Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/08/15/whats-up-bootlickers.html
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I wish the media narrative didn’t always paint “socialism vs. capitalism” as an either/or situation. Obviously some things work better when they are socialized and some things work better in a free market.
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I would say that it’s not as much that they don’t trust capitalism. It is that they don’t trust the government who was bent over backwards to corporate interests rather than put its citizens in front as a priority. I don’t necessarily trust socialism to fix problems but that’s not why i’m for it… i’m for because it will change leadership over to people who do seemingly care.
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I don’t think they have particularly warm feelings for the corporations either.
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That depends on the corporation, but generally speaking yes corporations suck but i think that’s a symptom of them getting their way for decades. If the government put Americans first they would have no choice but to be more pro-consumer if they wanted to stay in business.
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Thank you! This false dichotomy of choice is tiresome. We are already a socialist nation with a very capitalistic market.
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F*ck capitalism!
Sent from my iphone
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As others have stated on here, this either/or argument is getting tiresome. We have social programs that work well, we have some that don’t. We have free market ideas that work well, we have some that don’t. It’s quite possible to like some of these socialist ideas in you meme and not be broad brushed as a democratic socialist. Just like having a completely free market society would be bad, having a completely government run socialist economy isn’t the right answer either.
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It’s something the pure capitalists don’t seem to understand (or maybe they do and their support of capitalism is disingenuous and they’re really supporting their own dominance of a captured regulatory system): capitalism would work better if certain aspects of society were socialized, such as education and health care. It doesn’t mean you can’t have private education and private health care, but there are probably thousands of great ideas languishing in the heads of people stuck in a job because it provides their medical benefits instead of those people testing out those ideas in the market. They’re also taking up jobs others could rise into and be more fulfilled and more productive than the current workers. How many people are waiting for others to retire for their dream job? How many people are in a completely different field than they would be most productive because they can’t risk losing benefits? Healthier workers means less sick days.
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Gee, I can’t possibly imagine why The Youths would be losing faith in an economic system that refuses to pay them enough to live, saddles them with mountains of debt as a pre-requisite to obtaining a degree that opens the door to anything but the most menial of jobs, prices them out of the housing market, makes any sort of medical problem a one-way ticket to financial ruin, and celebrates actual Dickensian villains who force their employees to pee in bottles rather than let them take a bathroom break while also hoarding more personal wealth than Roman emperors could have ever dreamed of possessing.
Truly, it’s a mystery.
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Right? Maybe if the right-wingers hadn’t spent so much time screaming about how everything from the Civil Rights Act to Medicare to public schools is SOCIALISM!!1!, regular people wouldn’t associate socialism with all of those things they support.
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what is a pow wow?
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I know the media is incapable of nuance, but now they can’t even bother with the difference between USSR socialism and Sweden socialism.
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Hear hear!
Not to mention U.S. socialism.
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Yes the “A or B” narrative is disingenuous at best. Public/social provision of key services can optimise for citizens and society in ways private provision cannot, especially where competition only damages citizens - e.g. water should be a universal utility not a market-provided good, and if provided privately needs very robust state oversight and regulation. Free-market-driven provision also requires well-regulated markets not ‘free-for-all’ markets. A mixed democratic socialist society is in fact better for capitalists in the longer term, but modern capitalists are too often just seeking to extract shorter term rents - which is not really free-market capitalism.
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Even that is simplifying things. There are many different types of socialism (only some are Marxist), and a few of them predate Marx.
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capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
socialism: a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
(Note that neither definition mentions markets at all – the existence of markets is not a requirement for capitalism, and their absence is not a requirement for socialism. “Free” markets are a theoretical ideal that are essentially never achieved in practice.)
The difference is that under capitalism, the wealthy control the means of production whereas under socialism the “community as a whole” control the means of production.
In practice, that has typically meant the government. But suppose just as a kind of weird thought experiment that the wealthy control the government…wouldn’t the two amount to the same thing in such a bizarre hypothetical world?
Consider by contrast the syndicalist approach where the people who do the work control the means of production. The U.S dairy industry is a good example: Land O Lakes, Cabot, and Organic Valley are all co-ops.
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There’s that inflation again…
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