This is not true. At least here in Romania, the issue with colleges under communism was that there were VERY limited slots, so you had to either be the best of the best or have a high up party member in the family or as a close personal friend.
No, I’m disagreeing. You could study anything you wanted, not what the state wanted. It was just hard to get a slot.
I guess it’s similar to how it’s incredibly hard to get a scholarship at a great university today. You’d hardly say that the modern scholarship system “forces you to study what the state wants”.
Not as different as recent past in Brazil. Federal and State universities where free and the top of the country, but the slots were few and the competition high. And because class disparities were reinforced on school education, even if the universities were free, only rich and middle income families were able to get in. Since the first Lula’s government, there have been policies in place to ensure that public schools and black students have exclusive slots. Brazillian middle class hate it, but they can eat it. This year was the first time in history that USP (best university in Brazil) had more admission from public schools that for private ones.
Yeah, that does sound very comparable to what I was talking about. Your example and mine both do not have the state deciding what university you apply to though, which is what I understood from “the state decides what you’ll study”.
Do you know that political systems are a spectrum and hard socialism or communism are not eh only alternatives to rampant capitalism? Have you heard of Scandinavian countries like Sweden or Norway? If not, I strongly recommend reading about their political systems.
This is true! Socialism is a spectrum of different political expressions of the idea of socially held wealth. The term was coined by Marx to a wider already existant school of thought regarding how basic human needs should be handled through copious economic planning. The slogan we hear about workers and means of production isn’t quite accurate as it is kind of a short quippy way to summerize passages that uses terms like “use-value”.
There were other promenant thinkers who served as and creditied as predecessors on that school of thought. We tend to use the term “proto socialists” to that group because many of them predeceased the term but Socialism is an umbrella term. If you believe on any form distribution of resources required to meet basic needs then you fall under the umbrella.
A lot of the Socialist movers and shakers of the past saw variable amounts and expressions of success in integration of Socialist principles inside democratic systems.
Communism has somewhat less shades of grey and while technically under the umbrella term socialism in some ways it is unique. It refers in practice of the supposed handover of power to a system that is supposed to have a diminishing need for a state while also prohibiting privately held property. It sometimes aims for a currency free situation. As such it is incompatible with current models of liberal-socialist spectrums of representitive democracies. It has also never technically succeeded in that handoff… Which is sometimes veiwed as a critical failure point inate to the attempted implementation of the ideology - or as a set of individual failures of the movements who attempted to adopt the ideology in name and fumbled the landing.
There is a lot of interesting history on different forms of socialism!
The difference is you can still get those degrees if you want to. In communism, you cant.
Colleges didn’t exist in communism?
They did, but you got training in whatever the state wanted, not the individual.
This is not true. At least here in Romania, the issue with colleges under communism was that there were VERY limited slots, so you had to either be the best of the best or have a high up party member in the family or as a close personal friend.
So you are basically agreeing? Not true on paper but in practice you couldn’t just get into college, which is what OP claimed.
No, I’m disagreeing. You could study anything you wanted, not what the state wanted. It was just hard to get a slot.
I guess it’s similar to how it’s incredibly hard to get a scholarship at a great university today. You’d hardly say that the modern scholarship system “forces you to study what the state wants”.
Not as different as recent past in Brazil. Federal and State universities where free and the top of the country, but the slots were few and the competition high. And because class disparities were reinforced on school education, even if the universities were free, only rich and middle income families were able to get in. Since the first Lula’s government, there have been policies in place to ensure that public schools and black students have exclusive slots. Brazillian middle class hate it, but they can eat it. This year was the first time in history that USP (best university in Brazil) had more admission from public schools that for private ones.
Yeah, that does sound very comparable to what I was talking about. Your example and mine both do not have the state deciding what university you apply to though, which is what I understood from “the state decides what you’ll study”.
The university you apply for has nothing to do with what you’ll study if admissions are politically motivated.
Do you know that political systems are a spectrum and hard socialism or communism are not eh only alternatives to rampant capitalism? Have you heard of Scandinavian countries like Sweden or Norway? If not, I strongly recommend reading about their political systems.
This is true! Socialism is a spectrum of different political expressions of the idea of socially held wealth. The term was coined by Marx to a wider already existant school of thought regarding how basic human needs should be handled through copious economic planning. The slogan we hear about workers and means of production isn’t quite accurate as it is kind of a short quippy way to summerize passages that uses terms like “use-value”.
There were other promenant thinkers who served as and creditied as predecessors on that school of thought. We tend to use the term “proto socialists” to that group because many of them predeceased the term but Socialism is an umbrella term. If you believe on any form distribution of resources required to meet basic needs then you fall under the umbrella.
A lot of the Socialist movers and shakers of the past saw variable amounts and expressions of success in integration of Socialist principles inside democratic systems.
Communism has somewhat less shades of grey and while technically under the umbrella term socialism in some ways it is unique. It refers in practice of the supposed handover of power to a system that is supposed to have a diminishing need for a state while also prohibiting privately held property. It sometimes aims for a currency free situation. As such it is incompatible with current models of liberal-socialist spectrums of representitive democracies. It has also never technically succeeded in that handoff… Which is sometimes veiwed as a critical failure point inate to the attempted implementation of the ideology - or as a set of individual failures of the movements who attempted to adopt the ideology in name and fumbled the landing.
There is a lot of interesting history on different forms of socialism!
Why not?
Gulag
For what?