Comment by ant6n
3 years ago
And in certain capitalist societies, the capital decides the laws and allocation of resources.
At least in theory, in a democratic society, government should be elected by the people. Unfortunately there never was a democratic, socialist country, so it's hard to make statements based on observation with these matters.
Government might be elected but that's a really weak, confusing signal to decide all the spending a market currently decides.
Imagine lumping millions of spending decisions into a binary choice, alongside policy positions and everything else a government represents.
There were many democratic socialist countries, unfortunately socialism devolves into tyranny in less than one election period. For example Czechoslovakia voted for communism freely by its own volition in 1946, and the communists started killing people the same year. It's not an individual's fault - many new unknown people started ruthlessly competing for absolute power as soon as it became available. Similar process happened in the entire Eastern Bloc.
This is more or less what Brazil is doing, but they voted for a (luckily incompetent) proto-dictator to prevent the danger of "communism" (as in "voting for a center-left party" communism).
Democracy only works well with a well informed electorate. This is why we need to fight the diffusion of propaganda disguised as news.
If killing people is your bar for descending into tyranny then capitalism is guilty of the same thing. The whiskey rebellion happened in the US shortly after it’s formation and that was over paying taxes to the capitalist state. You also had the various government slaughters of workers striking whenever they tried to get a better deal from their employers
I'm not advocating for capitalism, I'm just against socialism/communism because it fatally corrupts people's minds - watching local movies from this era is painful, as you can see the horrific distortions it imposed on the people from above. I mean stuff like parents teaching children to never stand out, never excel, never strive for more, never be different - in a panic try to protect them from state-mandated harm.