> Most socialists (and certainly all of the originators and main theorists) would contend that socialism represents a pure qualitative break with capitalism
That's the kind of black and white thinking we need to do away with. "Purity" is fun for theorists to talk about but in practice we basically never want pure systems.
Anyhow, how can capitalism and socialism coexists? Well, it already does! Every democracy which levies taxes to run shared services is partly socialist, since these means of production are jointly owned. You can even see the taxes as a way for the people to extract profits from every venture, for example in Sweden the state spends around 50% of GDP so it already owns 50% of everything even if the papers says otherwise, you can't come and say that something which can extract 50% of all value from something doesn't really own it! And every country where you can start, run and profit from companies are partly capitalist. Hence all western nations are partly socialist and partly capitalist. They are on different parts of this spectrum.
For example, most roads are socialist, you don't have to pay to drive on them even though they cost a lot of money. Very few argue that we need less socialist roads and more capitalist roads with toll booths.
>Anyhow, how can capitalism and socialism coexists? Well, it already does!
No (well, "no" from the point of view of scholars of socialism, whose opinion as experts on the topic matters more). Taxes are not "socialist", because "socialism" does not mean a safety net within capitalism. Means of production, as they are spoken of by philosophers, cannot be said to be "jointly owned"[0].
>Sweden the state spends around 50% of GDP so it already owns 50% of everything even if the papers says otherwise, you can't come and say that something which can extract 50% of all value from something doesn't really own it!
These do not count as productive capacity, but as help for workers, even if they were monetary equivalents (quantitatively), they are not qualitatively the same thing. In fact, one of the problems in the theory of exploitation is the question of whether someone who earns a very high income can be said to be "exploited". The compensation, it is held, is not (or less) relevant than the share of productive resources.
>For example, most roads are socialist, you don't have to pay to drive on them even though they cost a lot of money.
Socialism isn't about "fairness" or getting something back from the state[1]. Rather, it's about "class society". I don't mean to argue for or against socialism, but it's important to get the views right. Social safety nets are a social democratic measure within capitalist society. They are "social" but not socialist. Taxes existed in Marx's time (in some cases, higher than what we have now) - nevertheless, Marx called for the establishment of "socialism". Simple redistribution is not the socialist paradigm, except in rare incarnations.
[0] One of the conditions outlined by Roemer, as quoted in SEP: "If S were to withdraw from the society, endowed with its per capita share of society’s alienable property (that is, produced and nonproduced goods), and with its own labor and skills, then S would be better off (in terms of income and leisure) than it is at the present allocation."
[1] "What is "a fair distribution"?
Do not the bourgeois assert that the present-day distribution is "fair"? And is it not, in fact, the only "fair" distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production? Are economic relations regulated by legal conceptions, or do not, on the contrary, legal relations arise out of economic ones? Have not also the socialist sectarians the most varied notions about "fair" distribution?" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875)
> most actually socialist systems in the world are democratic states with mixed economies
Well by any reasonable metric they are still significantly more 'capitalist' than 'socialist'. Or rather are these days, due to some reasons there even those 'democratic pseudo-socialists' states from the 60s shifted to 'capitalism' much more since the 60s.
> I wasn't aware that Socialism was sort of all or nothing
But it is, socialism is when there is no private ownership of the means of production, that is core to it. Europe has social democracy combined with capitalism, there is no socialism there. Social democracy has nothing to do with socialism, they are completely different concepts.
Edit: Some social democracy might stem from socialist movements, but there is none of that left today. No part of Europe is moving towards socialism, they are all happily capitalist with a majority of their economies being in the private sector.
Social democracy is mainly about the government serving the people and ensuring everyone gets to live a decent life. So health care, social security etc. The same thing USA does but a bit more. It doesn't have anything to do with the means of production except trying to ensure that the system serves the people.
> But yes, I meant socialist as in the government owns and controls aspects of the economy, with profit maximization often not the goal of those industries.
That already has a name: mixed economy.
"Socialist" in the American vernacular is too coarse grained when talking about politics beyond its own borders, since the connotation seems to always just be "left of American politics"... :)
>Describing an entire country as Socialist seems super opinionated to me.
