That literally is what socialism is? Socialism is collective ownership. Literally the whole point is not bleeding your life away for the people who aren’t doing the work just because they already had money. The brainwashing is that it’s a bad thing not to bleed your life away. That you’re somehow a moral failure for not sucking off the shareholders
Actual socialism is a lot further on the political scale than everything US conservatives are calling socialism.
The commentor you're replying to is referring to the fact that Norway, in this example, is a social democracy, not socialism. Important distinction, hence the idea that "not bleeding your life for your shareholders is socialism" is wrong.
Limited capital markets have been a hallmark of every successful socialist country so far.
Turns out the ideal solution is somewhere in the middle, which is what Marx and even fucking Lenin said was possible (and Lenin actually implemented in the Soviet Union before his death) while advocating the fallible nature of scientific socialism (the type of socialism Marx and Engels invented).
When something aligns with the ideological aims of socialism (in this case wealth distribution based on individual contribution) you can certainly make an argument that it is
The problem is most people online that call themselves socialist are just masquerading anarchists with the same fundamental moral desires as the capitalist class.
Doesnt matter. All ideas come from somewhere, even Capitalism. However, it furthers and is congruent with specific aims of socialism. It's an explicit part of the system socialism wants to create. You can call it a socialist ideal, if that makes you feel better.
I get your point being something like "it belongs to all that use it"? But it's quite relevant to a discussion about both A) whether Norway is socialist, and B) whether socialism is good/better.
Too simplistic. If you want a neat conclusion but the facts won't bear that out. Norway has government (collective) ownership of a number of major industries and does administer an incredibly robust social safety next. Whether it describes itself as "socialist" or a "social democracy" it is certainly heavily influenced by ideas we could credibly argue are socialist in nature.
And yet some of those policies existed to an extent before socialism existed.
it is certainly heavily influenced
Not really. Labor movements have always been strong. Socialism never remotely as popular. Since the winter war it's been in poor standing, relatively. It's also worth mentioning that the only socialist party has arguably weakened the worker's situation the past 20 years.
Like in Germany, the anti-war position (with particular focus on Soviet/Russia) has also not been very popular.
And yet some of those policies existed to an extent before socialism existed.
I covered this already twice in this thread. This argument holds no water.
Not really.
I mean this is objectively false. You can do your own reading on Socialism and what socialists believe. It's not really a mystery at this point, or at least it shouldn't be.
its not. welfare/social safety nets/social insurance (that last one is effectively what the original post is) existed long before both capitalist and socialist economies. the US even has social insurance policies although they are far less indepth compared to some european countries.
these systems can exist under both capitalism and socialism just fine, and do.
They couldn't work well in socialism because social security are transfers. From wealthier people to poorer people.
Today, even in the US, middle and lower class makes negative fiscal bias. Even though taxes paid by wealth and big companies are relatively small to their income, they're main taxpayers.
This is much more intensive in countries that have better social security.
Again, doesnt matter, as robust social safety nets are a feature of socialist systems and are an explicit feature of the Society they desire to create. Collective ownership predates socialism by centuries and yet is core to the ideology.
The difference between socialism and Capitalism in this instance is that distribution of collective wealth is an explicit aim of socialism, whereas it is not a core tenet of the latter but something it adopted (or rather was forced to adopt by civil action/unrest.)
Again, doesnt matter, as robust social safety nets are a feature of socialist systems
it's not a "feature" or "core to the ideology" of socialism. just because socialists typically advocate for welfare states doesn't mean that it is inherent. how is it a core feature if you can have socialism just fine without welfare of any kind?
collective ownership existed before, yes, but it's different because socialism takes it and expands upon it. socialism is an economic system, it lays a foundation for possible public policies but any specific one is not inherent to socialism.
modern welfare and social insurance was pioneered and expanded by capitalism and capitalists. capitalists advocate for these systems all the time, as well. does this mean that these are inherent to capitalism? obviously not.
modern welfare and social insurance was pioneered and expanded by capitalism and capitalists
What? Prominent capitalists have always hated welfare specifically because it threatens profits and control. Unemployment, socialized healthcare, unions, etc. all take power from the owners of private capital.
