Socialism!
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Like a troublesome foot fungus these are sprouting up all over Melbourne again. I got to meet some of these crazies when I went to observe the Aussie Pride protests last month. I was amazed at their organisation and also how incredibly sure that their ideology is exactly what the world needs and felt justified in achieving that by any means necessary.
In the interests of trying to get a bit of balance in my political analysis can anyone give me examples where socialism has actually worked as an ideology in history? I'm guessing maybe Sweden would be many peoples suggestion but aren't they still mostly free market capitalist but with high taxes and some socialised health and education?
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@Rembrandt said in Socialism!:
n the interests of trying to get a bit of balance in my political analysis can anyone give me examples where socialism has actually worked as an ideology in history?
Depends what your goals were: Genocide and mass deprivation while the elite lived the high life? Plenty of examples there.
Modern, European type Socialism works because it's really capitalism with wealth redistribution and safety nets. Certainly, nothing based on central planning has ever been a success that I can recall.
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As @antipodean alluded to, it really depends on your definition of 'socialism'. According to google, it can be defined as "a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole", which is not exactly a narrow range of activity, and encompasses a whole of shit-fuckery as well as pretty successful 'social-democratic' style systems. At the end of the day, I think that definition is broad enough to cover basically any country where the government plays a part in regulating any part of the means of production. I can't think of an example of a country which isn't socialist by that definition.
Not that I'm on their side or anything (although I find myself becoming more and more socially democratic after living in JP for so long) but I doubt that the muppets going to that event see themselves as living in a communist country, where totalitarianism is used to ensure that everybody should share equally in the wealth created by their collective labor , but where some animals are more equal than others
Seriously, I think that there is seriously benefit in examining how people is certain countries have been able to give up a little personal freedom, and transfer more regulatory authority to the government, in order to give everyone a fairer deal. Having said that, I doubt you are going to hear abut that type of socialism at this event - I suspect it may be SJW dressed up as 'socialism'.
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Dear old Maggie:- "The trouble with Socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people's money".
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@Catogrande said in Socialism!:
Dear old Maggie:- "The trouble with Socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people's money".
And Winston, " If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain".
It's something sensible people grow out of usually. Like capitalism we picked out all the best bits of it years ago and incorporated it into our political system .
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New Zealand was a broadly socialist economy until the Lange government's market based reforms from 1984 (large sell offs of state owned assets to fund social spending) - this is what the left mockingly refers to as "neo-liberalism".
Even the conservative prime minister Robert Muldoon was introducing the large state run productive enterprises (the "Think Big" projects) into the 1980s e.g. the NZ Steel plant was greatly expanded in 1986 (though that was years in the making of course). Some of these projects (e.g. a methanol plant) arose because of additional natural gas discoveries in/off Taranaki in the 1970s i.e. we had this abundant cheap energy source so we built industries to take advantage of it. Of course, these have mostly been sold to foreign investors.
Our electricity generation (which we can proudly say is from largely renewable energy sources) capacity was updated with significant investments in this period.
We'd be a bit fucked if that hadn't have happened. -
@antipodean said in Socialism!:
Certainly, nothing based on central planning has ever been a success that I can recall.
NZRFU Central contracting seems to be doing alright
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Two of Australia's trade unions have pledged their support for Venezuela's socialist paradise:
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Central planning is a key to good govt. Knowing what things to control and what not to is how improvements can be made.
Obviously too much control hinders ideas and investment, too little can have negative impacts in key areas when assets get abused as income providers more than long term society requirements.
Rail is a great example where some control rather than hands off privitisation would have benefited the country more.
The concept of SOEs has worked reasonably well. My criticism would be that it is more difficult for a govt to pull a SOE in line than it is for the SOE to move off the straight and narrow. Generally though, the mechanism keep things balanced. They just need to avoid getting sucked into offering decision makers contracts that are heavily weighted in bonuses from financial performance rather than overall goal measurements. -
Any "system" guided by one ideology like socialism or capitalism is going to be stuffed up, isn't it? All developed nations have a complex form of many things that are can have aspects of socialist/capital etc systems . Too simplistic I know but the military for example is clearly govt. controlled and funded and so definiely very socialist-like. Retail businesses are definitely very capitalist-like.
