Socialism
A system of government where the country’s wealth is concentrated into a small, ruling class of billionaires, who use the media they own to keep the lower classes fighting with each other while they . . . the rich . . . run off with all the farking money.
Oh wait. that’s capitalism. I don’t know how I got those two systems confused.
Is that Lenin or Louis CK in the second panel?
Lenin.
Missing the panel where millions of people die from starvation
Oh you mean like is currently happening right now without socialism?
I think they’re referring more to historical events. Like the great depression and the dust bowl.
Wait, you’re telling me that a preindustrial society, the successor state to an empire that had 10 famines a year, had one last famine during some failed policy of land collectivisation and then ended hunger for 300 million people? How does that make the USSR look bad?
I don’t know, ask a Kulak. Oh wait, you can’t.
How does that make the USSR look bad
“I don’t know”
Better luck next time.
I don’t know, ask a Kulak. Oh wait, you can’t.
Again with the ahistorical bullshit.
First of all, the process of dekulakization was only state-directed, but it was primarily peasant-enforced. There were some guidelines to the process, but it was poor peasants who organized themselves, who decided which kulaks to expropriate, and who oversaw the process. But the poor peasants were so extreme towards kulaks because of how they had been exploited by them, that the soviet government had to introduce maximum quotas of percentage of kulaks per region, in order to prevent poor peasants from going overboard.
Additionally, the elimination of Kulaks didn’t mean the elimination of each individual Kulak, it meant the elimination of the social class. A kulak getting a death sentence (or, more commonly, being killed by the poor peasants) was a rare thing, and forced relocation to Eastern territories was a much more common penalty. The vast majority of Kulaks survived dekulakization. But you couldn’t bother to read a book and your here spouting ahistorical nonsense.
Isn’t happening in well functioning capitalist countries
Because they continue what they have historically done: outsourcing the most extreme poverty and suffering to the countries they exploit for resources.
All capitalist countries are well-functioning, it’s just some are exploiters and some are exploited. But that’s not a malfunction, that’s there by design.
Or, to quote Chomsky:
We therefore conclude that in India the democratic capitalist “experiment” since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire history of the “colossal, wholly failed…experiment” of Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, tens of millions more since, in India alone.
You do know that hunger and malnutrition in the US impacts millions of people every year, and Cuba has eliminated food insecurity for its entire population, right?
If not, now you do.
That’s not data, that’s a newspaper article. Come back with serious sources.
Lmao
Give us the numbers, my dude.
I said well functioning.
I don’t consider the US well functioning by any metric
I don’t consider the US well functioning by any metric
I agree, which countries do you consider well functioning?
Canada, Sweden Denmark Australia
7 million Canadians going hungry under capitalism: https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/new-food-banks-canada-research-shows-7-million-canadians-report-going-hungry-833281882.html
And aren’t Sweden and Denmark famously more socialist than other developed countries?
Edit: also I find it interesting that Socialism is judged by the worst example you could find, but Capitalism can only be judged by “well functioning countries”. US is peak Capitalism, it is exactly the direction Capitalism goes towards.
Exporting your poverty and starvation to foreign countries where you super-exploit and plunder does not mean that the cause isn’t with the “well functioning Capitalist country.”
Missing the panel where anyone asked for your opinion
We’re on Lemmy, comrade. Sharing opinions is kind of the point. Not very socialist of you to try and silence me… Or maybe it is?
You’re literally posting liberal nonsense in a leftist community
Genuine question. How would a transition to socialism work in practice?
Eating the billionaires and “nationalizing” publicly traded companies is the easy part. Saying “you can still possess your car” is also easy. The hard, and ultimately unpopular, part is everything else in between. Summer cottage? Family farm? What happens to pensions/retirement savings, land ownership, inheritance, small businesses…
I’m not a socialist, but what I advocate for is explicitly postcapitalist.
Some postcapitalist policies include
- All firms are mandated to be worker coops similar to how local governments are mandated to be democratic
- Land and natural resources are collectivized with a 100% land value tax and various sorts of emission taxes etc
- Voluntary democratic collectives that manage collectivized means of production and provide start up funds to worker coops
- UBII’m not a socialist
All firms are mandated to be worker coops
Pretty sure that qualifies as socialism for most people. Welcome onboard, my friend!
