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But "socialism" is a scary word
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this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
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People don't realize that not every implementation of Socialist policies have to involve a vanguardist dictatorship like China or USSR (which is what almost every American have in mind when they think of "Socialism")
Well it depends on how you define "socialism" which is used to mean anything from a socialist policy to a fully socialist society. For some socialist policies, you can simply vote in some socialists into a parliamentary system and get them to pass some.
But there's never been enough socialists peacefully voted into power to make a fully socialist/communist society, so those attempts have always come at the barrel of a gun, which so far has always resulted in an authoritarian regime.
I'd love to see one actually get voted into power someday, but I have a feeling I will be waiting for a very long time.
There are many examples of elections won by socialist/communist parties. There would have been more of they weren't outlawed or suppressed historically.
There are also examples of revolutions that didn't end in authoritarian regimes, for example the ones that ended in anarchist communities.
Yes as I said if we are talking about a share of parliament, that's true. But fully socialist (communist) governments? Only by force so far.
Does Kerala (though only a state and receives national funds) or Allendé's Chile (Overthrown by US supported military coup after a couple of years) count, or do they not for the reasons in brackets or others?
Kerala: As you mention, not a country. Also didn't really seize the means of production. But when I think of Communism working well, it's at a local level like this rather than at the level of a country. There are communes and kibbutzes that lasted decades. Generally a tough life but at a small level you can have a government controlling everything without hopefully making as many huge mistakes. Worst case you can more easily just leave if they do (hopefully they let you).
Chile: Also didn't fully seize the means of production, it's more or less a perfect example of a government that's run by a socialist majority for a small amout of time and which enacts socialist measures during that time, but never reaching full communism. This is the kind of thing I would hold up as the ideal case. Socialism for long enough to strengthen the situation of the people, but not long enough to wreck the economy and grow into full blown authoritarianism.
Thanks for the detailed responses.
Sounds like, to me, that you have a bigger issue with government than Socialism or Communism themselves. Are you much of an anarchist?
No, I'm more of a social democrat. I'm a believer that the best we've come up with is to have a government who's job is to fill in the holes (economic externalities) of capitalism, while curbing it's worst instincts (monopolies, tragedy of the commons issues like global warming).
Indeed this is the system the most successful and happy countries use. Go too far to the capitalist side or too far to the socialist side and things deteriorate quickly, as history shows over and over.
Right now, especially in the USA, we are experiencing what happens when things go too far to the capitalist side.
Unfortunately it seems that this combined with misinformation leads to fascism which will destroy even capitalism and likely leave us only with war and authoritarianism. Which is what you get at both extremes of the political spectrum.
When it comes to personal liberties, I am more of a libertarian though. I am against the war on drugs or most wars, proxy or otherwise, unless they are in defense. The non aggression principle in libertarianism is something that appeals to me.
How about you? Full blown socialist I'm guessing?
More Anarchist, I think that we should try to disengage from states and their power structures and treat people with respect and autonomy. Try to bring thee principles into daily life and interactions and live as much of a better alternative as I can.
Devolution of powers is a fine first step to work towards if engaging electorily, but that's a long way from the be all and end all of political ideology.
I'm definitely on board on the small scale. Unfortunately when faced with issues like health care, education, global warming, and curbing the excesses of capitalism, only a government can solve those issues. At least it's the only mechanism we've found so far.
But yes, government should always be the tool of last resort for things that can be done no other way.
Those still to be solved problems may also be the result of governments. Those problems would likely shrink (albiet be replaced by others) when there aren't global systems of power and exploitation pushing to keep extracting resources from a corrupted Global South, polluting as processed by an overworked Asia, into commodities to sell to underpaid and liminally employed citizens of the Global North for them to destress and feel a fleeting sense of meaning in our increasingly atomised societies.
It's a good point. One that is true to some extent for communism as well. If we were operating in a system that was less efficient as extracting resources and using them for production, we would conceivably get more out of the resources we have and avoid the pointless cycles you point out.
Unfortunately in practice it didn't work that well because the resources under communism were just used less efficiently and in a more polluting way which negated a lot of the gains. The net result was just less benefit getting to the end user. Though you could argue that people were freed from the capitalist treadmill of overwork to feed largely meaningless consumption that you mention. They just had to pay in quality of life, occasional hunger and genocides, and personal freedoms.
The other issue is that if one country is operating inefficiently and there is another country operating efficiently, inevitably the other country will overtake the first, as we saw in the Cold War. So such a system would need to be enforced pretty strictly on a worldwide level least it get beaten by a system more streamlined for production and militaristic endeavors.
For anarchy, enforcement isn't strong enough to not get taken over by another system (or at least the requirement for personal buy in of all in the system is too high to be practical)
I agree with all your points on Communism. At least in terms of how it's been implemented, at least in name, by the Soviet Union and the PRC it has been as extractivist and imperialist as Capitalist nations.
Though one can't really divorce the conditions in countries such as Nigeria or Bangladesh from Capitalism. The Global North's standard of living requires the conditions there to exist, the Socialist with Totalitarian Characteristic nations at least keep their poor conditions mostly in house (albiet with some local imperialism, and the PRC has recently started expanding outside it's borders though mostly infrastructure and resource acquisition so far.)
They're not quite two sides of the same coin as the goals for growth are expressly different but neither cares for social connections, a sense of belonging, society in the real, let alone the environment.
I agree on your points as well. We are so limited by human nature and lack of consensus that I don't think we can escape these problems without something extreme like genetically modifying the whole population of the world.