Not to mention the fact he's wrong; contrary to popular belief, "socialism" has been described as many things but the simple fact of offering healthcare, market regulations and some amount of free Internet access(?) - Socialism is a mode of production in which means of production are operated and managed (and some would say "owned") collectively by the workers, i.e. the majority of the adult population. This is also a form of society in which abstract labour is not valorized. A modern nation with money, capital, rent, predominant wage labour, and capital accumulation is in no way "socialist" - never mind by Marx's term with which he considered "socialism" and "communism" to be one and the same thing.
>Note the question is not "Are we entirely socialist?" but "are we partly socialist?"
I already explained how and why to say "partly socialist" is false reasoning, because it assumes that "socialism" is some kind of sliding scale. Scholars of socialism do not consider it as such, socialism is defined to be diametrically opposed to capitalism, in the ways I have already mentioned. It is just like saying "Capital is partly a book." - no. It either is a book, or it isn't a book.
> The advantage most European and other countries have under socialism is it means there's a minimum average quality of life everyone. Pay more in taxes but get a lot more in terms of a more dignified, healthier, and longer life free from the slavery of "gotcha!" gangster capitalism.
It will sound like a nitpick but it's not: there's no socialism in Europe. Socialism is an economic system, not a synonym for "socially-focused policies" through societal-level welfare.
European countries are capitalists, completely. What we do have is a better support system for welfare, more labour protections and regulations to protect against the massive power imbalance that untamed capitalism creates but it's not socialism. Not even close.
> That can very well be socialism for a subgroup of your existing population.
This is like calling ancient Sparta - where the Spartans lived in an egalitarian structure while simultaneously oppressing their Helot slaves - socialism.
Or for a more a recent example, apartheid South Africa, where whites received a great deal of support via government policy that practically ensured their prosperity. That wasn't socialism, either.
Socialism is not about centralized state control. It's about whether the state plays a strong role in ensuring a standard of living for all it's citizens. In successful examples (like Social Security and Medicare in the US) it has accomplished this while the majority of the economy is not under state control.
This is the probably the best point to start from when discussing Socialism. So it was the point I started with:
"Socialism is about how workers organise their workplace (owning, managing and sharing the produce and profit of their labour)"
As the Oxford Dictionary says:
"a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."
So Socialism is something very specific, but Socialists often associate themselves with other principles that they believe are in line with their moral values, see as a helpful strategy for achieving their ideals, or their Socialism is part of a larger political philosophy (Communism etc.) This association (and some detractors using the word Socialism to define everything they don't like) are what lead to confusion.
Socialists joke that detractors believe "Socialism is when the government does stuff, and the more stuff it does the more Socialist (or Communist) it is." But some commentators - see current popular right-wing American opinion pieces - really do seem to believe this.
There is no mention of state, government or rulers of any kind in most definitions of Socialism (most Anarchists are Socialists too). Of course some Socialists have believed that the state can act in the interest of the public by being stewards over these resources with the ideal of later devolving this to the communities and workers. Which has led to State Socialism (which Lenin called State Capitalism) on the one hand, and Social Democracy on the other. Some (like myself) think both strategies are flawed as do non-hierarchal Socialists (Anarcho-Communists, Syndicalists, Libertarian & Council Marxists, Democratic Confederalists, and maybe Agorists etc.)
There is also no mention of private - non-personal - property (although some Socialists like myself are against that too, but other Socialists see the issue as an irrelevance or inevitability).
Some see Socialism as sufficient in itself, others see it as part of the progress toward Communism (stateless, classless, moneyless as stated before).
"It's continually amazing to me that more than 100 years after Marx and Engels wrote their papers on Socialism and Capitalism, people can't see past much more than those choices. Which seems to be very much a false dichotomy.
"
It seems a very US habit to think only two extremes can exist on any issue. There are plenty of examples of other paths when you look at the different countries in Europe. They all strike different balances between socialism and capitalism. Heck, the US is not very "pure" capitalistic either. We have socialized healthcare (for some), welfare (for some), progressive taxes and more.
