Actually, socialism done right is extremely sustainable, but if you want to even think about accepting that, you have to knock down a lot of assumptions, the biggest of which is that everyone needs to work thirty or more hours a week at a job in order to earn money in order to live.

Holy run-on sentence, Batman!

Seriously though. Socialist countries that are actually doing it right will treat everyone with respect, and give each according to their means. So you'll have some sort of allowance based on your overall needs (if you need monthly medical intervention that'd be covered or provided for you, if you don't then it won't because you obviously don't need it).

China can be much much better than north korea. Even for sighted. I don't like to ruin a country's reputation like this, but the things I heard about north korea makes me afraid of even visiting it as a traveler

Before this train goes any further down the wrong track, I feel it is important that I point something out.
This isn't socialism or communism done right. It's socialism or communism done very, very wrong.

I am horrified by the things done in the name of certain ideologies (democracy and capitalism most definitely included, by the way). Just because you dress up and call yourself a member in good standing of group x doesn't mean you actually are one, I'm afraid.

Socialism done right would set up the following:
1. Everyone would have a basic living allowance, and this would cover living expenses. You would be extremely unlikely to straight-up starve or to have no place to live.
2. Necessary health care would be covered by the government. Ditto education. This means no tens of thousands of dollars from student debt, and means you aren't going to be in the black for the rest of your life because you needed surgery for a medical condition.
3. Technology would be employed to make sure things like food, shelter, energy, health care, transportation and the like were all properly regulated.
4. People could and very likely would work, but they'd do it in order to afford non-essential items, luxury items and the like.

See, here's an interesting concept to bust your head open on. Capitalism has us convinced that the only way to live is to make as much money as possible, because we need that money for food, shelter, health care, education and virtually anything else we might want. It has convinced us that money is what makes the world go round; because of human greed, right now this is absolutely true. But consider a few facts:
1. We already have enough food to feed everyone in the world nearly three times over, at last check; we're also still improving farming techniques so this will only get better
2. We're reaching a point where we're finding cheaper energy sources, which means that once this infrastructure is set up, providing energy will also be much cheaper
3. As long as we don't go completely nuts, we've got plenty of space for people; there are tons of houses with no one living in them, and tons of homeless...and I don't know about you, but I see a correlation there. Home the homeless.
4. The aim is eventually to reach a point where money itself is not required in order to make things happen. Improving technology is only going to make this easier (3d printing is especially lucrative here).
5. If we hit this point, capitalism explodes.

Is this likely in the next couple of decades? Hell no. It's all a dream in that regard. But it is theoretically possible if people actually try and do it right.

But it bears mentioning that capitalism is killing the world.
1. Approximately eighty-eight percent of money is virtual (not real). If every creditor reached out to every debtor all at once, nearly nine out of ten owed dollars simply couldn't be produced, and so almost ninety percent of debt would still exist. Figure that one out.
2. That whole thing where 2 percent of the population controls 98 percent of the wealth? It might not be right on the nose, but it's close. Now remember that unless you are extremely fortunate, you're part of that 2%. Your financial earnings and contributions don't really matter much, and if you work, you probably generate far more income than you will ever see for your employers and for the people above them. This means that you will remain relatively paralyzed, while people at the top own their own islands, have private jets, get six and seven-figure salaries and generally never want for anything.
3. Prices keep going up, but a head of lettuce is still a head of lettuce. If inflation continues this way, it's eventually going to lead to a situation where all but the very rich are slaves to their work just so they can continue to eat. This is what happens when you essentially outsource everything. If you buy food and ask for shelter from faceless groups (rather than doing as we once did, providing our own or setting up arrangement with neighbours or whatnot) they can basically charge whatever they want because they know you don't have a choice. Capitalism is the embodiment of greed.
4. Capitalism has no human wellness variable. It doesn't care how happy you are, so long as you are a cog in the machine. Work-related stress is skyrocketing. the work week keeps getting longer. Mental health is bigger now than it has apparently ever been. More and more people are suffering and unable to change their lot. The idea that you'll get better somehow if you just try hard enough is noble enough, I suppose, but it's a privileged sort of idealism.

So I hope this gets you to realize that while socialism or communism have definitely been badly misused in the past, and may be again, capitalism is by no means a clean alternative. It's not working. It's only that it's also not quite ready to self-destruct just yet.

