What we must treat with respect are people’s right to express their beliefs. The actual beliefs are fair game for ridicule.
We’ve seen what happens when Nazis control the government. It doesn’t lead to a healthy discussion of “political alternatives.” It was a shocking genocide and an attempt at world domination. If we have enough Nazis that demonizing Nazism leads to civil war, then we need to go ahead and have that civil war to settle the debate. Some things are worth settling via combat.
Germany famously bans some political parties, like the Nazi party, and the Communist Party of Germany for that matter (not to be confused with the German Communist Party!!), supposed to be anybody operating unconstitutionally, which is not 100% laudable [see below] but, given their history, you can at least understand why. Also, it is somewhat logical in that if your party really does not respect the constitution, why would they let you politically participate in the state operating under that constitution? The flip side of banning parties is, look at China, constitutionally a one-party state. And, where it is not banned, when you see a Swastika, at least you know what you are dealing with.
One wonders if the term “genius” is suitable.
Or the word “works”.
If you look at the world pre-capitalism and the world now with capitalism, I think the answer is very clearly yes.
Actually China officially has nine political parties. The government is officially a coalition of these nine parties. However, the Chinese Communist Party has been designated as the “leader” of the coalition and none of the other parties are allowed to oppose the CCP.
You cannot make that statement categorically. A lot of people’s lives got worse. Many work 70+ hours per week and have nothing to show for it.
Before capitalism drove the industrial revolution, half of all people died before the age of five. I can absolutely make that statement categorically.
Even Marx admitted that capitalism was necessary for society to develop past the premodern stage and to create enough value for the workers to seize.
Technically true, but that does not in any way imply that the reduction of infant mortality was due to capitalism itself.
If one uses a regression analysis, the greatest reduction of infant mortality came from governmental and social battles against the industries that profited from capitalism.
When cities grew too urbanized to allow farms inside their borders, milk needed to be brought in from farther and farther away. Two trends followed. Long term was the development of chilled train cars; short term the adulteration of milk to make it cheaper. Look up swill milk, but not on a full stomach. Milk was the first but chilled meat soon followed and then laws like the Pure Food Act in the U.S., a direct blow against capitalist overreach.
The improvement of infrastructure for sanitation was also crucial. Water systems created pipelines, aqueducts, and treatment plants to deliver pure water. Sewer pipelines and treatment plants kept sewage out of rivers, especially after the Great Stink. These were all governmental efforts, since they benefitted everyone.
Medicine was primitive by today’s understanding and so was hygiene and nutrition, but the 19th century still saw efforts to improve standards in all those areas, none of them capitalist for-profit organizations. On the contrary, the capitalists tried their very best to peddle poisons that could have killed off everybody, not just infants.
Infant mortality is hard to pin down, and subject to great variations, but a reduction of the rate of death for those under five of 50-75% from 1800 to 1900 is probably in the ballpark.
What can be pinned onto capitalism is shortening adult lifespans with their pollution and disregard of workers. That’s why capitalists were so hysterically fearful of communists and kept denouncing, persecuting, and jailing anyone tagged with a Marxist label.
We’ve survived capitalism solely because of governments using “leftist” notions to place regulations on its “do literally anything to make a profit” underpinnings. An unregulated capitalist society would be as totalitarian in its way as any dictatorship. Neither extreme would be livable under. I firmly reject both.
Who said anything about an unregulated capitalism? Even The Wealth of Nations talks about the importance of government regulation.
I firmly reject the notion that regulations, social safety nets, and all the other reforms that capitalism has adopted over the years are socialist or communist ideas.
You do not think labor unions and syndicalists had anything at all to do with why you are not working 80-hour weeks under abysmal conditions?
(And many people still do, and there is a reason why there is so much dark humor about countries like China and Mongolia advertising themselves as some kind of communistic role models.)
Labor unions aren’t communist or socialist? They are a way of organizing labor to better their negotiating position relative to their employers. That’s not socialism, communal ownership of the means of production.
