The workers do not need to control the means of production when Pooh Bear Xi knows what’s best for them before they do.
Ah, you mean the elite, wealthy, oligarch class, Xi Jinping.
Whoa buddy you a fed? Got any sources? My xi would never.
Socialism is when capitalism
Owning the means of production is a means, not an end in itself. I’d argue the social democratic welfare state comes impressively close to achieving the ends.
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.
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.
That might be relevant if the USSR was actually democratic.
Is there any 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? It seems like a very vague definition when you start looking beyond slogans into what it actually looks like.
"Does socialism really MEAN anything?
"Really showing the libs, I see.
That might be relevant if the USSR was actually democratic.
Are bourgeoisie liberal states democratic? Curious your thoughts.
Are bourgeoisie liberal states democratic? Curious your thoughts.
To varying degrees. Certainly more than the USSR. Not really sure why anyone thinks “You can vote for the Party Approved candidate or not vote” is a real vote, other than a deep desire to throat authoritarian boots.
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.
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.
That is capitalism
“Capitalism is when there’s management”?
Many of the contradictions and crises of Capitalism are still present even under worker coop models in a market economy. Surplus value is still extracted, that money must be reinvested in the business to remain competitive. Meaning the Tendency of The Rate of Profit to Fall Remains, meaning capitalist crises remain. Imperialist incentives remain, and a worker coop nation-state would be equally imperialist as one with private corporations.
Profit falling leading to imperialism seems like its because of profit/expansion driven leadership which isn’t impossible under a coop model but seems fairly unlikely and is more or less a certainty under a more undemocratic and authoritarian hierarchy under capitalist enterprises.
In fact, one of worker coop’s “weaknesses” is that they have a tendency to not grow at all, which has been suggested as a major reasons why they don’t dominate our economy despite tending to be more resilient than conventional firms.
Profit falling leading to imperialism seems like its because of profit/expansion driven leadership
Leadership is irrelevant. Firms MUST reinvest some surplus value back into the firm. This will lead to the increase of capital in the business, and lead to overaccumlation crises. Firms must find new markets for their goods, or face certain economic despair.
In order to compete and grow, sure, reinvestment is needed. But even within capitalism, when markets are saturated the lay offs only happen because of a desire for profit growth when faced with a ceiling and they just cannibalize their own company because of perverse incentives. Cooperatives often willingly just impose pay cuts and hour cuts across the board during lean times like a market saturation and then usually endure as a result without the brain drain with their workers still “employed” at the end of the tunnel. Even if new market growth never comes, coops would simply stabilize and become easier work if become fairly low paying work. Where as capitalists tend to sell off the husk of a barely functioning firm for one last quick buck just before its usually doomed to closure from being carved up and mismanaged by leadership that no longer gives a shit.
I’m a socialist but not a strict Marxist. Even if I agree with a lot of his work, in particular I think his analysis is correct about the unsustainable relationship between labor and capitalists because of exploitation for profit, alienation, lack of control over laborer’s own work, etc. That said, I find meta-narratives (by any economist or philosopher) fairly wrong headed and verging on mystical and the level of rigidity towards market’s functionality regardless of potential configuration (like say into a mutualistic market system of coops) similarly wrong-headed and “prophetic”. I meet that level of certainty with skepticism.
I do think that eventually a mutualist market would probably become sort of meaningless eventually and turn into something else.
i mean, lenin era USSR might be socialist probably closer to communism though, but it was most definitely NOT socialist under stalin or communist.
Lenin’s ‘war communism’ was little more than state-sponsored looting (which, to be fair, is far from unusual in times of crisis; it is not, however, much of an innovation or a path to socialism); while the NEP was the exact social democratic reformism that the Bolsheviks were supposedly against, only without the pesky ‘democracy’ bit the SRs liked.
I think we’re mixing up socialism and communism here.
No True Scotsman
No True Scotsman
I love how people use the term to mean “Words cannot have definitions”, which isn’t what the fallacy means at all.
But I bet it makes them feel real smart for a few seconds when they incorrectly use the term.
