Hello, my name is Reginald and I am a Socialist | Hacker News Reader

Hello, my name is Reginald and I am a Socialist

raganwald.posterous.com

53 points0x1224 comments

You can turn blue in the face sifting through all the wonderful labels people have constructed over the years. Let's keep things simple.

Either you're for a direct command and control structure, you want a mix, or you want free markets. It doesn't matter why you want that, in the end, it boils down to those 3 options.

Self-organizing cooperatives are not anathema to free markets. As long as some jackass somewhere isn't making them mandatory, I think they're fantastic and I'm a Capitalist with a big C. Open source software is a perfect example.

The issue with free markets is that they tend not to stay free for very long. Efficiencies of scale cause monopolies and before you know it self-organizing cooperatives, open source software and anything else you can think of that doesn't directly benefit what few winners have resulted from unfettered capitalism cease to exist.

Like you, I'm a Capitalist with a big C. However, I do see it takes some rigorous government intervention to keep free (ish) markets free (ish). If you want to call that government intervention "socialism" then, sure, go ahead, but I'm pretty damn sure evidence points to big C capitalism never having worked as well as it did between 1950 and 1980 in the "western world" where every government, including the US, did its damnedest to keep the capitalists in check to make sure the market would stay as free as possible.

Marx was right. The free market is inherently self-destructive. But it the 100 years since the communist manifesto smart people have figured out ways around that.

Previous discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1653063

The whole idea of capitalism is to make it possible for people like you to experiment with different ways to organize and sell your work. If one method works really well for you - thats great. So I would say you are a capitalist enjoying the freedom in the free market. That includes the freedom to play small "s" socialist.

This is why I think of myself as a “local” socialist. Of course, the whole idea of capitalism is also for other people to experiment with different ways to accumulate capital, and one of those ways is to hinder and restrict my ability to be a libertarian socialist on a small scale, e.g. patent trolling.

I’m not saying capitalism doesn’t work, just that as practiced today it’s a mixed bag.

> I’m not saying capitalism doesn’t work, just that as practiced today it’s a mixed bag.

Like democracy. It kind of sucks, and produces people like Silvio Berlusconi. But it still beats the alternatives.

Or it only works in societies that are egalitarian enough to prevent an oligarch like Berlusconi or Thaksin Shinawatra () from using his wealth to incite the poor to become his foot soldiers.

() or Julius Caesar

Much as Berlusconi sucks, he'll be gone some day, and people will pick up the pieces, and things will still be an awful lot better than in places run by real dictators. I'm still free to call Berlusconi an asshole without secret police swooping down and taking me away in the night.

Julius Caesar gave way to Augustus (who in turn gave way to Tiberius, Nero, Claudius and Caligula).

I wouldn't get your hopes up.

> Julius Caesar gave way to Augustus (who in turn gave way to Tiberius, Nero, Claudius and Caligula).

> I wouldn't get your hopes up.

What do Roman emperors have to do with Berlusconi, besides being short, and the geographic location they have in common?

Are you seriously suggesting a parallel between the events of 2000 years ago and now, based on the fact that they happen to be based in Rome? Do you suppose Berlusconi is going to march over the Alps and invade France? Perhaps Sarkozy and a band of stalwart Gauls will resist Berlusconi's onslaught in a small village?

Hello Reginald, my name is Martin. I believe that society should promote a meritocracy where a person's success is highly correlated with their work ethic and abilities and that people should reap the rewards/losses of their risks. I used to think that made me some kind of right-wing type, but according to the current political climate, I'm actually a socialist too. Go figure...

Hello Martin, my name is mtts. I'm pretty sure that having a work ethic and abilities to succeed is strongly correlated to what family you're born into.

I'm not sure what exactly the consequences of that knowledge should be, but I'm pretty sure it should at least involve not allowing those who have been born in fortuitous (and work ethic and abilities enhancing) circumstances to get so far ahead the less fortunate no longer have a chance to catch up.

> not allowing those who have been born in fortuitous (and work ethic and abilities enhancing) circumstances to get so far ahead the less fortunate no longer have a chance to catch up.

