I write a lot of spreadsheets for games I play, so adapting them into more sophisticated software is always something I chip away at. Good opportunity to learn how to implement concepts in new languages too. Right now I’m writing a Warframe simulator in Racket.
Say what you will, but the countries with a good balance of socialist and capitalist policies are still on the top of every list, from happiness to life expectancy, to income equality to health to education, etc.
Sorry if my tone isn’t exactly right. You have my unconditional respect. I’m learning that I’m just not always a clear communicator, sometimes I get fired up and sound harsher than what I mean, etc.
I think this is actually a major mental blinder put in by the supposed “evidentiary basis” of modern neoliberalism. If you’re receptive to philosophy, I think you might like Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”. And then following from that, statistics mean nothing to the worst off in society. I’m currently fighting Australia’s health system for my human rights, why does it matter to me or people like me that statistics say Australia is doing okay? If I die, then what? What value are statistics to my corpse, and all the others who have been killed before me?
I think it’s also important to distinguish “social liberalism” from “socialism”. This is another instance of tricky words that have distorted people’s understanding of history and the trajectory of societies in crisis. Fifty years ago, what you are calling “socialist policies” were just liberalism, social liberalism in particular. This authoritarian meatgrinder we live in is also liberalism, albeit the neoliberal strain.
Socialism isn’t when you have your rights accepted and provided for, it’s the destratification of society along lines of resource ownership. Also, as an anarchist-adjacent I would say a further goal is the collective custodianship of the natural world and the proliferation of a culture of symbiosis and egalitarianism :) (but that’s me).
I don’t mean this as a slight, but I’m very sick and don’t have much energy, so I’ll just make some other offtopic remarks related to what you said, if you’re interested in personal research:
“Confederalist” is different from “federalist”. For instance, Catalunyan syndicalists were federated, in a confederalist system. The Kingdom of Spain is a Federalist system of government–and one that has very recently blocked Catalunyan autonomy. Also, the Fediverse is “federated” but confederalist in character. But you’re right, it is ambiguous.
I say “Bookchinite” because I’m somewhere hanging around the anarchists, but I’m not totally married to anarchism, and there are anarchist tendencies that I have mutual antagonism with; much like Marxists I’ll never be friends with. I’ll take whatever I can get so there is less horrific evil in the world. Social liberals, social democrats, Marxists, anarchists, whatever. Bookchin’s post-anarchist writings are the most aligned with my beliefs, values, and personal context.
I just have a dim view of liberalism as a durable and stable system with the way the world has turned out. Same way I think vanguardists are misguided.
Unfortunately I live in a country where “social wages” and an actual wage freeze were later used to suppress labour actions, and then retracted anyway. There’s a homeless crisis and mental illness suicide pandemic now. Oh yeah and Canada is euthanising “lost cause” disabled people, and Sweden let COVID cull off some of the elderly population…
Social safety nets can always be retracted. Social liberalism has run its course as a viable strategy, much like vanguardism (which is what people mean when they think of “communism”). We need perdurable systems, and as far as I’m concerned, confederalist systems are the only empirically successful systems, although even then it’s hit or miss; see the collapse of syndicalism in Catalunya due to socialist infighting.
Anyway I’m a Bookchinite and currently making peace with the idea I may not live to see 2024, so that’s my context.
Reading the responses here, why are people so mad about types? Maybe I’m biased coming from a background of statically typed languages and mathematics. I’d rather have a good typing system that makes me think about data than just hoping I’ve thought about a problem right.
Not just the US, Australia has slavery* for disabled people and the long-term unemployed, as well as private prison slave labour. Guess which group keeps getting sent to prison for no reason too.
(*legally distinct from slavery, as determined by the courts)
Also of note is that the UN OHCHR is also bluntly critical of austerity as a human rights abuse, due to the way it targets minority groups: https://www.ohchr.org/en/social-security/austerity-measures-and-right-social-security
Not mentioned is the way it helps established disabled people as a permanent underclass. We are simply less than human. In Australia, the more disabled you are, the more you’re exposed to being killed or maimed in an institution, or slightly “better” winding up homeless and exposed to violence and other crimes (if your state likes packing people into shelters like sardines) or the elements (if they don’t).