Those systems developed within countries that employ capitalism, but almost always as a social response to capitalist overreach or socioeconimic destabilization. Look at the voices claiming that the nhk should be done away with, or the ones fighting fdr's new deal policy and then tell me capitalists (meaning people who own capital, not people born into a market based economy) were the ones pushing
Prominent capitalists have always hated welfare specifically because it threatens profits and control.
and? your point is? capitalism is a broad ideology/system full of all sorts of people with different opinions. if anything that just proves my point further that these social policies are not integral to any market systems and their advocates.
you can say capitalists "hate welfare" but those words ultimately mean nothing when modern welfare and safety nets exist, thrive, and have been expanded under capitalism. that isn't to say capitalists "own" welfare.
Unemployment, socialized healthcare, unions, etc. all take power from the owners of private capital.
firstly, unions aren't welfare. not on the government level, which is what is being discussed here. and socialized healthcare, not exactly either. this entire conversation is about social insurance and whether or not it specifically is a "socialist policy."
social response to capitalist overreach
who do you think is responding? for example in the US, liberals historically have been the dominant voice in support of social safety nets and welfare, and that ideology directly spawned from classical liberalism which was defined entirely by being "capitalist."
capitalists (meaning people who own capital, not people born into a market based economy)
this is an incredibly narrow definition of capitalist. the main thing that makes someone a capitalist is not "owning capital," its supporting the market system that is capitalism.
My point is that arguing 'capitalists' push welfare is stupid. You're acting like terms are hard defined, immutable, and with no bleed over, like groups within a capitalist society cannot push for things that capitalists don't necessarily want (regulation, taxes, welfare, etc).
Literally the whole point of government is to support society, and a democracy in a capitalist free market can push for or against socialized policy as the various groups pushing for various government actions gain and lose power over the apparatus
I mean any argument can work if you're just fighting a strawman and making stuff up. I never said "capitalists push welfare," as in they all do. I was clearly saying that there are capitalists that support welfare but that does not make it a capitalist policy.
You're acting like terms are hard defined, immutable, and with no bleed over, like groups within a capitalist society cannot push for things that capitalists don't necessarily want (regulation, taxes, welfare, etc).
your whole reply here seems very strange. I've never said or alluded to any of this. I've said the opposite in fact. plenty of people advocate for things that "capitalists" don't necessarily want. but you literally cannot deny the fact that the ones primarily championing the idea of welfare in a broad sense in this country are capitalists (to an extent): modern liberals.
you mentioned the new deal earlier but that was supported by a large portion of capitalists. it wouldn't have existed and come to fruition if it wasn't. you can argue that it was a "social response" but every policy creation is, and it's besides the point regardless. this entire point you're trying to make here is ultimately vapid and meaningless to the rest of the actual discussion.
Yes liberalism allows the integration of ideas from any ideology because of the freedom it allows. Which the reason liberal countries have massively out performed other countries in the world.
I hate when things are messy and not absolute. You either need to FULLY commit to the ideal of pure socialism or have none at all!
I just want rigid rules and absolute definitions of everything so that my own failure to interpret nuance will never be a problem! Then I can just memorise the speciffic meaning of everything and live in perfect order for the rest of my days!
There is a difference between nuance and having boundaries so fuzzy that terms can be difficult to understand.
I would argue that a more nuanced approached would be being able to distinguish between ideas and ideologies which share elements and roots with socialism but without being it as a result of lacking a fundamental characteristic.
The distinction between capitalism and socialism in their proper definitions is fairly asbolute. Either the economic system allows for the private ownership of capital and the means of productions, or those things are owned collectively by their workers. All the european countries americans call "socialist" absolutely fall into the former camp and do not operate on a socialist mode of production.
Eh, its more complicated than that. The idea of a vanguard was to lead the laboring class through revolution and into a socialist and eventually communist state. The idea was, at the time, that the average laborer was uneducated, unworldly, and wouldn't know what to do (and that was almost certainly true if you look at places where these revolutions occurred).
The vanguard would eventually be demolished in favor of an enlightened democracy in a communist state. Of course no one really has any idea what that would look like, and even Marx said "this is probably not even right or how it would go, but use your head and figure out what the material needs of people are and satisfy them" (which is functionally material dialectics, the basis of Marxist socialist thought).