My own personal opinion is we need socialist aspects to our health and education systems in order to create a fair society. -
@Samurai-Jack said in Socialism!:
Any "system" guided by one ideology like socialism or capitalism is going to be stuffed up, isn't it? All developed nations have a complex form of many things that are can have aspects of socialist/capital etc systems . Too simplistic I know but the military for example is clearly govt. controlled and funded and so definiely very socialist-like. Retail businesses are definitely very capitalist-like.
My own personal opinion is we need socialist aspects to our health and education systems in order to create a fair society.Agree. The areas of contention are things that some people think are public necessities and others think are commodities eg power, water
I always find it funny that people the decry all forms of socialism as stupid are happy to drive around on roads that are funded from various user pools and public borrowings. A fully privatised roading system would be chaos and virtually unusable.
On the other hand those that decry capitalism benefit hugely from the advances made that would happen without such systems.
It's all about balance.
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@Crucial said in Socialism!:
@Samurai-Jack said in Socialism!:
Any "system" guided by one ideology like socialism or capitalism is going to be stuffed up, isn't it? All developed nations have a complex form of many things that are can have aspects of socialist/capital etc systems . Too simplistic I know but the military for example is clearly govt. controlled and funded and so definiely very socialist-like. Retail businesses are definitely very capitalist-like.
My own personal opinion is we need socialist aspects to our health and education systems in order to create a fair society.Agree. The areas of contention are things that some people think are public necessities and others think are commodities eg power, water
I always find it funny that people the decry all forms of socialism as stupid are happy to drive around on roads that are funded from various user pools and public borrowings. A fully privatised roading system would be chaos and virtually unusable.
On the other hand those that decry capitalism benefit hugely from the advances made that would happen without such systems.
It's all about balance.
Government funded roads are not examples of Socialism though. Socialism is a system whereby the workers control the means of production. This is not what happens with roads, hospitals or the military.
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@hydro11 Not an expert by any means so really shouldn't really comment cos could get into trouble but that is a bit simplistic, isn't it?
Straight from wiki:
Socialism is a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production,[10] as well as the political theories, and movements associated with them.[11] Social ownership may refer to forms of public, collective, or cooperative ownership, or to citizen ownership of equity.[12] There are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them.[13] Social ownership is the common element shared by its various forms.[5][14][15]
I thoughtSocialismCommunism is a system whereby the workers control the means of production. Straight from "Sociology 101Unit 3 Karl Marx" -
Hydro is correct. The roads example was silly. Since when does capatalism not believe in govt?
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@Tregaskis A little ironic given her father's work relied on those roads. The very work that permitted her to have an upper middle-class upbringing. The very type who can afford to crap on about socialism. Much easier with a safety net provisioned by the labours of others.
I guess poor people just use footpaths and bicycle lanes...
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If people disagree wth socialism the best thing to do is kill them apparently
Ken Livingstone: Venezuela crisis due to Chávez's failure to kill oligarchs
Ex-London mayor says wealthy families using power over trade to undermine Hugo Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro
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@jegga said in Socialism!:
If people disagree wth socialism the best thing to do is kill them apparently
Ex-London mayor says wealthy families using power over trade to undermine Hugo Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro
Somehow, I can't see New Zealand ever devolving to Venezuela...
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@Godder said in Socialism!:
@jegga said in Socialism!:
If people disagree wth socialism the best thing to do is kill them apparently
Ex-London mayor says wealthy families using power over trade to undermine Hugo Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro
Somehow, I can't see New Zealand ever devolving to Venezuela...
Never said we would? Well maybe under a greens led government. You would probably be composted too.
Red Ken used to be one of the more prominent figures in labour until that nasty strain of anti Semitism reared its head last year following Corbyns election to the head of the politburo. Now he seems to feel free to say what he really thinks which is actually quite horrifying but not all that surprising.
