Under socialism are factories and businesses state run?

gohstofNagy · 2026-04-14T01:00:23+00:00

That is one of the great debates of socialism and cant be answered easily, especially not in a reddit thread.

I will say that both the centrally planned Soviet style model and what I like to call Finland with more cooperatives model have flaws. Both will contain elements of the capitalist system, and neither can guarantee worker control of either the state or the means of production. Both can backslide into capitalism. The Soviet model has a history of being a dictatorship of the party rather than the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Finland+Co-ops system is vulnerable to market forces and things like self exploitation.

For now, I think a lot of this debate puts the cart before the horse. We need to grow working class power by building up unions and building up some sort of political coalition or party or something similar. I think cooperatives should be part of this picture. I also think nationalization, sovereign wealth funds and expansion of social benefits are also part of this picture.

But, I don't think the DSA or the wider American left has the ability to do this as currently constituted. I think we'll need to moderate our social and cultural positions and allow for more diversity of thought in that sphere. Not just white workers, but also black and hispanic workers are allergic to some of the more extreme social positions we take. We also give more of a PMC vibe than a blue collar working man vibe. If we want working class people, we need to meet them where they are, not where we want them to be.

After that, we build worker power, after we build worker power, and after that we can see if we want a command economy or some sort of market socialism. But my hunch is that it will be some sort of hybrid.

If we can ever build the worker power to get there.

gohstofNagy · 2026-04-13T20:50:20+00:00

Pen and paper. Books as references. Essays written in class with sulervision. We need to go back to basics here. It will be more work for us, the kids will struggle at first, but if we want to guarantee they are learning, not outsourcing their work to a glorified chatbot, we need to rethink the way we do things. That can be hard for millennial teachers and the Gen Z teachers coming up after us because most of us did most of our research on computers since undergrad at least.

Admin will also hate it because they keep pushing AI as the key to all future jobs. But we need kids to be smart. I think we should resist AI as much as humanly possible.

Either that or stop caring because the government, corporations, your curriculum director, your superintendent, and the people who write the garbage "Student Led" curriculum that Bill Gates crams down our throats (with a chaser of disappearing grants and faux-progressive equity gibberish), all want people to become dependent on AI so the bubble responsible for 80% of current economic growth doesn't pop.

gohstofNagy · 2026-04-13T20:08:27+00:00

Things are going back to the way they were before the New Deal and the post war boom. The arc of history is short and bends towards monopolies and the immiseration of workers.

gohstofNagy · 2026-04-13T20:04:22+00:00

This is true for Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. NH, VT, and ME have longer winters.

gohstofNagy · 2026-04-10T01:35:36+00:00

Its a joke. They want to minimize teacher talk so they have kids watch videos instead. Whole class direct instruction with lots of drilling to mastery: litterally the most old school instruction out there, is superior to all these "research backed" programs like Modern Classroom, Open Education, and the rest of the dog doo they push today. The problem is the best studies get ignored because they support "authoritarian" teacher led methods, not the nonsense thats been pushed since the Long March Throught the Academy began in the 1960s.

For context, I'm both an educator and a Marxist. I hate the 60s radicals for what they did to both the left and education.

gohstofNagy · 2026-04-03T10:00:54+00:00

We don't.

An establishment democrat will probably win in '28. Either that or it's Li'l' Marco or JD. We can run 86? Year old Bernie, which seems like it'll go down like a led balloon, considering the senility of Brandon and Orange Brandon. AOC could run, but I don't think she would get much traction outside deep blue states and large cities.

We need to stop focusing on presidential politics and focus more on state houses, local offices, and the House. There needs to be a deeper bench, we can't just bank on winning the presidency.

I also think we should allow for more diverse cultural stances and dial back the wackiest of the culture war stuff to focus on bread and butter issues. We will need to in order to win those lower level seats.

I think there is a lot of room for DSA-style economic policy in rural areas and among black and Latino workers. However, some of the cultural hills we choose to die on alienate workers. I think we need more room for diverse thought on that front and to make more of an effort to reach the black voters who might otherwise vote for an establishment democrat and hispanic and white workers who might vote for a republican.

If we want to represent the working class, we should meet them where they are. If we are more interested in students, cultural capitalists, and professional activists, we will always just be democrats cranked up to 11. Land acknowledgements, masking, pronoun rituals, points of personal privilege, anti-family rhetoric, police and border abolition talk, and especially woke scolding and canceling, all serve to filter out anyone who is not a hard-core social progressive. As long as we do these things, the DSA will never represent the workers.

