this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2025
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Have to get past American and western interventionism to figure it out. But socialism lifted millions out of poverty look at Chinese and Russian history. Both countries went from feudal and monarchal society to industrial powers houses lead by peasants and workers, rivaling the United States in mere decades. So I’d say yes socialism does work. Also both those societies went from a near totally illiterate society to a 100 % total literacy within a generation. Free healthcare, housing, education and unemployment was non existent. Just to name some more achievements of socialism.
Socialism yes. I've always thought that capitalism regulated with socialist policies is the way forward. That way you can still encourage entrepreneurs to get going.
But we're still left with the r > g problem (money attracts more money).
Communism is the extreme end of socialism isn't it? And I've always thought that extremes never work. Extremism is a circle...
I'm open to being educated on this though....
So extreme heat is extreme cold? It just wraps around? The bigger you make cars, eventually they become small cars? Like, in what universe do extremes exhibit circularity?
Entrepreneurship is the process of discovering unmet needs. You do not need capitalism to do that. Capitalism uses the profit motive to incentivize this activity, which means the ONLY unmet needs that get met are the ones that are profitable. There are MANY unmet needs that are not profitable to meet - like feeding the hungry, stopping domestic violence, ending police killings of black people, or housing the unhoused. Literally all of those needs are present, they have been identified, the resources exist, and the techniques exist, but, no profit, no movement.
Think about how weird it is to need profit to incentivize this behavior anyway. There is literally unmet need. People are experiencing it. What's the problem? They don't solve it themselves. Why? Because they don't have the power to do so. Why not? Because of the consequences of a society that privileges the ultraminority over the ultramajority. What's the solution? Stop doing that and people will have the power to actually address the problems they have. How? Democratically by raising their problems and working towards a solution.
The alternative is that the only problems that entrepreneurs solve are the ones that rich people make profit from - the least democratic way of solving problems ever.
very interesting points!
I've just started a non-profit (to try to reduce/undermine surveillance capitalism) - and we'll probably build software along the way. That is entrepreneurship, but not profit focused. However, we would need to be funded and paid to make it work.
How should I frame this in your way of thinking?
Non-profits either 1) live off of someone else's profits, or 2) they raise grassroots funding. 2 is incredibly difficult to pull off, and worse, if there is enough demand in the market, then a for-profit entrepreneur is going to come in and do it with private equity and dominate because they're incentivized to do it.
But more to the point, even if you are wildly successful with grassroots funding, you will be part of less than 1% of all entrepreneurial endeavors in the history of capitalism. Just because some people can grow small batch heirloom plants in tightly controlled environments doesn't mean that's what phenomenon of agriculture is. The phenomenon of entrepreneurship is what I described and I wish you good luck trying to do what many failed non-profits have tried to do before and your success cannot possibly be enough to contradict the vast majority of entrepreneurship.
There are a few clarifications to be made and some fallacies in your understanding of communism and socialism here. I'm not the one to clear all of this up, because I'm not going to put the effort and time needed into these subjects, but I'll try to guide you in the direction of some resources to help.
Some quick clarifications:
Socialism and communism are the same thing. Communism is the end goal, but you cannot just jump directly to communism from capitalism, so we fall the transition period socialism. Communists often use the terms interchangeably, but any actual differentiation is a distinction of progress, not the goals of the project.
Communism is no more extreme than socialism and politics are not a horseshoe or circle where the far ends are the worst. This is a thought-terminating notion meant to keep you boxed within the status quo so that those who are currently in power stay in power, meaning you will remain relatively powerless. The same thing goes for trying to stay in the middle of a conflict: you end up not taking a side, meaning you remain on the side of the status quo, meaning you stay on the side of the oppressor. Your oppressor. As much as people argue communism is extreme, communists can argue that "the middle" or "liberalism" or "other leftists" are extreme. These arguments are always made for the purpose of getting you to stop thinking about those topics, to stop considering their validity. They are not trying to convince you those are wrong, but that they are not worth even considering. I implore you to do the opposite: do some reading and interact with what "extremists" are saying in good faith, then decide what you believe. I'm sure you'll agree with some parts and not with others. We are all humans and most of us are of the same class. The "extremism" of communists is that we say working class people should run the world and the rich leeches should be oppressed in a sense that they cannot oppress anyone else through the use of their extreme wealth. We want to flip the system on its head to use an overly-simplistic metaphor.
