What do you think about socialism?

16 comments

1. As in the idea or real existing socialism?

2. Great idea, but humans are too selfish and dumb to actually execute it with any effectiveness.

3. Well I’m Canadian so I feel victim to socialism. Both from a taxation perspective and more so my health rights. The fact that according to the Canadian government the top 1% of Canadians are considered someone who makes more than $250k in a household (2 ppl) / that’s the ultra rich. And that we have no rights to get healthcare without timely often life ending waits. I’m gonna have to vote no on socialism

4. Well the public idea of socialism isn’t really the same in all countries. In France up until a few years ago the equivalent of the American democrats were called the socialists.

5. Seems great, would love to try it someday. So many first world countries have socialist policies and are close to a socialist-democratic state. A decade ago when I lived in Japan it was wonderful having easy access to healthcare that was incredibly cheap and higher quality than what I can find today in the US.

6. Too easy a path totalitarian rule.

7. I’ll copy and paste a comment I made a few days ago (with some minor edits)

   My parents first ate real butter on their honeymoon, and met in a public library because it was the one place guaranteed to have heating (AKA be above the freezing point of water) in winter. They were both there trying to teach themselves using the battered, outdated, heavily censored government textbooks. If you saw a queue you joined it in the hopes there would be something good like toilet paper, or bread, at the other end. Most of the time the other people in the queue wouldn’t even know what they were queuing for. Of course, my mum doesn’t like to talk about that time as much as my dad does because some of her family were disappeared by the the government over the years, and that’s not even counting the time that her people were the target of a government organised genocide. As for my dad the only time I’ve ever seen him truly, honest to God, someone-is-going-to-die-in-the-next-five-seconds levels of mad is when my brother’s dumbass friend turned up at our house wearing a Che shirt. The moment the wall fell my parents instantly fled to come West, yet even with access to quality modern healthcare my grandfather’s lingering cough that he got from staying in damp, mouldy, government housing stuck with him for the rest of his life. The only positive thing to come of this was the sheer frugality and repair skills they learnt from it, because in a socialist land with chronic supply shortages if you couldn’t make do and mend you were shit out of luck.

   But honestly? If they knew they’d have to put up with Western eejits trying to wilfully usher in this eternal waking nightmare in a country that is comparatively a fucking utopia, they’d have probably just stayed in Moscow.

   tl;dr: Fuck socialism. Fuck socialists.

8. It depends on how it’s implemented. It’s a lovely concept that can be implemented well or poorly. Most of the countries that consistently top the lists for happiest citizens, best access to healthcare, and best worker protections have many socialist-style policies in place.

9. As someone who’s from a Scandinavian country I can confidently say that I think it would suck to live In a socialist country

   There are just a lot of flaws with socialism making it impossible to succeed with it

10. Cute idea conjured up by people who never had to work for a living.

11. Oh totally, I love it in Les Mis when they come out in those high waisted trousers and the little red waistcoats, waving the flag and getting all passionate.

12. Nope

13. Nice idea, doesn’t work in practice because of human nature. No economic system will ever be truly good. Some socialist flair to a capitalist society seems like our best course of action currently.

14. Listen: Fuck capitalism. Utopian socialism sounds splendid as a replacement… but humans are too selfish. Edit: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are too selfish. They could fix this shit and choose not to

15. Just a reminder to everyone, Marx did not invent socialism. There are plenty of forms of socialism. And plenty of socialism is not meant to lead to communism. Also, the USSR was a bad example of *communism*, not socialism, anyway. They are not the same.

    It’s also going to look wildly different as robots get better and better. Socialism will make way more sense as robots replace more and more of the labor needed to keep us all alive. The goal should be to free humanity from scarcity and the necessity of dangerous and unpleasant labor, and let everyone share in that prosperity instead of just a handful of rich capitalists who owns the robots they fired all the humans they used to exploit for their labor.

    UBI, that’s the only reasonable way forward. The world would be such a better place.

    And in my opinion, the pandemic only proved that. I had a horrible time and am still not recovered from the trauma, don’t get me wrong, but at the same time… anyone who has ever thought that UBI would mean everyone sitting around being lazy was proven wrong. People were making masks to give away, just because they could. People were learning to bake or garden and finding useful ways to fill their time, and giving it away when they could. Performers were putting together free things to comfort and entertain. Tons of people learned new forms of art, or took classes. If you ever needed proof that society would better off with UBI and people would be *more* productive if we weren’t forced to burn ourselves out with menial labor, well, there you go. COVID proved a lot of horrible things, but it also proved that people want to be productive and give things away, and don’t need the threat of starvation to not be lazy.

16. That depends on whether you are talking about *actual* socialism, or communism that people call socialism because they don’t understand they’re not the same thing and they want to use the 1980’s boogeyman to keep people scared of positive change.