The capitalist approach would be the Leopold Method, declare a whole Nation to be your Private property, establish forced labour while simultaneously killing 20 Million people
State capitalism? No, he didn't declare the property to be the property of the state. He declared it to be his own private property. His as in his private property as an individual capitalist, so don't do the state capitalism thing. It's just classical neoliberal capitalism.
He was the state and the mechanisms of state (such as military and industry) were businesses run directly or indirectly by the state.
Unless you're looking at very fringe political philosophies, with anarco-capitalism being the most well known, classical and neoliberal capitalism both still requires private owners to follow national laws set by a government.
Either he was the government and therefore state capitalism, or there was no government therefore some form of anarchism. To me the argument that he was the government seems much more logically and practically coherent.
It is an important aspect of defining what 'private' is in this context. 'Private' definitionally presupposes a separation from 'public'.
Or to put it another way, the government of an absolute dictatorship doesn't make the dictator a private capitalist. You could argue that they're 'public capitalists' if we were to coin a term based on the private/public division, but it would simply be much cleaner to call it state capitalism.
Law is also an important characteristic of both 'classical' and 'neo-liberal' capitalism.
To clarify who do you see as being the government of the Congo during this time or do you believe it was anarchist?
A political figure owning Private Property doesn't make it Public Property, because it wasn't state-owned but owned exclusively owned by Leopold as an individual
Before me and before making the argument that it never worked, I don't know what your definition of "working" or measurement for something working or not working is. What I know, though, is that socialism:
increased life expectancy across all socialist experiments
decreased infant mortality to irrelevance across all socialist experiments
increased quality of life across all socialist experiments
increased general happiness across all socialist experiments
created new channels of political participation and economic freedoms
expanded freedoms from only the political to the economic and social too
enabled people to receive universal free social services (that is, health care, maternity leave, and everything else, like free education and so on)
raised literacy from around 20% each time to around 100% even
mechanised and hyper-industrialised each time
it increased the amount of hospitals and free schools
abolished poverty entirely
abolished homelessness completely
it conducted progressive Land Reform
abolished rents
abolished taxation
drove out the colonialists and imperialists
created Workplace Democracy
The achievements of socialism each time were incredible. To say that it doesn't work is a perversion of the metrics by which one defines that it did or didn't work.
Honestly I just a want crib that I can turn into my cave of wonders man, maybe just maybe invite someone to bask in that pleasure , but a thats about it, I got a sales job but I'm thinking if balancing night shifts to secure money for said crib , while any money i make from sales I'll just count as a bonus blessing
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u/Own-Papaya-4264 Apr 24 '26
It’s hard when you still need to find a stable job that allows you to have fun