Some people think so. That doesn’t make it a good academic definition. You get into the shitty definition of socialism that Dr. Wolff mocks:
“When the government that’s a lot of stuff, that’s socialism. And the more stuff it does, the more socialist it gets. And when it does a reeeeeal whole lot of stuff, then that’s communism”
How do you define socialism?
Rhetorically, it doesn’t matter how I define the term. It matters how people use it.
The way I would define it is either the systems of historical Eastern Bloc countries or a hypothetical society that has somehow completely abolished commodity production
It works by encouraging union and co-ops, actually punishing companies that break laws, and providing social safety nets. Basically everything this comic points out.
So by “encouraging”, I take that to mean a mixed system? I’m all for the Nordic model. I think a hard-line approach is ultimately too disruptive and unpalatable to a majority of people’s current personal situation, and I feel like it’s important to communicate that for buy in.
What is unpalatable to the people current personal situation tho? The problem is you are already seeing it from a capitalist point of view where you think most people have something to lose.
First, your second house or small business are not means of production.
Second, most people dont have a summer cottage, most people dont have a family farm, most people dont have land ownership, most people dont inherit shit, most people dont have apartments they are renting, most people dont have small business.
Most people have nothing to lose and everything to gain when we talk about people owning their workplace. If you think otherwise you are overstating what most people own, which is close to nothing. What most people think of is the idea that if they work hard enough they will someday have that apartment to rent, that summer house, that big money their sons will inherit, which for most of earth’s population is just bullshit.
A mixed system which starts with changing the most socially egregious examples is probably the only politically viable transition; lots of people fear disruption, and it takes time and proving to them that the changes are beneficial.
I’d suggest beginning with something like Corbyn’s Labor had proposed; if a capitalist business is sold or fails, the workers are given first right of refusal and a govt loan is given for them to purchase as a worker cooperative.
The problem is that capitalists will not tolerate a system that is made to remove them over time, and they will fight you to the death to keep you from passing reforms like that, as seen by Corbyn’s campaign being sabotaged from all angles.
While I do agree these people exist, most people are some mixture of benefiting from, and being harmed by the status quo. To erode support for a mode of production takes both fighting those who are directly against your class interests, and convincing the majority of people that their class interests align with your actions. Often those who feel the most precarity under the current system are it’s most ardent defenders, simply because their afraid of loosing what little status they have eked out for themselves.
Corbyn was sabotaged both by people who rightly saw him as a threat, and by those who didn’t see the benefit he could bring them.
I’m all for the Nordic model
The sad thing about the Nordic model is that it relies on wealth and labour extraction from poorer countries as much as the rest of capitalist countries do. Being on the upper side of unequal exchange (I beg you to read on unequal exchange, even if only the Wikipedia article), makes it very nice for some lucky few in Europe / North America, and very hard for the rest who aren’t on the upper side.
The others have given more concrete examples, so I’ll skip that and simply say that contradictions are resolved through practice. As in we can talk about the problems and solutions all day, but it only when we start to actually make the changes, do we create and engage with the problems and develop solutions in response.
Translation:
“You know, it’ll just buff out bro we build the bridge in front of us as we walk across it bro”
Is what humans have always done. Capitalism has so many contradictions, we have entire legal and regulatory systems and social programs in place to make it viable, and governments still have to bail it out with our tax dollars every 10 years or so.
Wealth tax and taxing inheritance. You know it works because the capitalists flee the fucking country as soon as you inplement it (or rather before, when they buy information from a corrupt official or legally from a politician).
So then how is that supposed to work? Tax something that can walk across the border tomorrow?
The capitalists subverting liberal democracies like this is precisely one of the reasons we call them dictatorships of the bourgeoisie. Fortunately, since absolute democratic control should be held by the people, we can just seize their assets for the public through exit taxes, but they will find ways around these as well, so preferrably retroactively.
Now, this would surely tank foreign investment capital in our countries and people might say that is going to “ruin the economy”. However, national control over resources is a necessary step in combatting global economic imperialism, and even though Western economies would suffer somewhat, it is precisely because they are on the top of the food chain of exploitation and frankly deserve to.
The majority of people should see a rise in material conditions and in freedom, as this makes them free to own their means of production and enjoy the fruits of their labor.
