Comment on Capitalism is all about using state power to protect capital by force
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 19 hours agoGet your nose out of your schoolbooks, and look around you, there is a socialism mixed with capitalism everywhere you look, over the entire planet.
The Fire Department is a perfect example of a capitalist concept (buying fire protection from a company), that was replaced by a socialist concept (pooling the community’s funds to pay for a municipal fire department that benefits all citizens), and exists within a capitalist system. Same with public schools, public libraries, parks, law enforcement (in concept, anyway), and more.
No political system could survive in its purest form. Any successful government is going to have to mix the best of all political systems, and reject the worst parts of them. That means lots of grey areas, which are hard for many people to accept. Many people need clearly delineated lines, and that’s not possible when your government is a Frankenstein’s monster, so they want a pure system, even if it doesn’t work as well.
theuniqueone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
No goverment services aren’t socialism do basic research before confidently stating blatantly wrong opinions.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 16 hours ago
It’s not blatantly wrong, you just can’t understand nuance, which is common for people who trust definitions over actual life. Fire departments were the earliest versions of insurance companies, who morphed into that business when their firefighting responsibilities were taken away by local fire departments. The original fire brigades would definitely have been considered a socialist concept, if the word had existed at that point. Eventually, as governments evolved, they took over fire brigades, and became fire departments.
Just because the government is the vehicle for offering the service to the citizens, doesn’t mean it isn’t made possible by the support and cooperation of the citizens, which is the basic concept of socialism - the people supporting a concept that benefits all.
And MAGA recognizes this, which is why they want to destroy anything that has socialist roots, like all those things I mentioned - libraries, museums, parks, schools, etc. The entire reason that MAGA is constantly trying to kill those things is precisely because they consider them Socialist influences on their obsessive objective of a purely Capitalist society that benefits only the wealthy, rather than a successful one that benefits all of its citizens.
There is no reason that both Socialism and Capitalism can’t co-exist successfully, as the Scandinavian nations have been demonstrating for decades.
theuniqueone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 hours ago
Again you don’t understand those words at all the Scandinavian countries are in no way socialist. Socialism isn’t just a public service it means workers ownership of the means of production. Capitalism is incompatible with this meaning private ownership of the means of production for profit, you can’t nationalize some industries then call that a mix of socialism and capitalism you either have one or the other.
DegradationDenial@feddit.nl 6 hours ago
Great lets try that out; how much ownership do you think a worker has over the means of production, without the ability to choose a union not pre-appointed by the state?
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 13 hours ago
There is a difference between theory in a book, and the way it operates in the actual world. There isn’t a single nation, government, or political system that exists by following textbook theory alone. So are we talking about Philosophical Political Theory, or are we talking Real World Politics?