3 Kinds Of Socialism

By Leo Gura - June 20, 2019

Mainstream culture does a terrible job of informing people what socialism actually means. There’s much fear-mongering and confusion surrounding this word. Professor Richard Wolff is great antidote to such ignorance.

With that said, please take a nuanced view of this issue. I am not posting this to convert you to socialism, but rather to get you thinking about the limits of capitalism. I have some important critiques of socialism, so it’s not as simple as me favoring socialism over capitalism. And I don’t agree with everything that Richard Wolff advances. But there is much to be learned from his presentations and I recommend you think about this topic critically yet openmindedly and come to your own conclusions.

While I don’t consider myself a socialist (I enjoy private ownership of my business), the limits of capitalism are simply undeniable at this point. We need to look towards the next evolution of our economy. That will not be pure capitalism nor pure socialism but some hybrid system. The question then becomes where to draw the lines. This requires a nuanced, non-ideological understanding of the pros and cons of both systems.

The point of upgrading our economic system is to allow as many people as possible to have the financial freedom to maximize the development of their consciousness. Our current economic system is so unfair and oppressive that most human beings on the planet are so deeply stuck in wage slavery that they are seriously hampered in their ability to develop their consciousness. And this ends up costing the entire human species.

The most important aspect of socialism which Richard Wolff talks about is democratizing the workplace. The core problem under our current system is that workers do not have any voting power or ownership share within the companies they work for. This effectively makes corporations dictatorships, with a few powerful elites dictating the corporation’s actions, reaping all the rewards, and pocketing all the productivity gains from technological innovation. The stockholders of most corporations do not work in the corporation, creating a conflict between their agenda for max dividends and the needs of the people who do the actual daily work in the corporation. This then leads to gross wealth inequality across society as the rich get richer and richer beyond anything they reasonably need, while the vast majority struggle to survive. Since the workers have zero voting power they are easily exploited because their agenda rarely a concern for the all-powerful corporate dictators. These corporate dictatorships then turn into metastasizing cancers which become so powerful no individual can ever compete with them. These giant corporations create monopolies which eat up many opportunities for small independent entrepreneurs, leaving people with little choice but wage slavery.

Unfortunately the solution to this problem is not easy or clear. But we have no choice but to figure it out. And we cannot figure it out unless the population is properly educated about capitalism and socialism in a nuanced way.

P.S. Check out Richard Wolff’s YouTube channel for more.

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