IS SOCIALISM SLAVERY?
- Thread starter Tudo
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xavier7995
Not ironically, I tell this to the folks in the midwest. You need to take that scary step of leaving everyone and everything behind and go out and carpe the hell out of that diem. Nobody owes you shit, go where the opportunity is and work at it.
Its nonpartisan. If you dream of being an actor, well you can't live in a village of 500 people. Have to choose what sacrifices you are willing to make. Conservative folks ranting about illegals taking their jobs...same shit, go where the jobs are and work hard. Most people on both sides aren't willing to make sacrifices to get where they want, instead they just get resentful and finger point at a buncha shit for why they fail without taking serious stock of why they are where they are in life.
*that taking serious stock should occur locked in a dark room on a head full of hallucinogens. Fer funsies.
Benny Hill - Socialism (1989)
Benny Hill - Socialism (1989)
Benny Hill - Socialism (1989)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLdZtU-RhPI
Benny Hill - Socialism (1989)
Benny Hill - Socialism (1989)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLdZtU-RhPI
Montuno
...como el Son...
that's what i like about the distinct difference between, anarcho-socialism and authoritarian socialism.
we need not tie ourselves to just 1 dimension and then try fold other dimensions into that linear conception.
if we take an earlier offered definition for the word, socialism being the transitional condition between capitalism and communism, then in a sense we see this as only referring to economics. we can take this economics line, and at 90 degrees draw another line, measuring everybodys(?[1]) freedom (or lack thereof), teasing out the differences between a libertarian socialism[2], and an authoritarian socialism. .... et viola, the political compass.
the libertarian forms of socialism are more born of, and maintained by, a sufficiently commonly held understanding that, as (at least) one political philosopher put it (albeit hastily paraphrased by me): my freedom depends on your freedom.
as in, enlightened self interest.
not an imposition by the self appointed enlightened upon the proclaimed subhumans or whatever other tankie[4] nonsense that reveals itself riddled with hypocrisy and contradiction. as much as capitalism does, with it's grand self marketing as great for freedom and efficiency (now since shown to offer neither ~ David Graeber's books are a good intro here, if you're not yet familiar with these two claims of capitalism not being true).
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this reminds again of the orwellian hole we're in, where the people from one part of the world have one meaning for a word, and people from another part, have another meaning, and barely an overlap between the two on the edge of a venn diagram.
yes, if defining socialism as antithesis to freedom, then job well done. but i dont think we're much past tautological affirmations at that point.
if we consider again,
not the nazi kind of "socialism", nor stalinist, no, not authoritarian,
but a more bakunin kind, anarcho/libertarian socialism.
how would we structure things... would we have taxes? if we did, would they be egregious impositions? would we have say in what they're spent on, and scrutiny, and even means to opt out? would we rearrange economics so none suffer the psychelogical sting seeing a portion of their resources be taken (& even without legitimate representation)? would we continue the manufactured scarcities? how might we re-organize resource synergies, when we have the freedom (oft touted from usa voices as a purely capitalist trait (lol[7])), and the enlightened self interest, to help all.
and then consider even further, in a kropotkin sense... when it's everybody's responsibility, each of us... how willing would we be to disregard our duties, compared to the externalities prone predicament we find ourselves in with our authoritarian right wing corporatist-stooge governments towing the central banking line? how much value would we each be willing to permit lost by the likes of, e.g. stock traders (whom i heard destroy $7 of value for every $1 they extract from the economy/markets), once we're all fully informed and fully empowered to apply remedy?
but try tell someone with a mcarthian redscare hangover about the autonomy and sovereignty of the individual in the socio-economic systems on the freedom side of marx[8]. no, really, please do try. much to unlearn. much to mend.
when you're being hozed of every penny, and more, by the friends of those who enslave and extort you, under the false promise that the money will go to services and things for you, and protection from those enslavers/extortionists by regulation, and you see it's just those same circle of friends in the regulators, turning them to deregulators, so you just go deeper into enslavement by rents and other means... "taxes" seem egregious. and rightly so. that is egregious. if you had means of remedy over that, n could get rid of the extortion, prevent the revolving doors and conflicts of interest, a system eliminating and preventing such corruption, rather than nepotistically built on it... then maybe you could be in a place where you've ample abundance, no stress, and are therefor more easily happy to chip in to help maintain things nice for everybody. no psychological sting anymore. no oligarchs. no slavery.