Capitalism cannot be mixed with socialist policies. What you are probably referring to as socialist policies are actually welfare programs and state regulation . This is what we call social democracy, which is still capitalism. Socialism is differentiated more by who owns the means of production, how the economy is organized, and what class is in control of the state. That aside, socialists think social democracy is insufficient to curb the problems of capitalism because you don't remove the roots of the problem. Most of the successes of social democracy in addressing wealth disparity and living standards are the result of countries trying to stave of socialist revolutions at home due to their workers seeing the success of nearby socialist republics in improving the quality of life of their people. These are capitalist concessions and if you look at the social democracies that exist in Europe, you'll see that all of these concessions started getting rolled back AFTER the fall of the USSR. They were temporary relief (at home, not in their colonies), but the profit motive always demands more. If capitalism can't steal enough from the global south, it will turn inward and eat itself like the US and UK are currently doing.
On entrepreneurs...most of the time people want to show the benefit of entrepreneurs, it is in terms of innovation and small businesses, so I'm assuming this is your point? Innovation and entrepreneurs do not disappear under socialism, but the way they function does. Innovation does not always need to be driven by profit motive as demonstrated within the USSR, but there is arguably some room for profit motive driving innovation in a mixed economy like China's. The main benefit of socialism is that innovation is not at the whims of the market, which tends to act as if it is allergic to innovation, ultimately stifling it rather than nurturing it. Small businesses (and thus entrepreneurs) still exist in many socialist countries and will not be nationalized unless they grow quite big or become central to controlling an important part of the economy. In some ways it can even be easier to start a thriving business because you are less at risk of being stamped out by the "health competition" of a mega-corporation with a monopoly on an entire industrial sector. Those get nationalized, fixing the money attracts more money problem. If you remove the profit motive, this power can no longer be abused for profit. Corruption can happen under any system and has to be handled case-by-case, but you'll find socialist countries have much harsher penalties for corruption to prevent it, unlike a paltry fine that is the cost of doing business. Jail time or up to the death penalty can be applied based upon the severity and circumstances of the crime. Vietnam and China have applied this last one to large-scale corruption within the last year whereas in liberal democracies, multimillion or even billion dollar fraud cases are widespread and normal with little to no repercussions. In some cases, it is even legal!
On education...if you want more, there are many sources available in many formats. I suggest Dessalines' crash course of socialism and his reading list but there are plenty of others on here who provide lists worthy of mention (but their links are harder for me to look up). Prolewiki is like Wikipedia for socialism by socialists. Search a topic there that you want to know more about. You can also ask for resources on specific topics in lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, and hexbear.net and you will probably get more resources than you care to consume in a year, so long as you approach them in good faith. People in these communities will only troll you if they think you are trolling them. The efforts some of them will go to in order to educate others is ridiculous (in a good way).
I hope this helps.
There is no such thing as capitalism regulated with socialist policies. That’s ridiculous and only shows that you don’t know what those terms mean
I was just in Denmark recently and it seems like that's what they have: a capitalist society but regulated by very socialist policies like (really) high taxes. Makes sense to me - I'm probably just not using the right terminology.
High taxes is not socialism
see, this is the problem - I've avoided thinking about politics forever, and now I'm not sure about the main concepts 😂
I've always equated high taxes with socialism - so long as those taxes go towards services and redistribution of wealth.
OK - so what *is *socialism? (the main tenets)
We can use socialism and communism interchangeably.
Engels wrote:
Some people say, based on paraphrasing of larger works by Marx and Engels:
But for you and me, we can just say this:
Let's define "productive forces as": all factories, construction projects, natural resource extraction and processing, financial systems, large-scale farming and food processing, and all other major productive activities that create the goods and services that people in society use.
"Socialism" is the administration of society to move all of those productive forces under the sustainable democratic control of the largest portion of the population and eventually the entirety of the population.