Come on, this is Lemmy where every person is a self-enlightened “intellectual” and any argument that they don’t like or don’t have a response for is a fallacy of one of the 2-3 that they can remember at the moment (always strawman and no true Scotsman) and of course then the opposing always completely invalid with no counter argument. (Even that this in itself is the fallacy fallacy lol)
Every metaphor, simile, or analogy is a strawman,every definition is a no true Scotsman, and every history book, report, research, or scientific studies is an appeal to authority 😉
Lol yeah. No True Scotsman is against shifting/arbitrary definitions, but your definition of socialism here is rigid and clear.
Lmao at the “le not real socialism” 😂
It’s really very simple. If you win your revolution and create a society better than the one you replaced, then you’re a red fash tankie - only the revolutions that fail or never start in the first place are true socialism.
It’s even simpler - if your revolution results in workers not owning the means of production, it’s not even vaguely socialist. If workers have no say over how the means of production are run, in practice, then they do not own the means of production in any sense.
Thus, hyper-centralized non-democratic states like the USSR are not socialist.
If you win your revolution and create a society better than the one you replaced,
Yeah, it took the USSR 30 years to create a society better than Tsarist Russia. Tsarist fucking Russia. The bar was on the ground, and the fuckers still tripped over it. Had the Soviets been utterly neglectful and corrupt, they could’ve cleared that bar. Yet they worked to make a worse society than the fucking Tsars ran.
Thinking maybe that by the period it takes 30 years of internal uncontested control to create a better society, you’re looking at less ‘revolution’ and more ‘reformism’.
But red fash have always prefered empty repetition of ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric to results.
I used to use this definition, but it has a few key issues. Modes of Production should be defined in a manner that is consistent. If we hold this definition for Socialism, then either it means a portion of the economy can be Socialist, ie USPS, or a worker cooperative, or it means an economy is only Socialist if all property has been collectivized.
For the former, this definition fails to take into account the context to which portions of the economy play in the broader scope, and therefore which class holds the power in society. A worker cooperative in the US, ultimately, must deal with Capitalist elements of the economy. Whether it be from the raw materials they use being from non-cooperatives, to the distributors they deal with, to the banks where they gain the seed Capital, they exist as a cog in a broader system dominated by Capitalists in the US. Same with USPS, which exists in a country where heavy industry and resources are privatized, it serves as a way to subsidize transport for Capitalists. The overall power in a system must be judged.
For the latter, this “one drop” rule, if equally applied, means Feudalism and Capitalism have never existed either. There is no reason Socialism should be judged any differently from Capitalism or Feudalism.
What Socialism ultimately is is a system where the Working Class is in control, and public ownership is the principle aspect of society. If a rubber ball factory is privately owned but the rubber factory is public, the public sector holds more power over the economy. In the Nordics, heavy industry is privatized for the most part, and social safety nets are funded through loans and ownership of industry in the Global South, similar to being a landlord in country form. In the PRC, heavy industry and large industry is squarely in the hands of the public, which is why Capitalists are subservient to the State, rather than the other way around.
As for the purpose of Socialism, it is improving the lives of the working class in material and measurable ways. Public ownership is a tool, one especially effective at higher degrees of development. Markets and private ownership are a tool, one that can be utilized more effectively at lower stages in development. Like fire, private ownership presents real danger in giving Capitalists more power, but also like fire this does not mean we cannot harness it and should avoid it entirely, provided the proper precautions are taken.
Moreover, markets are destined to centralize. Markets erase their own foundations. The reason public ownership is a goal for Marxists is because of this centralizing factor, as industry gets more complex public ownership increasingly becomes more efficient and effective. Just because you can publicly own something doesn’t mean the act of ownership improves metrics like life expectancy and literacy, public ownership isn’t some holy experience that gives workers magic powers. Public ownership and Private ownership are tools that play a role in society, and we believe Public Ownership is undeniably the way to go at higher phases in development because it becomes necessary, not because it has mystical properties.
