Hey.
Finland here. Socialism is pretty fucking great.
How’s it going in America, the bastion of capitalism, where there is no parental leave, limited sick days, at-will firing, cities are overcrowded with human excrement from homeless people who still have actual jobs, for profit prisons forcing people to slave away for years because of mandatory minimum sentencing, and all that other good shit?
Communism might not work until we get to a Star Trek style utopia, but socialism definitely does. Capitalism doesn’t have a monopoly on market economies.
Market socialism is just the same thing as capitalism, just with less poor quality products, good labour laws, no horribly massive income inequalities, etc.
But no you go on ahead and defend capitalism as an ideology, I’m sure you’ve read the literature on the subject and know what you’re talking about.
While I don’t disagree with your main point, to my knowledge Finland is still capitalist, it just has a robust safety net, regulations, and workers’ protections, like most of Europe, and unlike much of the US.
Yeah, a lot of people think that, and they’d be wrong.
We’re a social democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy and supports a gradualist, reformist and democratic approach towards achieving socialism.
Learn to separate your notion of “capitalism” from “market economy”. Capitalism is to market economy what cancer is to cell growth. It is that, but it is a malignant form of it that will never ever function in long term, and it’s very clear to anyone who objectively looks at it. Infinite growth on finite materials is literally impossible.
From the very source you used, the very next sentence:
In practice, social democracy takes a form of socially managed welfare capitalism,
I’m not saying you’re necessarily defending it even if I think you’re wrongly equating capitalism and market economy.
I just feel that for the most part, basically the “Red Scare” made people think that the only thing that’s an alternative to capitalism is full blown communism, which implies that all market economies are capitalist, which they aren’t.
I’m not blaming you — I’m blaming some of the implications of the language you’ve used. There is a difference.
Yeah, there’s a lot of good things about Finland when comparing internationally, but I can tell you, there are some rather bad things as well. While “first amendment auditors” in the US are sometimes annoying as fuck, we honestly need a little bit of that type of spirit here. We’ve got authoritarian issues. Honestly.
https://harvardpolitics.com/nordic-racism/
I’d just like to live somewhere else for a while, maybe that might give me a newfound respect to licking some boots or something, as currently respecting the Finnish police- and justice system in general is a very nauseating idea indeed.
My point is that adopting socialism would make the poor richer and the megarich poorer, and if it’s just socialism, a “market socialism”, not a “communism”, if you will, then nothing would really change for most of the people. Well, nothing would change to be more negative at least. The megawealthy would still be rich, but they wouldn’t be as disgustingly rich as now. Homelessness or hunger wouldn’t exist. But still a lot of people basically consider “socialism” to be a curse-word?