i'm already concerned i'm taking this too far for much of the likely audience here, but... i'm still pussy footing in the shallows. what we'd really do with a system designed to benefit everybody, surely, would be to (safely, carefully) unleash the many suppressed emancipatory technologies (of which there are THOUSANDS). when a wealth-extraction-maximising entity gets big enough to buy the rule makers, it buys rules that benefit it. including what new technologies get to come out. ... so if a new technology comes out that would disrupt their wealth-extraction-maximisation, they quash it. any number of means. assassinating inventors is just the most sensationalist means this has been accomplished over the decades. many times, it's just done with the patent system. and no, not just the upfront patents that they sit on, and they buy extensions to, perpetually, so no one can bring them to market, but also the secreted patents, so no one gets to know. ... except maybe a few patent examiners... of which there's at least one who's calling out the scam, having seen energy/power devices be secreted over 3000 times. it's clearly not all secreting for our benefit by a benevolent paternal system. clearly, a huge portion of it, is to maintain the wealth-extraction dominance of the monopolists. yay, go capitalism. *baulk*. so efficient. we're so free. bollocks.
and yet... because of the orwellian language differences... these anti-freedom traits of capitalism are proclaimed as communism and socialism creeping in, by those lacking a broader political vocabulary to tease out the authoritarianism they mean from the redscare, and in that conflation and redscare, unaware of that bakunin corner/quote[6], that's worth repeating/re-reading to really grok it.
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(amusingly, yesterday i saw again young sheldon s02e15 (or was it s02e16...) where in his dry half-brain hyper-logic integrity and blinkered naivety, suggested to 1980s texas, moving to a more socialist/communist system. HA! ouch. ~ yeah, i'm not without awareness n sympathy for how tricky that is for many to deal with... even over 3 decades on from the berlin wall coming down.)
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n imagine what we'd be willing to pay each other with each our own currencies, to complement the collective currency used, that we'd also have control over production of, and therefor secondarily (to a large extent) the buying power of. ... sry, ok, i'm definitely taking this too far for folks now (myself included, lol). idk if that's like some kind of neo-keynsian fantasy or wat.
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i'm still keen to see what kind of "socialism" can be born when the ayn rands and the emma goldmans of the world put aside their differences to collaborate on a freedomwards midpoint.
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okies, that's [more than] enough. those who most need to, dont read these long replies.keep the faif[9].
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[1]~ maybe not everybody's... that may splay out another difference between (economic)left-free and (economic)right-free, where on the right you're more free to be not free... free to enslave... and there's its drift from freedom to tyranny. contrast to the left's ideological fervency that'd lead them from anarcho-communists/anarcho-socialists/libertarian-socialists/etc, drifting up to become tankies. each side has its own distinct epic fail potential.
[2] i get that in usa, this is a particularly difficult concept to grok, given how the terms are abused. long time abused. how many decades was there that mcarthian redscare nonsense conflating all left as the same devil tyrant, and how long as the usa conception of libertarian been all but wholly owned by the ayn rand corner? combine both these flaws, n you end up hiding the kropotkin/bakunin/emmagoldman/graeber/chomsky[3] corner. ... the corner with both freedom and socialism.[6]
[3] hesitated to include that last name. ever been on the fence with him, oft catching authoritarian flies cleverly hiding in his slow dribbling ointment.
[4] i saw someone struggle with that term recently. think of it like "send in the tanks" to "free" those who are not yet doing it the correct way, your way, the supreme leader's way, forcing homogeneous group-think[5] n all that bollocks.
[5] no free thought allowed. ... #notmyleft.
[6] as neatly encapsulated in: "Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice. Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality." -- Bakunin.
[7] i laugh, because, of course, that's nonsense. "you can make it too if you become a worthy vampire and buy the right lottery ticket to pull yourself up by your bootstraps." ha! just a way of blaming the victim, and creating victim co-perpetrators, deepening the "tragedy of the commons" hole.. ... methinks i shud go read confessions of an economic hitman (again? idk if i ever did).
[8] fuck marx. not a fan. almost as much as not a fan of thatcher. each disregarded the other political dimension, "no such thing as society" as thatcher put it. so marx already taking a wrong turn away from bakunin to where he famously resides on the political compass, instead of turning kropotkinwards, and in so doing, paved the way for the tankies, slipping through lenin, trotsky, to stalin. similar to how thatcher paved the way to the "neo-liberal" (not new, not liberal) shitshow we have currently, hugging dangerously close to a pinnochet area of the political compass, e.g. with the mainstay of brexiteers and the more gleefully racist corner of drumpff support, seemingly largely oblivious, not witting, to the political philosophy of those they support, despite it harming them too. so fuckem [marx[ists] [and thatcher[ites]]]. their ignorance and arrogance, make them unbefitting of considering taking aboard their political philosophies, less for what was in them, more for what was left out, and what (tyranny-trajectory) they allowed to happen in that omission.
