Socialism

Wait. Why would that get hate here?

I only downvoted to make sure you get the hate you expect. Your opinion is not at all controversial.

I agree with everything you said in your comment, but it seems like an odd response to this particular meme.

In this meme we have the same person saying two things:

1. You can't use Norway as an example of Socialism being successful because it's not really socialism.

2. We can't have social safety nets in our country (probably the U.S. in this case) because that would be socialism, and socialism doesn't work.

That person is not interested in helping reduce exploitation and preventing needless suffering.

That person is not arguing in good faith.

Does that mean they go on intercontiental holidays to 5 star hotels? No. Does that mean they can afford food, heat, shelter and the ability to start a family? Yes.

Going on intercontinental holidays to 5 star hotels off profits from low wages is how socialism for the rich works. The rich then use this fact to say socialism is bad. I've seen kittens do less to a ball of yarn in a fit of rage than the Plutocrats have done with people's minds with their propaganda.

I don’t care if it’s welfare capitalism, UBI, socialism or fucking whatever.

Shouldn't you? I mean this is pretty basic fucking knowledge for some of the ways to go about it, and they are quite different. And it's also not like you have to go 100% all in one of them either. Seems like what you want, is also the core ideology of social democracy with a strong welfare system. Here's a thought: maybe that's what you want, and you should care? I'm guessing that you live in a country so completely fucked in all available directions of politics, and in that process forgot what workers rights were 50 years ago.

I live in Norway. People in otherwise underpaid professions such as teaching can afford to go on intercontinental holidays. Even more than once a year, if that's what they want to do. Though I will agree that staying at a 5 star hotel would be a silly expense. That stuff still requires the perks of exploitative capitalism, for which teaching is too useful.

Apologies if I'm being a bit rude. But the "I don't want to care about how stuff is and works, but how stuff is and works shouldn't be the way it is!" anti-intellectual attitude is annoying af.

No one thinks that North Korea is a 'republic' and 'Communist' China has a billionaire class. Stop getting caught up in labels.

I don't think you understand why people even want socialism or what it means to be a socialist. Socialism states that we are oppressed by the ruling class which are the capitalists. According to most socialist doctrine the government is controlled in part or entirely by the capitalists.

But sure, let's all form up into groups that either think only socialism works or only capitalism works and try to misapply these to sectors of the economy where they've already been proven not to work. That makes sense!

You also don't know anything about socialist economics. There are many socialist economic theories, a whole toolkit. Socialism isn't a single tool or a single group of people and ideas. Heck even capitalism has different variations, although less diverse than socialist ideology.

What you are talking about is hybrid economy which is also an ideology. You are also starting with the assumption that democracy is real and the government is acting in good faith. Neither of those are necessarily true especially if you live in the US.

I'll take that one step farther - socialism and capitalism are not even concrete tools - they are abstract values that actual tools and policies can be measured against - "this policy is more capitalist because it satisfies capitalist values X and Y, but it's also a bit socialistic because it contributes to socialist value Z". This is true for many things - like progressivism vs conservatism or deontology vs utilitarianism, to name a few - instead of treating them as the directions on the axes people decided to make them their all ideology.

Imagine if this was done with temperature. Alice likes hot weather and Bob likes it cold, so they decide to join the "Hotist" and "Coldist" camps respectively and fight each other publicly over which side of Mercury the Earth should be terraformed to. All this while the actually difference in their preferences is just a few degrees.

I don't advocate for centrism because I don't think we should always strive for the exact middle of every topic. We should strive for some point in the spectrum, because the very extremes are seldom correct (usually because of diminishing returns which make it, at the very least, not worth the complete dehumanization and destruction of the other side), but that point can be much closer to one of the extremes than centrists would be comfortable to even consider. Finding that point, of course, is not easy - certainly not as easy as picking one side (or picking the exact center) as your dogma.

It may be possible that socialism and capitalism are just economic tools that can applied to different sectors of the economy depending on which works best in a given context.

While I wouldn't agree that the ideologies of socialism and capitalism are compatible in determining economic relations within a country, I would say that socialism and even communism are compatible with markets, which is what I would say is the "tool" in that statement. Markets can be designed based on what is useful for that sector.

Except socialism and capitalism are fundamentally different and incompatible.

By using both for their tasks, do you mean state regulated capitalism?

Isn't socialism by definition a system that's supposed to be able to coexist with capitalism?

@SpaceCowboy @cyu i don't think that's possible. In an economic system private property is either present or it is not present, if it is there it is capitalism if it is not there it is socialism, I don't think there is any middle ground

I don't think it's a bad thing that people misunderstand what socialism is. After nearly a century of anticommunist propaganda, people adopting the label of "socialist" for socdem out of ignorance means we can more easily convince people about real socialism.