Do you think this is true about socialism?
Socialism will never work because it’s founded on emancipation, and you can’t force people to emancipate themselves. That would be the opposite of emancipation.
I’m not sure if this is a quote, I can’t remember where I heard it.
"Emancipation" in this case meaning emancipation from wage slavery.
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Also, when you have fixed pricing on products, there's suddenly no reliable feedback on what people really need. Now you can gauge it from how much they are ready to pay for a product, but with fixed pricing that is lost. And then the factories are constantly producing too much of something or too little of it.
And especially when it constantly happens that there is too little of this and that, a black market is practically sure to appear to get people what they need. And that grows corruption that then destroys the rest. Hooray.
Of course you can just ask people if they would want to have __________. But often they answer "yes" to things they won't bother to get anyway or "no" to things they will actually end up liking once their friends notice how nice they are. So, in reality that doesn't really help. You can also build some very advanced computer system that follows everyone in realtime and always guesses with a high precision what the people need at each time. But then we have a very horrible system where we are being spied on every moment. Not what I want, either.
If this problem doesn't get tackled, socialism cannot work.
Not sure this is the primary issue tbh, most human desires are fabricated anyways by the system, that needs our continuous consumption to function.
The issue in existing socialist countries, primarily the USSR, was that the leadership simply did not care about the population. There is no true socialism under dictatorship.
There is no true socialism under dictatorship.
I agree.
Lenin was probably the worst thing that has happened to socialism. I wonder if he managed to taint it for good?
On the other hand, he wasn't special in that regard. People with unchecked power are almost always monsters, because people in general are awful.
I don't really agree that people in general are awful, but we do all have our awful sides.
And indeed, people who really know how to get to the top and stay there tend to almost always have skills and a mindset that steer them towards dictatorship.
Yes, wasn't it studied that psychopathy is the #1 trait to get to the top in a capitalist setting?