I would be very curious about totally different approaches.
>"State socialism is a classification for any socialist political and economic perspective advocating state ownership of the means of production either as a temporary measure in the transition from capitalism to socialism, or as characteristic of socialism itself..."
I agree that this can exist and has the potential to exist, and the usage of the state temporarily to secure the power of the proletariat (their dictatorship) was something espoused by Marx and Engels. The issue is that it requires the proletariat as a whole to be in control of this state; at the moment, the state is run not by workers but by people who are acting as bourgeois on a global scale - buying and selling in a capitalist economy, trading commodities. They employ wage labour. As such, Venezuela does not operate a state Socialist system.
There is some confusion around the meaning of Socialism; in Marx's day, the word 'Socialism' and 'Communism' were synonymous, though Marx distinguished between lower and higher stages of Communism. The idea that Socialism is a form of state in the first place I am willing to concede, though this is largely a Leninist invention.
>So there still may be private capital, prices, money, and other things like redistribution in a state socialist country.
I don't know if I agree; the key component of a Socialist economy is outlined by what doesn't exist in the capitalist economy, namely in particular the absence of the law of value, which prescribes that commodities have both exchange and use value; if production is predominantly focused such that use values, but not exchange value is being produced (i.e we have products rather than the specific form of product, commodity) then it can be said that the workers own the means of production, that they are not paid wages in order to exchange products. Socialism is the breaking of Marx's chain of exchange (M-C-M').
The nationalisation of industry is conducted in the transition of power from the bourgeois state to the proletarian state (which necessarily incorporates proletarian democracy); however as soon as this transfer of power is complete, the state should start dismantling, withering away is Engels put it.
And we do not see this happening in Venezuela. The state continues to trade on a global scale (oil etc.), employing wage labour (showing that the state is not in the control of the workers) and is thus not Socialist. If you can find any major Socialist theorist who is in support of wage labour within a Socialist economy, I'd be surprised.
> I don't mean hardcore enforced-total-equality Socialism, I mean nice Socialism like the kind Bernie Sanders has been raving about.
It's taboo to point this out, especially on HN, but I'm feeling bold today:
You can't discuss the socialist policies of Western European countries without addressing their wealth. And you can't discuss the current wealth of Western European countries without acknowledging the process by which they acquired that wealth.
The "nice socialism that Sanders has been raving about" is the kind that is practiced in countries with a long history of colonization and slavery[0]. During this timeframe, they "earned" a massive amount of money by extracting resources from people that they literally enslaved. This started before the 17th century and continued into the 20th century.
Those people who were colonized and enslaved (and their countries) are still feeling the effects of that today, and they would not be so quick to describe that kind of socialism as "nice".
[0] Denmark and Sweden are the two that Sanders has called out specifically by name.
>The closest economies to real socialism are the high-taxation, high-spending Scandinavian social democracies, which score higher than the US on educational attainment, business opportunity, life-expectancy, and educational attainment - but don't do nearly as well at generating billionaires.
Close, but I would say that socialists don't see it as close enough. Sweden holds a strong form of liberal egalitarianism, as propounded by Rawls in his less 'socialist' writings. But even then, the socialism is beyond its horizon. There is a 'property-owning democracy', and no egalitarian distribution. The capitalist parts of Rawls, without the public ownership of MoP socialist stuff.
The championing of liberal egalitarianism as "good enough" leaves other questions unanswered. Is social democracy still exploitative? Dominating? Alienating? Environmentally damaging? Inefficient? Those questions hold for any form of capitalism, defined as a society in which capital's self-valorization is predominant, and where there is wage labour.
So the question is what kind of argument would justify not only going beyond old school 20th c. death capitalism, but social democratic capitalism, too. Only if you look into whether (1) capitalist societies are exploitative (2) there is a normative reason to do away with it, and the same with alienation, domination and environmental concerns - then there is a good reason for socialism.
>Simply having a welfare state or some nationalized industries is not socialism.
Yes it is. It is a matter of degree. When you have an income tax, you have socialized income. If you have a "workers factory", you have socialized the means of production.
