posted in Asklemmy
Why do so many defend capitalism?
Replying to @return2ozma@lemmy.world
They don’t even know socialism exists in the US.
Also what you say is more tied to political identity instead of your actual beliefs whether or not the belief falls anywhere close to truth.
Replying to @777Prawn@sh.itjust.works
They don’t even know socialism exists in the US.
You don’t know that it doesn’t and never has.
Care to explain the main idea of your inference?
Replying to @777Prawn@sh.itjust.works
Measuring the percentage of private vs state ownership of the means of production isn’t going to tell you whether that state is a capitalist one or a socialist one. The salient question is, which economic class wields the power of the state to suppress the other class? Socialism isn’t a slider bar, it’s a matter of political power the class war.
The US government was never not captured by the bourgeoisie, because the US was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
Here’s my opinion.
Every morning you drive on a road you didn’t build, drop your kids at a school you didn’t found, and trust that if your house catches fire, someone will show up without asking for a credit card first. None of that came from a business looking to profit. It came from all of us chipping in so everyone gets something we couldn’t manage alone.
That’s the basic idea behind socialism: we’re stronger when we pool what we have. And we already live it. When big banks and automakers were about to collapse, the government stepped in with public money to save them. If it’s fine to share the risk for corporations, why is it “radical” to share it for regular people?
So the question isn’t whether we do socialism. We already do. It’s who the leadership is willing to do it for.
Replying to @777Prawn@sh.itjust.works
That’s the basic idea behind socialism
Not really, no. What you’re describing is the socialization of production.
What you’re describing is fine; it’s not wrong. The issue is that you’re abusing the term “socialism,” which already has a well-defined and widely agreed-upon meaning that is quite different from the one you’re using.
You’re right, the textbook definition is social ownership of the means of production, and “socialized costs” or “public support” would be more precise for what I’m describing. And I don’t think it’s “well-defined and widely agreed-upon.”
Marxists, market socialists, democratic socialists, and libertarian socialists all disagree on what it actually requires, and in everyday US usage it’s commonly used to mean government spending for social programs.
Either way, my point stands: we already collectivize risk and costs for some groups. The real question is who gets that help.