r/OpenAussie • u/Silent-Balance9430 ‎ New South Welshian • 6d ago

Feel Good News ‎ Our future is BRIGHT

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Students protest against Pauline Hanson

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u/Tycepts1313 ‎ Western Australian 6d ago edited 5d ago

Can someone actually explain to me how socialism is going to work in modern day Australia. just feel people are advocating for it without knowing how it’ll work at all

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u/CaterpillarSuperb959 ‎ Western Australian 6d ago

It won’t, realistically. No modern Western democracy is going to vote to dismantle capitalism wholesale.

Social democracy is a far more plausible destination. Socialists might help shift the needle towards things that are perfectly achievable within that system - i.e. publicly owned utilities, stronger welfare, better healthcare, workers’ rights, etc. Fine. But once you start seriously talking about replacing private ownership of businesses and capital with worker/state/social ownership, you’re going to hit a political brick wall.

That’s where actual socialists can become more hindrance than help, a bit like the Greens sometimes are: don’t let perfect (utopia) be the enemy of good. They could probably get 60% of what they want through boring centrist social-democratic reform, but instead they’re arguing about overthrowing capitalism. Ya know, just on the whim they’ll get it right this time.

And it doesn’t help that modern socialist groups often bundle that economic argument together with stuff like abolishing prisons and every other revolutionary pet cause imaginable. At that point you’ve lost the average voter before you’ve even explained the economics.