I find this very troubling. Why should we prevent people from succeeding? I think rather than not allowing people to advance society would be better served by finding ways to help those behind advance. Also, why is it so important to catch up? Why cannot some do well and rise to the top while others do well (for their skill level) and not make it all the way to the top? What is so bad about that?

> the less fortunate no longer have a chance to catch up.

You just spit in the face of every "less fortunate" individual who worked harder than everybody else and did catch up. It makes his accomplishment seem rather worthless. After all, he could have simply accepted the charity of someone like you or supported a system where that charity was systematically dispensed. Why bust your ass and work hard?

Oh, that brings me to the next point. Incentives. You just killed any incentive to work hard and bust your ass if you're in the "less fortunate" group. Why bother? You can just wait until someone helps you up.

For every less fortunate that works hard and succeeds, there are thousands that work hard and do not succeed; their efforts simply go to increase the wealth of the wealthy who hold the capital. My heart goes out to them, and I wish their exploitation would stop.

Reducing the wealth gap, or more to the point, not allowing it to expand exponentially is not the same as removing it. There will always be a gap, there will always be incentives.

What people like you don't understand is that there is real value in failure. A system that removes failure from the equation reduces the quality of life for everyone. You are hurting the very people you claim you are helping.

Heh, collectively ownership and decision making would be great, only it's impossible in our world. There will always be a person who has more influence over others, therefore making him the leader.

Capitalism is kind of like advanced socialism, since everyone IS compensated based on merit or amount of work, only most people aren't ambitious or want to put in the amount of work that others will (i.e. not everyone wants to "maximize their potential"), therefore creating the inequality.

The exact same happened in the USSR, actually, and what did they do? They just put those uninterested people to work on the same jobs, for the same pay, as those who actually liked working there, and that brought the overall productivity down, because why would anyone work better and faster if the slacker next to him gets paid the same for half the work?

But hey, everybody had jobs, right? Problem solved! :-)

Capitalism would work amazingly well at advancing society/humanity and making individuals wealthy and happy IF every single one of them would want to always maximize their potential and do their best at everything, but sadly that will not happen very soon (or at all)...

> They generally share the view that capitalism unfairly concentrates power andwealth within a small segment of society that controls capital and derives its wealth through a system ofexploitation.

Capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism, etc, all end up like this, where power and control remain with the few.

You can't force or educate out human nature. Self-interest always ramains.

But people keep playing their games. Always looking outside, trying to change the world, rather than within. And they fail, fail, fail, over and over again. Same shit, different flies.

This claims too much. Differentials in power may always exist, but that doesn't mean power has the same distribution in all systems.

Social democratic systems coupled with vibrant civil societies lead to societies where power, though still distributed unevenly, forms a more interconnected and open network, instead of one centralized institution or small set of institutions that dominates society.

It's a bit unclear, though, which one leads to the other. Or if they're simply the same.

If I had cancer and science showed chicken soup could cure it, I'd take the chicken soup over chemotherapy. When I have the flu I'm not thinking chemotherapy. Marx talked about those with nothing to lose but their chains. People in the U.S., Europe, the West, are not in that situation. Chemotherapy has saved lives and people have won revolutions with Communist leadership.

Socialist? As Inigo Montoya would say, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

I think this got buried

The world's most economically successful and secure states today (China and Russia) would best be described as fascist or nationalist. The socialist states of Western Europe and the mixed economy of the US are in debt up to their eyeballs and careening through a series of financial crises.

So it will be interesting if in a few years, people start calling themselves unrepentant fascists. Probably the word itself won't be rehabilitated, but you may see more and more people declaring that the Chinese and Russian states provide a better business model than the failed American and European models.

China economically successful? Ok, I can see that. Elevating 300 million people out of poverty into the middle class is nothing to sneeze at, even if it still leaves 800 million (or so) in desperation.

But Russia? Sure, its GDP is impressive, but the vast majority of that is "produced" by oligarchs that are peddling out the country's natural resources without anyone else benefitting. It's a thief-ocracry that makes fascist Italy, Franco Spain and Samoza Portugal look like paradise.

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