What that means is the end of the legal concept of ownership of, for example, a factory, and the dictatorial control that owners have over that factory. In the olden days, you might have one person who owned the whole company. That person could decide literally anything and any employee who disagreed was fired. They could choose to paint the floors sky blue, or swap all company cars with motorcycles, or manufacture safety pins instead of bobby pins. They were in control. Nowadays, most of these things are owned by shareholders and the minority of the population controls 100% of productive forces and whatever THEY decide is now the law within those companies. So, they can choose to exploit a loophole in the law and dump toxic waste wherever, or they can ban employees from using equipment to detect radiation or other poisonous or hazardous conditions. They can lock people in rooms and propagandize them. Etc.
Essentially what we have is a dictatorship of the opulent minority the spans the entirety of "productive forces" in society.
Socialism removes the legal basis by which this dictatorship works - it removes/changes the laws around ownership so that shareholders do not own companies and cannot unilaterally decide what to do with those companies. It instead moves those productive forces under some democratic form of control. You could imagine many different models for this, and there have been many different models in history, but which model is used is not important for what you and I are discussing. We may disagree that the USSR's system was sufficiently democratic for you to call it democratic, but there was grassroots democratic decision making that systematically rose up through representation and decisions that ultimately made the decisions for productive forces. We can disagree that China's model is sufficiently democratic given the allowance of private enterprise and common stock, but we can see the grassroots democratic aspects of decision making that makes it all the way to the center of power and extends outward into every office.
But we also need to understand socialism not as a "state of being" by a "movement of action". As I said, Socialism is the administration (active verb) of society to move all productive forces under the sustainable democratic control of eventually the entirety of the population.
Taxes don't do that. Taxes are primarily about redistribution of money flows, not even redistribution of wealth, but of where liquidity exist in an economy. Taxing workers doesn't redistribute their wealth, it redistributes the present availability of liquid cash. Taxing profits doesn't redistribute wealth, it redistributes the present availability of liquid cash. Redistribution of wealth requires at minimum the seizure of wealth - say upon death ALL of your wealth is taken by the state and you can't hide it. But that's just redistribution of the wealth of a single person and the people controlling the state decide where it goes. If, for example, the wealth 0.001% of the country controls the state, then when they take wealth from one rich person and distribute it to other rich people, there's no wealth redistribution happening at the class level. That is to say, even under taxation regimes and even under death tax regimes, if the wealth stays primarily concentrated in the upper minority, there is no wealth redistribution happening.
Socialism has no problem seizing wealth from areas where it has concentrated or been hoarded if it turns out that the majority of society is suffering because of it. Taxes under socialism are used to smooth out CASH distribution systems, but wealth seizure - seizure of lands, factories, and hoards - aren't taxes, they are uses of force under the mandate of the masses to do what is best for society.
The doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the working masses - liberation from the demands of the ultraminority on their time, their health, their eviction for failure to comply, their mass layoffs, their unsafe working conditions, their child labor, their indoctrination, their ability to evade justice, their wage theft, their psychosocial abuse, etc. Freedom for 99% of the world from the 1% who would oppress them so they can have fancy balls, hunt endangered animals, build palaces, and wage wars.
That's what socialism is. And what it requires is the elimination of the legal basis for the ultraminority to have dictatorial control over the "productive forces" that all of society relies on. Because when they have that control, they can and do hold society hostage.
That does all sound much more equitable. But don't you just end up with a different 1% controlling everything, as per every communist state in the past? And isn't that because not everyone is a worker - you have to have the admin layer at the top, who are deciding what is 'best for society', and they can (and due to human nature usually do) most decide what is best for themselves.
What you describe sounds MUCH better for the majority of people - but I worry about the unaccountability of the ruling admin layer.
Does communism/socialism have rules for mitigating that (which haven't been followed by communist states, but could be)?
Denmark is a capitalist country. There is nothing socialist about it. Socialism is when the workers own the means of production (directly or otherwise), not when a country provides social services, that is a social democracy.
How do you determine where an "extreme " is on a circle? Democracy was considered extreme once
Entrepreneurs are usually known as useless scammers in my line of work