You’re just using the term in the definition and not explaining why you think socialism is a good thing.
The truth is most economies are mixed economies - some services and centralized and owned by the government. Some are left to the free market and private sector under varying degrees of regulation.
Most of the online conservatives I know are uneducated morons whose concept of “socialism” is that any service provided by the government they don’t agree with is one step closer to being North Korea.
I have no doubt workers in Vietnam and China know what “work” is. I don’t think too many college students calling for socialism want to work in a factor making iPhones for socialist wages.
What’s my personal opinion or definition of socialism got to do with it? I’m just noting that it’s absurd to assume that “wanting socialism” automatically means not understanding rhe concept of actual work.
Is that the only type of activity you consider to be “actual work”? Or is that the only kind of work you think socialism advocates are allowed to aspire to?
If you don’t like the right-wing Randians’ ignorant disdain for their narrow caricature of socialism, then I don’t see why you seem to be imitating it.
Most of the socialists I know don’t consider China or Vietnam socialist in the first place, but just two more capitalist nations. And they don’t believe that wages should exist, money is a capitalist concept. They are very insistent on money not being allowed in any form.
I’m pretty sure that the “socialism” most people who use the term want wouldn’t just be a more fair, less economically stratified society that (self-described) actual socialists would disdain as “not real socialism”.
In the same way, very few of the people who have ever said they wanted “Objectivism” ever understood or cared about the “official version”. It was just an ideological excuse for greed and ruthlessness to them. The main difference being that the socialists are generally well meaning, which the Objectivists aren’t. Right wingers never are.
Well you keep throwing around that term “socialist” as if I’m supposed to understand what it is you think you mean by it.
People in true socialist/communist countries are not allowed to “aspire” to work at all because it is centrally planned by a government that owns all means of production. You have great job security at whatever job they tell you to do, which unless you have party connections isn’t a very good one. Socialist / communist countries generally have low standards of living because they don’t reward innovation or extra effort and they produce based on what the central government thinks it wants, not what the market wants.
Usually what I think people actually want when they say “socialist” is more of a “social democracy”. They want their taxes (which we generally have to pay anyway) to go to public services like schools, police, health care, social safety nets, etc. This is a perfectly reasonable request because for some of these services the free market is perhaps not the best mechanism to distribute them. This is more in line with countries like Denmark or
The problem is the government does not have the ability to pay for ALL the services people demand. But really the argument is “what services should government provide, given it’s limited budget based off a limited tax base.”
Another problem is that people are morons. Particularly on the right IMHO because they are not only morons but also selfish and resist any sort of change. And the Republican party through Fox News and other right wing propaganda platforms has told them that anything that threatens the power of the wealthy elite is “socialism” and all socialism is a path to becoming North Korea or the USSR.
So I ask again, when you say “socialism” what is it you are actually looking for socialism to accomplish (and how do you think it should be funded)?
Provide some service like health care that is not being IMO effectively provided by our current mishmash of insurance providers and whatnot?
Pay people who are unable or unwilling to work so they don’t starve on the street?
Pay people some arbitrary job (maybe digging and refilling holes) so they have to do something to appear to earn getting paid?
Just tax billionaires and corporations higher?
Provided better worker protections like unions or higher minimum wages (which I don’t think is considered “socialism”)
You’re the one who started throwing the term around, when you were assuming—-AFAICT, with zero justification—-that when some college students you briefly met claimed to “want socialism”, they must have meant something that was completely detached from any understanding of actual work.
I simply pointed out what a bullshit assumption that was, given the diversity and complexity of what real peoplle generally mean by “socialism” in a real-world context, and how most of those real-world forms of socialism are deeply involved with actual work.
Ah yes, the well-known right-wing boogeyman of True Socialism, which is conveniently indistinguishable from communism.
That’s not an answer to what I think is a simple question that many young people don’t seem to be able to answer. “What actual work do you want to do that someone is willing to pay you for?”
If you can’t or wont answer that question but still want to get paid or enjoy a an adult lifestyle then what you are asking for is a a form of socialized services called “welfare”.
