this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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Having every company be petite bourgeois cooperatives doesn't really get rid of the major problems with capitalism, plus there's no actual way to get from here to there where socialism doesn't make more sense. Communism is a post-socialist society, so it isn't really something you do from the outset.
It would be a whole lot easier to convince on-the-ground reasonable people to be ok with "all companies are employee-owned" than to convince them that "socialism" doesn't mean everything the GOP has told them it means for the past fifty years.
Historically, that's not how social change happens. Even if you convince everyone that it's better that way, society doesn't magically morph around it. This question was answered already in the 1800s with the death of utopian socialism and the rise of scientific socialism.
Yeah, I'm not super thrilled with the historic way that social change happens, though. Historically, a lot of innocent people end up dying to get us there. It'd be nice if we could avoid that.
People die every day because we haven't gone onto socialism. Imperialism is the biggest factor in the genocide of Palestine, for example.
Yeah, but there are entire schools of ethics built around who gets the blame for indirect systemic causes. If you're the one who lights the fuse, though, the ambiguity is significantly reduced.
The ones facilitating genocide get the blame. The ones organizing a reign of terror get the blame. Who do you "blame" in past revolutions?
I can be a lot more objective about stuff when it's not actually me who's potentially responsible.
This is just tacit support for the present system of plunder and genocide just because you don't want to be responsible for ending the plunder and genocide.
And now we're into the billion different schools of ethics thing again. No, I didn't want to be responsible for the innocent people who would die as a result of this hypothetical situation where I have the ability to kick off a bloody revolution. So if there's a way to stop fascism and techno-slavery without risking the lives of the people I would be trying to save, I would prefer to go with that option.
That option doesn't exist, though, you're just hiding behind vague notions of "ethics" to justify inaction.
What inaction? I'm acting locally, I'm volunteering, I'm raising my kids to be skeptical of anyone who suggests that empathy is weakness. You're saying this like there's an actual option that I'm choosing not to take. I'm saying, if I were somehow able to choose the way the change occurs, it wouldn't be in a spray of bullets. But it's not like that option is actually available to me.
You seem to be defending a position you know won't work, though.
No. I'm advocating for us to try for the best possible version of our future. It may be inevitable, but I'm not interested in hoping for a world where we consider the loss of a hundred million people under the final spasming throes of a dying capitalist oligarchy to be an acceptable loss. Yes, it would be ultimately the oligarchs' fault, but I still couldn't live with myself if I were the one advocating for it.
Nobody is advocating for that, though. Revolution is very rarely that bloody, you need to look at historical example.
I was hoping that my ad absurdum example was clear. I just meant "a very large number."
Either way, I certainly hope nobody is seriously advocating for that. It would be quite bleak if that were the only way change could ever occur.
Revolutionaries can't just "do a revolution," we prepare for it so we can succeed when it happens. This is how revolution has occured historically, and there isn't really a way to avoid it with any reasonable chance of success.
Mark Twain hit pretty hard about it:
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
He did indeed. But I don't have it in me to be the direct cause of death for innocent people. Honestly, I very much doubt I have it in me to be the direct cause of death for guilty people.
I know the consequentialist arguments, but I can't do it.