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]

It’s being pointed out to me that the Soviet Union did do some experimentation of this kind, and that Socialism has had the built-in idea of “we don’t know what Socialism will look like”.  

This didn’t occur to me largely because I have only ever seen “we don’t know what Socialism will look like” used as an excuse not to do any planning against well-known failure modes of Socialism/Communism.  (I wouldn’t apply the same level of scrutiny to Social Democracy, as Europe exists and has problems but those problems generally don’t involve massive purges and so on.  I just think those attempting it in America will screw it up.)

There was further criticism about “how do you actually do this? because politics,” which is of course reasonable, because politics.  But I’m one person, rather than an organization.  I do have some ideas on this, however.