quyksilver

@quyksilver

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Chinese Jewish furry herm foxtaur trans lesbian Hank Hill, aspiring anaesthesiologist

Show love and kindness to the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.

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its-chaboi
@its-chaboi
its-chaboi
@its-chaboi

Socialism With American Characteristics

I feel like there's a way to have something that genuinely looks and acts like socialism (or, I should say, like socialism ought to) that's also genuinely compatible with mainstream American culture

Basically, I think the way to do this is to excise 100% of the jargon, visual symbolism, incomprehensible Continental philosophy, claims about historical inevitability, etc. etc. that has accrued to the concept of "socialism" and reduce it to basic, easy to express and understand principles like:

  • We should transfer wealth and power from those who have too much to those who don't have enough
  • Everyone should be guaranteed a basically adequate standard of living
  • Workers should own the companies they work for
  • Political decisions should be made collectively by regular people, not by wealthy elites

and once you've done that, you're left with something that's not just pretty much fully compatible, but actually even identifiable with mainstream American ideals like personal liberty and individualism and civil society

Because now you have a situation where average people will be freer to express their individuality and join in civil society, since they no longer have to degrade themselves all day to "just get by." The only freedom it would really curtail would be the freedom to get extremely rich, which seems like, uh, an acceptable loss

And when it's reduced to these principles, it doesn't require some massive dehumanizing state bureaucracy either - just a way to systematically take in wealth from the rich and spread it around, and probably some watchdogs making sure that no one's out there defrauding the workers of their rightful share of the places they work. It'd probably be way less of a bureaucratic thicket than what we currently have in place to (mediocrely) regulate business and support the welfare state

Something like this wouldn't even have to be framed as "socialism" at all, which is after all tainted by the Cold War and easily "other"-able by the American right. You could call it, I dunno...normal-person-ism. Which is after all basically what it is

quyksilver
@quyksilver

I can’t help but believe that in the future we will see in the United States and throughout the western world an increasing trend toward the next logical step, employee ownership. It is a path that befits a free people.
— Ronald Reagan

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in reply to @its-chaboi's post:

jcolag
@jcolag

It occurs to me that socialism and the American project are both results of the Enlightenment, and I wonder if that's why the "they were all hypocrites who we shouldn't listen to" propaganda campaign (rather than appreciating any progress, let alone progress that largely got rid of monarchies) comes from.

I bring that up, because Engels (socialist) quotes Hegel (Enlightenment-adjacent, I believe, or at least contemporary) as saying that "freedom is the appreciation of necessity," which sounds a lot like where you have this aimed.

Similarly, I've always objected to the framing of paying taxes as "paying your fair share," because people don't agree on fairness. Entry fees, maintenance fees, and cutting in your partners (the literal economy, in this case), people understand.

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onlyknownothing
@onlyknownothing

I believe you're advocating one of the flavors of Anarchism, probably Social Anarchism, which - importantly - is not Socialism. It has loose connections to it, but it's its own thing.

That's not to say I disagree with you - my learned experience is that large groups tend towards abuse of both the constituent individuals and the wider expanse of unaffiliated people - but socialism is really only defined by the vast majority of its proponents by the social ownership of the means of production. That umbrella covers a lot, including worker-owned firms and syndicates, without necessarily falling entirely into the subcategory of Social Democracy (as the prime definitional thing regarding social democracy appears to be "how you get there" more than "what the end goal is" - there is even disagreement among SocDems regarding what "amount" of socialism is the "correct flavor"). You could riot and kill your boss and seize the firm for yourselves and it'd definitely not be social democracy, but the firm would still exist.

That's kind of what the OP was talking about - it's WAY too easy to get into the weeds with this stuff about "how and what and when" and balkanize over how best to organize a final "end state," leaving the current system in place due to a lack of supporters over those disagreements. The first principles - private individuals have too much power in our existing society and cause misery for the masses in order to live in luxury - are broad and palatable and should be enough to build a coalition on, while the more granular and specific things get the more people are alienated.

Perhaps there is some reasonable cause for this - avoiding left-on-left violence post-upheaval, perhaps? I've never heard any actual analysis for why there is such concern for proper labeling and uniform consensus on the post-capitalist structure in leftist groups. If you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

(P.S. - I use Wikipedia links not because they are "right," but because they are an easy representation of the dominant modes of thought regarding any philosophy and when you're talking about how most people see something or define something that's kind of all you need.)

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smuonsneutrino
@smuonsneutrino

Anarcho-Communists are typically recognized as socialists. But yeah, typically the dividing line between a "social democrat" and a "democratic socialist" is willingness to commit to worker ownership of firms/sydicates/whatever.

I tend find anarchism unattractive because it leaves lots of room for indefinite abuse by cults/tiny theocracies/family domination/stateless-but-essetially-klan-run zones/etc with no recourse or formalized, accessible assistance. Lots of little tyranny more is still tyranny.

In a vacuum I'm generally more in favor of like... democratic socialist city-centric federalism?

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toad
@toad

respectfully, this is not a unique idea — people have thought of “redefining socialism” to be “palatable” to the “american public” (scare quotes to denote that each of those terms carry a lot of baggage to unpack) before and they’ll think of it again; the reason this idea has never changed anything despite cropping up time and again is that this pesky incomprehensible philosophy correctly identifies that it is matter that motivates change, not ideas (nor framing). it’s not because of wrong ideas that america hasn’t achieved socialism; rather, this failure and these wrong ideas are because of the material facts of history and present.

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