Anonymous asked:

Social Democracy With American Characteristics probably ends up looking a lot like Cali does now, and by all accounts that's not a very pretty sight. Americans are just too bad at governing (and budget management especially) for it to go any way but slow death. Still better than full communism though I guess.

mitigatedextras answered:

I don’t disagree.

Thus why Full Communism was described implicitly as having a (much) high(er) risk of “exploding and killing everyone.”

The Communists, Socialists, and Social Democrats lack the necessary organizational science and political will to successfully implement the hypothetical post-capitalist society they want, and the necessary cluefulness to overcome ideological blinding and make the necessary ideological sacrifices to achieve and maintain it.

Most of them don’t even seem to have the concept of organizational structuring/mechanisms as a form of technology which must be researched and developed (including with competing experimentation), despite all the rhetoric about how the mechanics of Capitalism drive human action.  

[mitigatedchaos]

@collapsedsquid:  Have you ever done a mirror test?

Look m8, that’s just what I’ve encountered in the wild outside the weeded gardens of Rationalist Tumblr and other places.

The Communists and the like I know in real life are all excited about mass immigration, can’t connect it to housing prices for some reason, want to abolish gender roles but don’t have a backup plan if that completely trainfucks the birthrates, and on and on.  And Social Justice?  Aside from a handful of them, that’s their thing.

A clever plot like “let’s use those quasi-automated investment funds to slowly shift to dominant social ownership of the economy” (even though we should guess that eventually that’s going to reach margins and quit working, but still) is not something I see in practice.

In practice, I see a lot of takes like “rich people are responsible for messing up the housing market by building rich people houses! we should confiscate the empty ones! …what are zoning laws?” or “we need to reintroduce rent control”.

---

And if you mean “you lack the required abilities to enter power,” well, duh.

---

One of the things about Capitalism is that it’s cruel, but it can sorta keep chugging along even if you don’t really know what you’re doing.  The threshold of competence for successfully implementing it is a bit lower.

[mitigatedchaos]

To clarify, I’m talking about America, here.

I agree with the anon that they will screw it up.