First, please define what you mean by socialism. That word encompasses a lot of very different forms of government, even when it’s used “correctly”, and it’s typically not.
The Nazis called themselves socialists, and I’m not moving there.
When many people say socialism, what they mean is capitalist democracy with a strong social safety net, strong government regulation, and highly progressive taxation.
Edit: for the love of god, please do a little bit of reading about socialism before reinforcing my point that this word is used terribly. We won’t take the wiki as ultimate truth, but please read. Be better. Read and think first. Comment later.
When many people say socialism, what they mean is capitalist democracy with a strong social safety net, strong government regulation, and highly progressive taxation.
Let’s go with that definition since that’s what most people think of as socialist.
That is objectively not socialism (any definition of socialism that begins by defining it as a form of capitalism is fundamentally confused)
That said, I’d agree that it is a widespread misunderstanding today. And what people mean when they say socialism is usually actually social democracy (which despite sounding like the word socialism is a mixed system based on capitalism)
Using that misunderstanding as the definition I would definitely live in many of those countries. Many have some of the highest qualities of life in the world, low rates of poverty, universal access to good healthcare and education, and good social mobility.
E.g Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Germany
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Yes… Please reread my last comment more slowly… particularly the first two paragraphs.
I swear. This place is way more toxic than Reddit.
I can’t imagine someone being so condescending there on a topic like this.
Please read the Wikipedia article. We don’t have to agree that Wikipedia is an ultimate source of truth, but it is a pretty good article.
I don’t think I’ll be able to communicate anything more to someone who tells me to “read more slowly”.
Provided there is an appropriate amount of technocracy (decisions made by experts rather than politicians), it’d be hard for me to think of a better form of government.
Anyway, this was largely the US until Regan. Social safety net could’ve been stronger, but that had to evolve. Same as in Europe.
Except , racism. Addressing that is not a part of any definition of socialism that I’m aware of. Equality is certainly going along with the spirit of this definition of “socialism”
I would love to.
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Why couldn’t that what you just described be called something different other than “socialism” then? Sounds like a bad move to make it fall under that same umbrella especially since that term is very frowned upon if not straight out forbidden in a few European countries for example.
It is, the term for this type of system is called Social Democracy which is not a synonym for socialism, but people (Americans at least) confused and conflate the two terms to the point that they’ve become one and the same in the minds of many people who don’t really understand the terms or their origins.
Because we’re too busy categorizing this stupid shit into bins of “good” and “bad” when reality is a greyscale between these two. These are fairly reasonable points and should be viewed as a more centrist POV, but since we (read: primarily North America) have a tribal “us vs. them” animosity about it we lump many reasonable ideas together on each end of the spectrum. Things like not having to go bankrupt when you or a loved one needs an emergency hospital visit somehow automatically gets lumped in with the other extreme “socialist” ideas just to solely argue against it and not budge from their end of the extreme.
Fucking Preach! I do not understand this mentality of one team or the other.
Words, used in non technical contexts, mean what people mean when they use them.
Descriptive. Not proscriptive.
Incidentally, most people suck at communication
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So in your view these people are inherently more ‘great’ than others? What would you call these people who are so above average? The over people? The overmen? The ubermensch… oh whoops
Are you seriously trying to compare that statement to Nazi ideology?
Yes. I think that great artists and scientists and chefs and authors and teachers and those that work hard contribute more to society than others.
The Nobel prizes are being announced this week.
The work of Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman saved millions. Most people are not capable of that.
Yes I think subdividing humanity into the great people who perform all the work, and the lowly masses that exist to serve them is at the heart of Nazi ideology so I am making that comparison.
“If you hate the Death Star so much, why don’t you go live on Alderaan?”
Death Star blows up Alderaan.
"Why would socialism do this?!
Goddamn
I moved to Germany from the US this year. There is subsidized public transit, universal healthcare, minimum vacation time, a heavy union culture, strong renter-favored laws (although capitalist for profit housing is still an ever growing plague).
As others pointed out, the terminology isn’t a great tool for debate without an agree upon definition. But yes, I would move to a country that cared about people over profits.
There are no countries with socialist policies.
Can you name a country that has workplace democracy? No? Then there isn’t a socialist country out there.
Would I move to the social democracies of the world? I love norway and whatnot politically (as much as a communist can love the state of any country)… but I love having warm air and nature I can enjoy without a coat much more.
Doesn’t any country with cooperatives have workplace democracy?
Norway is cheating because they have many natural resources to sell.
