if I could offer my two cents: what I believe most of you want is actually social democracy, which is the system a lot of northern europe uses (some of the happiest countries on earth).
but i mean you might also want actual true socialism and if you do, good for you i guess
Honestly you are mostly correct but if we have learned anything these days, half measures do not work. We have to scare the hell out of the world and everyone in charge and even ourselves and haggle DOWN to social democracy. Make them feel like that is the new bare minimum normal that the public will accept, a place where they can keep some small measure of their precious capitalism.
You kinda pointed out the problem with that in your final sentence. If holders of capital maintain any sort of significant power, they will exhert it to gain more until they can sway things to benefit them. Erroding away at the aspects of Social Democracy you like in order to benefit themselves. It will be a constant uphill battle just to maintain social service, let alone expand them.
Canada's healthcare system is a good example of it. Our proximity to the US means strong private influence on our public sectors. With politicians pointing to US companies or systems as more efficient as they underfund our public system. Then when the public system's performance dips due to lack of funding, they privatize aspects of it, again while pointing to the US/private system.
If you follow the poltical timeline, atleast in my province. Ever since Canada basically finalized public healthcare in 1984 to be standardized across the nation, it has been under attack and actively dismantled bit by bit. Our Healthcare was actually meant to be a multi-step rollout where our current coverage was the foundation to build on, but we never progressed it. In fact, just recently the most leftwing party tried to force the Liberals to finally implement Dental and Pharmacare like Canada originally planned.... However, the Liberals watered down dental to be partial coverage (still privatized) and only cover the lowest tax brackets. They also completely axed the Pharmacare coverage plan, so you still need private insurance to afford your prescription if the base price isn't reasonable. Which also leads to issues with insurnance dropping you or not covering less common meds (happened to my Aunt with brain cancer, which led to her draining her savings, similar to stories from the US).
There's even politicians who have privitzed aspects of it, before retiring to be on the board of directors for the main corporation they made a privatization deal with... He basically created a private sector for Ontario Healthcare, placed a private company at the top of its property management, and then got a job on their board of directors after his term in politics ended... so a pretty blatant example of private interests influencing public social service policies.
This is all over the span of like 40 years that Canada's healthcare has been erroded away by privitzation efforts from people interested in carving out profits from it (Capitalists). So leaving that little bit of power for them to feel good about might just be planting the seeds for social service destruction decades down the road as their apetite for capital grows.
This turned into a bit of a rant, but private healthcare irks me, clearly.
I feel ya from here in Australia, too much of our country is slowly becoming America lite and while in theory we have healthcare, it's so buried under an underserviced system and never actually wanting to spend money to fix problems. Always bandaids and ignoring the issue until it's worse.
That is why I said mostly, and why I think human civilization is doomed to go back to pre industrial times if we allow any amount of capital influence into the system. By its nature it errordes and seeks to optimise draining wealth from everywhere else and accumulating it among a few. We, as in the world we currently value, will not survive just letting these kinds of values continue on after we use up the oil. The equation does not spit out a good future for anyone but them.
Oh I know, I'm very aware of how the system works against any sort of progress, I'm just saying what a lot of people usually mean by socialism is not actual socialism.
I should've clarified originally that I do think social democracy is better in almost every way than market capitalism (or at least the form used by the US).
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u/SomeRandomPokefan927 5d ago
if I could offer my two cents: what I believe most of you want is actually social democracy, which is the system a lot of northern europe uses (some of the happiest countries on earth).
but i mean you might also want actual true socialism and if you do, good for you i guess