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So a mate of mine out of curiosity managed to sneak along to an aussie socialists meeting (he's foreign so forgive some of the english):
Trigger warning: Alt-Left
Sneaked into the Alt-Left's headquarter in Melbourne
They are Trotskyists and are responsible for the gang AntiFa (which, according to them, has already been dissolved)
They call themselves radicals. Very honest
Found hundreds of freshly-printed propaganda posters in their headquarter
They want a global revolution
They are against almost everything including Bernie Sanders
Compared Trump to Hitler and KKK
Said Tony Abbott and Cory Bernardi are evils, thus they should be fucked
Said capitalism and the west is total shit, bullying and oppressing people
Said there is NO real democracy in the west
Said the USSR and the PRC are not real socialism at all, and are all irrelevant to them
They don't want to get into the Parliament because they want to get rid of the Parliament
Beautiful girls and handsome boys though. Many are university students, and many are hardcore unionists
At the end of the gathering they asked for donation
Very very few participants donated. Are they too poor to donate?
Donated $1 for safety
Feels like George Soros -
@Rembrandt said in Socialism!:
So a mate of mine out of curiosity managed to sneak along to an aussie socialists meeting (he's foreign so forgive some of the english):
Trigger warning: Alt-Left
Sneaked into the Alt-Left's headquarter in Melbourne
They are Trotskyists and are responsible for the gang AntiFa (which, according to them, has already been dissolved)
They call themselves radicals. Very honest
Found hundreds of freshly-printed propaganda posters in their headquarter
They want a global revolution
They are against almost everything including Bernie Sanders
Compared Trump to Hitler and KKK
Said Tony Abbott and Cory Bernardi are evils, thus they should be fucked
Said capitalism and the west is total shit, bullying and oppressing people
Said there is NO real democracy in the west
Said the USSR and the PRC are not real socialism at all, and are all irrelevant to them
They don't want to get into the Parliament because they want to get rid of the Parliament
Beautiful girls and handsome boys though. Many are university students, and many are hardcore unionists
At the end of the gathering they asked for donation
Very very few participants donated. Are they too poor to donate?
Donated $1 for safety
Feels like George SorosThing that disturbs me the most is that there were beautiful girls. You can understand the mingers.
What I always find hilarious is that the USSR, China, Laos, Venezuela etc etc isn't real Socialism, they just got it wrong. So what will these genuises do differently and how will they treat those who question them. They're not exactly known for their tolerance of other views.
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@Rancid-Schnitzel Ha yes that's a worry, unless that was lost in translation..at the same time though it encourages me to try and infiltrate myself and see what the story is. If a pretty girl really wants to be a rebel in Melbourne there is nothing more rebellious than being a conservative. Socialist attitudes here are just assumed.
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The road to Wigan pier is about $3 to read on Kindle it's well worth reading to get an insight into the mind of a leftard and an understanding of their feelings towards the people they claim to be helping but in reality have no fucks to give for them at all. Orwell has socialism Sussed a long time ago and it's quite weird to see such a thoroughly discredited thing rear its ugly head again .
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This quote is gold:
The difference between Nazis and Communists is that when you mention the horrors of Naziism no one ever says "Yeah, but true Naziism has never really been tried.
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My personal theory is that it's taken a long time for human's to figure out the best way to organise society, and evidence shows that a democratic capitalist society that upholds western values of individual freedom is by far the best we've ever had - by a country mile.
We tested the Marxist and Socialist theories in the 20th century and have 100 million corpses to show for it - that's more than enough for me, and I look at anyone pushing the idea of equality/equity as either morally broken, or unbelievably naive as a quick glance at history gives you all the answers you need.
These young idiots in Antifa want to overthrow something they don't have even the most basic understanding of, and replace it with something that has a proven track record of leading to a brutal dictatorship. It's incredible that they think they are a moral authority when they haven't achieved a single thing with their own lives. Here's a tip to any young idiot who sympathises with Antifa - instead of attacking people you disagree with, how about spending the next 20 years of your life sorting yourself out, and becoming the best human being you can be. Just imagine how good things would be if everyone did that. Then maybe you will have acquired the wisdom to influence other people in a positive way. But until then, STFU.
