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Is it possible to sum up why people distrust socialism without referencing those things? I suspect not (at least, not accurately); they're part & parcel of the story we tell about what socialism is.

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Jonathan Rowson

@Jonathan_Rowson

Aug 27, 2019

Trying to sum up in a paragraph why people distrust socialism. The challenge is to do so without shrill references to Stalin, hackneyed references to Hayek and Popper, tired debates about past government failures and tendentious references to Venezuela and gulags. Who can help?

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Yes, it is possible. Anarchist theory, for example. Socialism is totalitarian in practice because social ownership is totalitarian in principle. Though our current system of tripartism has broken down to the point of being totalitarian in practice. If it is in principle, IDK.

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In principle, states are no less absurd than if your landlord was able to determine (or violate) your rights solely because you were born in their block. Besides which they have a private army and a cartel agreement with the other landlords to ensure they keep that "ownership".

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Practically speaking, most forms of socialism also directly argues for an increase in state power, putting you more at the mercy of the state. But so long as capitalism means implicit slavery to Capital, this is not an obvious worsening of conditions...

12:18 PM · Aug 27, 2019Twitter Web App

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It would be nice to have functioning tripartism like Scandinavian social democracy, but this is easily undermined by state or employers over time.