NationStates Jolt Archive

Socialism is economy controlled by the government. True. But that makes no statement on how democratic the government is.

I sincerely hope you are joking, rather than speaking from ignorance. 12% of America's population lives in poverty. Twelve freaking percent. That's an eighth of the entire population of America. People get ill all the time with "adequate" healthcare (me, for example). There is a massive population of people who rent their home (my family, for example), and a moderately high population of people who don't have any home. And the legal system here is crap.


http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=sarcasm

You are also completly and utterly wrong saying that Communism is to Socialism as Fascism is to Conservatism. Communism is to LIBRALISM as Fascism is to Conservatism at least in your sense. As I infer that you are wondering why conservatism exists and socialism does not. The reality is that in mankind's experiace and in a realistic political spectrum SOCIALISM is to LIBRALISM as Facsim is to Conservatism. The more moderate LIBRALISM and CONSERVATISM have survived where the radical SOCIALISM and FACSISM have died out because of thier brutality.



Since everyone seems to be concerned with semantics here, lets examine the underlying structure of the terms everyone is batting around here (go here (http://www.moral-politics.com/xpolitics.aspx?menu=Political_Ideologies&action=Draw&choice=PoliticalIdeologies.All) to see the map of ideologies):

Each political ideology is formed by a combination of moral structures: Interdependance/Independance and Conformance/NonConformance.

Roughly stated, Interdependance is the idea that collective efforts by society benefit the society more than individual efforts (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts); this is most commonly known as Socialism in most cases, Communism being the extreme form when the community takes ultimate precedence over the individual. Independance is the idea that individual efforts should be rewarded, thus providing incentive for the whole of society to compete, thus benefiting the society; this is commonly known as Capitalism in most cases, and Ultra-Capitalism (Capitalizm) in the extreme where the individual takes ultimate precedence over the community. All societies fall somewhere between the extremes (though some have tried, or at least claim to have tried, communism); with the vast majority falling closer to the center than the extremes (see here (http://www.moral-politics.com/xpolitics.aspx?menu=Political_Maps&action=Draw&choice=PoliticalMaps.G8_Countries) maps for approximations of where the G8 countries' governments stand).

The second dimension, Conformance/NonConformance deals with the order of society. Conformance adhears to a social order with a structured system defining one thing as superior to another (God > Pope > Cardinals > priests > parishoners > non-believers - I'm pretty sure I missed stuff there, but you get the point -, rich > poor, white > black, etc), in a word: classism. Extreme Conformance is Fascism and Fundamentalism, where the societal structure is absolute, and disrespect of that structure is not tolerated. NonConformance breaks down that social order by declaring all people, races, religions, ethnicities, etc, equal. Extreme NonConformance is Libertarianism, where all entities are considered absolutely equal, and personal rights are untouchably sacred. Again, most societies tend towards the center, with notable exceptions in Nazi Germany, Italy under Mussolini, Iraq under Hussein, etc (alot of medieval societies were fascist/fundamentalist too).

Combining these two dimensions yeilds four subcategories: Socialism (Interdependant NonConformance), Authoritarianism (Interdependant Conformance), Conservatism (Independant Conformance), and Liberalism (Independant NonConformance). Socialism is where much of Europe lies, and contains the ideology of International Communism (a boundaryless society in which all people enjoy equal social status, which is, unless I am mistaken, what Marx had in mind). Authoritarianism contains the vast majority of the "negative" ideologies: Fascism, Nazism (a subset of Fascism), National Communism, and Stalinism (a subset of National Communism). Conservatism is where the US currently resides, and is the opposite of Socialism (not liberalism, like many would think). Liberalism, where the UK stands currently, gets bashed from both sides; Socialism calls it conservative, while Conservatism calls it socialist, when it is truly neither.

