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...this makes sense when you put it like this, and it makes sense of something that had always confused me: why the left expects playing word games with "communism" and "socialism" to work as though the thing with meaningful opposition is the branding and not the idea. The coalition dynamic is obvious in retrospect, but it had always seemed obvious to me at the time that anyone who found the repackaging of communism and socialism under other labels persuasive was either already in the tank for it or had very weak principles. No, their strong principles might just be a different part of the American right wing's package.
Communism is a political and economic system under which the means of production are under state ownership rather than private property. In the contemporary US, this is very much a minority position, I recon that the fraction of voters who want to abolish private businesses is about as large as the fraction which yearns for the reintroduction of feudalism -- both should poll about the Lizardman's constant.
Basically, when the left wants to regulate something about corporations, the right will surely cry "Communism". Not that the right is generally a very good champion of laissez-faire capitalism. There is a broad consensus that businesses need regulation, though there is disagreement on the amount and the particulars.
Mostly, the control the government has over corporations is not by virtue of ownership but because existing regulations have enough leeway in them that its agencies could just adopt a regulatory interpretation which will destroy their business model.
The Aryanization of TikTok last year is one such example of the power the state has over businesses. My understanding is that it was a bipartisan effort. Congress had decided that having the lion's share of short form videos rotting the brains of kids under control of the Chinese was a national security risk. So they passed a law to remedy that, and because Trump was in charge he managed to have have one of his allies take control of it, thereby ensuring that Red Chinese propaganda will not reach the impressionable minds of future generations.
No, that's socialism. Communism, as the name suggests, is "commune-ism", where there's no need for individual ownership because people care about others as much as themselves. This works pretty well at small scales and utterly-terribly at country scales due to human nature.
The confusion is because Marx claimed that socialism was a necessary stepping-stone to achieving successful large-scale communism, and hence the Marxist countries (which were socialist, and said as much - "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics", "socialism with Chinese characteristics") were/are frequently governed by Communist Parties (named such aspirationally).
Valid nitpick.
Also, Potato, potato.
For practical purposes of non-fantasy economic systems beyond Dunbar's number, it makes no difference if they are owned collectively by the population or by the state. If I am digging holes in my back garden under the mistaken impression that there is gold to be found, I can insist all day long that this is just the exploratory phase and the proper gold mine will come once the assay is done, in practice I will end up with garden with a lot of holes in it (which will come handy for the mass graves though, to stretch my metaphor a bit).
I also think Marx was intentionally vague on these letter steps after the necessary but distasteful dictatorship of the proletariat. After all, our minds are toiling under the yoke of capitalism and class struggles, so we can not even hope to grasp the heights to which the human spirit could soar without these fetters. (All horseshit, obviously.)
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The DSA is much more popular than Moldbug.
And that is before you consider the faction of the Republican party that thinks private-sector companies in strategic sectors should be required to give large equity stakes to the government as a condition of being allowed to operate.
Between MAGA communists and DSA communists, I think the percentage of Americans who favour the state seizing the means of production is at least 20%. I would guess the equivalent figure is >30% in most western European countries, and >50% in France where both the Gaullist right and the mainstream left have particularly strong communist traditions.
Those are fascists, not communists. They want the companies to be mostly privately run but with an easy-to-use government veto over their decisions. It's still bad, but economically not as disastrous.
I'm with Orwell on this - I think they are equivalent in substance and differ only in coalitional politics. If you didn't already know, would you be able to work out which of "National Socialism" and "Socialism in One Country" was the fascist slogan and which was the communist one?
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Because a lot of the ideas are pretty popular? Stuff like universal healthcare and increased minimum wage does have pretty high polling when it's not being smeared with those labels or being delivered by weirdo lefties.
"Do you want Thing That Sounds Nice" is what gets high polling. "Do you want Thing That Sounds Nice But Has Real Costs and Downsides" polls much, much worse. The irony is that vapid branding on the level of "It's what plants crave!" is all that communism and socialism have to offer.
I mean sure, but universal healthcare and a higher minimum wage aren't Communism by any definition except Red tribe rage bait. So it is the branding doing the sinking. It's tying a thing people support to a thing people don't. People want medical care without worrying about bills they don't want breadlines and a Marxist-Leninist one party state.
"It's not communism guys, it's just a complete government takeover of the entire healthcare industry!"
No, it's the reality that does the sinking. We saw this play out with Obamacare. "Do you want Saint Obama to make healthcare cheaper, more accessible, more available, faster and better?" "Hell yeah!" "Even if your taxes go up?" "Oh. No, nevermind." And then in the real world none of those good things ever happened and the entire industry got more expensive and more opaque and it's also burdened with insane amounts of fraud.
Yes, everyone would like medical care without worrying about bills. They'd also like that for housing, food, Netflix and every other good. If you ask them "Would you like [accurate description of the Canadian or British healthcare systems]?" then support would tank into the ground.
And those problems keep cropping up in universal healthcare systems for the exact same reasons communism fails - no price discovery, lacking information from markets, bureaucratization adding hurdles and corruption and nepotism to access, etc, etc.
"I just want all the theoretical good parts of a communist system, but without any of the bad parts" is literal five year old logic.
The Americans who have US style universal healthcare through Medicare and Medicaid are pretty willing to keep it. That's why Medicare for all became a slogan. There's other way to do it besides copying Canada and I think copying Canada would be bad for obvious reasons. Swiss healthcare is more universal and technically more private for example.
This is basically a word for word description of the US insurance market which also used to function a lot better in the 80s. The ACA was a band aid on a the system and some bad a lot of good. The no pre-existing condition rules and Medicaid expansion it introduced were excellent.
So Margaret Thatcher was a Communist? The Gulf Monarchs who preside over national oil industries and healthcare systems all communists？ The US has public education does that make Donald Trump a Communist? The government providing a service in an economy with private property and capatalist modes of production is not communist. By that definition every government on earth is communist.
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