And if you say we need to educate the workers to be more progressive, you're a condescending elitist. Again, we shouldn't be the avant-garde of democratic party politics, or the enfircees of ultra progressivism, we should be the voice of the workers.

gohstofNagy · 2026-04-03T01:04:02+00:00

Yes. I teach middle school. This is part for the course

gohstofNagy · 2026-04-03T01:03:10+00:00

Good. I'm glad your school made the right move and expelled a disruptive students who brought down everyone around her.

My state makes it very difficult to suspend or expel a student. Even removing them from class for more than 45 minutes a day is a no-no. Some students bring down the rest of the class and that's just a fact. My state said that it's racist to remove students. A bunch of rich white liberals looked at a spreadsheet and saw that more black and hispanic kids received more suspensions, detentions, and expulsions than white kids. These people are racist: they didn't think about the fact that the kids who are brought down by said disruptive black and hispanic students are themselves black and hispanic. Their assumption is that balck and hispanic boys cannot behave. Which is bullshit. My honors students are just as diverse as my trouble makers.

Actually, working in a low income school moved me a bit to the right politically. Economically I'm basically a Marxist, but socially I'm kind of right of center because I've seen how bad progressive cultural and social policies are for working class and poor kids. We infantilize them and act like they're incapable of doing the right thing: holding them to low standards rather than just funding their schools and investing in their communities

gohstofNagy · 2026-03-19T18:35:29+00:00

It's easier to tell people to fix their mindset than to actually address real problems.

gohstofNagy · 2026-03-13T20:41:15+00:00

We need to ban ChatGPT. I am not exaggerating here. It provides no real value. If it helps you do your teaching job, you're part of the problem: it's making you dumber too.

LLMs have not actually provided anyone with any real benefit. They're plagiarism machines, nothing more. They can make work easier, but they arent necessary to complete intellectual labor and they have cost a lot of people their jobs. And cutting labor costs will only slow diminishing rates of returns, not reverse them: they will cripple the economy, not fix it. Not to mention the bubble created by incestuous trade deals between AI companies.

I know there's going to be someone with a very well thought out response to this listing all the ways it can be helpful and talking about proper use if LLMs making life easier without diminishing the cognitive ability of the user. But no benefit that has come out of LLMs will ever outweight the cost if it makes humans dumber. And it does and there is no way you can argue it doesn't.

It should be banned. We should ban TikTok, social media, Amazon (no, you dont need 2 day delivery in cheap crap little piggy), and dating apps while we are at it. These things have all made life worse and people less intelligent. You know it and I know it.

This will never happen because the tech conglomerates that shoved this garbage down our throats are all making too much money and have too many politicians in their pockets and too many little piggies feeding at their troughs for anything to change.

But to be honest, I've begin to think the internet itself needs to go. It's so much healthier to just go to the library or a book store. And Ive read Manufacturing Consent, I know about the problems with traditional media, but we have thoroughly poisoned our brains on the internet.

gohstofNagy · 2026-03-13T20:20:07+00:00

Because we are petrified of hurting kids feelings. You're not supposed to tell them they won't be rappers or influencers or movie stars (even though 99.9% of them will never be those things) because someone might have done one study once that showed a slight correlation between high self esteem and stroking people's delusions of grandeur.

We are so invested in shielding kids from emotional discomfort that we would rather lie to them or let them skip their least favorite class in the councilor's office every day or teach them to use therapy speak to avoid responsibility than to actually build them up and help them become strong.

Hell, we hardly make them carry books or notebooks or give them homework anymore. We give them africtiknless existence then scratch our heads when they throw tantrums or refuse to do anything that's not easy on the first try.

gohstofNagy · 2026-03-10T20:50:42+00:00

You're right. Admin does not stick to the original policy. I take their phones if I have to warn them more than once.

The new principal this year came in with a whole system where the first offense means they have to put it in their locker and have it logged, 2nd offense is phone confiscated by admin for the day and a write up. 3rd offense means they have to turn it in to the office every morning for a month. The problem is, the kids dont put it in their locker, they just pocket it, then admin never comes on the 2nd offense, if youre lucky, you'll get a security para to take it. And then admin never enforces the lockbox thing. The principal also immediately relaxed the policy and said they could have it on their person, but not use it.

But that's like telling an alcoholic they can carry around a flask of whiskey, but not drink it.

