this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
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I can't speak for others, but I've seen nothing but death and hate under the banner of socialism: USSR, China, Venezuela, etc, the list goes on. What most non-crazy people seem to mean by "socialism" is liberalism with a strong social safety net and public services (e.g. Nordic countries, "Democratic socialists" like Bernie Sanders, etc), which is a separate thing altogether.
Here's the issue. Capitalist nations are afraid of socialism spreading, so they do everything they can to destroy them. The only ones who have every survived this pressure are authoritarian dictatorships who have isolated themselves from western influence. This creates a situation (that the media, being capitalist, spreads) where socialism always ends up as authoritarian. That doesn't have to be the case, but it does when anything else is destroyed. It's ignorant to think that this is the fault of socialism and not circumstances.
Whether socialism results in authoritarianism because of the ideology or circumstances is irrelevant, the fact is that socialism generally ends in authoritarianism. It turns out that it takes a lot of force to transition a country from capitalism to socialism, so it's not surprising that this transition attracts authoritarians.
And yeah, it probably doesn't have anything to do with socialism itself, but on that transition. We see the same for other radical transitions. The problem isn't necessarily what you're transitioning to, but the process of transition and who is involved. Most countries in the world aren't socialist, so transitioning to socialism will be a radical change and will attract the worst kinds of leaders. So it's fair to criticize socialism precisely because a radical transition to it is highly likely to be fraught with authoritarianism.
Even transitions to liberalism runs that risk, but transitioning to liberalism has had a much better track record than transitioning to socialism.
That said, country-wide forms of socialism (arguably "pure" socialism) where capitalism is eradicated naturally come with a distillation of power in the government to control the flow of goods, and that concentration of power is what attracts authoritarians and is what's being opposed here. So socialism has a built-in problem that lends itself to authoritarianism. Yes, I know there are theoretical anarchist forms of socialism, but they usually have a transition period from an authoritarian system (big counter is libertarian socialism, but that's pretty "pie in the sky" IMO, as much as I respect Noam Chomsky).
The reason is because capitalists oppose it. If the world was ruled by Fascists you'd be saying we should try anything else because anyone opposed to Fascists gets undermined. It's a fault of capitalism, not socialism.
There have been many elected socialist democracies, but the West undermined them. We can have socialist countries without any issues. It just requires capitalists in the rest of the world not overthrowing them.
Bernie Sanders is a proper anti-capitalist not just social democratic capitalist. See: https://berniesanders.com/issues/corporate-accountability-and-democracy/
@noncredibledefense
He really isn't anti-capitalist, he's against concentrations of wealth generally, but he's absolutely in favor of our capitalist system, he just thinks there should be more rules so workers fare better. He's not a socialist, much as the right wants to think, he's just in favor of a large welfare system and high taxes on the wealthy. He doesn't want to fundamentally change our economic system, he just wants to make it more fair for his definition of "fair."
I agree he is not a socialist in the 20th century sense, but he clearly says that workers should have ownership stake in companies, which is not a capitalist sentiment. He advocates for employee ownership of companies. I also am aware of who his economic advisors on these issues are and they are very much anti-capitalist
@noncredibledefense
It absolutely is though. Partnerships have been a thing since pretty much forever, and a lot of publicly traded companies and some private companies hand out company stock as part of compensation. Employees owning stock isn't socialism, it's capitalism, and the goal is for employees' interests to be more aligned with the company's so overall profitability is higher.
Sanders is approaching it from an employee outcomes perspective, but it's still very much from a capitalist mindset.
He's not advocating for companies to be run democratically like they would under socialism, he's advocating for more profit sharing without meaningfully changing ownership.
I agree that giving alienable voting shares to workers isn't anti-capitalist. It becomes anti-capitalist when the voting rights over management and corporate governance are inalienable meaning they are legally recognized as non-transferable even with consent.
Here is a talk by people involved with Bernie Sanders politically about how all companies should be democratically controlled by the workers: https://youtu.be/E8mq9va5_ZE
Sanders supports worker co-op conversions
@noncredibledefense
Exactly, and specifically for this thread this is not quite the same socialism what Bashar al-Assad has been going for.
It's funny how many of them seem to like national socialism