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Marxican stand-off
Potentially controversial opinion: Just like capitalism, communism also needs to be regulated so as to not get exploited by a powerful few.
Any political system requires vigilant population, which needs education, which means we're fucked no matter the system we're living under because most people rather tune out 'the noise' and live their lives being blissfully ignorant.
Ding ding ding! Communists like to blame capitalism for everything (and vice versa), but anybody not blinded by ideology can understand that the problem is the human element. People like to imagine perfect systems, but those cannot exist with flawed creatures within them, especially when the flawed creatures operate the system. All of those systems require constant vigilance.
That is pretty much why the Constitution had checks and balances, in order to insulate it from the human element, by pitting elements against each other. It worked, until capture of the assorted branches became too concentrated for the checks to balance.
This isn't to say that the Constitution is a bad idea. Rather, I view laws and bureaucracy as a type of social technology. There are merits and demerits in the make and placement of components, and without good design, maintenance, or a well thought out replacement, the technology will inevitably fail.
We need a v2.0 Constitution for a better United States, one designed to eliminate flaws, loopholes, or even add new checks & balances outright. For example, term and age limits on supreme justices, with each state having 1 popularly voted supreme every 10 years. We don't want congress nor the president to select who interprets law, because it becomes a game of trickery or horse trading. We need younger and more diverse justices to represent the land's people.
In addition to this, I believe that we will need floors and ceilings to be set on wealth, alongside the provisioning of universal benefits to all people. By doing this, America and other nations can guard from the corrosion that excessive individual wealth can cause. We have to prevent the existence of future Musks, and design an economy that allows the many to live in comfort and freedom, without letting individuals metastasize into a cancer.
the problem is the human element
I absolutely agree. The difference is that the incentives of capitalism virtually guarantee exploitation and inequality. It's a system that encourages the concentration of wealth and power. Antisocial and anticompetitive tactics maximize returns and ensure that bad actors willing to put profit above anything else benefit the most and rise to the top as leaders and bosses. It relies on competition and, assumes "market forces" will self correct an imbalanced system... eventually.
Unless you want a brutal, unstable system where power and wealth accumulate and get concentrated until a violent shift (hopefully) collapses that power and eventually market forces pick a new "winner" you need regulation to keep the profit motive in check and competition fair. Still, the rules of the system encourage regulatory capture as competitive actors try to gain advantage however they can, regardless of the impact on the general population.
Socialism, honestly, has become a weird catch-all term for critiques of capitalism looking to align the goals of society toward democracy and equality. There is a ton of theory and different methods of achieving or implementing such a society but that's kind of where I see things.
Within that eventual ideal society there is still the ability for people to exploit each other for power. The human element doesn't disappear. The idea is that it is harder when the goal of the system is to ensure everyone has what they need and everyone gets a say in how things are done. The system needs to be built and tweaked with checks and balances to ensure that power doesn't get concentrated without the ability for the greater population to redistribute that power.
Basically, unless you are a proponent of laissez-faire capitalism (no government involvement) then you recognize the danger posed by unfettered capitalism. Socialism attempts to change the incentives so that society can be designed, fundamentally, to minimize the danger posed by that human element. It recognizes that a democratic and fair capitalist society is an oxymoron.
I have a challenge for you. Again, assuming you are not a proponent of laissez-faire capitalism, think about the ways that our capitalist society could be improved by new regulation or the removal or adjusting of existing bad regulation (Edit: regulation is meant to include laws, taxes, etc). How many of those regulations don't exist - were proposed and shot down - because those empowered by capitalism (Edit: **who have achieved disproportionate wealth and power via capitalism and wish to maintain their status) have fought tooth and tail to prevent them? How many of those bad, restrictive, existing regulations were implemented, or twisted, by those empowered by capitalism?
Edit: Look around the world at the questionable actions performed by the United States and ask why did the US do that? What was their incentive? More often than not, it involves preserving and furthering the power of those who already hold a disproportionate amount of power in that capitalist society.
Narcissistic assholes are born everywhere, randomly.
It's hardly controversial. Marx envisioned that a revolution would happen when the working class (the majority of any society) becomes class conscious and usher in socialism. That in essence would be a vigilant population.
The issue with popular presentation of Marxism is that what is presented is actually Leninism. Lenin is the one who thought proletariats can't become class conscious (or vigilant) on their own and instead require a vanguard party of revolutionaries to lead the proletariat into communism. How that worked out is evident from the USSR.
Communism is a stateless, classless and moneyless society. Of course there need to be structures in place to ensure it stays that way, because having a powerful few would have reintroduced classes. Thats why you need stable, democratic governance, for example federated councils or something similar.
most people rather tune out 'the noise' and live their lives being blissfully ignorant
I'd argue that's not an intrinsic feature of humans, but the result of capitalist alienation. On the one hand, the individual has very little chance to participate in the decision making process, and people are overworked so they barely have the energy or time to do so, even if they wanted to
What about social democracy?