The fact that left-wing outlets like CNN are actually fluffing Antifa beggars belief, it really does. Nobody, left or right, should have any time for a group that uses violence and intimidation to push their ideology, no matter how morally superior they think their "stated goals" are.
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So I've been given the meeting schedule of the Antifa and antifa equivalents in Melbourne. Since I clearly have a perverse interest in groups that I have huge ideological differences with I think I will head along and try and get some understanding of their point of view.
Anyone got any question suggestions?, keeping in mind of course that my goal isn't to get roughed up.
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@Rembrandt said in Socialism!:
So I've been given the meeting schedule of the Antifa and antifa equivalents in Melbourne. Since I clearly have a perverse interest in groups that I have huge ideological differences with I think I will head along and try and get some understanding of their point of view.
Anyone got any question suggestions?, keeping in mind of course that my goal isn't to get roughed up.
Sit there and keep your mouth shut if you decide to go at all
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My experience with the #antifa crowd goes back to late 1990s when Marxist-Anarachists were wearing the exact same all-black uniform with bandanas and hoodies and getting in the faces intimidating old church-ladies who were themselves exercising their own (mostly silent) free speech demonstration outside an abortion clinic. The mob was almost exclusively white male radical university students, yelling at church-ladies to "Wear a Condom you Dumb Christ Bitches!!" and it was all about intimidation. Of course, liberal media likes to mock & ridicule Christian abortion protesters so media didn't raise an eyebrow, #antifa decalred victory and moved on to other targets. The last decade it's mostly been about disrupting G7 and G20 meetings, etc., and it's mushroomed. Lots of disgruntled unemployed young males with university degrees and huge student loan debts, living at home smoking weed and playing video games. Modern-day America.
The chant at Berkeley yesterday said it all:
"No Trump; No Wall; No USA At All."
They don't simply despise Trump. He's just the vehicle for their seething rage. They hate all authority, cops especially, and want to dismantle the very idea of a nation-state altogether, and some hate western civilization so much they're content to burn it down scorched earth and start again. Student debts, mommy's basement, too much weed, video games... it's a molotov cocktail. -
@Salacious-Crumb Most of that antipathy is common amongst the young here too. The whole anti TPP brigade who when prompted didn't have a fucking clue what the TPP was about but everything is the guvmint's fault.
The ultimate result of raising a generation of precious little me generational entitleds
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Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism
Liberals sell innocence from America’s past. If bigotry is pronounced dead, the racket is over.
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@No-Quarter said in Socialism!:
Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism
Liberals sell innocence from America’s past. If bigotry is pronounced dead, the racket is over.
Can you post the article?
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@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in Socialism!:
@No-Quarter said in Socialism!:
Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Racism
Liberals sell innocence from America’s past. If bigotry is pronounced dead, the racket is over.
Can you post the article?
Is America racist? It used to be that racism meant the actual enforcement of bigotry—the routine implementation of racial inequality everywhere in public and private life. Racism was a tyranny and an oppression that dehumanized—animalized—the “other.” It was a social malignancy, yet it carried the authority of natural law, as if God himself had dispassionately ordained it.
Today Americans know that active racism is no longer the greatest barrier to black and minority advancement. Since the 1960s other pathologies, even if originally generated by racism, have supplanted it. White racism did not shoot more than 4,000 people last year in Chicago. To the contrary, America for decades now—with much genuine remorse—has been recoiling from the practice of racism and has gained a firm intolerance for what it once indulged.
But Americans don’t really trust the truth of this. It sounds too self-exonerating. Talk of “structural” and “systemic” racism conditions people to think of it as inexorable, predestined. So even if bigotry and discrimination have lost much of their menace, Americans nevertheless yearn to know whether or not we are a racist people.