Ultimately, it boils down to mindsets of dogmatism or pragmatism. Concepts like “true Socialism” treat Marx as a religious prophet, while going against Marx’s analysis! This is why studying Historical and Dialectical Materialism is important, as it explains the why of Marxism and Socialism in a manner that can be used for real development of the Working Class and real liberation. When taken consistently, AES states do in fact fit into the categorization of “Socialist,” even your original definition would categorize them as such.
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.
Braindead take in all of these countries you do have the right to run a business collectively owned by the workers. Countries economics are not black or white its never 100% socialism or capitalism
I’m a little out of the loop, why is a social democratic welfare state not socialism?
Social democratic welfare states re-distribute some of the surplus value extracted from the labor of workers back to them, but the fundamental functioning of the economy remains decision-making in firms owned and run by capitalist investors rather than workers.
That’s fair, but if the workers regulate the companies, control supply via subsidies and taxation, and cap the wealth of the investors then doesn’t it have the exact same effect as if a government office made all the business decisions while also allotting the freedom of the workers to create or retire businesses?
Pretty big but, though, I admit it would be asking a lot to accomplish that from the perspective of the world we live in.
That’s fair, but if the workers regulate the companies, control supply via subsidies and taxation, and cap the wealth of the investors then doesn’t it have the exact same effect as if a government office made all the business decisions while also allotting the freedom of the workers to create or retire businesses?
Not really - I feel like I should address this in parts, though it’s all one statement and I feel like it needed to be denied as a whole statement first.
That’s fair, but if the workers regulate the companies, control supply via subsidies and taxation, and cap the wealth of the investors
This is the ideal functioning of a social democratic welfare state. We… do not really have a fully ideally functioning social democratic welfare state right now (speaking even outside of the US, because we’re pretty fucked here), but this is a fundamentally good, or at least better, goal to aim for than our current situation.
then doesn’t it have the exact same effect as if a government office made all the business decisions
No, it does not. What you’ve proposed, as a social democratic welfare state, results in a government which restricts and encourages economic decisions which it believes will be in the best interest of the workers. The final decision-making power resides with independent firms mostly run by capitalist investors, even if their decisions are restricted by regulations, and invariably, the decision made within those restrictions will be the one which most benefits (or which the investors perceive as most-benefitting) the capitalist investors, not the workers, and not the firm.
What you describe is probably most comparable to French dirigisme
while also allotting the freedom of the workers to create or retire businesses?
This is a common misconception about socialism, or at least many forms of socialism. Under socialism, a worker running a business is not necessarily restricted - what is restricted is who, beyond the worker, can create or retire a business.
Under the loosest definition of socialism, or, if one prefers the more stringent definition of socialism as beyond simply modernist anti-capitalism, under generally anti-capitalist ideals, there is nothing preventing a worker from starting a business and selling their labor.
Where things get fuzzy is ownership of capital. The strictest socialists would say that all ownership of capital is anti-socialist - down to tools being communally shared. This is an extreme position, however. Most socialists accept that some amount of workers owning the tools they themselves use (or, for some who are insistent about ownership being verboten, workers having ‘exclusive rights to dictate the usage of their tools as long as the tools are in use by them’) is acceptable - what is important is that capital is not a tool to leverage control over others, but a tool to enable one’s own labor.
At its absolute loosest, a generalized anti-capitalism, a worker would be able to run a business, hire workers, buy and sell capital on behalf of the firm, etc, in a mostly recognizable way, even if his work was done on what we might regard as an executive level. The difference would be that the capital would belong to the firm he ran - the worker could not simply cash out and leave the other workers high and dry because it’s ‘his’ business. Nor would there be outside non-worker investors.
This is considered by many socialists to be insufficient to qualify as socialism, and many would insist further that a firm must include workers as a fundamental and major part of the decision-making process to be socialists - but even then, again, nothing in most of these conceptions stops a worker from starting a business and hiring workers. It’s simply that once other workers are involved, they must be involved in decision-making, in some form - whether by electing who runs the firm, or by worker-investor schemes, or by votes on major decisions.