Yes, they have a tiny, insignificant amount.
An entire country has to have workplace democracy for the country to be socialist.
This is kinda like saying “doesn’t any country with a slice of bread have food”
What would change if every company would be democratic?
To begin with, there wouldn’t be an unspoken agreement between companies to keep wages as low as they can be because more than half of the companies in that market agree that the best they can do is starvation wages.
Y’know how totalitarian regimes are incentivized to be shitholes because of the keys to power problem?
https://invidious.asir.dev/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
at the very least, that goes away. But there’s many more other things.
You think a co-op only has a tiny amount of democracy? I think it’s the best form of workers owning the means of production - the definition of socialism.
I believe they meant that worker cooperatives are a small, almost insignificant part of the overall economy in every country that has them. Often co-ops end up serving a small niche market because they really can’t compete with the anti-competitive nature of capitalist big business.
That’s not what I said, my point is that co-ops make up a tiny fraction of a percentage of the economy. If they made up all of it, that would be socialism.
Ah - I misunderstood. My mistake.
What is workplace democracy? Would love to finally hear some socialist philosophy from someone that isn’t a goddamn Hexbear user.
Yeah, they’re really indoctrinated by chinese propaganda, I can’t stand them, and I’m a damn communist.
Workplace democracy can work a vast number of ways, and I can’t claim to have figured out what the best way of doing it is, and this is one of the most contentious areas in socialist theory, but I’ll give a relatively easy to understand example:
A business running democratically, instead of having a CEO who decides everything, could have weekly meetings where everyone gets together and decides what is needed, pay structure, schedules, etc, building decisions through consensus, and then falling back to a vote if people disagree, they could also work like a modern democratic republic and have the workers elect people to various positions, and then maintain heirarchy, if the business is far too large for consensus building to work.
The way a business works currently, under capitalism, is often with a CEO at the top, who controls a group of people directly below him, and so forth, this results in bad divergent incentives, due to the keys to power problem (if you’re not familiar, watch this: https://invidious.asir.dev/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs ). One such example is if i’m a walmart employee, do I give a fuck if walmart does well? No. As long as they don’t go out of business, i’ll be paid the same, who gives a fuck how well the business does if I’m not a partial owner and have no say?
cuba is quite close to real socialism
In what way? I have yet to hear of a single socialist policy from cuba.
Do note: socialism is worker ownership over the means of production.
afaik, in cuba the means of production isn’t directly controlled by the workers but is controlled by the government which acts as a middle man between the workers and the means of production
That’s state capitalism, and has nothing to do with socialism.
The workers control the means of production under socialism, not the government, this makes it in no way socialist by any commonly used definition of socialism by philosophers.
if the government functions as a worker’s union is that state capitalism or socialism?
State capitalism.
What does a “workplace democracy” mean?
I’m envisioning that’s the janitor having a vote in where the brain surgeon makes the next cut.
That’s a possible interpretation of “the people control the means of production”, but that’s just ridiculous.
Well, that is a pretty ridiculous interpretation.
Workplace democracy would most likely and most broadly refer to all employees of a company having a say in how the company is run. Either by voting on policies and changes, or by electing people to various executive/representative roles, much the same way that current Western democracies work.
An example of the janitor voting on where the surgeon makes a cut makes about as much sense as us voting on where the president flies in his helicopter. At best, it doesn’t pass the make sense test, and at worst is a bad faith interpretation of what people mean when they say “workplace democracy”
I’d settle for just having a labor representative in the C-suite at this point.
It’s quite simple, right now businesses are structured in a totalitarian manner, socialism seeks to overthrow that totalitarian regime within your workplace, there’s a number of ways to do this, nobody is suggesting the janitor should decide how a surgeon does his job, we just want to eliminate the useless position of CEO, and replace it with democratic systems managed by the people who work the jobs.
An easy to understand version of this would be if every company was transformed into a worker co-op, but that of course is only one of many models for socialism.
It is important to note that the government is not the worker, and therefore government control over the means of production DOES NOT COUNT.
It means the janitor has a vote on how their duties are done
So…what if they decide their duties are brain surgery?
Like the nonsense a peer post to yours is spewing. From a person who’s handle is “communist”.
They could have reasonable points, but if your philosophy suggests that brain surgeons can get told what to do by janitors, that’s a problem. I wouldn’t call that “totalitarian”. I would call that sane.
Now, what do we do about brain surgeons and the cost of healthcare (which is and will always be phenomenal, no matter who is paying and how it is being paid for)?
