fixed cyberghost's "meme"

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Until you understand what socialism is?
- Anyone that learns what socialism really means and then thinks it is a bad thing must be selfish and self centered. There is no alternative, you either don’t get it or you believe society should continue to hold “certain people” down for the uplifting of “us”
  
  I'm a socialist/communist btw
  
  My big issue with socialism is more about the implementation. I'm not sure there is a way of enforcing socialism that isn't antithetical to the goal of socialism- a more even distribution of power (which we quantify as wealth in a capitalist society).
  In general, I don't think there are any stable economic systems that don't decay into feudalism when abused. At least for the economic systems we've come up with so far. The best one I know of is the gift economy, but that requires people to not expect something in return, because otherwise it could be reduced down to capitalism.
  In short, all the economic systems so far, despite their best intentions, reinforce inequality.
  
  It’s always about the implementation. No one I know would consciously decide that everyone should be poor or we should all pick someone to stomp on. But in older communities like Native American tribes, if you didn’t pull your weight you were left behind. “If a man doesn’t work neither shall he eat.” There are exceptions, but you and I are always going to disagree about those exceptions. How many chances does a person get? What about people who abuse the system? Whoever enforces this has an agenda, not to say capitalism doesn’t, but to assume that socialism as an implementation will be devoid of discrimination is utter nonsense.
  
  I don't think native tribes are the architects we should look to for modern society. Maybe there is something to learn from them but only in an anecdotal sense.
  
  I agree, but what is human history but chronicled anecdotes?
  
  Data and data analytics?
  
  Socialism is based on public ownership of means of production. In order to shift to socialism in foreseeable future and in the past, it requires forceful removal of private property and converting it into public, since I can not imagine that all people would do this voluntarily (and they did not do that voluntarily historically). So, yes, you require forceful state, a dictatorship. Soviets openly called that “dictatorship of the working class” when they were nationalizing means of production. That included by the way farmers who used seasonally hired labour. They fought to destroy those farms and farmers were treated as enemy to socialism. Ukrainian Holodomor that killed millions of people is a good example of such fight.
  So, before blank-calling other people self-centered and selfish, maybe you should learn a bit more about socialism and its history?
  
  Did you just say the Holodomor was a good fight ☠️
  
  A good example of the issue. Nit that the fight was good
  
  Good example, dammit!
  
  You’re talking about the “tankie” type of communism. Don’t worry, it’s a fairly common mistake.
  
  I am talking about socialism as it existed in history. If you have another historical example where all the means of productions were public, you are welcome to educate me.
  
  Monroe ensured there are no historic examples. We (USA) destabilized entire continents just to keep it from being established democratically.
  
  Holodomor was a genocide perpetuated by fascists against the working class of an unfavored nationality to benefit the favored nationality. It's a great example of why you redfash aren't socialists.
  
  Quite sure this is not what happen. The Soviets were trying to build socialism via the process of collectivization. While some argue that it was also a process of suppression of Ukrainian nationalism, the collectivization was the official policy at the time in the whole USSR and it destroyed lots of farmers everywhere, and killed or sent to exile huge amount of farmers and their families. Ukraine was affected more since it was primarily agricultural with strong farmer class. But hunger and deaths from hunger were common in other agricultural regions too, just to less extend than in Ukraine. In any case, this is what the process of collectivization did, the process of building socialism. Farmers do not want to give up the means of production - hence the forced collectivization.
  But my main point that calling selfish those who against socialism because they know about these historical examples is just wrong.
  
  It's exactly what happened; your regurgitation of redfash propaganda does nothing to change that.
  
  While I don't particularly agree with the example you've given, the idea is correct. In order to have any kind of system (especially at its inception), you need to have authoritarianism of some sort, and in the modern liberal democratic countries, this authoritarianism is in the form of the law and police, who protect private property so capitalists can do their thing.
  When it comes to socialism, in almost every case it was done via a military dictatorship, and it's rather hard to tell if this was done because everyone was copying the big 'socialist' countries like soviet union or china, or if dictatorships are the most practical way to do so. With dictatorships there's a substantial risk of putting someone in power who's just an opportunist and wants all the power above all else like Stalin, or having a party that doesn't really care to bring on communism and it turns into oligarchy.
  However, it's not all dictators - Paris Commune was a revolution that had the dictatorship of proletariat, as in the dictator was the working class, and while it failed, it definitely was on the right track, at least in my opinion. You minimize the risks of having a singular dictator, but to succeed you need to have the majority of people on board with the idea, which is a tall order especially today where any talk of socialism is met by misinformed skepticism and years of anti-communist propaganda by the liberal democracy world.

929 comments