this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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I just really dislike the whole left/right tribalism. Politics is a lot more complex than left/right and just marking someone as either just increases polarisation...
Thats just economics, and there is more to it than simply socialism vs capitalism.
You're actually the one infantilizing the divide in this case and I'm saying this as a socialist myself.
"Both sides bad" is a bad take when applied to economics. In that area, one side is clearly superior. However, when it comes to politics as a whole, specifically social values, the other commenter is right. Now don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm crazy about the right's social values or anything, but I am very critical of some of the stuff the left is promoting lately (and no, I don't mean just chronically online liberals).
I'd agree, except the progressives and conservatives align with the left and right respectively in 99% of cases. Some even go as far as to consider their social values inseparable from the economic ones. When's the last time you met a conservative socialist, for instance?
They're pretty compatible when you use capitalist principles to allow for a market economy where the corporate machines are owned collectively by their workers, rather than their boards of shareholders like we see today. We need a completely different government structure to properly enact and enforce environmental and safety regulations though, since lobbying, bribery, gerrymandering, and cronyism are entirely too effective in the US
I agree that it isn't very similar to modern Capitalism at all, but the means of production would still not be state-owned or managed, so the only socialism going on would take the form of unions and government welfare, which is more similar to early 20th century american capitalism than it is to most socialist movements of the past 100 years.
The definitions of socialism and capitalism are constantly in flux though so assigning a simple name to a nuanced economic framework will always be reductive and confusing.
All squares are quadrilaterals, but not all quadrilaterals are squares.
Socialism is when the workers control the means of production: could be through the state, could also be through unions or co-ops or other labor-controlled structures. Might make you uneasy to say so, but I think you're a socialist, my man.
I am called a socialist by a lot of people who call themselves socialist, but I am called capitalist to a lot of people who call themselves capitalist. As I said, the word has taken on many different meanings by people who interpret or misinterpret Marx's ideas differently.
I don't align myself with any named doctrine because the names are reductive and often misleading or conflicting. If you consider me socialist because of your definition of socialism I won't tell you otherwise, but I will push back if someone tells me to call myself socialist because I don't agree with the more common interpretations of what it means to be socialist.
All squares are quadrilaterals and all cubes contain squares, but a cube is not a quadrilateral, it merely looks like a quadrilateral in some projections. It may look like a hexagon in others. Projections don't show the whole shape
Game recognize game, that was an excellent response.
I'd just point out that there has been a decades-long crusade against socialism in the west, starting during the WWII and through the cold war, and the "socialism = state run economy" shtick comes from confused westerners who've bought into the red-scare propaganda. A lot of people feel quite comfortable imagining the USSR and Moaist China as the idealistic image of what socialism is, because it's quite easy to write them off as failed "authoritarian" projects (a lot of reasons for those scare quotes, but I won't go into it). Fair enough that you don't want to be associated with that scary image, but all I'd say is that by avoiding the word with all its nuance, you loose the detailed and rich debate about it that can inform how one could approach a socialist system of organization, even the one you just described. And as long as we're stuck arguing about semantic definitions and being pitted against one another, we're not effectively unifying under our common interest, which would be the end to private ownership over the means of production.
I agree with most of this, I just don't think we can afford to discount the power of stigma when it's easier to go around that stigma and choose other names to unite under. The left has no problem getting hateful and even simply distasteful words out of common usage by drawing attention to what makes them problematic, sometimes even with proposed changes that are more inflammatory than the original (Looking at you, "Latinx"). I don't see why we can't do the same for the term "Socialism" and use something with less historical baggage in order to better appeal to moderates without sacrificing any actual ideological shifts.