On this, we disagree. Union rights? Okay I can see that as having a connection to the capitalist/socialist divide. But gay and lesbian rights? How is discrimination against homosexuals a result of capitalism?
Maybe a better question would be is it better for people to go without because they are unable to pay for goods and services or for them to go without because of the inevetable shortages created by a planned economy?
Also, FWIW, socialism, planned economy and regulations are not synonymous.
To start with, capitalism needs workers. It needs workers who are just functional enough to produce as much as possible, and it needs workers to reproduce and ensure the next generation of workers is born and raised. This economic need - a functional, regenerating workforce - translates into a need to govern the lives of the workers - moral requirements, and ultimately laws and legislation. To draw a parallel, we can look at the temperance movement and Prohibition. Drunk workers and hung-over workers mean a loss of profits, since they’re either too sick to work or they cause accidents that slow or stop production. Hence a moral crusade against alcohol eventually becoming the banning of the sale of alcohol in an attempt to regulate workers’ lives.
Similarly, homosexuality and lesbianism reduces the number of new workers being born and raised - an unacceptable condition from the capitalist viewpoint. Hence moral crusades from the pulpit, the criminalization of homosexuality and lesbianism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the legislation today that treats them as second-class citizens.
This is not to say that homophobia, both personal and legislative, is solely the product of capitalism; in earlier societies, however, the acute need for workers didn’t exist, and therefore neither did the need to heavily regulate and oversee their personal lives to such an extent. Discrimination against gays and lesbians has never been so deeply institutionalized as under capitalism. The fight for gay and lesbian rights cannot be a separate, isolated fight, since there are working-class gays and lesbians. It needs to work in solidarity with other struggles both large and small, which need to offer their solidarity in return.
False dichotomy and unsupported conclusion. Your next sentence:
allows for the possibility of a non-socialist planned economy, i.e. an economy planned solely in the interests of a minority ruling class. Up until now, this is the only sort of planned economy we’ve witnessed. You have only a hypothesis that a socialist planned economy would result in the same problems, but no concrete evidence to back it up. Socialism cannot be built in one country or one region; it requires the sum total of the world’s productive power to be built. Since these conditions do not yet exist, you cannot conclusively state that a socialist planned economy will inevitably result in shortages.
Now seems about right-moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
Dammit, I didn’t ignore Colibri’s request on purpose. Sorry about that, Dostoevsky.
Well, supported by 50 years of economic history, but the OP said he didn’t want debate.
The free market is just one possible mechanism for distributing resources. And as you implied, those with less have less to exchange for their needs and wants. Rationing, lottery and “first come/first serve” are other mechanisms for distributing finite resources that are not dependent on a person’s current financial situation. However, as with the free market, if there are more people who want a good than there are goods available, some will have to go without.
So do you think these other methods for distributing goods and serves to be any more or less fair and equitable than the free market?
FWIW, the benefits of the free market IMHO is that while only those with money can afford the most rare items, the high prices those items fetch will typically attract other sellers and drive the price down to more equitable levels.
I downloaded that movie and watched it for free because I sneer at the capitalist pigdog profiteering of film - the people’s medium!
[sub]I’ve never actually seen the movie.[/sub]
Kinda late to play that card, seeing as how you fired the first shot, isn’t it? I should know better than to respond to you by now.
I can’t even claim that, I’m just a Brit that moved to Stockholm in 1999 and never left.
I pretty much agree with what everyone else has said regarding Social Democracy. I find the standard American view - as shown in this thread - of Socialism being hardcore Communism to be profoundly depressing. There seems like there can be no middle ground, either Capitalism or Soviet-style repression.
Is there a chance? Now, that’s a question worthy of GQ! It’s like rolling a 6 and a 3, then asking if there is a chance of rolling a 6 and a 3.
Hehee, yeah.
I actually visited the Soviet Union in the eighties, with my parents. Even to the preteen kid that I was, it seemed like a profoundly bleak and depressing place. And they were showing us what was supposed to be the tidied up and glamourized version of the country…
The only thing that seemed good was the tea. And I drank gallons of it. 
I was asking those who see socialism as the “pure idea” and of those who do, presumably some (all?) would argue that socialism hasn’t been properly tried.
No worries. 
Could you elaborate on this? Do you believe Americans have any ‘real’ civil liberties? If so, what are they?
ETA: To All, has there every been a peaceful socialist revolution?
