sounds like a worse way of doing it, if it’s universal for everyone tbh.
It would inflate prices, making it useless for people who need it. And giving money to people who don’t need it doesn’t make sense. It’s kinda greedy when some people actually need the money.
The idea is that the average person earning will pay the UBI amount back in tax. The taxation systems will all have to be adjusted. It’s not free money on top of what we have now.
Most people will not be significantly better off under UBI, just a base level that we can’t go below, that will be there for any reason from “can no longer work” to just “want a break from it all”.
Smart way of doing it if the tax system can be adjusted for it.
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I like working and feeling like I’m helping others or working towards a larger goal without the constant ever present exploitation of myself and others.
The concept of helping people.
Personal greed cannot grow to unlimited dimensions.
Well, under a free market system it can’t because of competition. Under a centrally-controlled system, greed can run unchecked in the environment of total control.
It’s one of the better -isms currently available.
Workers owning the means of production is the way it should be. Until we can mature further.
that it holds that social practices are created from social practice and not inherited from immutable law, enabling criticism of the underlying machinations of society without being hindered by the argument that such machinations are an inherited and instinctual product of nature and thus unalterable.
The part where the workers own the means of production.
That it’s anticorporatist.
I wish there was a movement called anti corporatism, literally. I feel like we need something new since anything socialism related is automatically bad to a lot of people…
Those people tend to be the ones benefiting most from socialism without realizing it. There also is a lot of confusing communism with socialism in here, they are not the same thing
A friendly reminder that socialism is not communism. The latter is closer to capitalism as it’s just state-owned instead of privately owned. However, socialism and capitalism can coexist, which cannot be said the same about communism.
Socialism is a political philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic and social systems[1] characterised by social ownership of the means of production,[2] as opposed to private ownership.[3][4][5]
Hard disagree. Capitalism with a handful of social systems implemented is not socialism.
I did not say it was?
No, you said they could coexist, on which I disagree.
So communism is closer to capitalism because it’s state-owned?
Why are we trusting the output of your brain again?
You have no idea. For a society to be communist it has to have no state. Marxist states like the USSR or Cuba aspire to be communist one day in the future but believe you need a stage of state socialism first to get there without capitalism taking over again. How close they actually get to socialism is debatable. This is different to anarchists who want the state abolished after the revolution.
Socialism is not compatible with capitalism. Any communist society is socialist by definition, but not every socialist society is communist by necessity. Socialism is compatible with market economy where communism is not.
Under the definition of socialism the working class must own and control the means of production. Outside of that requirement you can have a range of different economic systems which may or may not involve a state, money, or markets. Socialist market economy has markets and possibly a state but where each worker owns a share of the company and votes in company leaders and/or decisions.
I like that the government is financially able to provide social services above and beyond anything Americans are used to. Those services are a reliable way to help out neighbors.
There’s no reason for any American to be unhoused, hungry, uneducated, or in need of healthcare. If wealth taxes were implemented, 95% of Americans wouldn’t have any more money taken from them than they already do and it would do so much for millions and millions of Americans.
A socialistic society lifts up the people that need it most and doesn’t hurt anyone in a way that they can’t cope with. And moreover, some studies estimate that helping out those poorest Americans allows them to add value to society in ways that makes up for the wealthy people and corporations getting taxed heavier.
What I like is that when there is progress, the progress is actually experienced by everybody and not just by a wider or narrower elite.
For instance, I love robotics but I can’t stand that adding robots to society results in unemployment. You can’t just let the owners scoop up all the capital gain.
I’d prefer the profits of robotics to be socialized rather than putting a limit on the jobs that can be eliminated.
Where’s our utopia where we don’t have to work to survive? Automation should make that a reality.
Used to dismiss it out of hand because all the ‘socialist countries’ are complete authoritarian hellholes. But in hindsight this is a kind of thought-terminating cliche. I never really knew what the idea was apart from some vague notion about sharing or something that’s well intentioned but never works out in practice. I think most people share this belief.
Turns out the idea is pretty simple: Worker ownership and control. Places like the USSR and China fail this definition because they don’t have any of that. Therefore they are not socialist. Those countries replicate the worker/owner dynamic of Capitalism, so it is ‘State Capitalism’. And they both have the same problem: A small group of people have all the power and they fuck over everyone else.
I had to get sold on the specific idea of ‘market socialism’ / ’ workplace democracy ’ before I learned and realised this. The general idea is that if you can run a country like a democracy, you can run a business like one too. In fact, many are. So lets do that as much as possible in order to wrestle power away from the owner class who spend all of their money bribing politicians and ruining everything.