I suspect young people aren’t answering your pointed question not because they don’t have an answer, but because they no longer want to have this conversation with you.
Actually no, true socialism/communism doesn’t have a government. The state will supposedly “wither away”, workers will own the means of production and all that. That’s not what actually happens of course, but that’s just because “true socialism” like other utopian ideals is an unrealistic goal.
Also, after decades of anything to the left of Hitler being bashed as “socialism” the term in practice has become so broad for most people as to be nearly meaningless. The vast majority of possible government and social forms are by American standards “socialist”. Just not by anyone else’s.
No economic system can work that does not take into account that people are to a large degree natural “spongers”: given the opportunity they’ll take more than they give, often with the innocent selfishness of a child. Free market societies work by a strict quid pro quo mediated by money. The command economies of polities like the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China worked by a combination of prison labor (de facto slavery) and the workers doing the laziest shoddiest work they could, with what they could buy strictly rationed.
They come to me man. We aren’t having a political discussion. It’s more in the context of recent college grads (alumni of my school, people in professional networking groups or children of friends) looking to enter the workforce. Ultimately they need to figure out what skills they have that they can take to a potential employer. Which I’m happy to help with. But I can’t really answer “call me if you hear of any jobs”.
Just under half of the population of the UK is not economically active; children, students, the disabled, the retired. This fraction will get larger with increasing automation until the ‘economically active’ are in a tiny minority. We are going to have to invent better words than ‘spongers, scroungers and moochers’ for people who make up the bulk of society.
Eh, that’s rhetoric designed to excuse exploitation, abuse and coercion, not reality. Most people if anything have the opposite problem; they are easily exploitable because they are inclined to put in more effort than they should for too little return.
Oh, is that what you’re actually complaining about with regard to the students you met, that they wouldn’t or couldn’t answer that specific question you asked them? You didn’t make that clear when you brought up these claims: all you said was
It now appears that “wanting socialism” is simply your disparaging take on the horrifically unprecedented phenomenon of very young adults seeking entry-level jobs while still being largely unfamiliar with specific correspondences between their own qualifications and potential employers’ requirements. Wow, shocking. Anyway, thanks for finally clearing that up for us.
So how does “socialism” help these people? If that’s how we are defining it do you mean “have the government step in and tell me what to do for a living” or “tax rich people so I can get paid more doing….something?”
I get that young people often have trouble figuring out what they want to do for a living. But the concept of “how do you actually want to contribute to getting stuff done” should not feel offensive to anyone.
I think this depends very much on the context of the conversation. They may find it off-putting that you have such rigid ideas about what kinds of activity are included in “getting stuff done.” I put this out there not to convince you of anything, because that does not seem possible in this area, but just for the record.
I would sooner think the large issue is that young people since forever have had an outsized idea of how well jobs pay, and especially entry level jobs. Even if we’re talking “entry” level for folks with a STEM BS, or a directly business-relevant degree.
The change now vs the old days is that, due to www & social media, the kids have a much more realistic idea of how poorly they’ll be paid. And they are not amused.
Some of that is inflated expectations, implicitly expecting their parent’s mid-career earnings for the git go.
The other part is the unrealism of how well some numerically scarce “glamorous” jobs pay. IOW, “What I want is what I (seem to) see on YouTube: a mid 20s person traveling the world making multiple $100K filming travel vids and being given lots of merch for product placement. That’s the job I want!”
And yeah, that is a great job. As the rueful saying has had it since before I was a kid: “Nice work if you can get it”.
There is just not that much visibility into the humdrum realities of working an engineering or administrative job in the bowels of Corporate America. As they learn just how humdrum it’ll be, they recoil in horror.
I suppose at a very deep foundational level we can contrast the attitude “I’m a fine person & worker and businesses should be competing for my services” versus “I recognize I’m a generic wannabe cog in the giant machine and I am competing with dozens of other generic wannabe cogs for each open position.”
Kids who’ve been the prince(ss) of their parents, then somebody of stature at college are really not prepared for the great comedownance (opposite of comeuppance ) that awaits them when they emerge into the world of work.
) that awaits them when they emerge into the world of work.