Hacker News Reader

Comment by javert | Hacker News Reader

Socialism makes every other person a potential enemy and a potential victim. Resources are scarce. People come to hate one another.

Capitalism makes every other person at worst a neutral non-threat and at best a potential trading partner. Resources are plentiful. People feel benevolent towards one another.

This is not an apology for America; America is only semi-capitalist. You can see Americans getting meaner over time as the country shifts more in the socialist direction. There is less everday that makes America distinct from Europe.

View on HN

> Socialism makes every other person a potential enemy and a potential victim. Resources are scarce. People come to hate one another.

You're taking a look at countries that have implemented 'socialism' and ended up with what amounts to dictatorships. Do you really think that Communism as envisioned by Karl Marx included someone like Stalin, or the corrupt officials that inhabited governments in the Eastern Bloc?

For all of the rhetoric that the far-right sling around in the US about the evils of Socialism, even they have Socialist policies. The government regulates, picks winners, keeps companies afloat that are 'too big to fail,' Social Security and other welfare programs, etc.

Don't confuse situations where neighbors reports other neighbors who then 'disappear' as having anything to do with Communism or Socialism (or than that they have historically resided together).

Do you think that the life, as envisioned by children, who want to eat only ice cream when they grow up, includes scurvy, diabetes and other effects of such a diet?

>Do you think that the life, as envisioned by children, who want to eat only ice cream when they grow up, includes scurvy, diabetes and other effects of such a diet?

Do you think that people are automata, and any attempt to build a system with X attributes necesarrily also has Y attributes, in the automatic way that eating only sugar leads to diabetes?

Just because there was an attempt to build X (socialism for example), under specific circumstances (e.g less technologically and politically advanced countries such as Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia), under specific forces (20th century colonialism, WWII, cold war etc), and with specific people at the helm influencing things all around (Stalin and Mao basically), doesn't mean any attempt to build X in different circumstance will end up the same.

Yes they will. The premise is flawed. Socialism (US term) or social-democracy (Euro term) can work in a democratic society but communism is flawed from the start.

Putting everything in one communal basket and expecting people to behave is a recipe for disaster. Don't make a system which works only when people do not make mistakes or are only driven by their purest feelings.

>Yes they will. The premise is flawed.

[Citation needed]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

My point is that if you try to create a socialist country, but end up with a dictatorship, then you have a dictatorship, not a socialist government. Let's call things by their real names instead of trying to associate secret police and paranoia with the terms "Socialism" and "Communism."

Dictatorship is a form of government[1]. Socialism is an economic system[2]. One does not exclude another. The history shows, though, they come together alarmingly often.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

So your response is to ban ice-cream forever and eat nothing but salads instead?

Because, you know, that's the analogous response to banning all socialism and social-democracy forever just because the Soviet Union didn't turn out well.

Karl Marx should have envisioned that someone like Stalin might exist in the future and will take over the power, otherwise his perfect Communism system is only applicable to perfect people.

Perhaps it is also not applicable to geopolitical co-existance with imperialist countries like Nazi Germany and the USA?

Communism is bad in practice, but it's also bad in theory. It's not like if people were more moral, or more rational, or if we had the government run by a smart computer, communism would be possible. Setting that aside, there's also no reason to prefer communism over a free market, or pretty much anything.

tl;dr don't grant it moral credit.

Regulation and Keynesian policies are not socialism.

You do realize that most of Western Europe is socialist? That some of the countries that enjoy the highest quality of life and happiness are socialist?

How do you square that with what you've written?

On a tangential note, it's not quite right to call the European system socialist. "Social democracy" might be more correct, otherwise people confuse it with communist socialism which is an entirely different regime with much more negative connotations. There are very few things in common between the systems in, say, Sweden and Soviet Russia.

As a European I find it interesting how Americans have started to completely misusing the term 'socialism' especially over the last couple of years. Even those who don't fit the die-hard right-wing profile seem to have started calling any kind of social welfare 'socialsm' without realising what actual socialism looks like.

To me, what's surprising is the contrary: that people call communism "socialism". While here in France, our Socialist Party (in power right now) has always been far from communism.

It feels strange to me to call social welfare anything other than socialism. Maybe it's just a case of French socialisme and English socialism being false friends.

That's a good point and there seem to exist different understandings of the term in different countries. I do wonder where this comes from. In Germany Sozialismus is always understood in the marxist sense and it is furthermore inseperable from the political system of the German Democratic Republic. I am not privy to the finer points of the French Socialist's political agenda, but from my understanding they roughly resemble our Social Democrats.

It's because most communist parties in the Eastern Block were initially (or even always) called socialist parties. And many Eastern Block countries were named "socialist republics".

Heck, U S S R.

Well, North Korea (and many other dictatorships) are technically "democratic republics"... Doesn't mean that they are.

True, and so were all the socialist regimes I mentioned. But after tens of years of propaganda by the communists, the name tends to stick. After the fall of communism, it sticks in a bad way: socialism = communism.

I think that the best people to ask are those that lived under "socialist" regimes (I'm one of them). If I ask almost anybody I know that lived under a socialist regime, they'll probably say the same.

Maybe theoretically socialism is a different thing, but practically it really isn't for a lot of people.

We're not misusing it. We support socialism. Social democracy is just the first step.

Today increased budget for food stamps, tomorrow the world, that sort of thing.

> You do realize that most of Western Europe is socialist?

Only if you use the american dictionary.

> You do realize that most of Western Europe is socialist?

Yep. I would even include America in that, just to a slightly lesser extent.

> That some of the countries that enjoy the highest quality of life and happiness are socialist?

Well, who are you comparing to? There aren't really any or many relatively free countries (and there never have been more than 1 or 2 at a time in all of history).

It's not true if you compare it to 19th century America in terms of happiness, nor modern-day Singapore in terms of quality of life.

(In fact, a pet has a better quality of life than a typical American, since they have better access to healthcare.)

> How do you square that with what you've written?

I hope I've answered your question.

Do you realize that socialism was born because of struggling workers in capitalism based societies?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com