What stopped him from agreeing in the end?

That is absolutely painful

And that’s the only intellectual critique of socialism I ever heard

It almost is, until you watch 5 minutes of billionares talking and go "so these are the smarter guys that won't fuck it up".

When its owned by everyone, one person doesn't get to mess it up, everyone gets a say. And you still will have people with business minds, mechanical minds, and just let me do labour minds

You should ask your dad if people are stupid why are they allowed to vote?

If the answer is that they shouldn't be allowed you can go down the rabbit hole of "who is worthy to vote?" and end up with a variation of fascism. Or if everyone should be able to vote the followup is if people are allowed to decide how their government is ran why shouldn't they be allowed to decide how their work gets done?

The thing with letting people own the means of production is that it heavily correlates with the concept of democracy. It's contradictory to be pro democracy and against collective ownership of the means of production.

He's not wrong, per se.

People that are closer to production are less likely to see the business holistically. That's not their fault...I think many CEOs don't want employees talking about the big picture. They want silos. An us vs. them mentality between support and developers...between accounting and purchasing...between human resources and Chad in sales....etc.

Of course, that goes for an individual person. When you have all departments represented and conferring, then you've got the whole picture, and that changes the calculus significantly.

It doesn't mean the general public should be in charge of the nuclear reactor, it just means that the benefits of the power plant get spread around the populace rather than all getting funnelled to one guy and his 2nd yacht. Also perhaps the energy prices should be capped at a reasonable level rather than allowing them to go sky high just because somebody built a data centre within 500 miles of the power plant.

My dad is a teacher with two masters degrees, was the teachers union president for 20 years and is MAGA.

your dad is short sighted and needs to read about labor and union history.

Is that supposed to be a serious critique?

People currently own the means of production.

Less people, tiny amount of extremely rich people.

Rich != Smart. Literally 0 correlation. Significant amount of evidence showing that being or becoming extremely rich actually makes you both stupid and a psychopath.

Your dad's argument can also be applied to the concept of a democratic government.

People are stupid, they shouldn't be allowed to vote or have rights, they should just be be told what to do by their betters.

... your dad has the social iq of a toddler, or a cult member.

You're the first person ever that is correctly defined socialism that I have seen on this platform.

Thank you so much.

It's like that all around people mostly agree on things or at least want to work together. The problem is our "Leaders" don't want any part of that.

I hung out with the warehouse guys at my job and one of them talked about how good his wife's nurses union was. I agreed with him, and made a joke about the warehouse guys unionizing.

A few of them got really upset, and couldn't explain why they were upset. They just kept saying "We didn't understand". Like brother, right now - there's nothing stopping the company from firing you... I think you don't understand.

And I'm sure, within one week, they were right back where they were.

Fundamental mistake, not good people, indoctrinated bad people.

Well the downside is they would lose a tiny insignificant amount of profit as they would no longer be allowed to abuse their workforce quite so much. If they actually sat down and did the maths they would work out that it isn't really worth fighting against it. But a lot of Republicans don't like it on principle.

That's why they always come up with hand wavy arguments about the need to incentivise work. You can always see them a mile off because they're the type that keep yelling about how minimum wage should not be a livable wage, because it discourages people to advance.

I'm assuming you want to abolish money and free markets altogether, because otherwise we're just talking about capitalism with social safety nets a la most of Europe.

So: Depends. Are we making working voluntary, or are we forcing everyone into jobs they may or may not like?

If it's the former, then there's no reason to work jobs that don't seem interesting or fulfilling. Good luck keeping the garbage service running.

If it's the latter, then well, economically everything's great, but the downside is that people will be forced to do jobs they don't like.

If you DON'T want to abolish money and free markets altogether, then there's still going to be private property, so then that's the downside. It's the exact same one we already have from capitalism. Just less of it, because more capital is redistributed via taxation.

Non-ironically: the fact that it's not liked by groups of people capable of sabotaging it. For example, is the USA at fault for the embargo on Cuba and all the hardships it goes through? Yes. Is it still a problem for people living in Cuba? Also yes.

Unfortunately, some things may not be your fault, but they are your problem. And as long as there will be entities who don't like you and are able to make your life worse (so basically forever as long as there exist powerful non socialist nations), that's a problem you have to deal with.

And I don't say this as a critique of socialism itself, yet it's still a downside of it. Unfortunately, being liked by the bullies is an advantage and not being liked by the bullies is a downside, since they will bully you. And at the level of nations, there isn't a bigger authority you can go to. It's just school kids with bullies but there is no supervisor teacher. You could make the bullies unable to bully you by either becoming stronger then them or banding together with others who are against the bullies. But just like in a street fight, playing dirty is an advantage, so the bullies are at an advantage.

Again, this is not the fault of socialism, but it is one of its problems.

It's hard to distil into three words, so it fails to win elections.

One name: Stalin!

Oh but the state! If the lovely corporations were only free from bureaucracy...

it sounds like that’s what was happening

I think despite people's best efforts socialism is becoming less of a dirty word. Every time you correct someone by identifying that what they're thinking of is authoritarianism or communism you can bring them around to the idea that socialism is just allowing workers to have more of a say in their workplace and decommodifying basic needs, which is much harder to be so hard-line against.

Of course socialism is just a stepping stone to communism but it could never happen without some generations of de-programming our culture from this capitalist mindset.

People always love to equate socialism and communism as if one is the natural consequence of the other. They're on opposite ends of the 2D political spectrum. Communism is right-wing social policy, left-wing economic policy.

Basically if the Republicans actually learnt how to run an economy.

Although it would be better than the current crop of idiots it wouldn't be the most desirable outcome.

I don't believe this : show nazism so that anyone would agree !

Most left-leaning ideologies can, but not all ideologies.