Gary Childress wrote: ↑Wed Jun 10, 2020 5:15 am
Do the workers control the government of China or North Korea?
The workers never end up controlling anything anywhere.
They talk about it, but what happens instead is that a strong man takes over by becoming the figurehead, the leader of the revolution. The collectivist rhetoric is used to level the population and to justify cruelty to any who seem "privileged," or may present a rival to the leader, as they are called "enemies of the revolution," their very success being held as evidence of their anti-revolutionary guilt; after all, how could they be doing better than the levelled ones without cheating? (so goes the reasoning) Special success becomes the mark of treachery, and equal-failure the mark of revolutionary conformity.
Socialism instantly produces authoritarian leaders who exploit the people. It's happened in every case. Consider Tito or Ceaucescu, or the Kim Jongs, Mao or Stalin, Hitler or Castro, Maduro or Mugabe...it always happens.
And if socialism has never really existed, has capitalism ever really existed? When was there ever "capitalism"?
Well, capitalism is an economic arrangement, not a comprehensive, collectivist political ideology like Socialism is. As such, it does not have or imply a "pure" form, and exists in different but significant degrees in all Western countries, and in a variety of others as well. Even China has a limited experiment going with what's called "Red Capitalism," meaning capitalist business practices overseen by the authoritarian Socialists in Beijing.
But capitalism can potentially become exploitative too. So it has to be watched. And competition can become unfair, so there need to be rules in the game to prevent things like monopoly or price-fixing. However, the good thing is that capitalism doesn't come bundled with a comprehensive political ideology; it's much more pragmatic in practice than Socialism. It requires rules of the game, but does not preset how the game will turn out. That's determined by the free market itself.
And that's one big difference between the American Left and the American centrists. America has traditionally looked to a system of "checks and balances" to limit the authority of government. This is because they have recognized centralized governments for what they are: not a
positive good but a
necessary evil. We can't get along without government, but we also cannot trust it. So it must be permitted but watched closely and justly limited. In contrast, the American Left holds that government is a positive good -- it is, in fact, salvific and the hope of the nation. The more areas of private life fall under the control of big government, the better we all will be, goes the thinking. So far from government being limited, it must be expanded unreservedly: it must come to own education, health care, welfare...indeed the entire economy, which Socialism imagines it will then manage for the public good.
But it will not. It never has. Not once. What it does instead is use that centralized control to concentrate power and privilege in the few autocrats who run the collective, and most particularly in "the great leader," then distributed downward at his discretion to whatever lower administrators he wishes to use to control the population. In other words, it runs on pure political corruption, and treats the economy as a tool of its own advantage. And then equality comes simply to mean the equal misery of the populace.
So far, it's never gone any other way. But somehow, people keep thinking that if THEY ran a Socialist system, THEY would be wiser than everybody else has ever been, and it would go differently this time. It never does, but they keep thinking it will.
