“Ha nice try! That is not real capitalism! You think workplaces would just give workers health insurance under a free market? They would just tell sick workers to figure it out themselves and replace them with healthy ones if needed!”
“Some of the first evidence of compulsory health insurance in the United States was in 1915, through the progressive reform protecting workers against medical costs and sicknesses in industrial America. Prior to this, within the Socialist and Progressive parties, health insurance and coverage was framed as not only an economic right for workers’ health, but also as an employer’s responsibility and liability—healthcare was in this context centered on working-class Americans and labor unions.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_in_the_United_States#The_rise_of_employer-sponsored_coverage)
Also “free speech” that doesn’t apply to corporate platforms. Which is, you know, all of them. Love when a liberal says “that doesn’t count, they’re a private business” whenever you point out the blatant censorship in the West.
and this logic applies even within bourgeoisie political parties https://observer.com/2017/08/court-admits-dnc-and-debbie-wasserman-schulz-rigged-primaries-against-sanders/
Valid criticism, but let’s not pretend socialism leads to better outcomes for freedom of speech or press either.
Freedom of press only applies to the wealthy, how do I benefit from it as a worker when all media in my country perpetuates comprador propaganda and I’m too poor to make my own press?
For sure— I’m not saying freedom of press actually exists under capitalism.
My point is that socialism doesn’t have freedom of press either. Censorship and surveillance by the vanguard state (see China, Cuba, historical USSR) is routine.
“Dictatorship of the proletariat”. Unfortunately, dictatorships do not have a tendency to allow for freedom of press.
The proletariat is the majority in most if not all societies, arguing the dictatorship of the proletariat is undemocratic merely because the word “dictatorship” doesn’t make sense. Democracy is [ideally, not what it is in practice] is a dictatorship of the majority, and the proletariat are the majority, surely you see how saying democracy is undemocratic makes no sense.
States are instruments of oppression weilded by classes, they are all “dictatorships” in the sense that a class oppresses the other; the question in state is, is it the capitalists oppressing the working class, or the other way around
Except in practice it’s not proletarians doing these things, it’s bureaucrats who end up forming their own class and class interests in the name of the proletariat. The average proletariat isn’t actually the one who makes these rules or checks or applies censorships. See China, USSR, Cuba.
There shouldn’t be classes to begin with. Eliminating hierarchies in lieu of anarchism deals with the issue without it being “another dictatorship”
Dictatorship of the proletariat means democracy for the proletariat, dictatorship against capitalists.
Those words don’t mean anything when they are used to censor. The introduction of censorship allows censors to censor anything, regardless of whether or not it is “capitalist” or not.
There is no way of knowing whether only “capitalist” content is censored or if criticisms that are staunchly and directly against the state (which absolutely deserves its place in any state that doesn’t want to be an echo chamber) are also being censored under the veneer of “capitalism”.
Every government and even every culture practices some degree of control over how we speak and how we exist. Language itself has an impact on this. Despite this fact, it’s possible to recognize proletarian control vs capitalist control.
“Everyone does it!” is literally a logical fallacy.
It’s not even just “some”, you’re minimizing the extent of control here. You cannot have a state held accountable if it systematically suppresses criticism against it.
Socialism changes which class controls the speech from the capitalist class to the working classes.
This is not the case in any of the AES countries.
China, Cuba, Historical USSR. No such thing what you described. It’s state-controlled. In china, it’s bureaucratic class that controls the media, not average workers by any means.
The state is governed by the working classes in China, Cuba, USSR, etc. Administration is not a class, it’s a subset of a broader class, ie the proletariat. Classes are relations to ownership of production and distribution, not simply job categories.
The bureaucracy is still a class category that is distinct from workers in general with its own class interests.
States such as China aren’t really governed by the working classes.
No, this is not how class or the state works. Administration is a subset of a class, just like teachers and doctors are not classes.
Teachers and doctors don’t get to make laws to further their own interests, make it easier for others they know to do the same, amongst the countless other power moves bureaucrats are able to pull off. This power concentrates and develops them into their own class with their own interests because they are so largely cut off and distinguished from the rest of the working population.
Teachers and doctors are nothing like bureaucrats, that’s a fallacious analogy.
Not “somehow”. Quite easily. Advertising works. People are easily influenced. It wasn’t sudden; it happened little by little over a long time.
Most people do not naturally develop an advanced political education by themselves, they’ve got their own lives to deal with. A peasant could not hold their own in a complex economics debate with a King because they weren’t even taught to read nonetheless learn the intricacies of Middle Age politics.
There is a similar thing going on in the modern world, where sure most people can now read but only the capitalist class for the most part gets to access the highest levels of education. And without the tools to see beyond your cultural norms, to analyse whether they are right or wrong or being lucky enough to be born with the right brain to see past it, what can you even do?