It is this diametric opposition of Socialism and Conservatism that has created a gulf in understanding between the United States and Socialist nations; neither side can accept as valid the virtues of the other.[/LONG WINDED LECTURE]

A while ago I started a thread entitled "Did the cold war rob America of any sense of social justice" which basicly asked why the American political system has no Socialist representation in its political system. I then immidately got showered down in a series of insults against communism and a series of arguements about why communisim is inherintly evil ranging from the number of deaths in communist regiemes to the explaination of why you loose personal freedoms under communism. Now I just want to make it clear that Socialism and Communism are NOT the same thing. I'm not sure why people can't understand that but its the truth. Calling Socialism Communisim is like calling Conservatisim Facisim. Both Communisim and Facisim are extreme authoritarian styles of their respective original forms. It seems to me that many Americans here like to confuse Socialism with Communism so as to avoid having to look at the possibility of Socailalism working in their country.

To me, the two things might as well be the same. Both creeds want to subvert the system only by different methods. Also socialism invariably leads to communism like teenagers invariably lead to bad rock music.

Thank you! At least a few people seem to know what they're talking about!

As for Urantia....how can you still not have seen the difference between the social/political side and the economic side? Really, come on it's not difficult!

"How is socialism "economic" if it involves "collective ownership"?" You asked...well, because private ownership is the basic premise of a capitalist economy and collective ownership is the basic premise of a communist economy. But there are varying degrees between capitalism and communism. The greater the degree of public ownership, the more socialist is the country. And public "ownership" can include taxation, as it is basically the premise that the state owns a % of the individual's income.

Europe tends more to socialism than does the US, but the Europe is beginning to tend more towards capitalism as public ownership decreases (mainly due to EU competition policy which increasingly covers state monopolies) The UK, in the 1970s was extremely socialist in that the Health Service, Telecommunications (TV, Radio, telephony, etc), Steel, Coal, Public Transport, Air Transport, Airports, Education (including Universities, even today) were, and some still are owned by the state.

To say that true socialism cannot exist with democracy is to underestimate the extent to which state monopolies were dominant in democratic Western Europe. Even today, in Scotland (my part of the UK) more than 60% of employment is with the state (that's 60% of employment TODAY, 2005, well AFTER the peak of public employment in the 1970s). The State-owned NHS is still the biggest employer in Europe, with a workforce of more than 1million people - all working for the state, in a state-owned industry.

Yes, privatisation and private finance are erroding the socialist tendancies in Europe, and removing much that was state-owned to the private sector, but that does not detract from the fact that the UK was socialist (and Democratic!) or that the EU still operates a greater degree of social welfare provision than the US, and is therefore more socialist.

So in conclusion there can be no debate as to whether you can have socialism and democracy because, quite clearly, it has already happened here in the UK. It might not be socialist now, but it certainly was!


PS - I admit that i didn't read those statistics properly yesterday, since it did actually that they were adjusted by population. But...

United Nations' Egeland brags about his native Norway, which, in giving, he says, "is No. 1 in the world." Norway gives 0.92 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) to foreign aid development, versus 0.14 percent in this country. " . . . We have . . . no country up to the 1 percent . . . line of foreign assistance in general," says Egeland, "and we have, I think, three . . . Scandinavians that have exceeded -- and Holland -- the 0.7 percent line of gross national income for assistance."

(That's from one of the articles Urantia posted)

So....US gives 0.14% GDP and the Norway 0.92% and the only reply to this in the article is

" Yes, Holland gave $12.2 billion in foreign aid in 2003, but that was following two years in which it received more aid than it gave."

Yes...good comeback. How much aid did Norway receive back though....? None, I would imagine - Norway is a very rich country. And I would also imagine that most of the "aid" Holland recieved would be from the EU (CAP anyone?) and since Holland also contributes to the EU, and such contributions don't count as "aid" from Holland to the EU (since these payments come straight from VAT), this isn't an entirely accurate picture of the aid balance in Holland.

Further figures you might want to consider are

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/19/52/34352584.pdf

which shows that the EU (then of the 15) which was of comparable population to the US gave nearly 2.5 times the amount of aid as the US.

In any case, you have to doubt the integrity of an article that refers to "mega-gifts". Mega-gifts??? Lets just make up buzz words here! Mega-socialism! Mega-aid! Mega-globalisation. Fantastic....it sounds so much cooler when you prefix words with mega for no apparent reason.