You have defined socialism here quite broadly, which may be unhelpful to discussing it as it can mean anything between
a. A market-based economy with a significant amount of redistribution from the wealthy to the poor and some business regulations for prosocial reasons.
b. A command economy where a centralized government has control over (or attempts to control) almost all aspects of the economy.
In my view, the former may very well be the ideal for developed countries at the moment but I am rather skeptical of the latter.
If we look at the socialist public figures, both the politicians (e.g. Bernie Sanders, AOC, Jeremy Corbyn etc) and the public intellectuals (e.g. Ĺ˝iĹžek, Naomi Klein, Richard Wolff etc) always advocate for the former and not for the latter. The only reason that pro-capitalists keep steering the conversation towards command economies, despite there being no real support for it in socialist movements, is because they know that thatâs a conversation they can win much more easily than actually engaging with the position of contemporary socialists. This is a red herring.
Itâs probably wrong to call it a âRed Herringâ. Bernie-likes are generally âdemocratic socialistsâ in particular. While âdemocratic socialismâ is the most popular strand of socialism right now, it is certainly not the only popular one. Even the DSA, named for its basis in democratic socialism, actually has quite a large faction of more authoritarian leftists heavily influence by Marxism-Leninism (i.e. Stalinism).
You have defined socialism here quite broadly, which may be unhelpful to discussing it as it can mean anything between
a. A market-based economy with a significant amount of redistribution from the wealthy to the poor and some business regulations for prosocial reasons.
b. A command economy where a centralized government has control over (or attempts to control) almost all aspects of the economy.
In my view, the former may very well be the ideal for developed countries at the moment but I am rather skeptical of the latter.
If we look at the socialist public figures, both the politicians (e.g. Bernie Sanders, AOC, Jeremy Corbyn etc) and the public intellectuals (e.g. Ĺ˝iĹžek, Naomi Klein, Richard Wolff etc) always advocate for the former and not for the latter. The only reason that pro-capitalists keep steering the conversation towards command economies, despite there being no real support for it in socialist movements, is because they know that thatâs a conversation they can win much more easily than actually engaging with the position of contemporary socialists. This is a red herring.
Itâs probably wrong to call it a âRed Herringâ. Bernie-likes are generally âdemocratic socialistsâ in particular. While âdemocratic socialismâ is the most popular strand of socialism right now, it is certainly not the only popular one. Even the DSA, named for its basis in democratic socialism, actually has quite a large faction of more authoritarian leftists heavily influence by Marxism-Leninism (i.e. Stalinism).