Are you being outrageous and arguing in bad faith on purpose?
I genuinely can’t tell, in the event that you’re not, nobody has ever suggested that janitors should be allowed to do the duties of brain surgeons. Furthermore, even if a single absolutely insane janitor decided he should be allowed to do the duties of a brain surgeon… nobody else would agree with them, because we live in a society with vaguely reasonable humans… and that janitor would likely be democratically FIRED for suggesting something so outrageous, or put in a mental institution.
Or are you worried about the janitor uprising in which janitors decide they can do all jobs known to man? Perhaps nothing can stop the janitor uprising, and we are all doomed.
At the very least, they’d keep the streets clean! I, for one, welcome our janitorial overlords.
What kind of idiot workplace would allow that? Perhaps if you don’t assume the people you talk to are literally brain-dead, you might understand what they’re saying.
what if they decide their duties are brain surgery?
In your world the only thing keeping janitors from doing brain surgery is the current corporate structure?
Like the nonsense a peer post to yours is spewing
Which parts are nonsense
but if your philosophy suggests that brain surgeons can get told what to do by janitors,
It can’t.
Now, what do we do about brain surgeons and the cost of healthcare
The government pays for it like in most wealthy nations
The first part reminds me of religious people who can’t fathom ethics existing outside of religion.
“If there’s no hell what’s to stop people from doing bad things?”
You make my brain hurt.
hat’s a bad faith interpretation of “the people control the means of production”.
I want you to consider the difference between the work needed to complete a task, and the work needed to manage a workplace: for one of those tasks, only the experts in that task can meaningfully contribute to the outcome, whereas for the other, everybody who is part of the workplace has meaningful input.
I don’t know about your experience, but everywhere I’ve worked there have been people “on the ground” who get to see the inefficiencies in the logistics of their day to day jobs; in a good job a manager will listen and implement changes, but why should the workers be beholden to this middleman who doesn’t know how the job works?
I’ve also had plenty of roles where management have been “telling me where to cut”.
The question here is “What Counts as Socialism?” Because for most Americans, a functioning society already counts as Socialism. No need to be afraid that your kid gets shot in school? Non-ruinous healthcare for everyone? No need to work at 80 just to survive and pay your rent? Workers rights?
For many Americans this is Socialism or Communism (the same people could not be pressed to tell the difference between those terms).
If you mean the modern idea of socialism, like the nordic nations, then absolutely get me the fuck out of rugged-individuals-at-eachother’s-throats-land please, these people are fucking nuts in the not fun way.
If you’re talking about one of the formerly socialist nations that the United States intentionally took covert action against and destabilized to keep the regional markets open for our capitalists to sociopathically exploit like Venezuela, then no thanks, I’ve already seen enough of that trademark American for private profit cruelty played out domestically in our innumerable tent cities in every American population center.
https://time.com/5512005/venezuela-us-intervention-history-latin-america/
Your response got me curious and I’ve read the entire worldhappiness article you linked. Are you saying you dislike the Nordic countries? If yes, why? The article explains quite thoroughly why living there people feel happy.
No friend, I meant the opposite.
I live in the US, a gold plated dystopia. I would be very much prefer to live in the Nordic nations. I dislike the United States, I see the Nordic nations as role model nations.
No, I want to fix my own country.
These kinds of questions, aimed at any ideology, will result in a “no” for the average person unless they can take their friends and families with them.
To be fair, a lot of people have left their families behind to leave Europe and enter the US.
The bulk of that immigration happened in the 19th and early 20th century when European countries were the most capitalistic and economically stratified.
Economically stratified, absolutely. Capitalistic, though? Most European immigration to the Americas happened when kings and queens still wielded absolute power.
I feel like a lot of redditors are joining because I see a lot of down votes but only one response.
Yes that is true, but the average person in those countries in the 1800’s was starving which changes things a lot.
I took your question as “people living in the US or Europe, would you move to a socialist country” so the average person in that would not be starving, so family and friends matter more.
100% if that country is in northern Europe. Hard nope if it’s in South America.
I’d buy a ticket tomorrow if there was a job for me in a Scandinavian country and I didn’t need to speak the language immediately.
Ireland is calling you. Cost of living is high but check it out.
Soft same. Norway would be awesome. I love the cold.
Not wanting to learn a language of the country you live in, is kinda asocial tbh
I agree with a blend of socialism and capitalism, and in the right places. The US has healthcare in the same category as PlayStations. I don’t think this makes sense.
