https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/10/17/idtt-o17.html?pk_campaign=wsws-newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws-daily-newsletter

For the last few years I have been a fairly extreme socialist but as time has gone on I’ve shifted away from my socialist views to some kind of left-wing Georgism.

What I currently believe:

Georgism: a political theory that aims to keep the efficiency of markets while taxing unearned economic rent, most notably through a land value tax.

Publicly owned natural monopolies: water, electricity, roads and others.

Public healthcare and insurance: private markets fail here because insurers avoid high-risk people and healthy people opt out.

Public funding for positive externalities: things where the gains spread across the whole economy and private firms underinvest because they can’t capture them, like public transport and education.

Pigouvian taxes: in line with Georgism, I support taxes like a carbon tax. The atmosphere is a commons, so you should pay for anything that imposes costs on others.

Taxing monopoly profits above normal returns.

Why I moved away from socialism:

Both socialism and Georgism start from the same idea: people getting rich without working while others struggle. However, I believe Georgism targets the right problem.

The key difference is where each thinks the value goes. Marx argued workers are poor because employers take what they produce. George argued it’s landowners. As an economy grows, land becomes more valuable, not because of anything the landowner did, and rent rises to swallow those gains. Workers become more productive, businesses invest more, and the extra wealth ends up flowing to whoever owns the land underneath.

Socialism instead treats all private profit as exploitation. But most profit comes from people actually creating and selling things people want. Income that’s unearned is economic rent: money made from owning land and natural resources that nobody created, or from other forms of rent like monopolies.

Georgism also keeps what markets do well. Prices tell producers what people want. Every attempt at large-scale central planning, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China, ran into inefficiencies because planners can’t replace the information that markets gather.

China only took off once it brought markets back, while keeping public control of land and natural monopolies, in a weird hybrid of Georgism and socialism. Land value capture also funds much of the government in Singapore and Hong Kong.

It also doesn’t need an authoritarian state, which, regardless of your opinions of Stalin or Mao, can always be abused. All Georgism needs is a government that can value land and tax it.

And for people who know more than me here, why should I return to socialism?

Also I'm not sure if this is the correct subreddit to post this on but please don't remove my post mods.

We want to rebel, to rebel against the handful of capitalist-roaders in power within the Party. We want revolution, to overthrow the ox-demons and snake-spirits of the bourgeoisie. We want to sing the songs of revolution loudly, we want to fan the flames of rebellion higher, we want to sweep away all the filth and dregs left behind by the old society. We want to turn the old world upside down and leave it utterly defeated. We want our great motherland to remain red forever, for thousands upon thousands of generations; we want the great Lenin and Mao Zedong Thought to spread throughout the country and turn the whole world red. The revolutionary masses take to the streets, smash the Four Olds on a grand scale, establish the Four News on a grand scale, smash to pieces all the slavish attitudes toward foreigners of revisionism, tear down all the foul signboards of feudalism, and send this wolf called the bourgeoisie straight to hell.

Chinese:我们要造反，造党内一小撮走资本主义道路当权派的反。我们要革命，革资产阶级牛鬼蛇神的命。我们要大唱革命之声，我们要大点造反之火，我们要横扫旧社会遗留下来的一切污泥浊水。我们要把旧世界打个天翻地覆、落花流水。我们要让伟大的祖国千秋万代永不变色，我们要让伟大的列宁、毛泽东思想，插遍全国，红遍全世界。革命群众走上街头，大破四旧，大立四新，把修正主义的洋奴相统统砸掉，把封建主义的臭招牌统统拆掉，让资产阶级这个狼见鬼去吧。

The revolutionary communist international have grown quite considerably over the last few months. Does this mean that they are now our only hope for a better future?

Just to remind us that the space race was not just the moon!😌

https://sbhager.substack.com/p/whats-left-of-psychedelics

I'm a leftist. One might even call me somewhat of a far leftist. But every time I engage in discussion and they call my ideology "evil" and whatnot, they bring up regimes who were oppressive not because of the communist frameworks they took on but because they were oppressive regimes and that's what they do. The Khmer Rouge are frequently brought up in conversation, for example, from whom I of course distance myself because I'm not exactly the biggest fan of Pol Pot as a leader.

So here's my question: why is it that they get to call leftism inherently evil because of this, but I don't get to call capitalism inherently evil because of evil capitalist entities who are evil because of capitalism and not coincidentally capitalist alongside being evil? What's stopping me from calling rightism evil just because Hitler was right-wing? I'm sure they would feel the exact same as I do when I get lumped in with Pol Pot. But unlike with leftists, liberals and conservatives aren't expected to actively distance themselves from Hitler because it's assumed by default they don't agree with him. So why don't I get the same grace with leftists I don't agree with? I feel like I'm talking in circles here but it really does both confuse and infuriate me to no end the lack of scrutiny everyone to the right of me faces with respect to their views simply because it's the norm.

How do we help people who misplace their hatred towards other cultures? I have met many people who agree with the socialist economic analysis. Many of them fully support the over throw of capitalism however, they do still believe that immigrants add to the issue of class struggle. The issue of culture always seems to come up and honestly I don’t have a good answer for them when it comes to how we preserve American culture in a multi cultural environment. I’ve even had someone refer to malcom X and his affirmation of black separatism to affirm that having a primary or distinct culture to our country seems to only help social cohesion and further material progress. Any advice or reading recommendations?

I’m deeply interested in how a person's social (or class) standing is reflected in their perception of themselves and the world—and how that impacts their psychology, emotions, behavior, and even body language, speech patterns, etc.

​Any thoughts or recommendations on this?

On this day, 233 years ago, 16 October 1793, the French Queen Marie Antoinette was guillotined.