Welfare capitalism was better than the other ones.
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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And better than real existing what-was-called-communism (as to not trigger the no true Scotsman leftists)
Listen man I know I'm edging pretty close to "no true Scotsman," but hear me out... it's not that it wasn't "true socialism," but whether something is socialist economically isn't necessarily tied to authoritarianism. Like, fuck tankies, but also I do think that combining market economics and truly representative democracy with proportional representation and freedom of speech and association with socialist ownership structures (as in the abolition of corporate governance from any input from, frankly, absentee "owners") is the move. Socialism doesn't have to be authoritarian, nor does it have to be against market economics. Ya know?
I got a death threat from a tankie today because I suggested that Kamala would have not been as bad as the current administration.
That was fun, don't worry I was banned shortly thereafter from that community
Accelerationism is a hell of a drug. You would have thought they would learn something from Weimar Germany, but no.
Was it that six-sided ursine one..?
It’s just that that’s not socialism either. You’re no true scotsmaning existing socialism, and idealizing not-socialism. You’re a social democrat, a cooperativist, maybe a mutualist, which is the right thing to be. You seek to manage contradictions, you don’t idealize their synthesis.
That's true, but i don't know if it's fair to say that mandating employee ownership is anything other than socialist. Not Marxist, sure. Certainly leftist. But isn't employee ownership and governance of the means of production, by definition, socialism?
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yeah I keep hearing how we're a democracy but I've never felt it ever was. We have the technology to do a direct democracy but no one really wants to do it.
I mean state capitalism is by definition not communism. This isn't a no true Scotsman they're just two different things.
Sure but words have philosophical pre-definitions and real world usages. It’s also possible that the pre-definitions are impossible, and that all attempts to achieve them lead to something else, it’s natural then that that something else becomes the new meaning of the word.
If I gave a recipe for bread, and it always came out to be shit, that word “bread” would come to mean “shit”, even if the old book said “bread is not shit”
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Because it's half way to socialism?
It's the most left of the right-wing scope that is pro-capitalism, but doesn't address the underlying contradiction and will inevitably backslide to the right. It'll take longer, but will eventually side with fascism as capitalism historically does
All human systems contain contradictions. They don’t synthesize. The very act of system building by humans is the act of manipulating nature into a box it wasn’t made to fit into. Socialism has contradictions: global planning of the economy vs somehow not centralizing power and being susceptible to oligarchy, the overwork of the “from each according to their abilities” when everyone is motivated to exaggerate “to each according to their needs”. Among many others.
What we need is multipolarity. All systems need to be actively tried and tested in the fire of competition. People need to be allowed to vote with their feet. For instance, European capitalism is CLEARLY superior in every way to American capitalism, while simultaneously being more free than Chinese “communism”.
I'm referring more to as a Mode of Production, where the Socialist Mode is the democratic organization of the workers who together control all aspects of the business such as wages and investment. Richard Wolff explains it well. Socialism doesn't mean exclusively using central planning or centralization of power.
The contradictions I'm talking about are between the workers and the capitalist owners. That exists whether the capitalism is state or private, and whether the capitalism is laissez-faire or social democracy.
That contradiction will always lead to the capitalists accumulating wealth and using that wealth to improve the mechanisms of which they are able to accumulate wealth. High taxation, while an improvement over laissez-faire, does not change that reality. Wealth will still be accumulated by capitalists, who will then use that wealth to change the laws for their benefit. Democracy will backslide as corporate influence grows year over year. We see this backsliding all over Europe to various degrees, despite them having significantly more social safety nets than America. There is no type of capitalism that won't lead to Fascism.
China is a mix of capitalism and socialism. Richard Wolff also explains this well. It doesn't matter if they claim to be communist or not, or if they claim to be on that path or not, the current system is a mix
I think you are talking about cooperativism. That’s a form of capitalism. Again, it would be great to have a multipolar world where we could try that out. But it doesn’t not have contradictions, it just has new ones. Every politicial system has dialectical contradictions, and we simply flow from old ones to new ones as material conditions change. I recommend reading the deluzian criticism of dialectics.
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Social welfare capitalism is a good mix but over time the social aspect got burried
Social welfare capitalism is good in theory. But social welfare is in direct opposition to capitalism, and there is no way to actually contain the corrupting power of capitalism. The social aspect will always get buried.
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We're now trying pump and dump capitalism
Just look at life expectancies. Countries with social capitalism do the best and not by a little. By arguing everyone is the same, it's really supporting the worst.
But 2 large economies tried to impliment communism... while engaged in a cold war against much more entrenched ideologies, while having corrupt leaders and they didn't do it well.
The corrupt leaders were inevitable under the ideologies they devised. I swear people think it’s somehow an accident that Stalin and Mao were evil dictators and if only they weren’t we’d have true socialism. No. The system of Leninism is the centralization of power into a vanguard which limits dissent. All Leninist countries are fundamentally dictatorships. Dictatorships transfer power over time via dynastic means, and you always eventually get a power hungry madman when you do that without any checks and balances or democratic recall. And no other Marxist groups can get power enough to actually implement their ideas. QED socialism fails.
I swear people think it’s somehow an accident that Stalin and Mao were evil dictators and if only they weren’t we’d have true socialism.
I don't know about Mao, but while Stalin being an evil dictator wasn't an accident, Lenin being an evil dictator was. The Russian revolution wasn't just the Bolsheviks; there were many different groups of which the Bolsheviks simply happened to come out on top because of a ton of coincidences and bad decisions by everyone else.
And no other Marxist groups can get power enough to actually implement their ideas. QED socialism fails.
The Ukrainians did it until they were invaded by the Soviets, and Rojava's experiment seems to be mostly successful.
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There's also been quite a few smaller socialist and anarchist societies that have existed under similar external influences. Almost like capitalism is tied up with ideological warmongering or something.
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What’s that Churchill said about being the worst thing except for everything else that’s been tried?
Churchill said that about democracy, interesting you interchange the two.
Something that's incorrect
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Don't look at what came before mercantile capitalism.
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