We should believe in healthy, educated Americans as a common ground. And if you want to save up for a PlayStation, go for it.
Ironically, since the government hasn’t fully stepped in to provide healthcare, coverage has moved to the private sector. So you still have socialist healthcare, just with shitty insurance companies trying to find ways to make billions of dollars from sick individuals.
I think we can do better. Do you?
This is kinda where I’m at.
I believe no American citizen (either natural born or immigrant) should have to work just to live a safe life.
Everyone should have access to a safe, well kept, secure, climate controlled home with internet access, 3 meals a day, and Healthcare.
After that, if people want to “work extra” and save up for legit luxuries and not necessities for life, then let them. Let the people who want to flaunt their wealth have their Lamborghini, while the rest of us are living comfortable with an Electric SUV if you have a family/Electric Coupe if alone(or even better. A walkable city!)
To add to this, I can’t help but notice that pretty much all private sector businesses in control of quality of life have become extremely greedy. There was a time in the 70s where your home wasn’t that expensive, wages were comfortable, retirement was expected, and something like healthcare, with private insurance companies, was not expensive. Even hospital visits without insurance were still feasible.
This makes the capitalism model appealing. We have the freedom to run a business, the government is small, regulations are light, and everyone gets along. It makes sense that old folks are out of touch with how rampantly expensive everything is, because they have their $20k home paid off, they got their social security and pension, and they’re on Medicare (which is ironically a social program). There is little reason to change anything for your personal benefit if you are already retired.
However, the business model of making as much money as possible has caught up, and when you’re getting charged $70 for a Tylenol pill (but don’t worry, insurance covers it), you know there is a serious problem. “But my insurance covers it” is exactly what they want you to think to let this continue for a few more decades.
I love Japan’s bike roads. Anyway yeah we can do so much better. End corporate power.
There’s no need for any privatization. We can simply have a market socialist economy that works on the principles of worker and customer owned companies.
Basically, we can have utility companies (and that type of stuff) be owned equally by the citizens they serve, have all the other companies be heavily antitrust regulated and owned equaly by the workers of said companies through the worker cooperative corporate structure.
Conflict of interest things (like healthcare) can simply be government programs.
This way, we preserve the market and the Playstation while at the same time ensuring that Sony makes more moral choices and pays all their workers fairly.
There’s no need for Uber rich people to even exist, functioning examples of worker cooperative companies exist (For example, Mondragon Group in Spain).
I belive profit itself should be eliminated, we can do just fine without it.
If I have a broken car and want to sell it to my neighbor, how can I do that if profit is eliminated?
I meant corporate profit. Selling your used car wouldn’t earn you any profit in the first place and even if it did, you would be your very own self employed employee.
I meant profit as the money that instead of through fair wages for actual employees is distributed through dividends to shareholders.
I thought everyone had the same definition of the word “profit”, but I guess not.
There’s no need for any privatization. We can simply have a market socialist economy that works on the principles of worker and customer owned companies.
Basically, we can have utility companies (and that type of stuff) be owned equally by the citizens they serve, have all the other companies be heavily antitrust regulated and owned equaly by the workers of said companies through the worker cooperative corporate structure.
Conflict of interest things (like healthcare) can simply be government programs.
This way, we preserve the market and the Playstation while at the same time ensuring that Sony makes more moral choices and pays all their workers fairly.
There’s no need for Uber rich people to even exist, functioning examples of worker cooperative companies exist (For example, Mondragon Group in Spain).
I belive profit itself should be eliminated, we can do just fine without it.
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Probably. If I could get a job with the same standard of living, the moving costs were paid (do not overlook this, it’s insane), the paperwork was trivial or non existant, sure. Bonus perks would be language classes and walkability/bikeability.
It depends on what “socialism” entails, but US capitalism has failed me and mine, has caused so much suffering in my friends and family.
Social(ist) policies are extremely removed from socialism. The countries people list here, aka Canada, Danmark and Ireland among others are extremely capitalist still. This thread is therefore useless.
Yeah, I feel like “a country with strong social safety nets” would be a better way of putting it
Socialism has a TON of historical baggage
Yes. Looking hard at the Nordic countries.
We have socialist policies here in the US. We just have fewer of them than other countries.
My favorite example that I think you could consider is the United States program to assist citizens with ESRD, in some cases I think the entire cost is covered. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_Stage_Renal_Disease_Program
I’m an American who has lived in the UK and Australia. Socialised medical systems are fucking amazing.
