Socialism One

(cut and pasted from my Physics forum posts)

To think that Anarchism can work in a large, condensed industrial society is naive to say the least. As has been said time and time again, people are just not like that. There are too many greedy people. I’m not talking really evil people, but people who can’t be bothered doing good for others or not getting that extra peice of the pie when they can. Communism hasn’t worked not just because of poor economic management but because the countries generally started out poor and had no goods nor the infrastructure to distribute goods and services. There are apparently parts of China that have no idea they are under communism to this day.

Marxism is a paranoid form of socialism. It implies a conspiracy on behalf of the rich against the poor. The reality is that your economic status or ethnicity has nothing to do with how much of a knob you are. Get 100 people from any demographic and I will guarantee that you will find the same amount of bad to good (no particular benchmark used).

I consider myself a socialist. I believe in state ownership of major industry. I also believe in democracy. Why democracy is always associated with capitalism is beyond me. We should be able to chose what it is we need and have the government supply it. At the same time, people need to realise that we all need to spend some time working in a job that we don’t particularly enjoy, for the greater good. The pay off is knowing that when I’m shovelling sh*t, my bills are getting payed, I have housing and healthcare, my kids have a good education etc. In a capitalist society your pay is scaled by the stuff you are shoveling. Shovelin’ sh*t, sh*t pay. I don’t necesarrily believe in entirely equal pay. Some jobs I think require a different level of stress or hard manual labour. Restricting hours of work might be ok to equalise wages in this case but some jobs require continuity. It’s not easy.

To answer the inital question. I would love to work on a project to develop a system which provides adequate goods and services to people, probably based on socialist concepts but with small scale capitalistic, highly taxed, enterprises to fill niche markets which are impracticle to cover with goverment industry and allow some creativity in employment. Capitalism works with the idea that everybody can be a millionaire. Clearly they can’t, but an ideal socialist system started in a resource, infrastructure rich country could possibly feed the consumerist society so they lived like millionaires, only everyone would have to work.

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