by Atlas667 | 2025-12-02 21:33:12+00:00
> If you actually make individualized decisions by votes of the entire public, that's direct democracy. But it doesn't scale.

You're right. I was making a mistake.

What I'm actually talking about is delegate democracy. Where representatives act only as mouth pieces for their directly involved constituents.

The title of this wiki article may make you cringe but its a good, short summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_democracy

For this to work it requires a culture of active democracy, not just, often rich, representatives estimating what we need from their detached lives.

It may answer your logistical questions, though i suspect it won't ease your power-dynamic worries.

> 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.

You're right as well. In many cases the type is defined by its use. In many socialist practices local councils barred individuals or group of individuals from employing others for production. This settled that distinction. While at the same time using your own property to produce yourself (or your family) is fine. The point of socialism is recognizing that capitalist production becomes a social illness, not individual production.

Another way of putting it is that socialized production for private profits creates a power imbalance.

If you are an employee at MY food farm, helping produce the same food you consume, then I have leverage. This is a very very simplified view of capitalism.

> 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.

True, this is what lead to the fall of the USSR. There was a conspiracy to destroy it from within. When it fell what happened next is national assets worth billions were bought by individuals for literally next to nothing.

And this same thing you point out is also what is causing so much corruption and de-regulation in all capitalist economies.

> So how are you envisioning this working?...........

These are things that would be worked out by the people in that job. The point is to keep the place running and everyone satisfied. Generally, people are paid according to how much they work. You don't work you don't get paid. If the place is running efficiently the people keeping it operational reap more benefits.

Look at it this way. In capitalism efficiency is kind of terrible for workers because they get laid off. In socialism efficiency means less work for more benefit. And if you automated it, great, the world is a better place, go find another thing to do. There's always shit to be done, no need to limit work to profit-generation.

It's self sustaining, actual social benefit.

> 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.

Many people who lived through it remember it fondly. Especially when they're comparing it to their now capitalist countries. The CIA actually recognizes that at one point the USSR had similar or greater avg caloric intake per person than the US. Sure, there were downturns, sure there was Stasi (Stasi is a CIA/FBI). But a lot of it is bogey man propaganda.

People are people, you can't run a country with absolute abject repression anywhere in the world. Sure, there are always periods of repression in any country. The US has had its periods as well: the great depression, the red scare, the extreme racism, the deep classism, the defense of megacorp theft, the war-mongering at the cost of its youth, the US also has the most people in jail, more than any country on earth (this gets spun as tough-on-crime).

I'm sure the USSR was a tough place during the civil war and during WW2. The US benefited from not having a civil war in the 1910s, and it benefited from not having a world war fought on its soil. The Germans were literally trying to annihilate the USSR, where more than 2 times more Slavs than Jews died during WW2. These things objectively made the USSR rougher to live in.

Even then, socialism, to me, is only tangentially related to the USSR. I am not a fanatic or anything like that. The USSR was a country who tried to do it and failed, plain and simple. They made terrible mistakes leading to massive loss of life AND also had terrible conditions to work with. In my mind it is similar to how the US has lead to terrible loss of life inside its own borders and through out the world due to policies and wars that have only made a few people rich.

What I'm saying is that for socialists the USSR, in and of itself, is never the point.

> What gives someone the incentive to grow food for other people or build tractors or mine copper?

The satisfaction of their own needs. A council of workers can abstract resource distribution in an even better way than money ever could. Money is like the lamest proxy for work with too many exploitable flaws.