this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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Hey.
Finland here. Socialism is pretty fucking great.
How's it going in America, the bastion of capitalism, where there is no parental leave, limited sick days, at-will firing, cities are overcrowded with human excrement from homeless people who still have actual jobs, for profit prisons forcing people to slave away for years because of mandatory minimum sentencing, and all that other good shit?
Communism might not work until we get to a Star Trek style utopia, but socialism definitely does. Capitalism doesn't have a monopoly on market economies.
Market socialism is just the same thing as capitalism, just with less poor quality products, good labour laws, no horribly massive income inequalities, etc.
But no you go on ahead and defend capitalism as an ideology, I'm sure you've read the literature on the subject and know what you're talking about.
I'm not saying you're necessarily defending it even if I think you're wrongly equating capitalism and market economy.
I just feel that for the most part, basically the "Red Scare" made people think that the only thing that's an alternative to capitalism is full blown communism, which implies that all market economies are capitalist, which they aren't.
I'm not blaming you — I'm blaming some of the implications of the language you've used. There is a difference.
Yeah, there's a lot of good things about Finland when comparing internationally, but I can tell you, there are some rather bad things as well. While "first amendment auditors" in the US are sometimes annoying as fuck, we honestly need a little bit of that type of spirit here. We've got authoritarian issues. Honestly.
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/25412-hs-most-finns-would-accept-human-rights-violations-to-enforce-border-act.html
https://unric.org/en/finland-must-address-legacy-of-human-rights-violations-against-sami-people-says-un-expert/
https://harvardpolitics.com/nordic-racism/
I'd just like to live somewhere else for a while, maybe that might give me a newfound respect to licking some boots or something, as currently respecting the Finnish police- and justice system in general is a very nauseating idea indeed.
My point is that adopting socialism would make the poor richer and the megarich poorer, and if it's just socialism, a "market socialism", not a "communism", if you will, then nothing would really change for most of the people. Well, nothing would change to be more negative at least. The megawealthy would still be rich, but they wouldn't be as disgustingly rich as now. Homelessness or hunger wouldn't exist. But still a lot of people basically consider "socialism" to be a curse-word?
Some Tankies have told me more than once that Cuba and China are on the path to communism and the fact that they get more capitalist every day is proof of that somehow.
While I don't disagree with your main point, to my knowledge Finland is still capitalist, it just has a robust safety net, regulations, and workers' protections, like most of Europe, and unlike much of the US.
Yeah, a lot of people think that, and they'd be wrong.
We're a social democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
Learn to separate your notion of "capitalism" from "market economy". Capitalism is to market economy what cancer is to cell growth. It is that, but it is a malignant form of it that will never ever function in long term, and it's very clear to anyone who objectively looks at it. Infinite growth on finite materials is literally impossible.
From the very source you used, the very next sentence:
Yeah I'm pretty sure that wasn't there the last time I read about that.
It's a highly contested article, because people hate admitting that socialism is better than capitalism.
But when you look at the ideologies prescriptively, socialism is about the welfare of everyone in said society, while capitalism is about accumulating capital, at whatever cost. These are mutually exclusive objectives.
Thus, it's unerasonable to say that there's a "form of capitalism that isn't capitalism but actually is more like socialism but it's not actually socialism it's just well managed capitalism", because capitalism by itself is unmanaged. Capitalism seeks to get rid of any regulation. Capitalism seeks to have the most profit for the least cost. This ideology conflicts with making good products and treating your employees well.
There's no such thing anywhere as unrestricted capitalism. Even the US, the very center of the modern capitalist movement, isn't "purely" capitalist. If if was, it wouldn't have socialist policies like the antitrust laws.. But it has to, because without those, the economy would collapse, because capitalism is self-defeating, just like cancer..