Stop Socialism

[ItsjustMe]

[AnotherMother4Peace]

1. Two of the most rabid trumpsters I know are on disability.

I assume it's social security disability. Their stupidity and hypocrisy is beyond understanding.

[Poiuyt]

2. Yes, this is cute and funny and all, but they aren't describing socialism

Socialism is when the government controls the production and distribution of goods. What they're describing is government providing for the welfare of its citizens. Unless the definition of socialism has changed.

[Bonn1997]

10. The government is distributing goods in these examples

The examples could be described as socialist policies

[lagomorph777]

14. Socialism and capitalism are directions along an axis. No system is purely at one end or the other.

Every economic policy can be described as being somewhere between the ends of that axis. Collectively (no pun intended), all the policies add up to a system you could place on that axis. Almost never will it be purely at one end.

Rigid definitions here make it more difficult to discuss nuances.

[JHB]

3. I'm going to stand by my complete refutation of "RW crackpot" definitions of "socialism"

Right-Wing crackpots have, for decades, called anything they don't like "socialism".

They're full of shit.

Nothing that has been proposed -- not even by Bernie or The Squad -- are Socialism.

[Hortensis]

5. "Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts

to build a socialist society. It has been tried in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Albania, Poland, Vietnam, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, North Korea, Hungary, China, East Germany, Cuba, Tanzania, Laos, South Yemen, Somalia, the Congo, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua and Venezuela, among others—not counting the very short-lived ones. All of these attempts have ended in varying degrees of failure." ...

In the early days of any new socialist experiment, it is enthusiastically greeted by huge numbers of intellectuals. ... This has happened many times. The most recent example is Venezuela, which, just a few years ago, was being hailed by leading intellectuals and left-wing politicians as a model for “Socialism of the 21st Century.” One leading left-wing intellectual, the Princeton Professor Cornell West, proclaimed: “I love that Hugo Chávez has made poverty a major priority. I wish America would make poverty a priority.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzitelmann/2020/03/16/socialism-the-failed-idea-that-never-dies/?sh=99e3bdc23cc2

Yes, Chavez made poverty a major priority. Let's not.

Bernie Sanders is a lifelong socialist who's spent decades advocating for socialist revolution in the U.S. Sure, he soft pedaled it while running for president and relabeled himself "Progressive" (not to be mistaken for progressive) -- he was trying to win! Embrace it or denounce it, but don't pretend it isn't real.

[AZProgressive]

6. He was the chair of the Progressive Caucus

If I'm not mistaken he was the first chair of the Progressive Caucus established in 1991. Even Nancy Pelosi served in the Progressive Caucus while Bernie Sanders was the chair.

Out of those countries I'll address Yemen. There used to be a South Yemen which was socialist and also backed by the USSR until the funding dried up while the North was backed by Saudi Arabia. Yemen reunified in 1994 and shortly after there was a socialist purge. Now the Yemeni government is a kleptocracy and was before the bombing campaign by the Saudi coalition. When it comes to the war in Yemen there is a lot of talk about Houthis but very little when it comes to the Southern Movement or the history of Yemen in general.

[Hortensis]

7. Well, yes. The U.S. is not socialist. We don't even have a socialist

party for him to belong to and be elected from. He once said serving in congress was a total waste of time.

What we do have is a mixed system of: capitalism (with varying degrees of government involvement and regulation, varying widely depending on the era and which party dominates it), a number of government run social services such as Social Security, AND one large socialized program, the VA.

Like most western European nations, including Scandinavia.

Those European nations are also mixed systems with capitalist economies, but they have more socialized public services. This is the direction I'm hoping/expecting we'll continue to go. It's proven that it can create stability and prosperity without sacrificing freedoms or prosperity.

Socialism is different. It's a socioeconomic system where the people or state take over, own and operate the means of production. I once listened to Sanders in an unusually open mood say that the transition to socialism would require some ? (pain or sacrifice) but that it would make us better people.

Unfortunately, that experiment has always made poorer people and failed governments.

Social Democrats, btw, believe in the ultimate replacement of capitalism with collective ownership, beginning first with the socialization of industries producing necessities such as food and medicine, but eventually all, with an emphasis on local and regional control. This is not Europe's successful capitalism-based model.

[AZProgressive]

9. That is what I favor is a mixed economy

I'm Keynesian rather than Socialist or anything else. Sanders' socialism is FDR liberalism.

Some of the examples cited by the Forbes article are left wing authoritarians that the US only really cares about. Things are more complicated than saying they tried and failed. There is Pinochet who the University of Chicago economists backed and neoliberalism is unpopular in Chile. Naomi Klein covers this in her book The Shock Doctrine. Paraguay has poverty and corruption but they have a conservative as Head of State.

I also remember watching a documentary on Bob Marley in Jamaica. The CIA and others were doing everything they could to make the Democratic Socialist look bad and Marley ended up shot during the campaign.

This wiki has limited information.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Bob_Marley

I think a better example is New Zealand whose Prime Minister is a Social Democratic Progressive.

[Hortensis]

12. Yes, we have what the European nations have but not so advanced.

Whole lot of deceit and obfuscation surrounding these terms, and entirely intentional.

FDR lead the battle against socialism and the socialist and fascist revolutionaries threatening to overthrow our liberal democracy. The socialists loathed FDR as a traitor to the people who protected the greedy corporatists, and they fought passionately to defeat both the capitalism-based New Deal and FDR himself.

They lost, of course. A bunch of nations in that era fell either to fascist or socialist revolutions, or both in some cases, but not ours. And every socialist state failed. Dreadfully.