Hi.
I will say quickly, that socialism and communism are to very different things and should not be mistaken.
That said, coming from Denmark (born and raised) I will say, that is socialism done kind of right. Here in Denmark, we have combined socialism and a free market economy. Giving the pur and less fortune (that doesn't have a job for whatever reason) unemployment benefits that's actually quitte high (between 18000-25000 DKK, which translates to 2.710-3.764$) a month. That may not seam like a lot, but keep in mind, that here everyone has access to free healthcare (included most expensive medicine) free education (both normal school and universities), free maternity leave and much more.
The downside here, is that we pay everyware from 35% up to 55% in taxes depending how how much you earn a year.
When I think about it, I'm pretty sure, that most scandinavian countries work like this.
- NicklasMCHD

Okay. You say that we need drive to innovate. If we don't have something pushing us, nothing gets done.
I disagree with this, but I see where you're going. some people absolutely do benefit from encouragement. But should that encouragement exist in the form of "do it or you're dead"? That seems...a bit off to me.

Consider this:
If you provide for someone's basic needs, they no longer have to actually spend as much time stressing about those needs. If they are innovators to begin with, this means they have more mental and even physical resources to put toward innovation. If they aren't worried about getting sick or making ends meet, they will be able to put their focus squarely on their task, whatever it is. The result is that people are even freer than normal to invest in their chosen field. Okay, yeah, you're going to get a few who really and truly fuck the dog if given half a chance. But those people exist in a minority. Studies on UBI have demonstrated that even when people were given enough money to live on, they largely still wanted to work, and in fact, often wanted to work harder, or in different areas, or wanted to expand on what they were doing somehow. Example: a woman who was previously just working at a fast-food place might start considering taking night courses to get her GED, and then who knows?

Again, I'm not saying socialism is the answer tomorrow. It's not. No one's going to accept that. But I think, at base, you have to get away from the idea that everything costs money. It doesn't. Money is not literally turned into goods and services. People-power, labour, man-hours do that. So if you incentivize those man-hours in some fashion (i.e., people want to do it, don't feel like slaves doing it) then you end up with a win-win situation where people who want to do work are doing that work, but can still get by without requiring monetary compensation for it.

Trust me. This is a mind-bender, because people have been taught to equate money to goods and services practically since birth. It's not true though, and if you really look at it, it's kind of ridiculous. When people say "Yeah, but that costs money", they're actually saying "yeah, but that costs effort and resources". Don't you think it's bad when those concepts are being inextricably welded together?

My personal opinion is that I guess I have to unload now, lol.

Here's some of the flaws in capitalism:

- Money doesn't really accurately reflect value of labour. For example, lets say you have 10 lead developers on each important team and their wage is no more than 5 million dollars combined. While a CEO could be replaced, despite being risky, the value of the developers is probably a lot more intregral to the success of the company because that entire sector of the company could fail without the knowledge being passed down properly. So if one of the leads decided to leave, they would be in a much stickier situation than the CEO. Especially if all the leads left. But the CEO still gets paid many more times the value than these 10 developers combined - is that really justified?

- to elaborate on the first point, money doesn't reflect labour at all with things like rent, investment, IP or nowadays, cryptocurrency. Many of the wealthiest people didn't really innovate anything at all (true for all those except IP). Also, notice all of those things require the ability to make prior investment, that means that those who are in poverty will have a much harder time being able to make income through passive means.

- the idea that capitalism leads to innovation is inherently flawed. First, its important to point out that innovation occured before the existence of capitalism. Second, it actually stiffles most innovation by weakening the workforce with repetitive work. It encourages the consumption of media that are based on what will sell rather than something that makes people think, so over time, things become more and more meaningless. This kills innovation. Under capitalism, the motivation isn't to create, but rather to escape the frustration and misery of pointless work. Third, because under capitalism products must survive market competition, over iterations, diversity dissolves and monopolies form. Innovation is focused around surviving in the market rather than producing actual meaningful innovations that are useful to consumers - it's just that in ideal conditions they correlate much more strongly.

- Capitalism directly interferes with the direction that technology is going. Accessibility in technology is a good example of how capitalism and the spread of accessibility are inherently conflicting ideas, and that JAWS thread I made is a good example of this. However, the problem extends far beyond just accessibility. We are seeing that social media being centralized around corporate control is both encouraging blanket censorship and privatized control of technology. Because of capitalism, we can't use the immense power of the internet to share our code and make essentially the best software possible - this code hoarding slows down progress. And really, the only reason why its done this way is so that programmers can survive. Is this really necessary?

- To build on the last point, Capitalism interferes directly with automation. Why don't we automate many of the tasks that we have people working? Because if they don't work, they will starve. One major problem with communism in the 20th century is that human automation isn't practical; but technology can be seen as an extention of humanity. If technology is able to progressively automate more and more necessary production, then what need is there for work at all? Humanity can focus on different matters that have more to do with what they want to create, such as arts/communications/ect. Technology and automation work very well with the propogation of ideas but interferes directly with capitalism.