It's been very nice discussing politics with you. Such civil political conversations are rare and noteworthy.
Agreed. Have a good one.
There is no distinction. A socialist/communist party with a majority in a parliament forms a government, and there are examples of those elected. Even a lot of the authoritarian ones established in a revolution had a parliament with non communist parties having representatives.
Of course there's a distinction. A partial socialist/communist government has never implement full communism (seize the means of production and guarantee equal distribution of resources). That's only ever been done by force.
They have achieved things like universal health care and education, however, and for that we should all be grateful. IMHO the best case scenario really is a parliamentary system with a socialist majority to get these kind of things passed but leave a heavily regulated capitalist economic system in place.
You are repeating false statements. There have been fully communist elected governments in Nepal, India, San Marino and probably more. In Spain we had a elected republican government run mainly by socialists and even an anarchist president.
The reason why most of them have been through a revolution is because they were declared illegal.
Nepal: Installed by force in the armed uprising against Rana rule in 1951
India: Never seized the means of production (or really got very powerful IMO)
San Marino: Attemped a coup and never seized the means of production.
I'm sorry but calling the USSR a "vanguardist dictatorship" is just not historically accurate. Plenty of democratic mechanisms in the USSR, at any rate much better than anything else we've had so far. For a dictatorship, it dissolved itself quite peacefully didn't it?
Sadly, attempts at socialism in which workers didn't take the power of the state, ended up like Salvador Allende in Chile, like Mosaddegh in Iran, like the Spanish Second Republic... Idealism only gets you so far, sadly.
Fucking lmao
I'm sure you'd say the same about Pinochet, wouldn't you? :)
Yes, if only Allende was a dictator, THEN he wouldn't have trusted Pinochet. That was what planted that seed of trust in Allende's heart - not being a dictator.
Ah, yes, when Social Democrats are overthrown by Western powers, they're good comrades; any other time, they're social fascists.
The same Spanish Second Republic which was backstabbed and destroyed by Soviet-bootlicking MLs?
While the soviets did ostensibly appear to have democratic structures, the reality was that the democracy was a fascade at best.
Real democratic mechanisms in the USSR: highest unionisation rates in the world, announcement/news boarboards in every workplace administered by the union, free education to the highest level for everyone, free healthcare, guaranteed employment and housing (how do the supposedly "authoritarian leaders" benefit from that?), neighbour commissions legally overviewing the activity and transparency of local administration, neighbour tribunals dealing with most petty crime, millions of members of the party, women's rights, local ethnicities in different republics having an option to education in their language and widespread availability of reading material and newspapers in their language, lowest rates of wealth inequality in any country, more female engineers in the USSR than in the rest of the world, higher representation of women in the party and in the justice system than anywhere else at the time...
Please explain me how getting to vote for the less-evil but equally neoliberal party once every 4 years is more democratic than that.
First off they were installed in the government by force You could really only vote for one party. And usually the elections were to some degree rigged. And the government that did all the nice things you mention also committed genocides, mass starvation, massively oppressed its people, and finally spent so much on its military that they crashed the economy.
Not to say western democracy is perfect (the US is especially flawed these days), but there are a good amount of European countries that instituted many socialist policies democratically without that baggage.
"The government did all the nice things you mention" you don't get it, that's not the government doing things, all of those are mechanisms for democracy that barely exist in western countries. You're basically saying "well yeah those things did exist, but have you considered that you get to vote for republicans/democrats (US) or socialdemocrats/christian-conservatives (EU) every 4 years to decide which of the two parties will apply austerity policy?" You're not talking about democracy, you're talking about electoralism, yes we have electoralismo in the west more than they had in the USSR, it's just that electoralism isn't democracy.
Not true, there's not one case of genocide committed by the USSR. There was famine in the preindustrial soviet union during the period of land collectivisation, but guess what, there's famine everywhere in preindustrial societies recurringly, and once the country industrialised, hunger disappeared.
Again, revisionism. We are literally living in an era in which the NSA has access to your information in a digital database, and in which the government will happily tell you how they use facial recognition on protests to see who's protesting. There are literally more people in jail in the USA TODAY than there were in Gulags at the peak of the gulag system.
The academic consensus is that the USSR constantly tried to put an end to the arms race with the US, at times going as far as unilaterally reducing their nuclear arsenal, which the US never corresponded back. The militaristic empire which forced huge military expenditure in the USSR was none other than the USA, and again, that's academic consensus. Fucking Zbigniew Brzezinski used to brag about that himself.
Again, ahistorical bullshit that you've never even bothered to look into. The USSR NEVER suffered a crisis after WW2, the only time that there were some problems economically was during the liberalization process in Perestroika, towards the end of the soviet union. It's the illegal and antidemocratic dismantling of the eastern block its centrally planned economy which drove the economy to the gutter and ended the lives of millions of people through unemployment, lack of basic goods, lack of healthcare, homelessness, alcoholism and suicide. Seriously, do a quick search, look at the historic GDP of the USSR/Russia, and tell me when it falls, before or after 1991.
We are literally funding a genocide in Gaza
That's where you're wrong. It was the existence of the USSR being pioneer in all of those policies, and the struggle of hundreds of thousands of unionised workers in Europe trying to imitate this policy, and the resulting fear of a revolution in western Europe by the elites that made these concessions, that led to this progress. Again, you're talking ahistorically, as if these advances had been earned electorally in the west.
We can at least agree that it was a dictatorship under Stalin, right?