Sanders describes himself as democratic socialist (i.e., socialist) these days, though I remember him waffling about that, saying something like he was "most like." Experts say that over his lifetime his socialist ideology has been what was in the air when he was growing up, with all those hopeful young, and not so young, socialist states in Eastern Europe, the far east, and Central America showing the way to a better world. He's always been a supporter of their remnant socialism, though he's recently had to denounce what happened to Venezuela. Too apt an example.

But, happily for what you and I believe most people want, the New Deal began the capitalism with socialized public services in America that western European nations have just been able to take further.. More socialized public services. And we can do that also just by passing laws as FDR did. Right now we're watching Democrats with enough power create a permanent child tax credit that's going to do wonders for low-income working families. By passing a law. As long as we have enough power, we will continue to do that.

[Demsrule86]

13. I believe in Keynesian economics also.

Communism and Socialism today are merely a ruse...what we have is dictatorships where the creme de la creme live like kings and the rest in poverty and misery. And of course I take note of Sander's admission that people would suffer...absolutely against socialism as an economic system.

[Celerity]

11. False, Sanders is not in favour of state appropriation of the means of production, which is a core

tenant of socialism. He falsely self-labels as a democratic socialist when he is simply a bog standard social democrat.

The very definitions of social democrat and democratic socialist are fundamentally divergent.

Socialism's end goal is state/societal control of the means of production, ofttimes via nationalisation. I can assure you that that is not the endgame in any of the social democracies on the planet.

Sweden has a very robust capitalist system as one of its fundamental organising principles, they just do a far better job at regulation and steering the outcomes of it, especially in terms of income inequality, which is the most important overarching and interlocking statistic that determines the well-being of a nation state.



What socialism is — according to Bernie Sanders

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders has been calling himself a democratic socialist since the 1960s.
Bernie's use of the word "socialist" has attracted both love and ire from the left.
His definition of socialism is vague, but is the basis for many peoples' understanding of the concept.

https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/what-is-socialism-bernie-sanders?rebelltitem=3#rebelltitem3

snip

Luckily for us, Senator Sanders explained his political philosophy in a speech he delivered at Georgetown University in 2015. (The entire speech can be viewed here.)

He begins by referring to the New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt and pointing out the good that it did for a country in the depths of the Great Depression:

"He saw one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. And he acted. Against the ferocious opposition of the ruling class of his day, people he called economic royalists, Roosevelt implemented a series of programs that put millions of people back to work, took them out of poverty and restored their faith in government. He redefined the relationship of the federal government to the people of our country. He combated cynicism, fear and despair. He reinvigorated democracy. He transformed the country. . . . And, by the way, almost everything he proposed was called 'socialist.'"

The senator then muses on several issues facing the United States, income inequality, unemployment, high rates of childhood poverty, the high cost of medical care, and a declining faith in our political system, among others, and decides that the concentration of wealth and power is both the root cause of them and the key reason why we have failed to solve them. His solution, of course, is "socialism." It is then that he gives us his conception of what that is:

"Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy. Democratic socialism means that we must reform a political system in America today which is not only grossly unfair but, in many respects, corrupt."

He goes a bit into the particulars of policy and explained that his conception of socialism would require — this is what it would look like — universal health care, total employment, free college education, more public spending, a living wage, environmental regulations, and a robust democratic culture to come into existence. He flatly denied any interest in nationalization, telling the audience:

"So the next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this: I don't believe government should own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal."

The contents of this speech were very similar to other statements he has made about socialism across his entire political career. The entire speech could have been summed up neatly in a quote he gave to the Associated Press back in 1997:

"To me, socialism doesn't mean state ownership of everything, by any means, it means creating a nation, and a world, in which all human beings have a decent standard of living."

Wait a moment, praise for the New Deal? No interest in nationalization? That definition sounds a lot like capitalism!

You might have noticed that this program focuses on making capitalism work better and not replacing it with an entirely new system based on social ownership. This has made his definition of socialism a matter of contention.

While "socialism" is a system based around replacing private ownership of the means of production with social ownership, which generally means having the workers own and operate them instead — either through cooperatives or the state — Bernie hasn't shown much of an interest in using the government to promote this change.

Bernie's explanation of "socialism" is, in fact, closer to what political philosophers refer to as "social democracy." This is a capitalist system, since the means of production are still privately owned, where the state heavily regulates the economy and has an active welfare system in place to correct for the worst problems inherent to capitalism like inequality, cyclic instability, or the profit motive encouraging people to do things against the public interest.

snip

[Hortensis]

4. "How Venezuela Fell From the Richest Country in South America into Crisis"

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/venezuela-crisis-5-reasons-why-oil-rich-nation-brink-collapse-n674051

Bankrupted by Socialism, Venezuela Cedes Control of Companies
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-12/bankrupt-by-socialism-venezuela-hands-over-control-of-companies

How Venezuela Struck It Poor: The tragic -- and totally unavoidable -- self destruction of one of the world's richest oil economies
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/16/how-venezuela-struck-it-poor-oil-energy-chavez/

Biden administration grants humanitarian protections to Venezuelans in the US
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/08/politics/biden-administration-tps-venezuela/index.html

Venezuela food crisis, fallout of a mismanaged economy
A whopping 87 per cent of Venezuelans say they don't have money to buy enough food
https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/food/venezuela-food-crisis-result-of-a-failed-economy-54509



A Venezuelan Refugee Crisis

[brooklynite]

8. Of course, none of those socialism...

SOCIALISM (noun): "any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods"

[ck4829]

16. Who uses the dictionary?

When I saw people saying buying stuff before a blizzard or not wanting to get shot in school was “socialism”, I don’t remember anyone throwing the dictionary at them then.

[ck4829]

15. K&R