A staple on cable news these days is the “racial incident,” which stands as a referendum on this question. Today there is Charlottesville. Yesterday there were the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and others. Don’t they reveal an irrepressible racism in American life? At the news conferences surrounding these events there are always the Al Sharpton clones, if not the man himself, ready to spin the tale of black tragedy and white bigotry.
Such people—and the American left generally—have a hunger for racism that is almost craven. The writer Walker Percy once wrote of the “sweetness at the horrid core of bad news.” It’s hard to witness the media’s oddly exhilarated reaction to, say, the death of Trayvon Martin without applying Percy’s insight. A black boy is dead. But not all is lost. It looks like racism.
What makes racism so sweet? Today it empowers. Racism was once just racism, a terrible bigotry that people nevertheless learned to live with, if not as a necessary evil then as an inevitable one. But the civil-rights movement, along with independence movements around the world, changed that. The ’60s recast racism in the national consciousness as an incontrovertible sin, the very worst of all social evils.
Suddenly America was in moral trouble. The open acknowledgment of the nation’s racist past had destroyed its moral authority, and affirming democratic principles and the rule of law was not a sufficient response. Only a strict moral accounting could restore legitimacy.
Thus, redemption—paying off the nation’s sins—became the moral imperative of a new political and cultural liberalism. President Lyndon Johnson turned redemption into a kind of activism: the Great Society, the War on Poverty, school busing, liberalized welfare policies, affirmative action, and so on.
This liberalism always projects moral idealisms (integration, social justice, diversity, inclusion, etc.) that have the ring of redemption. What is political correctness, if not essentially redemptive speech? Soon liberalism had become a cultural identity that offered Americans a way to think of themselves as decent people. To be liberal was to be good.
Here we see redemptive liberalism’s great ingenuity: It seized proprietorship over innocence itself. It took on the power to grant or deny moral legitimacy across society. Liberals were free of the past while conservatives longed to resurrect it, bigotry and all. What else could “Make America Great Again” mean? In this way redemptive liberalism reshaped the moral culture of the entire Western world with sweeping idealisms like “diversity,” which are as common today in Europe as in America.
So today there is sweetness at the news of racism because it sets off the hunt for innocence and power. Racism and bigotry generally are the great driving engines of modern American liberalism. Even a remote hint of racism can trigger a kind of moral entrepreneurism.
The “safe spaces” for minority students on university campuses are actually redemptive spaces for white students and administrators looking for innocence and empowerment. As minorities in these spaces languish in precious self-absorption, their white classmates, high on the idea of their own wonderful “tolerance,” whistle past the very segregated areas they are barred from.
America’s moral fall in the ’60s made innocence of the past an obsession. Thus liberalism invited people to internalize innocence, to become synonymous with it—even to fight for it as they would for an ideology. But to be innocent there must be an evil from which to be free. The liberal identity must have racism, lest it lose innocence and the power it conveys.
The great problem for conservatives is that they lack the moral glibness to compete with liberalism’s “innocence.” But today there are signs of what I have called race fatigue. People are becoming openly cynical toward the left’s moral muscling with racism. Add to this liberalism’s monumental failure to come even close to realizing any of its beautiful idealisms, and the makings of a new conservative mandate become clearer. As idealism was the left’s political edge, shouldn’t realism now be the right’s? Reality as the informing vision—and no more wrestling with innocence.
Mr. Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is author of “Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country” (Basic Books, 2015).
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Sorry didn't realise it would ask for a login. When I click the link from the twitter app it lets me read the whole thing.
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@Rancid-Schnitzel said in Socialism!:
This quote is gold:
The difference between Nazis and Communists is that when you mention the horrors of Naziism no one ever says "Yeah, but true Naziism has never really been tried.
You fellas love your quotes eh?
The difference is that communism is a system based on an ideal of equality, whereas Naziism is based on an ideal of the exact opposite, and in fact genocide.
True communism cannot exist, because of the moral hazard involved. It's a disastrous proven failure that had led to despotism that has cost a vast number of lives - but you can be a well meaning idiot who supports the ideal, Naziism not so much.
Or:
Wouldn't it be great if everyone was equal?
Wouldn't it be great if all the Jews were dead? -
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