this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2023
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A Boring Dystopia
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Not to be that guy... But Americans have always been partially socialist. That's the reason child labor is not supposed to be a thing, your work week isn't 60 - 80 hours long without overtime, you have things like vacation days, sick leave, agencies in charge of stamping out food and drug adulteration, OSHA codes for safe workplaces, a public school system, public libraries, banking regulations... And a very long list beyond that.
Do you think any of these things are naturally occuring under a capitalist system? These were the fights you can map to specific socialist movements of the past.
But who am I kidding anybody who unironically starts complaining about Communists is so far up McCarthy's ass all they can smell is grave rot.
Is that really socialist though?
A strong labour movement isn't necessarily socialist. In fact I do believe it kind of gets in the way of socialism as they make capitalism bearable for the well organised labour class. Socialism is when the labour class also own the means of production, and for now, mostly, that isn't the case in most developed countries.
Your definition of socialism has been warped by decades of propaganda to weaken labour friend. Labour movements including labour unions are a feature of socialism, not capitalism or even liberalism. Only at the very deep end is socialism about labour co-ops and abolishment of private property. There is also not a unified singular definition philosophy or movement within socialism though it can be very roughly broken into a raft of different breeds of "market socialism" and "non-market socialism" . Market socialism looks at itself as a balancing force to coexist and oppose capitalism because capitalism left unchecked is a hellscape. Capitalist marketing has been very good at taking credit for a lot of market socialism's previous fights and rebranding it as a sort of "responsible capitalism" but basically all the civil rights and labor movements that we celebrate today had variable breeds of socialist cores. The few unifying factors of Socialism is democracy and collective action and that there are at least some things that should be held and maintained as "public goods" that require protection from private interest. Things like national parks, environmental services, roads and infrastructure, sanitation, public education, fire fighting services, the public domain are examples. In some places these extend to things like healthcare.
When the majority of people on the left talk socialism they talk market socialism or social democracy. When people on the right start frowning and stamping their feet about socialists (and what you are doing now) they are usually tarring all socialists with the brush of non-market socialism... which even the majority of people who identify as socialists veiw as complete loony-toons idealism.
I get your point, but I would still argue there is use for a distinction between two sets of ideas. One which aims to improve upon capitalism to make it sustainable for the working class, and one which aims in some for to transition to a system where workers own the means of production outright. Ownership (of labour) is really key in Marxist theory.
The term social democracy is kind of unhelpful too because while it is used for the Nordics, Western Europe, etc., a society where capital is exclusively owned by the workers can be, at least in theory, at least as democratic. But I still prefer it as a term over socialism.
I'm not stamping my feet about socialists either by the way. I just don't want people to get the wrong idea about countries like mine. I live in the Netherlands, and the left is not doing that great. We've had right leaning coalitions for decades that have been slowly eroding social services, sometimes aided by misguided political ambitions of labour leadership. The working classes are voting for populists and even our largest party VVD, which presents itself as the fiscally conservative entrepreneurs' party. It's the familiar story.
I'm not sure if socialism is Utopian or not, but using that term to describe countries like mine and the social policies we're known for internationally surely doesn't do socialism any justice.
I don't think folks have such high expectations of it being utopian. The issue is that unchecked capitalism is kind of a worldwide gig. If you as a society are competing with people from a market who basically allow their people to save their money by being dangerous and unprincipled and put their money permanently out of the tax system they are still mining your society for resources and cash that are taking it out of the system.
But even a system that is imperfect but equal is better than one that basically tells you that if you don't earn enough you basically deserve to die. I fear for a lot of my friends in the states because everytime they change jobs if anything happens to their health before their insurance re- kicks in they mighy never financially recover.
I know a lot of people with what have been considered jobs you could afford to pay a morgage with 30 years ago who are living paycheck to paycheck out of their cars. I see people with disabilities whose families can't afford to help them who depend on institutions like libraries because other government services got privatized and decided that they were "able enough" because of bottom lines. I know people who have suffered burnout, displacement and have been traumatized by working conditions because their employers decided that their shareholders were more important than the people actually making their products.
Being Canadian is to have more than a bit of surviors guilt watching American friends you visit from time to time do everything you do but without the same safety net... We are a more socialism forward country with less people and less resources but the difference is stark. My American friends have it noticeably worse.
Right now my Province is losing another city because climate change, lobbied for by rich assholes worried they won't be able to make as much money on plastic and oil is causing my province to burn. We are too small alone to fix these problems. It requires the sign on of a much bigger collective action. The failure isn't your country - it's that its not enough countries.
Some of them did evolve, looking a bit differently. I mean soup kitchens, places for the poor to sleep (it didn't look nice, I'm thinking late XIX and early XX centuries), sick leaves and vacations were sort of traditionally fine, work weeks, while being unregulated, weren't necessarily longer than what we have, cause unregulated just means individual arrangement, and so on. Life of a factory worker surely sucked, yes.
It's just questionable whether this social progress and labor protection laws are the same.
I mean, there's that problem with socialists - they like to call anything good in human history socialist or proto-socialist (the extreme case is Soviet history books for children with their descriptions of what was Spartacus' rebellion or German peasant rebellions and so on).
One of the issues with capitalist narratives is that they are very good at rebranding successful socialist initiatives as "responsible capitalism". Also it likes to point at non-market socialism and claim that's what socialism looks like completely ignoring market socialism and social democracy.
Also you really need to check your history. The 12 hour day was looked at as the standard before 1926 in America though 100 hour work weeks were not unheard of. Overtime pay was not a thing it was all flat rate. Ford gets the credit for adopting what was then a long standing issue campaigned for by labor to show "actually it's beneficial for capitalist interests!" but the idea as it applies to modern labor was originally campaigned for by Robert Owen in 1818 and was being implemented across Europe by socialist labor parties starting in the 1850's. Ford just basically swooped in last second and like capitalists do stamped his bloody name on it.
What a vacation looked like for a lot of people pre - vacation pay was you packed up to the countryside to work an non-mechanizable agricultural job like hop picking. Labor day and the American origin of the paid vacation itself comes from the Haymarket mass rally of socialist interest in 1887.
So yeah, it's not really as questionable as you make it seem.
I mean, there's no particular narrative in my comment - but there is one in yours.
I'd say you are arguing against something you've imagined. The subject your whole narrative is built around is touched in my comment by the following words: "life of a factory worker surely sucked". And that's it.
So you've basically illustrated this observation, I'll quote myself:
That's some short term memory loss there biddy. You seem to have left all the stuff I was responding to on the table... And quoting yourself OOF. I am embarrassed on your behalf
It's like you don't remember saying any of this :
Some of them did evolve, looking a bit differently. I mean soup kitchens, places for the poor to sleep (it didn't look nice, I'm thinking late XIX and early XX centuries), sick leaves and vacations were sort of traditionally fine, work weeks, while being unregulated, weren't necessarily longer than what we have, cause unregulated just means individual arrangement, and so on. Life of a factory worker surely sucked, yes.
I would suggest reading a bit more into the labor practices of the 18th and 19th centuries and the labour movements of the 19th and 20th otherwise you really are gunna just keep playing pretend and talking out of your ass about this pastoral fantasy and this conversation is really gunna leave you behind.
No, I haven't, I've addressed all in your comment worth addressing. Think again.