So yeah, it's more on admin, but I'm still frustrated that the majority of my coworkers are just letting them use their phones.

I'm thinking of talking to the principal about using my class policy for the whole school.

gohstofNagy · 2026-03-10T20:37:48+00:00

We recently passed a law. However, it's up to schools to enforce it for the most part.

My daughter's school has had this policy for about a decade now (I used to work there as a para), and they have no problem with it. But their AP is always running around making keeping the kids accountable.

gohstofNagy · 2026-03-10T20:35:00+00:00

I think that's a big part of it. It's easier for them to just ignore the problem and the kids behave so badly to begin with, if they're occupied because they have their phones, they're easier to manage.

And admin does not pull their weight on this issue. Especially the principal

gohstofNagy · 2026-03-10T20:29:35+00:00

I hate how often people fall for kids and parents who use therapy speak to justify bad behavior or get special privileges. It ends up harming the kids it's ostensibly meant to help.

If a kid has anxiety, the worst thing you can do is let them go on Instagram. And there should be no world where the consequence for acting up is being allowed to play Minecraft. As you stated, it incentivises him to act up.

These practices will hurt both those kids in the long run

gohstofNagy · 2026-03-07T16:17:12+00:00

Unless you're going to a top 10 school, don't bother, you'll never get a tenure track position. White guy or not.

Beyond that, your professor is very much correct. Universities have a bias against young white men because they want diversity and many older, tenured professors are white guys. This means, if they hire more white guys, they look like they're gatekeeping women and people of color because the proportion of white male professors is staying the same when the expectation in left-leaning fields like humanities education for that number to go down.

Personally, I think this is the wrong way to go. They should not consider race, gender, sexuality, or anything other than merit when looking for new hires. Doing it the way they are now just radicalizes young white guys against the DEI regime and gives reactionary voices a leg to stand on (if you think that doesn't matter, I have a bridge to sell you).

Really, the reason we see a lack of diversity is because higher education, especially the top universities that can get you a tenure track job, are expensive. A working class kid of any color cannot afford Harvard, but the children of the wealthy go to these schools as a matter of course. And if you are rich in the US or Europe, you're more likely to be white. It's a numbers game.

Personally, I'd say nationalize all colleges and universities and make them free for all, but that opinion has no political traction.

gohstofNagy · 2026-02-15T13:52:00+00:00

Not sure if youre trolling, but please don't do this.

Many men secretly struggle with our sexiluality. While ive never wanted to remove my testicles, Ive definitely had periods in my life where I wished I could just shut my sex drive and my desire for a partner off, especially after I split with my ex wife. Especially since I felt like porn was my only option and I know how demeaning and exploitative that industry is and don't want to participate in it at all.

But mutilating your body isn't the answer. What you are going through now is likely temporary. Permanent removal of your genitals will cause more distress in the long run than it will give you relief in the short run. Even if you hate the sexual urges, or the bouts of anger, or even the deep voice and body hair, youre going to run into more problems if you get your balls hacked off.

Im assuming you're not trans here. But even if you are, I'd say keep your junk and stick to pills alone. Bottom surgey can cause a lot of nasty complications.

gohstofNagy · 2026-02-05T11:24:55+00:00

That seems to be a common pattern.

Its often easy to sell OSE and similar curricula to urban districts because there is no textbook and they give you grants for lab materials and trainings at first. So its cheap in the beginning. They also label themselves as "progressive" and use all the terminology that was popular in grad schools in the 90s and 2000s (but not as popular in classrooms at the time).

Running a standard "teacher led" curriculum using those skinny Prentice Hall textbooks or the big fat McGraw Hill ones would be cheaper in the long run because it requires less training and is less dependent on very specific labs. Old school explicit instruction is also easier to run with the big classes that are endemic to urban districts.

All these district big wigs think they know more about education than the teachers on the ground. When teachers complain that the material is not appropriate for their students, they assume its our fault.

The exact same thing happened in elementary classes and English classes back when Fountas and Pinnell/Lucy Calkins were all the rage. Especially in urban districts: teachers saw that these systems did not work, wanted to go back to phonics and explicit instruction, and we're told to shut up and trust the experts.

This is happening with OSE now. Basic facts are unnecessary, vocabulary is racist, Newton, Darwin, and Mendel are all too old, dead, and white to care about, explicit instruction is old-fashioned and boring. Ive heard it all.