Syndicalists do indeed seek to replace capitalism with communal ownership of the means of production, but they were also basically a footnote compared to trade unions.
I assume that American posters are using the historic definition of the term in this country, which differed from the common usage in Europe.
Impossible for even me to summarize socialist history in a few paragraphs, but in broad terms socialism came to represent the policies to protect farmers and workers from exploitation. There were actual Socialist parties starting in the 1890s and consolidating as the Socialist Party in 1901. Socialists won state and local elections and elected two representatives to Congress. Eugene Debs ran for president five times on that party’s ticket, and racked up several percent of the vote, making him one of the most successful long-term third party candidates.
Communal control was certainly advocated by socialists. Eugene Debs’ 1912 platform makes that explicit.
Collective Ownership
- The collective ownership and democratic management of railroads, wire and wireless telegraphs and telephones, express service, steamboat lines, and all other social means of transportation and communication and of all large scale industries.
- The immediate acquirement by the municipalities, the states or the federal government of all grain elevators, stock yards, storage warehouses, and other distributing agencies, in order to reduce the present extortionate cost of living.
- The extension of the public domain to include mines, quarries, oil wells, forests and water power.
- The further conservation and development of natural resources for the use and benefit of all the people . . .
- The collective ownership of land wherever practicable, and in cases where such ownership is impracticable, the appropriation by taxation of the annual rental value of all the land held for speculation and exploitation.
- The collective ownership and democratic management of the banking and currency system.
Yet those demands were then and later completely ignored, while the vast majority of the other planks were adopted. Other political parties like the Populists and the Progressives took up socialist ideas and also won many elections. Both the Democrats and the Republicans absorbed many of the policies, which saw their way into law in the era from Roosevelt and Roosevelt. People forget how hard people had to fight for basic rights that are now so mainstream only the MAGA fringe wants to abolish them.
Socialism - and the less influential communism - became a bugaboo of the right, who fought implacably against any random thing they could tar with the label. Capitalism won. The first paragraphs of Debs’ platform could have been written yesterday.
Under this system the industrial equipment of the nation has passed into the absolute control of a plutocracy which exacts an annual tribute of hundreds of millions of dollars from the producers. Unafraid of any organized resistance, it stretches out its greedy hands over the still undeveloped resources of the nation-the land, the mines, the forests and the water powers of every State of the Union.
In spite of the multiplication of laborsaving machines and improved methods in industry which cheapen the cost of production, the share of the producers grows ever less, and the prices of all the necessities of life steadily increase. The boasted prosperity of this nation is for the owning class alone. To the rest it means only greater hardship and misery. The high cost of living is felt in every home. Millions of wage-workers have seen the purchasing power of their wages decrease until life has become a desperate battle for mere existence.
America doesn’t have European socialism or even social democratism, but the fight against wealth is a direct legacy of socialists. No history of the 20th century can ignore that.
Maybe so, but the governmental structures in Russia and China, for example have been rock solid for a very long time. Based on what is happening here in the United States, if any form of government is “without a future”, it’s Democracy.
The thing about authoritarian governments is that they often appear rock solid, even when they are anything but. Without transparency, how can you tell?
Good question. My answer is that they last … and last … and last. If Putin was immortal, he’d be the dictator of Russia forever.
But Putin isn’t immortal. And he seems pretty paranoid about allowing anybody else in the Russian government to have any power that might make them a potential rival.
So the Russian government seems likely to undergo some pretty severe shocks when Putin dies, even if he does so peacefully of natural causes.
Any country with a one man government is inherently unstable.
This is an interesting postulate and, in a “banana republic” scenario, would be true. Russia, however, is far more established and stable in terms of rule, so it will be interesting to see what will happen when this occurs.
Is it though? The country has only had one change of rulers since Communism ended. When Putin dies, we’ll see if the country has institutions, or just people.
I wouldn’t call the Russian government very stable. Putin’s government is very different from Yeltsin’s government, which was very different from Gorbachev’s government, which was very different from Brezhnev’s government. As Alessan put it, it’s a government of people not institutions.