What is socialism? If you answered “sticking it to your dad,” you’re absolutely right

It’s not clear how much of a role scarcity would play under socialism, given how much of the scarcity we experience today is artificial or exacerbated in order to drive up profits, but even if we imagine scarcity to be just as important of a feature as it is in our current lives, there’s no doubt that the socialist model is more legitimate in settling the disputes scarcity would produce.

It’s not clear how much of a role scarcity would play under socialism, given how much of the scarcity we experience today is artificial or exacerbated in order to drive up profits, but even if we imagine scarcity to be just as important of a feature as it is in our current lives, there’s no doubt that the socialist model is more legitimate in settling the disputes scarcity would produce.

Socialism is a fundamentally different project for society. A society organized around a different economic model.

. Socialists have a different idea of how things should be run. Instead of concentrated and individual ownership over the means of production, ownership should be collective

For starters, how does capitalism incentivize work? A big way capitalists incentivize people to do stuff is by imbuing work with innate value

Capitalist cultures have all assimilated the idea that work is good in and of itself. No matter how degrading, punitive, boring, or evil, it’s morally good to work and morally bad not to work.

So the other, most significant way capitalism gets people to work is through material coercion.

Capitalism doesn’t maximize productivity or human potential. Even by its own standards. In the US, there are more people that are unemployed than there are jobs for them to do

maximizing human potential doesn’t maximize profits.

Our governments care more about how profitable an economy is than putting that profit to good use, so this reserve army of labor is perpetually maintained. If governments solved poverty they would hurt profits, and that’s what’s more important to them.

Most Americans don’t like their jobs. That may seem subjective, but according to Gallup 66% of Americans are either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their job. We might call that kind of feeling “alienation.”

the jobs we’re working, and the context in which we’re working them, aren’t built with human needs in mind.

One of the big reasons your job can suck is because of who your boss is. Usually, they aren’t accountable to you, there is a strict hierarchy and odds are you’re near the bottom.

We are hardwired to want to do things

but can this system work perfectly? Here again, the honest answer is probably not. But it doesn’t need to. It just needs to work better than what we have now. And better than brutal poverty, massive unwanted unemployment, and a general dissatisfaction with how we spend the bulk of our days isn’t that hard to do