If we used technology to automate agriculture for example, we would have no need for thousands of workers, but because we are dependent on an economy, we can't do this even if the technology existed, because it would destablize other sectors that are not automized yet.

- IMHO, using technology, humanity can slowly transition safely towards fully automation production, allowing people to focus more on communication and propagation. Essentially I view this as a transhumanist step towards eusociality. Right now, capitalism is one of the biggest things in the way of actually reaching this goal.

These are really not things that I think are acceptable and people shouldn't be looking at the situation like a dichotomy between capitalism and socialism/communism. In my opinion the biggest problems that socialism faces is the problems that are inherent to statehood, and how to maintain production while technology catches up. If technology is suitable I find literally no excuse to not embrace non-state communism, but I think that trying to put this in place now is hasty and honestly ridiculous. I have a really unusual position on the matter that I don't really want to get into but I think this helps illustrate a wider image of the problem - I don't want to encourage people to think like me, but rather to think about the problem from their own perspective to offer more meaningful input, because imho late stage capitalism is a serious problem that needs solving regardless of communism or not. Also, I think anyone trying to start a 20th century revolution in the modern era needs to learn a little bit about the effect computers have had on the 21st century.

Psst, centralized organizations have a huge disadvantage on the internet: they are much less secure from malware attacks (which are decentralized in of themselves), they cannot afford to not privatize their information which means public information can eventually overcome them and centralization leads to outages that wouldn't occur in decentralized design. This is why many tech companies transitioned towards server farm design, not just to hold data but hold it in a way that spread it out and prevented larger breaches. However, because it is still centralized as an organization, a centralized entry point still exists, exposing all the data. Decentralized services don't have this problem and thus can out compete technology corporations, but they have the initial disadvantage of not being attractive to investors.

EDIT: BTW anyone wanting to post their experiences about being blind in the soviet block or anything, don't feel intimidated by this post lol, I actually think its really interesting information about the failures of 20th century communism.

Uh, no, to the last post. Just. No. That's borderline offensive, right there.

I want socialism one day (not tomorrow, for reasons Daigonite pointed out well) because it works, and because capitalism is rotten at its core. Technology can't support it yet, but we're going that way. I think we need to stop being afraid of automating tasks and start embracing things which give the average person more time to do what they wish. I promise you, most of them will still probably do useful things.

Moderation:

I'm dropping a caution for this. it's borderline personal attack.

1. I am a social service work student. I have spent the better part of the last sixteen months studying politics, social structures, privilege and oppression, group dynamics, sociology, psychology, gender theory, family dynamics and a host of other things. I am planning to be a social worker, and I consider myself an ally of all sorts of causes. Telling me to shut up because I know nothing is foolish; I'm studying this in school and have plenty of intelligence to sort out fact from fiction. I am, in other words, someone who has devoted a great deal of time to the study of these concepts, including hundreds of hours of conversation with experts in the field and hundreds of hours of personal research. Where, exactly, is your similar accreditation, the one that entitles you to invalidate my experience in the manner that you have? I mean, disagree with me if you want to, but it ought to stop there. You'll note that I'm not saying anything like, "You're just an x. What could you possibly know"; that would be extremely rude, and plenty of people know a lot of things.
2. Can you point me at where I said that not everyone can be an artist? Better question: how is this even relevant?
3. Can you point me at the bit where I said "ra ra socialism today!" or some other equivalent? Because what I'm pretty sure I said was that although I think it's a great idea - and I do, it's got a ton of benefits - it's also not going to hurry up and step in place tomorrow. It can't. We're not ready yet.

The reason you're getting a caution for this is because there are far, far better ways to disagree with someone, short of insulting them about their lived experience. You do not have the right to tell anyone that they know nothing unless you are prepared to back yourself up. If you can credibly support that statement, I will retract the caution and apologize personally.
Until then, please demonstrate more tact.

Jayde its called stepping out of your bubble. I used to be a hardened progressive like your self. But most of the stuff you just said that your studying is post modern drivel other than politics. Study the slow march through the Univirsitys and you will understand.

Gonna jump in here and ask this....

Why is America (stereotypically) deathly afraid of socialism. Why, exactly, do the loudest voices decry it and instantly equate it to communism? I mean....let's take socialism piece by piece, and equate it to various nations around the world, shall we and total up how 'socialist' countries are?

I'm sorry....I'm just so tired of the loud mouthed US politicians fearmongering about socialism at every turn as if they believe socialism  = Soviet era communism and it must be destroyed, like this is still 1965 and there's the fear of the spread of Russian communism....

21, maybe something in the psychi due to the cold war?