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by blueskin_
4295 days ago
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Communism itself is the opposite of individualism; a centrally planned economy doesn't need innovators, it needs Citizen 647,203 to work at his assigned job in Agricultural Collective 63 and not get thoughts above his station lest he be sent to the gulag. I'm British, and I can tell you libertarianism here does not mean anarchism (or the popular US version of 'libertarianism' either, AKA conservativism with legal cannabis). Also remember why communistic economies fail - again, it's the lack of drive to innovate. If you have a dull, tedious, mind-numbing job and you get paid (or food stamps or whatever) the same value no matter whether you work hard, innovate, and improve processes or bump along at the bottom doing the bare minimum, people are going to gravitate towards the latter. As such, technological development stagnates, processes never change even when deeply flawed, and bureaucracy becomes entrenched in defending their own jobs. |
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I'm in the UK, and libertarianism here most certainly does mean anarchism to a lot of people, socialism to others, though it is probably today more commonly used about factions of Thatcherites.
The word itself was first used by a French anarchist and communist, and it has a long history in Europe (150 years+) of being used about left wing organisations, and only a few decades of use about the right wing.
In the UK, the use of the term date at least as far back as the 1880's, when some prominent members of the Socialist League (1885), which counted people like Engels and Eleanor Marx as it's supporters, considered themselves libertarians.
> Also remember why communistic economies fail
No country to my knowledge have claimed to have had a communist economy. Some have claimed to be socialist, and many socialists would disagree with that as well.
Your comment seems to assume that these terms are applied to just one ideology. Meanwhile there's an old joke that if you put two Marxists in a room, you will have three different opinions about what Marxism is. And Marxism again is just one of many dozens of socialist ideologies that differ widely.
Even in Marx' days, Marx and Engels devoted a substantial proportion of the Communist Manifesto not to criticise capitalism, but to criticise other socialist ideologies that they saw as ranging from hopelessly utopian, to reactionary: worse than capitalism.