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 Originally Posted by wufwugy
This appears to be what I was referring to when I stated that cooperative capitalism is becoming more of a thing in recent times and is likely to grow. It's important to note the foundation of what capitalism is. It's really just using resources to make more resources. It could be called resource-ism for all I care. Cooperative resource-ism is a thing. I think we have little of it now, but I think in the future we will have more of it, and I think that will be largely due to the integration of technology.
I like that term, Coop resource-ism. This is pretty much what I had in my head. The interesting thing though, is that, while ownership still can be a real thing, it could be predicted that over time the cult of ownership would diminish. People would be celebrated for the skills they contributed to society, not for the goods they stockpiled for themselves.
You could have a bio, which is peer reviewed by those you interact with, and the person who hooks it up with a pop-up soup kitchen once a week on skid row would have no problem getting people to share or discount produce.
It's almost like a commune, except with current technology, there isn't a need for the commune to be self contained. And it's something that can grow organically, without the need for revolution or any other sort of shock to the system.
I'm not a libertarian and I'm not expressing libertarianism. Everything I have proposed assumes a strong welfare state. Perhaps Renton considers himself libertarian, but his agreement with the subsidized wage OP I made is in alignment with capitalism that assumes strong welfarism.
Fair enough. But I still think your bias has you critiquing one end of the spectrum, while staying mum about the same sort of stuff when it's closer to being aligned with your views.
Those were screenshots from class slides pulled from my textbook. It's a cultural geography course.
Fair enough. I really didn't mean to nit it up, but you just kinda put them out there with no context except wuf wuffing.
What do you think a proper example of socialism would be?
I believe it would be any society that can perpetuate an economy based on centralized command and production and distribution based on need. I think the USSR exemplifies this. We're taught little about the Cold War in school, but it was the biggest showdown of all time, between opposing ideologies: capitalism and a more philosophically pure form of socialism in communism. I think it's important to note the validity of this since so much of the modern era is defined by it, as well as socialism never actually caught on until it was appropriated by the communists. The popular opinion is that regions like Scandinavia are socialist, but I disagree. They're capitalist and welfarist.
I'm not sure there is one, and I think that case can be made more honestly with communism than with capitalism. The communist experiments where controlled by a very small group who pushed their view of how it should work-- this stunted any possibility for varied solutions to problems in the system. Again, I insist the reason for failure was similar to the central reason the Nazi's failed. Dissenting opinion was not tolerated and those with power were overstepping the extent of their expertise.
Communism may have been prone to these problems with the tile-set we had to build with at the time, but the same could possibly be said for capitalism in the middle ages.
And no, it was not in the least bit a showdown between ideologies. Perhaps it started that way, but I'm even weary of that. It was a showdown between the two world superpowers which emerged after the war. Rival ideologies are just a convenient avenue for propaganda.
If you insist on pushing that notion, you'll have to prove that it holds validity over a claim that the Cold War was a showdown between totalitarianism and democracy.
If you look up "socialism" on Wikipedia, the first line says this "For the concept where the state promotes the social and economic well-being of its citizens sometimes mistaken with socialism, see Welfare state."
I think that's telling
I did conflate Scandinavian welfarism with socialism. I'm glad to have learned the difference from this discussion.
The proletariat was effectively classless. The idea of total classlessness is ridiculous, but the USSR represented about as practically classless a society as we could get.
The classlessness of a class is a nonsensical measurement. The society had distinct classes. The closest you could come to a classless society, in my opinion, would be the most egalitarian society. That is, the poorest of the poor are a close in status and ability to access goods as the richest of the rich. In the USSR, this was undeniably far from the case.
If you'd like to push this point, then I'd like you to explain how the same cannot be said for Europe in the middle ages.
I've been referring to the elements. I don't care about "true" implementation because I don't think it will happen or that it matters. Also I've never said the free market hasn't been truly implemented. It's implemented in a lot of ways. There is a stark contrast between the capitalist and the socialist, and we can examine these. My position isn't that welfarism doesn't work, but that it doesn't work when it's assumed what creates resources.
I also don't care about true implementation, but many people do and they use it as a defense of the free market. If you're not, fair enough, but I think it is worth presenting the other side.
As for comparing the two systems, as they have been implemented-- fine, but capitalism has been implemented in democracies across the world. These democracies have been free to experiment with it as they see fit, and change has been fluid. Communism has really only been tried in one rigid way. Even if you want to say that China, Russia, Latin American countries, etc had their own brands of communism, we still only get a hand full of rigid experiments due to dictatorships. Totalitarian regimes are not implicit cogs in a communist state. They actually are a hindrance to a true communist state.
In ways, I agree. I think we simply need both. The play between public and private sectors has played out quite well over the years, and I think it has shown that both work
Yeah, for sure. I think that other elements can be folded in as well though. Like the "shareconomy", which is really neither public or private, and is more akin to true communism. The problem is, communism needs to be made palatable, because it has gotten such a bad wrap because of how it has been misconstrued. Hybrids in all sorts of applications have been shown to be the best solution-- the problem is, hybrids are nuanced and need balancing, but people crave simple ideological solutions.
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