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I almost got a Trump voter to agree with socialism by pointing out that the concrete plant he and his father worked at, which supported a whole town, could be shut down by someone halfway around the world to save a buck. I asked him “shouldn’t you have a say in that?”
What stopped him from agreeing in the end?
His buddy saying “that’s communism!”
The correct response to that is "what is communism?"
Proceeds to give a description of capitalism.
That is absolutely painful
I used to hang out with a few rednecks. Good people, but absolutely indoctrinated. Union workers who didn't know the history of unions.
We got drunk around a bonfire one night and I started talking about solidarity, unions, workers rights, labor value, personal / private / public property, etc, etc.
By 3am, we were talking about seizing the means of production. If we'd had a few cases of s'mores schnapps, we could've changed history
I hung out with the warehouse guys at my job and one of them talked about how good his wife's nurses union was. I agreed with him, and made a joke about the warehouse guys unionizing.
A few of them got really upset, and couldn't explain why they were upset. They just kept saying "We didn't understand". Like brother, right now - there's nothing stopping the company from firing you... I think you don't understand.
It's like that all around people mostly agree on things or at least want to work together. The problem is our "Leaders" don't want any part of that.
My dad says most people are stupid and shouldn't own the means of production, since they will fuck it up. And that's the only intellectual critique of socialism I ever heard. Everyone else is just saying some stupid bullshit about minorities having rights and feeding the undeserving.
And that’s the only intellectual critique of socialism I ever heard
It almost is, until you watch 5 minutes of billionares talking and go "so these are the smarter guys that won't fuck it up".
His critique carries the underlying assumption that private owners of the means of production are selected for their merit rather than nepotism, chance, corruption, and sociopathic tendencies.
Even so, give the little guy a chance to fuck it up for once.
But they're not fucking it up. They're making it better for them. You're not even on their radar
Right, as if things haven't already been fucked up entirely in the default of capitalist ownership
Is that supposed to be a serious critique?
People currently own the means of production.
Less people, tiny amount of extremely rich people.
Rich != Smart. Literally 0 correlation. Significant amount of evidence showing that being or becoming extremely rich actually makes you both stupid and a psychopath.
Your dad's argument can also be applied to the concept of a democratic government.
People are stupid, they shouldn't be allowed to vote or have rights, they should just be be told what to do by their betters.
... your dad has the social iq of a toddler, or a cult member.
When its owned by everyone, one person doesn't get to mess it up, everyone gets a say. And you still will have people with business minds, mechanical minds, and just let me do labour minds
You should ask your dad if people are stupid why are they allowed to vote?
If the answer is that they shouldn't be allowed you can go down the rabbit hole of "who is worthy to vote?" and end up with a variation of fascism. Or if everyone should be able to vote the followup is if people are allowed to decide how their government is ran why shouldn't they be allowed to decide how their work gets done?
The thing with letting people own the means of production is that it heavily correlates with the concept of democracy. It's contradictory to be pro democracy and against collective ownership of the means of production.
He's not wrong, per se.
People that are closer to production are less likely to see the business holistically. That's not their fault...I think many CEOs don't want employees talking about the big picture. They want silos. An us vs. them mentality between support and developers...between accounting and purchasing...between human resources and Chad in sales....etc.
Of course, that goes for an individual person. When you have all departments represented and conferring, then you've got the whole picture, and that changes the calculus significantly.
My dad is a teacher with two masters degrees, was the teachers union president for 20 years and is MAGA.
According to Helen Cox Richardson, socialism was a thought-stopping buzzword as far back as the antebellum 19th century as objectionable because it was about giving benefits to the poors who owned nothing and therefore deserved nothing. The US has been about the preservation of hierarchy from the beginning despite the alleged promise of the American dream, an honest day's work for an honest day's pay.
We've only begun to develop fundamental infrastructure and social safety nets for the public since FDR's New Deal, and that still didn't include women or blacks until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and Women's Lib in the 1970s.
All the while, the industrialists who supported Hoover were super sore about the New Deal and have been striving to gut those programs from day one, even though the US thrived with them in place in the 1950s and 1960s, our ownership class wanted to own everything, and to Hell with the worker class.
They got their in-road with the election of Reagan, thanks to Falwell's Moral Majority and the US evangelical movement (an early white Christian nationalist movement) uniting behind a single issue: abortion access. They didn't care about Reagan's gutting of social services, deregulation of businesses (who'd already shown they can't be trusted to self-govern), and the normalization of corruption in politics. They were just terrified that women were (allegedly) killing their own babies.
Anyway, Communism and socialism got a bad rap thanks to the USSR which was an honest effort at command economics during Lenin's rule, but got trashed by corruption with Stalin. It didn't help that since Wilson, the US and Europe had been sanctioning the Soviet Union just for trying to do a communism.
And, sometimes in the name of containment the US would seek to sabotage any other efforts at socialist democracy, first with CIA subterfuge and sometimes with military intervention.
If the only thing you disagree about is terminology, why insist on using terms that other people are opposed to? Find a common ground.
I think despite people's best efforts socialism is becoming less of a dirty word. Every time you correct someone by identifying that what they're thinking of is authoritarianism or communism you can bring them around to the idea that socialism is just allowing workers to have more of a say in their workplace and decommodifying basic needs, which is much harder to be so hard-line against.
Of course socialism is just a stepping stone to communism but it could never happen without some generations of de-programming our culture from this capitalist mindset.
What are the actual downsides to socialism?
And don't say corruption. We have that in capitalism as well.
Also don't say parasites too lazy to work taking advantage of the system. We have that in capitalism also. They own mega yachts instead of a shopping cart.
People hear socialism and immediately think Stalin, that's one problem. Another problem is thinking having a capitalistic system and socialist services are somehow necesarily mutually exclusive.
Capitalism works fine in some area's. Socialism is needed where it won't. Healthcare is a case in point. Everybody needs it when they need it, so there's really no reason to leave that shit to any "market" and therefore chance. Investments in public transport, taking care of the livability at the bottom end of the economic ladder are other examples.
Capitalism is dogshit whenever you have deal with things you just can't, or morally shouldn't, attach an ROI to.
Basic neccesities (healthcare, including mental healthcare, nutrition, electricity, clothing, heating, water, communication, housing, transport, etc.) should be covered by default.
Then, less basic neccesities (like entertainment, fashion, safe drugs) could be profited from.
Well the downside is they would lose a tiny insignificant amount of profit as they would no longer be allowed to abuse their workforce quite so much. If they actually sat down and did the maths they would work out that it isn't really worth fighting against it. But a lot of Republicans don't like it on principle.
That's why they always come up with hand wavy arguments about the need to incentivise work. You can always see them a mile off because they're the type that keep yelling about how minimum wage should not be a livable wage, because it discourages people to advance.
Every single thing that people criticize socialism or socialist countries for is literally just a description of capitalism.
And why do so many people not know what it is?
I suspect, in largest part, because:
Rule 239: Never be afraid to mislabel a product.