Marx thought that capitalism was an essential stage before socialism was possible. This might explain some of the failures of China and the Soviet Union, both were barely out of feudalism when their revolutions happened and when you try to cram 50-100 years of economic development into a five year plan you should only expect trouble.
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Um, engineered famines and resource destruction are not a thing restricted to capitalist societies, you know? It happens in socialist cultures too.
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I disagree. Maybe you’re thinking that tax funded police are equivalent to private security guards, mercenaries, etc? The fact that they’re sworn to serve and protect the public, even those individuals who may not have paid any taxes, is a big fundamental difference.
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Nope, I’m thinking of our police. I’m thinking of why they exist in the first place. And I’m thinking of the chasmic difference between how they treat those with extensive property and those with minimal.
Don’t tell me what I’m thinking, dude.
https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-and-origins-american-policing
Also, another fact: paying taxes on a widely distributed social good does not make it socialist, either.
ETA: the following article sums up my thoughts fairly well.
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Really what’s surprising is how much the Soviet Union actually grew in the first few decades – there was a real anxiety among the capitalist class that the USSR was proving that Leninism really does work better than capitalism. Hence the USSR winning the “space race” up until we unilaterally changed the victory conditions to “landing human beings on the surface of the moon”.
Then it turned out that there was a limit to the scalability of central planning. More importantly from my perspective, the human and environmental costs of that growth were appalling.
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This history of most empires, city states and kingdoms?
Yeah I mean I’m not really relying on the shorthand Cambridge American edition definition of “socialized” as a serious theory of socialism. I suppose ymmv
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You do understand the difference between a dictionary and an encyclopedia, correct?
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Let’s be nice, eh? We can argue vociferously without making it personal, and the quality of the arguments will be much better that way.
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Why are you asking me to provide you with an example of a thing which I’ve already explained hasn’t happened yet, along with some examples of reasons why it hasn’t happened?
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Because you seem to be making the case that it is possible to have a functional and productive society without any form of capitalism at all. You could bolster this case by providing even a single example of it.
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To sort of add to your line of argument: it’s probably worth noting that many of the earliest written documents ever found by archaeologists are investment contracts from ancient Sumeria.
If you think of the cost of starting a business as a sort of “activation energy”, then credit acts as a “catalyst”, allowing speculative future profits to be spent in the present to start businesses and other enterprises that otherwise simply couldn’t exist. But a side effect of this process is that a lot of businesses end up being owned by wealthy people.
In reality, the first two days of that conference would be taken up with the questions:
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Should the name of the conference have an apostrophe in it?
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Where exactly should that apostrophe be?
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I see no logical* problem with a socialist institution being used to prop up capitalism, so cannot agree with you here.
* It’s certainly morally problematic and likely a destabilizing influence.
I think we are back to defining exactly what socialism is. My apparently unpopular view is that one should be able to define or at least know the key tenets and primary goals of a political organization before one becomes a supporter. Collecting taxes to pay for shared services is not socialism.
The article is about why young Americans are embracing socialism. It appears to me that one of the reasons for this is that that have only a vague idea of what socialism is. Pointing out that the primary objective of socialism is somewhat problematic is not pedantry.
Part of this conversation is reminiscent of doing the paperwork to buy a car. When you point out some obviously unacceptable passage in the contract, they likely reply that “the lawyers made us put that part in, but we would never enforce it”. So it is with controlling the means of production. Sure, all that Marxist language is present in the constitution and stated goals of all the socialist organizations, but they are actually just about individual empowerment and egalitarianism. They really have no intention of seizing control of the means of production, national resources, or the economy. Perhaps the lawyers made them put that part in. (S)
Of course the car salesman wants you to focus on all the leather and chrome, and the sound of the turbocharger. But his real interest is getting you to sign that contract, without reading it very carefully.
So, if you look at the human engineered famines that caused the greatest loss of life in the 20th century, you will likely notice that the places where they occurred all have the words “People’s Republic”, or “Socialist” in their names, with the single exception of India during the waning days of WW2.
Compared to the amount of time that is spent here surgically parsing the description of “socialism”, the amount of time carefully explaining exactly what is meant by “fascist” or “Nazi” is visible only with an electron microscope.
Obviously folks in this conversation (and those that filled out the survey) are not all using the exact same definition of the term “Socialism.” That’s OK I guess, words do change meaning over time and can also have more than one meaning. But can we at least agree that services provided to all citizens by their government meet the commonly accepted dictionary definition of being “socialized,” especially in cases where the government is the sole provider of those services?
In this thread I’m not even specifically advocating for any particular preference on the “capitalism vs socialism” question. I’m just trying to lend support to the idea that it’s a false dichotomy- in real world societies it’s always a mix, and every working government larger than a small tribe falls somewhere on the spectrum. Obviously you and @wait_really disagree, but my understanding of the world is that governments that provide more services and resources to better society as a whole (public schools, firefighters, police, medical care, environmental regulations) the closer it is to the “socialist” end of the spectrum, as opposed to a government that leaves most things entirely up to market forces.
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There is also this factor:
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