Surely the good or bad effects of socialism are a function of policy? Whether or not a policy arises democratically and/or revolutionarily does not change the policy itself. This is a striking non-sequitur.
The Scandinavian countries are indeed pretty good places to live. This likely has nothing to do whatsoever with democracy per se, but with the fact that the Scandinavian model does not regulate to anything resembling more strongly socialist nations, despite the fact that they famously have a large welfare system. There is no casual mechanism whereby voting for a leader would make the policies of that leader better-though obviously a leader that harmed the people in legible-to-them ways might get voted out! But that would be democracy changing policy, not democracy making a given policy better. As a real-world test case, consider the Maduro regime in Venezuela. While his democratic bona fides are somewhat questionable (there are people who think he stole his election from Juan Guaido), he certainly had enough popular support to be a serious candidate. And that did not prevent his policies from having predictably impoverishing results on Venezuela.
(Preliminary note: I see you’ve had a lot of downvotes in this thread; none of them is from me.)
I agree that whether a policy is good or bad doesn’t depend on how it arises, but what other policies come along with it may do. For instance, so far as I can tell socialism as such doesn’t need to involve much in the way of totalitarianism, but governments brought in by revolutions tend to be totalitarianism whether they are left or right or something else. At least some of the harms of e.g. communism in the USSR seem to me to have been consequences of totalitarianism more than of economic policies as such.
In any case—my apologies if I wasn’t clear enough about this—the democracy-versus-revolution thing was not my main point; my main point was that there is a big difference between (say) Soviet communism (a way of running a whole country) and workers’ cooperatives (a way of running a company), and this difference seems highly relevant to the question of whether the disastrousness of the USSR tells us anything about the likely consequences of organizing more companies as workers’ cooperatives.
A nation isn’t really much like a business, despite occasional rhetoric along those lines from politicians when the policies they prefer for other reasons happen to have the shape of “run the country more like a business”. And a workers’ cooperative isn’t much like a communist or socialist country. If you think that running a company as a cooperative makes it more likely to fail in ways parallel to ways in which communist countries commonly fail, then I think you should show your working: explain how the relevant parallels work. (Including, in particular, explaining why you think such a company is more like Venezuela or the USSR than it is like, say, Sweden.)
(Why did I mention the democracy-versus-revolution thing at all? Because it seems to me that the most plausible ways of ending up with more workers’ cooperatives are more democracy-like than revolution-like, and e.g. it doesn’t seem likely to me that workers’ cooperatives will have much tendency to end up being totalitarian. And, in fact, so far as I can tell actual workers’ cooperatives don’t tend to be totalitarian.)
Scandinavian people think that socialism is a functional gear in having the Nordic model work. However the understandings are so different that the word “socialism” means very different things across the pond. Too little socialism and you have obvious downsides like not having universal healthcare and much distrust among population.
When a country has big tradition of tempering market forces the knowledge tends to be way more practical than “boogieman” understanding. Even if some party doesn’t want to call such balancing acts by particular names they have been around and are not “new”.
Surely the good or bad effects of socialism are a function of policy? Whether or not a policy arises democratically and/or revolutionarily does not change the policy itself. This is a striking non-sequitur.
The Scandinavian countries are indeed pretty good places to live. This likely has nothing to do whatsoever with democracy per se, but with the fact that the Scandinavian model does not regulate to anything resembling more strongly socialist nations, despite the fact that they famously have a large welfare system. There is no casual mechanism whereby voting for a leader would make the policies of that leader better-though obviously a leader that harmed the people in legible-to-them ways might get voted out! But that would be democracy changing policy, not democracy making a given policy better. As a real-world test case, consider the Maduro regime in Venezuela. While his democratic bona fides are somewhat questionable (there are people who think he stole his election from Juan Guaido), he certainly had enough popular support to be a serious candidate. And that did not prevent his policies from having predictably impoverishing results on Venezuela.
(Preliminary note: I see you’ve had a lot of downvotes in this thread; none of them is from me.)
I agree that whether a policy is good or bad doesn’t depend on how it arises, but what other policies come along with it may do. For instance, so far as I can tell socialism as such doesn’t need to involve much in the way of totalitarianism, but governments brought in by revolutions tend to be totalitarianism whether they are left or right or something else. At least some of the harms of e.g. communism in the USSR seem to me to have been consequences of totalitarianism more than of economic policies as such.
In any case—my apologies if I wasn’t clear enough about this—the democracy-versus-revolution thing was not my main point; my main point was that there is a big difference between (say) Soviet communism (a way of running a whole country) and workers’ cooperatives (a way of running a company), and this difference seems highly relevant to the question of whether the disastrousness of the USSR tells us anything about the likely consequences of organizing more companies as workers’ cooperatives.
A nation isn’t really much like a business, despite occasional rhetoric along those lines from politicians when the policies they prefer for other reasons happen to have the shape of “run the country more like a business”. And a workers’ cooperative isn’t much like a communist or socialist country. If you think that running a company as a cooperative makes it more likely to fail in ways parallel to ways in which communist countries commonly fail, then I think you should show your working: explain how the relevant parallels work. (Including, in particular, explaining why you think such a company is more like Venezuela or the USSR than it is like, say, Sweden.)
(Why did I mention the democracy-versus-revolution thing at all? Because it seems to me that the most plausible ways of ending up with more workers’ cooperatives are more democracy-like than revolution-like, and e.g. it doesn’t seem likely to me that workers’ cooperatives will have much tendency to end up being totalitarian. And, in fact, so far as I can tell actual workers’ cooperatives don’t tend to be totalitarian.)
Scandinavian people think that socialism is a functional gear in having the Nordic model work. However the understandings are so different that the word “socialism” means very different things across the pond. Too little socialism and you have obvious downsides like not having universal healthcare and much distrust among population.
When a country has big tradition of tempering market forces the knowledge tends to be way more practical than “boogieman” understanding. Even if some party doesn’t want to call such balancing acts by particular names they have been around and are not “new”.