So are we pinning this post or what?
Come on now! China is totally communist! After all when Marx envisioned his ideal state is was an authoritarian police state with billionaires, massive wealth disparities, stock markets and an investor class, right?
I think that in order to have a socialist nation you first need a nation.
And you’re not going to get that without being a power hungry lunatic.
We’re still a serfdom ruled by kings, and no amount of window dressing has changed that. At best we decide what colour hat the king will wear every four years.
Right-wingers have has convinced their flock that anything the government does that isn’t pay-as-you-go is “socialism”.
Was the Darma Initiative socialist?
Define “collectively own”.
Ownership generally means two things:
- The owner gets to make decisions about the thing being owned.
- The fruits of the thing are directed to the benefit of the owner.
(I’m intentionally omitting the third implication of getting a share when the thing is being sold, because that requires the concept of selling a means of production which brings us deep into the realms of capitalism)
These things are pretty much clear-cut when it comes to individual ownership, but what do they mean in the context of collective ownership?
- Decision Making
- Does every decision have to unanimously supported by all the workers?
- Or is it enough for all the workers to get a vote in every single decision regarding the thing? Note that in this case there has to be a process where decisions are brought to vote, and whoever controls that process has the real power, but let’s not get into that.
- Or is it enough for all the workers to elect someone to make these decisions every X years?
- Or maybe it is enough for that someone makes all the decisions as long as they insist really hard that they are representing the workers?
- Fruit Enjoyment
- Does the product of said means of production have to be distributed directly among all the workers who own it?
- Or is it enough to sell the product (a process which require some concepts from capitalism, but let’s not go there) for some commodity and split that commodity among all the workers?
- Or maybe it’s enough for the product can be put toward projects that are supposed to benefit all the workers?
I think we’re mixing up socialism and communism here.
Socialism is an economic system in which major industries are owned by workers rather than by private businesses. It is different from capitalism, where private actors, like business owners and shareholders, can own the means of production.
ok, then what’s communism?
Communism seeks to completely abolish private property by distributing goods based on needs. Socialism is just the workers owning the means of production.
Communism (from Latin communis, ‘common, universal’)[1][2] is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement,[1] whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in society based on need.
– Socialism, the workers aren’t exploited, they get all the money they make because they own the business they work for, they collectively hire and fire. Workers keep the money they make.
– Communism a social order in which the entire populace communually ‘owns’ all business and all resources are divided up as needed.
Communism is in the Socialism wheelhouse, but it’s not a necessary part of Socialism. Socialism can maintain a consumerism corporate society in theory. Also democracy and republics can be socialist as Socialism doesn’t need an authoritarian police state to make it work, just people owning their own labor.
Yeah I was under the impression that socialism was a collective redistribution of wealth, “from those that are most able to those that are most in need.” While Communism is where capital is publicly owned, like a commune, “Seize the means of production”.
Socialism is seizing the means of production alone. Communism is a ‘Socialist’ socio economic system were the means of production are owned by the state and all product and labor is divided according to needs. Socialism redistributes nothing on its own. It is simply the means of production owned by the laborers, so a trade union type of system that can exist without authoritarian police state, there are worker owned businesses in the US right now, it’s not illegal to create or operate a business this way, so it exists where people create it and favor it with or without effort from anyone else.
It’s when you don’t shave or bathe and spend all your time wearing army-surplus jackets in coffee shops trying to pick up hippy chicks.
Sign me up!
Ya that’s what I thought too.
Genuinely curious about the standard by which you evaluate whether the means of production are collectively owned. For example, one person might say that it looks like a government, representing all workers on a national scale and making decisions based on votes or elected representatives, owning all the means of production. Another person might say it looks like each industry being controlled by a union representing the workers in said industry. A third could say that it means anytime a person operates a machine, they own it and can decide what to do with it, until they stop using it.
Is there any concievable physical reality in which it would be impossible to reasonably argue that the workers do not collectively control the means of production, because of a disagreement on which means of production should be owned by which workers and in what form? It seems like a very vague definition when you start looking beyond slogans into what it actually looks like.
No True Scotsman
What does it even mean to own the means of production? How are decisions made? Big decisions can go to a vote, but what about small ones? I don’t see how any organization can function without some kind of hierarchy. But the way you describe socialism implies that hierarchy can’t coexist with socialism.
Maybe the pirate ship system would work well.
Every man got the same share except the captain (2x) and quartermaster (1.5x) and the doctor (1.5x) any of that position can be replaced anytime by a vote
Aye, this be a fittin’ trajectory for ye politics
Maybe the base pay the same for everyone but and only do a multiplies on profit sharing.
The socialist democratically owned company would still elect a CEO or something like it to make those kinds of decisions, and if they don’t make good decisions they can be recalled by the employees to be replaced with someone else. The way I look at it it would be like how companies are currently but with all employees owning shares of the company rather then outside investors or the owner of the company. Atleast that’s how I interpret it but there’s probably a million different ways you could set it up while still having it be much more democratic then the modern structure.
