The problem is that socialism inevitably leads to authoritarianism through its very nature. See, for example, Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom”, where he lays this case pretty extensively.
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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28444422.
Perhaps one day there will actually be a socialist state that manages to successfully create the egalitarian society it promotes, without requiring heavy-handed authoritarianism to bring it about. But until then, the association between socialism and authoritarianism is about as well established over the last century as anything can be in the realms of political science and economics.
Hence the fierce insistence from large parts of the socialist movement throughout history that it must be radically democratic - otherwise oppression, rather than liberation will be the result.
The socialist option is to deny individuals the right to own personal capital at all to prevent said inequality, and instead to create a system to allocate capital in a way that is best for society, i.e. through the government. But it turns out that all the ways that society requires capital are practically beyond counting, and the system is so complex, that any government looking to even be minimally successful in overseeing that allocation process requires large amounts of power over virtually every aspect of society. Guess what? That's authoritarianism.
Take this thought experiment. Say we decide we want to make a new entertainment service to compete with Netflix. But creating it requires capital: money to pay programmers, money to pay for servers, money to pay for content production, etc. In a capitalist society, we just have to convince enough people that there is enough return on investment to give us their money. They don't even have to like watching TV, they just have to be convinced its a good use of their excess money. And they could be millions of people, or it could be a single individual. On the other hand, in a socialist society, we have to convince the proxy for society in charge of doling out society's collective capital (i.e. the government) to give us their money. So now the decision on what content to produce is directly influenced by the government. Even if these people are democratically elected, they will cater exclusively to the majority opinion, and in the more likely case, they will cater to whatever consolidates their power. Oops! Now you have state-controlled media. Seems unlikely the people controlling said media will devote much air-time to opposition parties or ideas, or that your functioning democracy will last very long in that scenario.
The point is that socialism without authoritarianism is a paradox. Socialism cannot function without authoritarianism, because the process of allocating capital in society is far too complex for a reasonably constrained governmental body to undertake. It needs an authoritarian level of power to effectively manage society's capital (and as history shows us, even then it rarely is actually effective). Insisting on non-authoritarian socialism is like insisting on a diet consisting exclusively of ice cream and cake while also living a long, healthy life. Perhaps it sounds nice, but it is fundamentally impossible.
Combine direct democracy and collective ownership with fully transparent decision processes everywhere (every decision made documented and freely available to view by anyone) and I have a hard time imagining any authoritarian system emerging.
There is no difference between what you write here and my example. Whether you call it a "collectively owned bank with a democratic decision-making process" or simply "ruling government, it's still a government body deciding what will and won't receive funding, and if you disagree with it there is no opt out or alternative route to investing in competitors, resulting in state-owned media.
> With our current technology we could make such decisions using direct democracy.
Direct democracy is impossible given the scale of the number of decisions required. We can't even get 50% of the populace to show up for elections once every 4 years. Every single issue the constituency might vote on in a direct democracy wouldn't involve 99.9% of the actual populace's input. What proportion of the population have the time and will power to follow and investigate even a fraction of the bills being voted on by their national representatives? Their state representatives? Their local government? Their school boards? Their HOA? All of that represents a pittance of the amount of decision making that would be required for the government to assume the decision making that goes into managing what currently happens in the free market. Do we really expect direct democracy to work there?
That's the hubris of socialism. It assumes that the aggregate direction required to manage modern day nation-states is something that can be handled in a centralized way. Which is how the largest famines in human history have been self-imposed through communist regimes trying and failing to do so. Capitalism, for all its many faults, is decentralized enough to offer more resiliency.
You don't really need competition if anyone can influence the organization by making propositions, debating issues and voting. If there's a problem with the media, you can propose a fix for it. That's already much better than what we have today, where very few rich people own most of the media and therefore decide what most people think and talk about.
Even if you need competition, it can be done in such a system. There's no reason there couldn't be multiple competing collectively owned, democratic banks, newspapers, etc. Capitalism is not a requirement for markets.
You don't need everyone to vote on everything. You just need the process to be open to everyone and fully transparent. If any small group were to start abusing the process, it would immediately be visible and fixable. People would notice and start voting against the group. Mostly they would vote on things that interest and affect them. If that's not enough, you could have randomized voting duty on issues that need it.
It's fascinating how uncomfortable it is for some to even acknowledge the existence of democratic minded socialists, even when we've existed as long as socialism itself (obviously).
When what's tried is not fundamentally (authoritarian vs democratic) different from the start.
Socialism inevitably is authoritarian.
Empirical examples tell you what it is. You’ve already agreed with this.
“The regimes that are commonly referred to never turned authoritarian, they started authoritarian - much to Chomsky's and other libertarian socialists dismay.”