[9] free as in freedom.
Indeed, the absurdity of this thread is to identify an economic system with democracy or dictatorship.
Socialism or communism can be dictatorial or come to power democratically and even enhance that democracy.
Likewise, one forgets how many capitalist regimes have been atrocious dictatorships: look at the history of Central & Souuth America (which happened in El Salvador, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Paraguay, Chile, Argentina...?).
Or the terrible African capitalist dictatorships? Or in Europe: weren't the dictatorships in Greece, Italy, Portugal or Spain capitalist? Wasn't Nazi Germany capitalist (some will say it was socialist because of National Socialism, he, he...)? Wasn't a capitalist dictatorship imposed in Spain by a failed coup d'état and a subsequent civil war on a democratic government where socialists and communists were in the majority?
And the achievements of freedom, rights and prosperity that different socialist parties have democratically achieved for Western Europe, from Scandinavia to the Iberian Peninsula, are forgotten.
As for Marx, we forget his stature as a philosopher and economist, and his attempt (and his achievements) to develop a scientific theory to explain the historical and political-social human development...
And let us not confuse Marxism, with the interpretations and ideological derivations that were made of it in the U.S.S.R.: Leninism, Troskyism, Stalinism...
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
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White Beard
Active member
Excellent points, all - and to highlight the distinction between economic systems/structures and political systems/structures: capitalist systems can describe themselves as *anything* politically, and talk “freedom* 24/7 - and still reinforce the “freedom” to obey or die...and all perfectly legal.
Sounds more your area of expertise
Yes I've been known to have the ability to figure out who to avoid and who not to most of my life. Unfortunate there are those who just don't want anyone else to be free
Montuno
...como el Son...
I cant understand it, but I suppouse a reason: becouse the económic power are in capitalism stronger than the power of a goverment decomaticaly elected.
(I have read same very intersting articules of Chosky tranlated to my tongue, anyway...)
Montuno
...como el Son...
You would live wonderfully in a capitalist regime like that of Franco, or Pinochet or Videla: You had all the freedom in the world to buy, sell and do business (the few who had money, of course)... and to do strictly what you were ordered to do in the rest of your life... If not, you could be thrown alive from a military transport plane flying thousands of meters above the ocean...(and that was the best ending: the previous tortures were the worst, of course...)
As they say here to the children : "If you don't want to be like Benny Hil, read"...
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G
GYOweed
I aint giving up my guns or paying for your shit.
Am told this makes communists laugh out loud....
Am told this makes communists laugh out loud....
,"On one occasion, so it was narrated, Stalin called for a live chicken and proceeded to use it to make an unforgettable point before some of his henchmen. Forcefully clutching the chicken in one hand, with the other he began to systematically pluck out its feathers. As the chicken struggled in vain to escape, he continued with the painful denuding until the bird was completely stripped. “Now you watch,” Stalin said as he placed the chicken on the floor and walked away with some bread crumbs in his hand. Incredibly, the fear-crazed chicken hobbled toward him and clung to the legs of his trousers. Stalin threw a handful of grain to the bird, and it began to follow him around the room, he turned to his dumbfounded colleagues and said quietly, “This is the way to rule the people. Did you see how that chicken followed me for food, even though I had caused it such torture? People are like that chicken. If you inflict inordinate pain on them they will follow you for food the rest of their lives.”
— Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God, (Word Publ., Dallas: 1994), pp. 26-27
Am told this makes communists laugh out loud....
,"On one occasion, so it was narrated, Stalin called for a live chicken and proceeded to use it to make an unforgettable point before some of his henchmen. Forcefully clutching the chicken in one hand, with the other he began to systematically pluck out its feathers. As the chicken struggled in vain to escape, he continued with the painful denuding until the bird was completely stripped. “Now you watch,” Stalin said as he placed the chicken on the floor and walked away with some bread crumbs in his hand. Incredibly, the fear-crazed chicken hobbled toward him and clung to the legs of his trousers. Stalin threw a handful of grain to the bird, and it began to follow him around the room, he turned to his dumbfounded colleagues and said quietly, “This is the way to rule the people. Did you see how that chicken followed me for food, even though I had caused it such torture? People are like that chicken. If you inflict inordinate pain on them they will follow you for food the rest of their lives.”
— Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God, (Word Publ., Dallas: 1994), pp. 26-27
In the US, what is called socialism generally means that the government spends some of your tax money on the taxpayers. A proper education that makes our population competitive in the world, or a tax system that makes the rich cover their share of the burden will always bring on the comments about socialism from the uninformed along with references to variants of socialism that failed due to massive greed.