What about it makes it so special that it can exist and not get exploited without vigilant population?
Every system needs awareness from people to keep functioning.
Social democracy seems to be working better than most systems, including keeping the people interested in politics. Because the democracy works reasonably well. Scandinavian countries that have social democracy also have high election participation.
Of what use, then, are the American Communists?
They serve one function extremely useful to you and to the country, so useful that, if there were no Communists, we would almost be forced to create some. They are a reliable litmus paper for detecting real sources of danger to the Republic.
Communism is so repugnant to almost all Americans, when they are getting along even tolerably well, that one may predict with certainty that any social field or group in which the Communists make real strides in gaining members or acceptance of their doctrines, any such spot is in such bad shape from real and not imaginary social ills that the rest of us should take emergency, drastic action to investigate and correct the trouble.
Unfortunately we are more prone to ignore the sick spot thus disclosed and content ourselves with calling out more cops.
—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government
Well. He's not wrong. Admittedly, many people in the US are opposed to socialist policies largely because of propagandizing by corporate interests, but when they get really popular anyways, that's def. a sure sign that everything is going to shit.
I might start throwing Heinlein in the same bucket as GK Chesterton. Wrong a lot, but wrong in interesting ways, and so close to getting it.
That whole book is a wild read. It's about how and why to be involved in politics. Some of it is kind of a 1940s manual on how to operate a campaign, but a lot of it is talking about why it's important to be engaged and pay attention, and also stuff like this:
If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.
Heinlein has plenty of issues, but I feel like a lot of people overlook his positives.
I feel like a lot of people forget just how wildly different the time Heinlein was raised in was. He may have been wrong-headed in our current view about a fair amount of things--particular his work prior to the mid-60s or so--but that's a cultural issue, rather than someone that was pig-headedly stupid. The quote you have--"[...] forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath [...]--is especially ironic because AFAIK Heinlein appears to have had open/polyamorous marriages (...or multiamorous/polyerotic, if you're a linguistic pedant); that sort of inclination should be quite antithetical to laws enforcing religious doctrine or sexual morality.
I don't know that there's any irony there. In my reading, the passage is actually advocating against such laws. And is aimed at the kind of thinking that leads to such laws.
I don't think he is condoning or advocating for such thinking in that passage - more saying that, if you do want these kind of laws (while he lists some contemporary examples) you have to realise that it won't actually work and will have other, negative consequences. That's not him necessarily condoning the thinking or actual moral standing of those examples. Just pointing out what he sees are the realities of such laws.
that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws.
I dunno. Sounds like he's not opposed to them, just doesn't think that they're effective without going after root-cause issues. (...Which, I would like to point out, is one of the huge fucking problems that people in favor of banning guns have. E.g., address the root causes of violence, and you stop the violence without curtailing the civil right.) He doesn't seem to have a problem with addressing the root causes so that there's no need for the laws in the first place, and doesn't appear to be arguing against the things he lists as being 'social ills' in the first place. (He did think that the youth of his time were declining morally, which is a tale that goes back to at least the Greek city-states.)
Fundamentally though, yeah, laws alone rarely change behavior; you need to change the material and social conditions to change behavior.
Heinlein wrote a lot of characters in his novels who were there to make you think, right or wrong or otherwise. I'm not so sure he himself was wrong, but he wasn't trying to be right. He just wanted us to think.
An example of this was the communist were heavily involved in organizing share croppers in the Jim crow south. This caused a lot of red baiting during the civil rights movement, with MLK often being labeled a communist ( he was definitely more left then he is often portrayed, radical by today's standards, but not a commie).
"Source, "Wikipedia": A power vacuum is a very powerful vacuum."
Edit: fuck I didn't mean to make this comment
People's Front of Judea vs the Judean People's Front
Splitters!
I am pretty sure that this honest leftist self-criticism thing is against online decency rules and I demand to see the manager.
Ok, so Two-Tone-Beard-Man is Marx, Slightly-Darker-Beard-Man is Engels, but who are Long-Beard-Man and Auntie-Glasses-Lady? I ask because Long-Beard-Man appears to be the winner of the heated exchange at the end...
Mikhail Bakunin and Emma Goldman, both are anarchists. It's below the comic on the source :)
Brilliant.
If the people are the true means of production, then wouldn't seizing the means of production mean slavery? 🤔
"Means of production" means factories, fields and mines and shit. Bear in mind that was before digitalization, so now the meaning would be more broad.
Yeah. Today the means of production is your laptop!
Or even some proprietary SaaS shit that's irreplaceable for your work
" ALEXA, define power vacuum."
