How can socialism work when it’s failed in the past.

[ChrisZoZo]

My mum said to me “ask @Leo Gura how can socialism succeed if it is failed in the past”. I’m not privately messaging Leo but  I am interested hearing you guys  perspectives on this. 

[RareGodzilla]

You need stage orange or at least well developed blue society for capitalism to work. In stage red society it won't work. It's kinda like how USA attempted to enforce democracy on stage red/blue countries like Afganistan. It can't work, people don't want it and they are not ready. 

Same with socialism, it can't work on a stage red or even blue society. People need a higher stage of development in orded for the system to work, socialism is inherently based on solidarity, if everyone is just attempting to give into the system as little as possible and take as much as possible it becomes impossible for the system to work.

Even Karl Marx wrote that socialism would come as a step after capitalism. Historic irony had it that socialists only won in semi-feudal countries. 

Edited April 27, 2023 by RareGodzilla

[Leo Gura]

Depends on how you define socialism.

Soviet-style socialism will never work. Something akin to the Nordic model already works. You could create a more extreme form of the Nordic model in the future. Maybe it could work if the culture and populace is very developed. Then again, that might not even be a good system. At some point too much pampering by the state will become counter-productive and make people weak and lazy.

Edited April 27, 2023 by Leo Gura

[Mormegil]

One way it could work, could be through establishing a universal basic income. Of course it's easy to say, people will get lazy because of it, and stop working and the entire economy will suffer from. But I would actually disagree here. Getting your basic needs taken care of, gives you free time to express yourself and work in whatever way you want.

The fundamental difference to soviet socialism would be, that back then people still had to work in whatever job they got told to do, but in return got a safe income. This lead to the decline of work morale, because why would you put a lot of effort into the job you are not passionate about but forced to do anyway for 40 hours a week, when you always get your paycheck no matter how well you perform at work.

With an universal basic income, you got free time to invest in whatever field and project you want. You can more easily turn your passion into a career and people would get more productive by themselves.

At least that's the theory. But I can imagine it could work. Yes people generally tend to get lazy, when it gets TOO comfortable (so a basic income would need a lot of testing and adjusting), but 90 % of people don't enjoy laying on the couch for more than a few months. It gets boring. You wanna do something, and even it is just for your own enjoyment of it, and not so much, because you feel like you owe something to society (I believe there are already even some small studies, that back this up, but I guess we would still need to research this more and have trials on a bigger scale).

But obviously it really depends on what form of socialism you are aiming at. A too extreme form where you take too much freedom away from people and interfere too much with the market (to the point where normal business is not possible anymore and it prevents people from creating new technologies for the benefit of all of society), it will not work out.

Edited April 27, 2023 by Mormegil