Memes

Now, I’ll stop patronizing you. I’ll throw my argument out there so you can tear it to pieces. Back to labels - what socialism looks like to you depends on who you are. You say it’s when “the old institutions are thrown out and the new institutions are introduced”. I’ll take that to mean some form of government is in possession of the means of production across the board? My hesitancy towards socialism is mostly centered on my knowledge of history and the repeated trends of powerful institutions decaying into corruption and greed. I think socialism could genuinely work really well as long as the people in charge were kept honest.

Nah man this is nonsense and it comes from people who exist on the fringe of politics who don't actually participate and have never actually had a political education or tried to give themselves one.

Socialism is exceptionally well defined as an ideology. You take Marx's historical materialism and come to the conclusion that all of human history is driven by class struggle and revolution. You then reach the understanding that there is a possible ending of all class struggle through the abolishment of class (communism). After that you accept that communism can not be jumped to straight from capitalism because it would simply be crushed by capitalist states through being unable to defend itself. This leads you to the belief that a transition exists between capitalism and communism - socialism. What is the socialist state? A state in which the proletarian class of society overthrew the bourgeoisie(capitalist class of society) and built a dictatorship of the proletariat. This of course is not a dictatorship of an individual but a dictatorship of class, the opposite of capitalism where the bourgeoisie have designed a system and institutions that always comes to the outcomes that benefit them the most, instead it is a society where the proletariat designed their institutions to always come to proletarian outcomes. Economics and everything else within this socialist state differ from country to country, because conditions differ and what is possible differs. The important aspect is that the proletariat control the power.

This is a basic 101. The fact that you see liberals misusing the word socialism does not change the fact that this is definitionally what socialism is. We'll argue about whether market economies or single party or multi party or completely centralised planning or something in between are best, but all socialists will agree on the above. It is the core definition of socialism and is more or less what Engels and Marx laid out 200+ years ago. It is materialist and it is non-utopian because it accepts that these states will have their flaws, socialism isn't a magically perfect society, it has problems and struggles, the difference is that it comes to better outcomes for its populations than capitalist societies when compared at an equal level of development. (This is a very important point with regards to the difference that proletarian rule vs bourgeoise rule has.)

But my skepticism is towards the long term sustainability of such a system. Time and again we see institutions decay and fall prey to humanity’s worst impulses. The fall of the Roman Republic (and the regular chaos of the Roman Empire for that matter) is my classic go-to for this, but there are plenty of non-western examples as well. The best cases I’ve seen in my studies of various histories seem to be centered around cultures that dispersed their power into many smaller institutions. My problem with socialism is that it inherently says “we’re going to get rid of business corruption and government corruption by combining the two”. I think creating an even smaller, more focused center of power in society is a dangerous proposal - it becomes all the more easy for the wealthy elites to worm their way into that power and take control. Essentially you’re taking all of those wealthy capitalist greedy dirtbags and then moving them into the government.

This is contrary to what socialist institutional design actually is. You don't get smaller numbers involved, you get much bigger numbers involved. The basic socialist democratic system implemented in the single party states is one where you start with a small group of people, 150 or so, called a worker's council, these people select a representative and are intended to physically know their representative. This person then represents them at the local workers council. Then every representative on this council selects from among their reps someone to represent that council at the next tier. And the next and the next. 12 tiers up until the national congress, where the final tier selects leaders councils and various committees etc. This design removes popularity contests from the leadership and builds a democratic meritocracy where anyone at the top has also worked their way up through the entire system demonstrating actual ability to improve the lives of the people to their peers at every single level. The design of this differs slightly from country to country of course but these fundamentals remain the same. My point here is that you don't have less leaders, or bigger centralisation of power, you actually have a larger spread of power across more people. Even the highest councils like the politburo don't typically have a leader with special powers above anyone else on the council, even if we go to controversial figures like Stalin, he didn't have special powers, he had exactly the same powers that the other 5 members of the Politburo had. But let's stay off controversy. There's a neat video of Cuba's system here that I strongly recommend

Capitalism, on the other hand, removes business from government which allows, in theory, for the government to act as a counter-weight to business.

This is not really true is it? Capitalism is designed from the ground up to ensure that the people in power are the bourgeoisie - the financial elite. Assuming you're american (correct me if not) who runs your country? The people on Wall Street do that's who. No not the people. No not the government. The people on Wall Street run the country through the think tanks they fund dictating policy, through the media they own deciding who wins and who loses, through the political parties and representatives that they fund with hundreds of millions of dollars. This system is designed from the ground up to ensure that it does not produce proletarian outcomes, in fact there are several quotes I could give you where founders explicitly state such.

It’s throwing fuel on the fire by cutting out the one supposed protection we do have, which is a separation of government interests and business interests. Ostensibly, when capitalism is working the way it should, the government is acting as a counterweight to business greed. I think there are better ways to strengthen that counterweight that don’t necessarily fall under the label of “socialism”.

Under capitalism you have a system that is designed to chase profit. Everything about it is built around that central point. A very good way to chase profit is to hold the levers of power in order to wield them in a way to chase more profit. You can not counterweight this in a society where the people chasing the profit have all the money, own all the media, own all the politicians, own all the policy tanks, etc etc etc. This is the way bourgeoise-democracy is designed to come to outcomes that benefit the bourgeoisie. It is a dictatorship of class built for them.

The proletarian democracy on the other hand is a dictatorship of class built for the people. And it does a lot of shit things, because it's a state and states do shit stuff. It does all the shit stuff that the capitalist states do in fact (and oh boy they've done a lot of shit things we could reel off). But what it also does is come to outcomes that are proletarian, and thus benefit a massively larger number of the population than the bourgeoise-democracy does.

You talk about needing government to mitigate business and I AGREE. But the reason government does not mitigate business in the bourgeoise-democracy is because the bourgeoisie run the government, so they obviously do what benefits their class. When you put the proletarians in power on the other hand you get a government that DOES mitigate the power of business, oppressively so in fact (oh boy they love to remind us of that). In exactly the same ways that the bourgeoise state oppresses the proletariat, the proletarian state oppresses the bourgeoisie. This is your government that mitigates the worst aspects of business. Properly.