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Help me SE++, you're my only hope: Historical Arguments for Socialism
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In socialism (some strains, anyway) the community owns everything directly, so there is no need for a government to protect property rights, since there is no property. The people all decide together what to do, instead of relying on a government.
This only applies to some strains and notably does not apply to socialism as Marx defined it, which is the big guy everyone always thinks of.
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Oh, then focus on the Triangle building fire, the Jungle by Upton Sinclair (really), and some of the ways that capitalism fails. A good one is how under capitalism, if you have no capital you have no say in the economy. So we have drugs to make old guys get boners, but there's no widespread malaria vaccines for use in Africa. There's no market for those vaccines, so they don't get made.
Wrooooooooooooooong wrooooong wroooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong.
This is... completely contrary to what I understand "socialism" to mean. But then, I also haven't read Das Kapital, so I don't purport to be The Resident Socialist™ or anything.
And no one thinks Karl Marx is "some evil dude" except for people who are uneducated, or deliberately trying to scare people. Marx was actually a noted sociologist, and made a lot of substantive contributions to several social science disciplines.
Bad form.
If you're just attacking the other guy's position, you're leaving yourself wide open for similar on your side and if he or she has a good tragedy lined up, at best it shifts into mudslinging, at worst you've lost already.
Early American history has a ton of quasi-socialist religious experiments, share and share alike.
AVOID THEM. Disaster after disaster, textbook "See! It can never work!"
There's been a fair handful of minor one offs that worked for a bit though, I think. Find them, call them representative even (Hell, especially) if they're exceptional.
On the other hand, you want to get credit from the professor rather than be right, maybe NASA?
Hell of a thing, all told. And it needed Uncle Sam's dime to get done.
(And Marx was absolutely shit at getting how people work. Look at Adam Smith, GK Chesterton, Machiavelli, heck, Pratchett, you go "Yes, of course this is how people work." They may be wrong about mechanisms, they can be debated, hell, they may advocate madness but their theories are built to be tested in the real world by people as we know them. You look at Marx? No dice. He was a clever guy, but his system relied on, well, people not being people, and that's a bad place to start.)
This just seems... like... what?
Also, The debate is in a world civilization class so it's supposed to be in history, and non-American generally.
Well the word has been bandied about for a lot of things. I focus on the economic aspect, which is just social ownership of the factors of production. That's it. That's all. So you can have government run socialism, yes. If the government owns everything, then the people own everything. Alternately the people own the factories, but the government decides what is made In practice this is a lopsided power structure and it falls apart pretty hard as every single time it's ever been really tried indicates.
You can also have "market" socialism, in which there is no central government, so the people own everything directly. That's the utopian glorious communism ideal and also stops working once the community is bigger than about 100 people.
Shit's about to get heavy, just run. Get out of the thread while you still can. I'll try to hold them off.
Marxist historians are a pox upon historiography!
There, that should hold for a while, now run.
Well depending on how far back you wanna go, all hunter/gatherer type civilizations were socialist (since the only things to own were food and clothes), and they did pretty great. China is transitioning away from socialism, but a big part of why they are experiencing the massive growth they've got is because the government has the power it does. It can just tell people "you are now going to build solar panels. Now you are going to make factories" because they have state-owned corporations.
I would look at their literature and highlight what they use to sell their organisations.
http://www.usworker.coop/wcfaq
http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/encyclopedia/Con-Cos/Cooperatives.html
Why is this wrong? Withering away of the state is one of the goals. What's the point of putting the means of production in government hands if you're going to end up getting rid of the government?
It is? Merriam Webster seems to disagree. The idea of socialism ITSELF is not to dissolve the government, but Marx and others thought of it as a stepping stone towards the ideal Communist society. First it's Socialism, where the government takes control of production or at least regulates it, and eventually as the government is dissolved and people take ownership of things personally as a community it becomes communist. Or something like that.
Did you kick the capitalists' asses
or was this commune a failure
I wouldn't say "often." I'd say that the type of governments that often take control of production and resources often don't qualify as common or public ownership. I think you'd have to have a very narrow category of government that legitimately qualifies as a public interest or common endeavor.
Anyway, the definitions of socialism and communism aren't objectively fixed, quite the opposite as they were largely being theoretically expanded at the same time that revolutionaries were trying to practically implement them. As far as generalities, I think it's pretty safe to say that socialism concerns common ownership and control of industry, while communism is the larger concept of society as stateless and classless of society. It incorporates socialism, because it embraces industry in a way that certain luddite fixations within some schools of anarchism do not.
But I think it's pretty on the level to say that if your movement tried to institute socialist or communist ideals and skewed them or otherwise screwed up, that's a fair complication of an ideological system. But if you're decades along and nowhere near the ideology anymore, you fucked up. The state policies of the PRC are almost certainly not communist and have safely inhabited the domain of differing established ideologies in recent decades.
Now you could say that the people could own everything on a commune to commune based system, but I don't actually see that happening on a large scale. In any case, unless everyone supports the communist agenda you are going to end up with people wanting to split themselves off and becoming something else (capitalist) and if you don't let them do this then you are in effect enforcing laws against that. Whoever enforces those laws is the govermment. The only way it works without that is for everyone to want to be in socialist communes and follow the rules and I simply do not believe that human beings are like that.
blowcialism
scrotialism
This is about where your post just takes a running leap into the void.
Go on then
Someone should create a term for that...
No, my argument is that a common organisation that governs things is a government. So in a socialist society the group than organises the trading of goods and the enforcing of laws (in effect, the group that governs), that is their government, even if it isn't based on the same system as before. As a result, pretty much all socialist societies are government run because pretty much all socialist societies would develop that organising group, and therefore Socialism does infer "government-run" to a rather large extent.
That said, looking back I worded it very poorly so I understand why you thought I said what you thought I said.
free sex
Look back again at the part I quoted and try to decide if you're still making unfounded assertions.
I already said I wasn't, there is nothing to decide.
Honestly this whole thing where people read a post and say "hah well that's wrong" and then you asks them why and they don't give you an actual answer is getting on my fucking nerves. If you disagree, god damn say what it is you think is wrong instead of some smug little post that just informs everyone that you are, in fact, a silly goose (this is not entirely or even mostly directed at you Annie, it is a more general thing).
e:t, Solar. Laws are not inherent. Sorry if this challenges any fundamental concepts you held about the nature of humanity.
cool. i am making pizza that i can't eat all by myself and you guys are also thin so maybe if we combine our powers we can finish like half of it
e: there are children starving in china b/c this is a free market pizza