this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27293783

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

all of the above listed counties have very solid healthcare and are not entirely socialist. what’s your point?

socialism is not a requirement for being a place that treats people with respect and dignity; nor is it a silver bullet

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

As @[email protected] said, the Nordics can only provide the safety nets they do while paying generally high wages while still maintaining enormous profits for their bourgeoisie because they expropriate vast sums from the Global South via Imperialism, manifested in outsourcing manufacturing for pennies and through large loans. They are Landlords in country form.

They aren't alone in this, of course, the whole of Western Europe generally does it, and the US Empire is the biggest at it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 43 minutes ago (1 children)

i don’t disagree, but socialism won’t solve that just by virtue of it being different… global socialism, perhaps but on the country level it’s just not. socialism just aligns local incentives

[–] [email protected] 2 points 41 minutes ago (1 children)

Socialism allows it to be solved, Imperialism cannot be eliminated while Capitalism remains. Imperialism is the later stage of Capitalism.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 27 minutes ago (2 children)

theoretically

and now you’re arguing for massive bloodshed and forcing people to live the way you want, in potentially awful living conditions for a lot of people (i certainly, as an LGBT person, would not want to live in any previous or current socialist state) for a long time for theoretical improvement

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 minutes ago

Theoretically and practically. We have evidence for this throughout the last 130 years.

As for advocating for "bloodshed," revolution remains the sole path to end the bloodshed, especially of the genocidal US Empire.

As for LGBTQ rights, I am pansexual myself, and I can confirm that Socialist countries make faster progress on social issues. Cuba today has much better LGBTQ rights than anywhere else in the world, and countries like the PRC are gradually improving as well. Socialism, if anything, improves the rate of progress. Even the GDR began pushing for LGBTQ rights well before Western European countries and the US did.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 minute ago* (last edited 49 seconds ago)

I would point out that the system we live in now is also maintained by violence and a lot of bloodshed, all alternatives are aggressively opposed, many people live in awful conditions already, and more often they tend to be the people on receiving end of US weapon systems. The actual death toll of capitalism is extremely high if you include social murder and neglect too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

it is a requirement if you want to do that without oppessing brown people elsewhere.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

the important thing is not socialism: it’s a government that deals with negative externalities

socialism tends to do better at that simply because often it often does better at long-term planning (but that’s not a given either), but capitalism without corporate bullshit, stock markets, etc (ie actual ownership over a business rather than just ownership over a vague thing where you’re only concerned with line goes up not long term business health) has pretty much the same drivers: long term sustainability and this holding others to account for their negative externalities

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

What you describe as "corporate bullshit" and "stock markets" are just a symptom of later stages of Capitalism. You cannot maintain the small stages forever, eventually they will coalesce into large firms and syndicates. You can't simply bust up monopoly either, manufacturing gets so complex that it needs to be done by large companies to handle the scale.

This process doesn't stop, though, it becomes better and more efficient to publicly own and plan these large firms as they get larger and larger. This is why Socialism is a necessity regardless.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 30 minutes ago (1 children)

just a symptom of later stages of Capitalism

i don’t disagree of course, and i wasn’t saying capitalism is the only way; i think capitalism like this is absolute trash as well… i’m simply saying that those qualities are neither intrinsic to, nor exclusively found in socialist systems

You cannot maintain the small stages forever

perhaps, but honestly i don’t think we’ve actually even tried. we jumped straight from feudalism to some form of capitalism to some socialism. we’ve never had a system that tried to keep things small - and i’m not saying we should either necessarily

but these arguments are all reasonably theoretical

Socialism is a necessity

socialism is perhaps part of a solution but dealing in absolutes is rarely ever correct

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 minutes ago

Corporate bullshit and stock markets and whatnot are magnified in impact and scale in Capitalist systems, surely that's relevant?

As for "trying to keep things small," that's been tried. Trust busting was attempted, protectionism has been attempted, but regardless of will, material processes continue.

As for Socialism being a necessity, it's true. It will have various forms, but eventually as production gains in complexity it necessitates public ownership and planning to continue to be efficient.