There are a lot of conceptions of socialism out there, and a lot of different proposals for what we should be working for. About the only point of agreement is that capitalism is not the way forward - that investor-driven market economies have results which follow the iron law of institutions - decisions benefit the decision-makers, not the firms, and certainly not the workers.
This is a common misconception about socialism, or at least many forms of socialism. Under socialism, a worker running a business is not necessarily restricted - what is restricted is who, beyond the worker, can create or retire a business.
That statement doesn’t really parse. They’re either able to create a business or they are not. They’re either able to put goods onto an exchange market or fill requests even beyond or far below requested amounts, or they’re not. You will absolutely have people who start a business and make others do the work so long as the government does not directly manage the business, unless you completely disregard human nature which was already stretched pretty thin in the assumption that a worker owned government and by extension means of production were incorruptible.
That statement doesn’t really parse. They’re either able to create a business or they are not. They’re either able to put goods onto an exchange market or fill requests even beyond or far below requested amounts, or they’re not.
I think you’re misreading the statement. The statement is trying to say that workers can create businesses. In start-up businesses, there very often (though not always) is no difference between the founders and the workers - and management work is work, mind you.
You will absolutely have people who start a business and make others do the work so long as the government does not directly manage the business,
That’s just the thing - as mentioned here, the two, broadly speaking, ways that socialism addresses this would be either:
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The worker who started the firm does not have private ownership of the firm’s capital (and there are no outside investors which have ownership or part-ownership of the firm’s capital); if he is the only worker, the difference is purely formal, but if he is not the only worker, he does not have the right to, say, sell everything the firm has and take the proceeds to his bank account, the way a modern private company could. The worker who started the firm, in this case, would be in a position akin to a public corporation in which the executive(s) must answer to shareholders for financial decisions - only instead of shareholders, it’s the firm’s workers. Even if he sold the firm’s capital, the firm itself would still own the proceeds of the sales, and he could not simply regard it as ‘his’ and write it down on his personal income tax form as liquidation of capital gains.
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The worker who started the firm does not have exclusive executive control over the firm unless he is the only worker in the firm.
unless you completely disregard human nature which was already stretched pretty thin in the assumption that a worker owned government were incorruptible.
It’s not about corruption. Corruption isn’t even in the conversation here.
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No it’s not the same, it’s a totally different system as long as the labor doesn’t own the business they work for. Ten thousand different mechanisms to circumvent the ownership by private capital is still ownership by private capital and as America has demonstrated again and again, no battle is won by a vague circumventing of the major problem of exploitation, because all those mechanisms are quickly and easily removed by private capital the second they buy enough power to do so. Our entire economy is monopolizing at an alarming rate, this was illegal just a few decades ago, it’s now legal to hand politicians millions of dollars to do what they are told, this was illegal before Citizens United decision, also legal to bribe then to do your bidding openly as long as you only give them the money after they accomplish your task, and now unions are difficult to start and maintain this was a legally protected activity a few decades ago, all the circumventing is temporary and inefficient.
If we’re moving on from hypotheticals then it seems like welfare state approaches were far more effective when put into practice than things like the USSR.
Yeah for a while the work tax credit and child tax credit was my main income It paid more than my job, and a lot of corporate stock trade types like Warren Buffet advocated that was the solution to the capitalist problem of long term income stagnation and inequality, but it’s not around anyone, I can’t expect it to work after any election, and it is easy to lose it every four years. It doesn’t work not because of the factual outcome, it doesn’t work because it’s temporary and under constant attack. Unless we get laws that can’t be ended or argued without a very high majority of the legislator AND the states, can’t be thrown out by a renegade supreme court, or hand waved by executive orders, then it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.
Because a welfare state is irrelevant to worker controlled/owned means of production and worker ownership is the defining characteristic of socialism.
A welfare state is just a welfare state.
Right-wingers have convinced their flock that anything the government does that isn’t pay-as-you-go is “socialism”.
If socialism were bad, law firms wouldn’t be structured as partnerships.
karl marx only invented socialism for rich people, read theory shitlib
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.
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?