ETA(Take2): I’ve noticed that socialism = Marxism in this thread. I take it the difference between socialism and communism is one of semantics… right?
On a related note, Reason, the libertarian monthly, made exactly this point with:
Damn! This should read I’ve noticed that for some socialism=Marxism.
Why did the Leninist cross the road?
Because the Central Committee told him to!
Why did the Anarchist cross the road?
Because it told him not to!
It is if it’s communism with a small c. The early Christian congregations were small-c communists, sharing all their goods. But Communism with a capital C has historically, since the early 20th Century, been used to denominate those loyal to the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist tradition and the Moscow-based Communist International; as distinct from, say, Trotskyists, who are Marxists and arguably Leninists, but in the orthodox Communist world-view are heretics and schismatics; and Anarchists and Anarcho-Syndicalists, who are even more heretical.
Maoists count as Communists, even though their idea of peasant-centered revolution was rather heretical in terms of Leninist ideology (but, whaddaya want? Pre-revolutionary China had no industrial proletariat to speak of), and even though they stopped listening to Moscow not long after they took over China.
Of course.
Well, not right to life, since you have the federal death penalty but no UHC. Press freedom is OK-ish (but even there there’s censorship of broadcast media) But in the general “freedom from state interference like search and seizure” you do OK, unless you’re a suspected terrorist, of course.
No. There’s never been a violent one, either. The only true Socialist revolution is a worldwide one.
However, there have been peaceful socialist movements that effected political changes, like the Solidarity movement in Poland.
Whew! That sets the bar pretty high!
That was a labor union fighting the status quo, all right, but I’ve never heard it characterized as a socialist movement before.
The difference between socialism and communism is not one of semantics. Even Marx made the distinction between two phases of post-revolutionary society; what he called the the ‘first and second phases of Communist society’ are generally called socialism and communism today. In these terms, socialism is the society that has just come out of capitalism and is rebuilding society in the interests of the working class. Communism, on the other hand, is the society built on the foundations of socialism. Essentially, a litmus test for being a socialist is one’s attitude towards capitalism. Socialists (whose ultimate aim is communism) argue for its overthrow as a necessary prerequisite for being able to move society forward. Those who believe that capitalism can be permanently reformed for the better without getting rid of it, whatever the approach to getting there, are social democrats.
BrainGlutton’s assertions, though widely held once both on the left and right but now mostly on the right, are completely inaccurate. It should be enough to note the absolute trust Lenin had in Trotsky during the Revolution and Russian Civil War, and his express desire, written shortly before his death, to have Stalin removed from the post of General Secretary, to give an idea of which tendency was the more ‘orthodox’ and which the ‘heretical’. However, it should also be noted that in order to fully complete his grip on power, Stalin resorted to systematically murdering those who had led (and did far more than he did) the Russian Revolution - something Trotsky clearly found horrific and detestable.
Maoists are neither socialists nor Communists (big or little ‘c’, if you hold to that absurdity). Pre-revolutionary China had a distinct and sizable industrial working class, which in 1922 had at least 300,000 workers in a dozen cities when the first All-China Labor Congress was held. From 1925 to 1927, when a revolutionary situation swept over China, hundreds of thousands of workers took part in actions across the country. As the Guomindang neared Shanghai on March 21, 1927, they were greeted by a strike of some 600,000 to 800,000 workers protesting the violent crushing of an earlier strike by the local warlords (which Chiang Kai-shek sat and watched as his army stopped 25 miles from the city). Mao’s perspective was a deliberate abandonment of the working class after it was crushed, partially as a result of Stalin’s criminal policy of emphasizing nationalist unity with the GMD in China rather than an independent working-class movement. You can’t throw out the backbone of socialist theory and still claim with any justification that you’re a socialist.
Oh, and that quote from the libertarian magazine completely misses the point in order to score a rhetorical zinger - Moore said nothing about how he felt about bootlegging, only that the studio didn’t want bootlegged copies going around. Michael Moore certainly didn’t have complete control over the film from planning to shooting to marketing and distribution, so it’s completely off-target to sneer at him for not acting as the writer thinks a socialist ought to (I don’t think he’s ever claimed to be one, either) when it’s the studio calling the shots on this particular question. I should note I haven’t been able to find whether Moore has any financial interests in Paramount Vantage or Overture Films, which would of course affect the issue but to a much lesser degree than whether Moore has ever claimed he’s a socialist and whether bootlegging films is socialism.