Your first paragraph seemed like you had the right insights, yet you contradicted yourself by the second.
> Sure, you might disagree that socialism is possible without big government, but that has nothing to do with the definition. My only point is that it doesn't inherently have anything to do with control. The problem with saying that socialism means big government is it associates it with decades of red-scare propaganda and makes all discussion impossible.
I didn't say that at all. You can review my comments. But the point is that socialism doesn't distribute power, it concentrates it because "society" is never in control of anything. They'll elect representatives and they will be in charge. It is something that would work, provided human nature didn't exist.
> Not really, if the workers have ownership over the company and the capital, then they "own the means of production".
Shareholders have control over capital and have ownership.
> Sure, resource allocation is hard, but "lets just let the rich/monarchs/the lizard people decide" is a cop-out.
That's not what anyone is saying and that's not what is happening today.
There may be some who have a philosophical difference about "many" being in charge versus a "few". But just because I believe that in plurality of power it doesn't mean I believe socialism is the best way to get there.
I am not going by Twitter here. I have read a lot on the subject. Most of what I see uses socialism as a shorthand for "common good" and capitalism as shorthand for "greed". It is incorrect.
As an analogy, imagine if we're taking about ethics and morality and how to have a better and just world. If this was 100 years ago in the west, "Christianity" would be shorthand for morality and "Atheism" synonymous with evil, greed, and depravity. We've moved beyond that today and realized that neither of those will necessarily lead to a more moral or just world, and that ethics and morality are nuanced topics with a lot of details to be worked out. Simply being Christian doesn't make you one or the other, although hard to prove that to an average American in 1895. Furthermore, of the two, one is more static, dogmatic, and leads to corruption. I view the socialism and capitalism debate in the same vein.
>Socialism says two people do not have the right to come to an agreement on the exchange of property and labor. What is social about that? How is that in harmony with human nature?
No, socialism says focusing on group cooperation optimizes aggregate wealth. Socialism says that somewhere between a completely shared economy and a completely private economy is a sweet spot where you get the best of both worlds.
You're very focused on this "socialism is anti-social" stance, but not only does it not make any intuitive sense, it is not backed up by any data. Show me a modern, prosperous state that absolutely abstains from social programs or promoting collective interest.
The very idea of a state is a threat to (completely) free exchange of property and labor. Most people are willing to buy security from the state in the form of regulations and taxes. We think our food should be safe to eat, so we make rules and add a cost to ensure a baseline. We want advertisements to accurately represent products. As individuals, we have little recourse against an industry which has decided to curtail consumer health in favor of increased profits. The state is simply a mechanism to ensure our collective will is met, not as entities in a capitalist network but as the weird little thinking, walking primates that we are.
> Let's never forget what socialism is actually like.
The term socialism has no clear meaning, and trying to group failures together is just as unhelpful as trying to group successes.
The key is to find a balance. Europe has had some success with socialising things that make moral sense (e.g. healthcare) while leaving everything else to the private industry. That's still socialism, it just isn't absolute socialism.
Even China is experimenting with the levels of socialism they want. They've been moving towards a more capitalist-style market and they've found a more workable balance.
Socialism is a dirty word in the US, but is a complex word everywhere else. Hopefully with a self-proclaimed "democratic socialist" running for your highest office we'll see people's understanding of socialism expand.
That's the kind of black and white thinking we need to do away with. "Purity" is fun for theorists to talk about but in practice we basically never want pure systems.
Anyhow, how can capitalism and socialism coexists? Well, it already does! Every democracy which levies taxes to run shared services is partly socialist, since these means of production are jointly owned. You can even see the taxes as a way for the people to extract profits from every venture, for example in Sweden the state spends around 50% of GDP so it already owns 50% of everything even if the papers says otherwise, you can't come and say that something which can extract 50% of all value from something doesn't really own it! And every country where you can start, run and profit from companies are partly capitalist. Hence all western nations are partly socialist and partly capitalist. They are on different parts of this spectrum.
For example, most roads are socialist, you don't have to pay to drive on them even though they cost a lot of money. Very few argue that we need less socialist roads and more capitalist roads with toll booths.
reply