Conversation

I feel like pretty much everyone in the entire world who isn't actually invested in the idea of socialism as a concept is incredibly confused about how it actually works so here's a diagram I made and I didn't even bother to try to directly incorporate "communism" but if I did it would go roughly under Marxism.

For what it's worth I'm a big fan of democracy and hate totalitarianism and feel like "communism" in practice means totalitarian Marxism. So I'd contrast that to more democracy-oriented ideas like coops that are in fact independent from governments and can act as a check on totalitarian rule.

#socialism

I guess the main break from Marxism is: who should seize the means of production?

Obviously oligarchs are the ones it needs to be seized from.

But governments can be run by Donald Trump who will appoint Hoggish Greedly in charge of the EPA.

America is perhaps an early experiment in Democracy that concentrated way too much power in the President, oops.

Co-ops offer a path forward where the means of production can be controlled by those who use it, rather than oligarchs or governments corruptable by the oligarchs. It's distributed rule directly by the very people who consume a resource with deliberately limited scope.