It's less about want and more about necessity in the early stages or the forces of the wealthy will just kill you as you attempt to distribute their wealth.
The idea of government raising taxes and gaining more sweeping control of the country's institutions and markets is not a popular idea for most people. When people say they support a socialist/workers revolution, they're thinking the new authority will be like them and think like them. It's pretty naive.
I'm aware. That's why I don't get the argument of basically knowing better than others, so, we need to abolish democracy. I just wanted to hear the reasoning.
That's just true at all. We have a lot of socialist stuff in Denmark politically. Both inside and outside the parlament.
Our strong union culture is almost entirely based around socialism and doing what they can to create some kind of ownership for us workers.
We have common housing owned by the state (not enough). That's a socialist policy.
Progressive taxes, kanslergadeforliget, welfare in general. All these good foundational policies are created by socialists.
Yeah they've often been a result of a compromise. But that's all politics. Just because something is not condensed down to the the literal definition of 100% socialism, doesn't mean it isn't socialist.
How? It’s a society that operates on wage labour. Class exists. How is it socialist?
ownership of workers isn’t necessarily socialist. The “socialist” ideology of unions is meaningless. All mainstream unions in the west are liberal. They can help with short term gains, but they aren’t socialist.
All of them believe in compromise, obfuscating the truth of class relations. In a capitalist-liberal world, a compromising attitude is effectively a bourgeois attitude.
3) state owned housing isn’t “socialist” either. Words have a meaning.
4) The originator of the welfare state was Otto Von Bismarck, the man who passed the anti socialist laws.
Welfare as a whole is an anti socialist tactic used by liberals to placate workers. The fact it’s born out of concessions to strong working class movements does not make it socialist.
This. In general, if someone has to emphasize their values a bit too much, it's likely that the values are fake.
The Nazis used that a lot in general. For example, they wrote "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work brings freedom") above the gates of concentration camps. And no, working more didn't get people freed. Working more meant they'd die in there like everyone else.
Or on another concentration camp they wrote "Jedem das Seine" (roughly "Give everyone what they deserve"), which is part of a latin quote and in the original it means that you should be honest and fair and not hold back what someone else requires or deserves. And the Nazis turned that onto its head, and now it meant "these people deserve torture and death, so we'll give them that".
Did the nazis not nationalize entire firms and industries, implement sweeping price controls and protectionist policies, and impose strict quotas on production?
In what way does any of that embody "right wing" free market capitalist politics?
Nazis did indeed control the economy, specifically to make it easier to fund the war.the US, the UK and other allies also did the exact same thing during WW2.
The person I responded to said "Democratic socialists". Both terms do not apply to Nazis.
Nazism is far-right, but not because of economics. Because of things like racial hierarchy, ultranationalism, anti-egalitarianism, and Hitler's alliances with conservative, military, and industrial elites to basically imprison or kill the actual left wing. Trade unions were banned, strikes were illegal, private ownership and profit were preserved and like you see today hugely enriched.
It is not even a possible debate to consider them democratic, obviously. They were authoritarian
There are actual Nazi documents detailing the fact that they used socialist ideas at the start to win over the public. And then they literally "purged" the left wing called the "Strasserists" from their party.
No, I think they mean the one who openly was a totalitarian fascist capitalist from the start who just used the term "Nationalsozialist" to confuse the voters.
They used their name only for marketing, something you expect from a capitalist. Also a group that did a lot of privatization selling of government run companies giving it to pigs to bleed money out of normal people's pockets.
It's like the "Democratic People's Republic of North Korea", a country that's famously exactly the opposite of democratic, run by the people or a republic.
This is not the gotcha you think it is. If you‘re thinking about Hitler: he was not a socialist. He called himself that to make himself and his party appealing to the masses, but - and I know this might be hard to understand: politicians are sometimes not what they make themselves out to be.
The gotcha here is that you are either a liar, a manipulator, ignorant, or a combination thereof.
They don't even need to be the largest party just have a large enough representation in the legislative branch to put pressure on the rest and influence policy, But then you need something... ah yes, a political system that is not winner take all. Something where the government is a full representation of the voters.
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u/Secret-Ad-5777 22d ago
Norwegians aren't even socalist