True, and actually these companies already exist, at least in name. Not sure how well they function or how closely they follow what you describe.
That is capitalism
Similarly:
Is every good or service-providing entity privately owned? No? Then it’s not capitalism.
Is the fire department part of the government (i.e. worker-owned), or is it a private entity? Do you have pinkertons or police? Are there soldiers, or are the armed forces entirely mercenaries? Are roads privately owned? When people get old and need some kind of regular monthly payment, does that payment come exclusively from private insurance policies and/or investments, or are the payments provided by fellow workers in the form of a government benefit?
Every modern economy is a mixed system involving some capitalist elements and some socialist elements.
That’s ot what the word capitalism means. Like, not even close.
The meme said, “the means of production.” It did not say, “every, single means of production.”
The OP could have meant anything from workers electing their CEOs in 51% of the steel mills, smelteries, oil rigs, cinemas, restaurants, etc. all the way up to 100% like you decided to assume.
But honestly, it makes very little sense to read 100% into this, especially with your wording of “good or service-providing entity”.
A hell of a lot of “good or service-providing entities” are sole proprietorships, which are in a blurry gray area between private ownership and cooperative ownership. On the one hand, many capitalists started out as sole proprietors. On the other hand, by owning one’s own means of production, a sole proprietor is both worker and owner, fitting perfectly in the definition of socialism. In fact, I would argue that the sole proprietor doesn’t really become a socialist or a capitalist until another worker joins the business and it becomes a cooperative or a private company. Until then, the distinction is meaningless.
It is private in case you didnt know (police) It is just not on paper
The DPRK is, I’d argue, more or less an absolute monarchy that just uses different words to describe itself than traditional for that kind of system.
The People’s™ Absolute monarchy
Seriously it’s insane how people can unironically lie to themselves. Thy literally said “socialism is not for the workers” lmfaoo
I personally only know that as a westerner we know next to fuckall about North Korea, and withhold judgement accordingly.
If you want to reach that level of knowledge, try investigating where some particularly absurd claims about the DPRK came from.
Oh come on. Y’all have a whole Instance to bootlick in, why do you have to spread that shit around?
Yall are literally no different than conservatives who claim with total confidence to be experts on socialism, despite having read nothing written by any socialist, and going entirely off of what other conservatives say.
I know very little about North Korea, but I am certain someone who uncritically accepts what they hear from western media, and defectors who will literally go to prison if they say nice things about North Korea, knows even less.
If socialism were bad, law firms wouldn’t be structured as partnerships.
Law firms are so so so not socialist.
Partnerships only involve a few select attorneys at a firm, associate attorneys, paralegals, legal assistants, and every other role is not part of the partnership, and has no stake other than their vested interest in getting their paycheck (the same as any employee).
“Big Law” firms have thousands of employees excluded from any partnerships including billable (associates, paralegals) and non billable (legal assistants, HR, IT) staff, the partnership is more of a private ownership club where people are accepted mostly on vibes and sometimes, rarely, on merit.
The partnership structure is pretty antithetical to socialism, since it’s structured in a way to exclude people deemed not worthy of receiving profits (But still somehow needed to make the profits??).
TL;DR: a small group of owner operators within a larger company is decidedly capitalist.
karl marx only invented socialism for rich people, read theory shitlib
This is an extremely important point you just made! Pure socialism is impossible for humanity due to the individuals that are so easily corruptible. We need a system similar to socialism, capitalism, AND communism, that takes the best of all of them, abandones the worst, and compensates properly for human nature. Human nature is why everything fails, not the theoretical systems themselves. Theoretically they work.
I would actually argue that money – and not human nature – is the point of failure. To be more specific, money’s capacity for growth.
The second you have the growth associated with a store of value (the ability to spend $100 and get back $110), you have the capacity for different piles of value to grow at different rates (depending on things like luck, ruthlessness, and cleverness) without being limited by a single human’s ability to labor.
And when you have different piles of money growing at different rates with no upper limit, you have some growing so fast that they become cancerous, sucking the resources out of the entire system.
It’s both better and worse having this problem than having one of human nature. Worse because growth is an even more universal part of nature than greed. (So we can’t get rid of it.) Better because it’s something we are intimately familiar with trying to contain. We have surgeries for rapid cellular growths. We have antibiotics for rapid bacterial growths. We have entire forestry organizations that release hunting licenses dedicated to containing rapid deer population growth.
Growth is an incredibly simple, two-dimensional graph, and it’s easy to tell when we’re controlling a growth vs succumbing to it.
i mean, lenin era USSR might be socialist probably closer to communism though, but it was most definitely NOT socialist under stalin or communist.
the biggest difference was the war