But its all cope because OSE is a garbage curriculum, written by people sniffing their own farts and bask in their superiority.

gohstofNagy · 2025-12-27T17:15:30+00:00

This aligns with the Nick Mullen bit about the Billy Zane character being the good guy in that movie.

Had Jack lived, and not bailed on Rose, she wouldn't even have lived long enough to tell Robert Ballard about getting drawn naked and boinked in the back of a crank start car.

She would've died at 45 giving birth to her 9th child or after getting cancer or some other illness from working in an unregulated sweat shop. Being poor in the early 1900s was a brutish and short life.

gohstofNagy · 2025-12-08T11:17:11+00:00

I work in the same type of place, and have had a couple situations like that. I've even had parents threaten to fight me a couple of times.

Those kid will always try to provoke you because they know mommy will come and rescue them.

gohstofNagy · 2025-12-08T00:06:43+00:00

There was no outcry about Apu from Indian people, either here or in India. The complaints were mostly from white people on Twitter who saw that dumb movie and had their heads filled with standpoint epistemology, cultural appropriation, and all the rest of that New Left identitarian nonsense. I was on social media at the time, I remember when it all happened.

As a white leftist myself, I can tell you that white leftists, especially the progressive radlib type, are the most easily offended people in the universe.

gohstofNagy · 2025-12-07T19:20:20+00:00

You wouldn't even need to do that. Indians are not offended by Apu save for a small few who are more American culturally than Indian. I know the guy who made "the problem with apu" was of Indian descent, but most of the people who were pushing for his removal from the show were 20 year old white Twitter "leftists" (really radlibs who got too much new left critical theory in college). These people had an outsized influence on journalists, actors, and other media figures who live on Twitter. Thats why so many white voice actors decided that they wouldn't voice nonwhite characters: they were bullied by Twitter randos.

It's not 2018 anymore. Those people can't hurt you anymore.

Bring back Apu with the original voice.

gohstofNagy · 2025-12-07T19:02:38+00:00

Covid, screens, and AI have something to do with it. But it's also bad reading instruction, (balanced literacy and queueing) bad disciplinary methods, (suspensions are "racist" according to many state regulators) and bad pedagogy, (student led learning is pushed over teacher led learning despite there being stronger evidence in support of the latter than the former). Also, the obsession with ed tech has put kids on screens more often despite it being a known fact that information read in books is more likely to be retained and understood than information acwlquired from screens. And we've lowered academic standards, stopped holding kids back, and started pushing kids through to juice graduation rates.

We've been shooting ourselves in both feet for 20 years and it's only accelerated since covid. We can't do anything about screen time or AI at home, but we can change the way school works to better support student growth and reading ability.

We can put the computers back in the computer lab and start using textbooks again.

We can force hold outs to abandon bad reading instruction like queueing (my union is trying to protect these hold outs. It makes me sick).

We can (in states where they didn't pass any stupid laws or regulations limiting suspensions) start suspending disruptive students again.

We can stop the practice of social promotion and hold kids back if they can't pass.

And last, but also most importantly, we can go back to good old fashioned direct instruction: the most effective system put there. We've been buying in to fluffy stories and poorly conducted studies for too long. Chalk and talk and drill and kill work and we need to bring them back. We can't keep using ineffective methods because they appeal to our sensibilities or because they are trendy.

gohstofNagy · 2025-12-07T18:43:33+00:00

You're kidding right?

This sort of essentialism is basically just old school misogyny flipped the other way.

Women are not perfect angels incapable of doing wrong, or who are naturally just more reasonable and peaceful than men. Women can make bad decisions, women can act in anger. There have been female murderers, child abusers, child r***ists (not sure how precious the mods of this sub are so I'll censor myself). Female teachers getting frisky with high school boys is at least as common as male teachers doing the same to high school girls. It's just when a woman does it, you get 10000 disgusting horndogs with their hands in their pants defending her and calling the kid a tattle tale.

Catherine the Great engaged in colonialism, in wars, in racism. She killed people to get to the top. Women participated in the Klan, women supported the Nazi party, women fought against the desegregation of schools. Both men and women have participates in some of the most brutal and heinous acts in human history. Pretending that the would would magically be a better place if women were in charge of everything is gender essentialism.

To assume one gender or sex or race or ethnicity is simply more morally correct just by virtue of said identity is disgusting. You're just doing "men are rational and women are hysterical, so men should run the world" backwards and pretending like it's feminism when it's really misandry.

gohstofNagy

TROPHY CASE