by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-02 18:28:40+00:00
> You mistake direct democracy for literally just majority decision making.

If you actually make individualized decisions by votes of the entire public, that's direct democracy. But it doesn't scale.

If you elect representatives, the rules of the elections process and thereby the seats become the target of capture efforts. And the more having a seat gives you the power to do, the stronger the capture efforts will be.

> A political party that consists of councils of workers who represent an industry. A socialist workers party whose aim is to increase worker control of the economy.

The premise here being that if the party becomes successful, its leaders would somehow be immune from the principal-agent problem. But what stops them from using the fact that most people don't have the bandwidth to pay attention to all the details to stuff their own pockets the same as Democrats and Republicans?

> Socialism is about productive property NOT personal property.

That isn't a discernible category. If you have a house that you can both live in and run a restaurant out of it, which one is it? If you have a computer that can both contain your personal documents and hosts your business website, which one is it? You're not describing a type of property, you're describing a use for it. And if you actually tried to create special rules for making productive use of existing property, expect that to be the first thing anyone tries to capture to secure a monopoly for themselves.

> Take a retail store, the way I generally see it is these persons who work at these places of production would form councils and run it, generally, like any other retail store, but not for the service of private profits.

I mean, there is no law against this right now. You can literally get your friends together, pool your resources and open your own retail store. The biggest existing barrier to this is raising the money for the real estate, which is the thing kept artificially scarce by government zoning restrictions.

> My most sincere take is that Socialism is about increasing production by unchaining it from private profits.

So how are you envisioning this working? You and your friends get together and open a retail store. You all work there and collectively control the company. Do you all get an equal share of the proceeds, even if one of you is the janitor and another is an engineer? If the store is successful and you could use more staff, by what means do you determine who is allowed to join and what they get in exchange for signing on? If the store is successful but you don't need more staff, e.g. because you're good at automating things, does that mean everybody who works there gets a bigger share and no one new is allowed to join? What if someone is already a member and they turn out to be a schmuck who refuses to do their part?

> This is simply propaganda that can be dispelled by a simple look through CIA wires.

The CIA sucks but the USSR actually was a dystopia. You can ask the people who used to live under it, many of them are still alive. Bread lines and the Stasi were both actually a thing.

> You don't strictly need money in order to produce, you need willing and able people.

Money is a proxy. To produce you need labor and materials. But where do they come from? What gives someone the incentive to grow food for other people or build tractors or mine copper?