Thread by @mariliacout

1 / The #BaffledImmigrant is always a bit over-baffled with the cluelessness concerning things like "socialism", "capitalism", "redistributivism", "privatization" and other basic concepts. Let's start with an experiment. Google "classic socialism books". This is going to show up:

2 / Most of them were written in the late XIXth and early XXth century, when the world and the economy were very different. Most of us, old folks who grew up under dictatorships and were involved in organized action to bring them down read all of them.
bit.ly/2JGtZNB

3 / You can download most of them for free in the many online resources available. Below is one. But why would you read that old stuff?
marxists.org/ebooks/

4 / Because the whole idea that we can fix the problems inherent to market economy by eliminating private ownership of the *means of production* and the *plus value* sinkhole seemed like an awesome solution in the XIXth century, when the totally unregulated market was scary.

5 / How do we accomplish that? Simple: a revolution. For that, you need a revolutionary army, the violent destruction of the class-based system and the "dictatorship of the proletariat". The folks who devised this path were not mean: they were being logical (keep reading).

6 / They assumed the private owners wouldn't just agree with them on the basis of logic, so violence was called for. But in their defense, they envisioned the need for a dictatorship as a bad but necessary transition to the perfect, "administrative" society. No State, no class...

7 / Every human free to follow their full human potential because the *forces of production* were finally free to unlimited development. Except they were wrong and they couldn't see that in the XIXth century. Market economy is a totally different animal and dictatorships are =>

8 / => always a bad strategy. It's naive to think about them as a means because part of society, the one in power, will see them as an end unto itself. Socialism is both the ideology and the (never truly accomplished) social organization I described above.

9 / Unless your "socialist" advocates for State ownership of absolutely everything, they are not a socialist. You are using the wrong word. American "socialists" are social democrats and "socialist" economic measures are actually "redistributive":
plato.stanford.edu/entries/redist…

10 / Why does this matter now? For several reasons. The first one is the false dichotomy between "totally State-owned" V "totally private". There are some areas of economy/social structure that must be 100% State-owned, such as prisons.

11 / Any (even a little bit) private participation in incarceration directly affects the Justice system and this conflicts with the basic tenants of democracy. So, no: private prisons are not okay. By the same token, privatization of the military is a complete no-no.

12 / There are other areas where the basic system must be State-owned and provided, such as health and education. Supplemental participation of the private sector, as is the case with many countries, does not erode basic rights. For example:

13 / Although the State must guarantee that every person has the right to public K-12 education, the existence of private schools (obviously, under regulation, starting from curriculum regulation) doesn't hurt that.

14 / The idea that a Public Health System destroys all health insurance companies is just not true. Please feel free to browse through the @PubTrend collection below. Ignore the error message. There are 218 research items about "national health systems".
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/collect…

15 / So: defending a public health system does not make you a socialist; defending the end of private prisons (@AbolishPrivate ) does not make you a socialist; defending a more rational tax system does not make you a socialist. All these things show that you are progressive.

16 / That's another problem-word: "progressive" (as opposed to "regressive"). It is a problem because time doesn't move backward (at least if you are not an atomic sub-particle, in which case time is a trippy thing).

17 / Things will always "progress". The problem is how they will do so. Maybe the best thing to label ourselves as, if we need to, is "democrats" - not in the American sense, but in the universal sense.

18 / That means acknowledging that democracy is messy, imperfect, vulnerable, high-maintenance but it is still the best game in town. Maybe it's the only game where things like civil rights, freedom and other valued items can exist.
welcometorel.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/concep…

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