The small business part of the transition is “easy” (or at least, not any harder than maintaining a capitalist business), people have been and are currently doing this already. They are known as worker-owned cooperatives, and are often extremely liberating to those who make the effort. Depending on the industry (and the government you live under), it’s not even that difficult, roughly on the order of forming a freelancing agency. There are also entire organizations dedicated to assisting with corporate transition to cooperative structure.
Here are some good examples of resources in the US to start learning that process:
family farms are practically non-existent (i admire romanticism lol). Pensions get paid, land is not owned, homes inheritance is on the right-of-first-refusal of undefined-length lease, small businessman become paid position in agreement with employed workers, rent is asset depreciation no more no less. You can afford asset depreciation on 200 million mansion? 50 people together probably can
A worker coop is an example of joint self-employment. The workers are not employees, and the employer-employee relationship is abolished in worker coops
Genuine question. How would a transition to socialism work in practice?
Generally, Leftists believe it can only happen via revolution. The general idea is to organize and build dual power, so that when an inevitable revolution arises, the working class is already organized and can replace the former state.
Eating the billionaires and “nationalizing” publicly traded companies is the easy part. Saying “you can still possess your car” is also easy. The hard, and ultimately unpopular, part is everything else in between. Summer cottage? Family farm? What happens to pensions/retirement savings, land ownership, inheritance, small businesses, the apartment your are renting out to pay for your own rent…
You’re working off the mindset of maintaining Capitalism and piece-by-piece Socializing it, which is not what Leftists generally propose.
I suggest reading Critique of the Gotha Programme, if you’re genuinely interested.
Generally, Leftists believe it can only happen via revolution.
I’m an outsider and I don’t really know much about Leftist thought. I’m curious what the general belief among Lefists is for why this revolution hasn’t happened? (In the capitalist West that is?)
Marxists believe it is due to Imperialism, also known as Unequal Exchange. Western Capitalist countries export the vast bulk of their poverty to foreign countries with cheaper labor to make a wider proportion of profit, similar to the idea of countries functioning as Bourgeoisie and Proletarian.
Whether you agree with Lenin’s analysis of the State and Revolutionary methods, I have yet to find a Leftist that disagrees with his arguments in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
What we are seeing is an increase in Anti-Western sentiment among the Global South, as conditions deteriorate and expropriation increases. As this revolutionary pressure builds, the weakest links pop, so to speak, weakening Western Hegemony and driving their own Proletariat closer to revolution.
Marxists believe it is due to Imperialism
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “imperialism” here but regardless, what is the solution to imperialism according to Marxists?
I elaborated on it later, it’s the concept of exporting the bulk of industrial production to foreign countries to super-exploit for super-profits.
Imperialism defeats itself in much the same way Capitalism does, it increases in severity and exploitation until a boiling point is reached, and the country in the Global South moves towards domestic production and nationalization of their resources and products, rather than serving as an outsourced factory for wealthy Capitalists abroad.
I don’t think we’re communicating. I asked what Marxists’ solution to imperialism is. I can’t see any solution in what you’ve written here.
What do you specifically mean? I just said Imperialism defeats itself, and people in the Global South can act against it by protecting their own production and resources.
I’m not a proponent of socialism due to the whole ‘state’ aspect, but I’d say universal healthcare and unconditional UBI would be the actual first steps toward the moneyless and stateless goal put forth in this comic.
It is really funny (read: not funny but sad) that you think our current system is working. This post has such big “I have not thought about this at all and am out of ideas” energy that I can’t engage with it seriously.
Do you own a summer cottage right now? What percentage of people do? Will not owning that cottage impact anyone’s life in a meaningful way?
But yea, sure, let’s have a few hundred people own more wealth and thus influence than the rest of the world as a whole! It’s the best way to make sure the people a step or two below those few hundred get to have a summer cottage! This really makes society the best it can be!
How would a transition to socialism work in practice?
Decade by decade, have more things be run by the government rather than for-profit enterprises.
For example, in the 2020s, the US could transition to a Swiss-style healthcare system. In that kind of system, everybody would have insurance provided by a private company, but the most basic plan would be very cheap and offered by every company, and there were subsidies available so nobody in the country was uninsured, no matter what their financial situation. The US could also have a government owned bank that operated out of every post office that provided extremely basic banking services with zero fees. Private banks would still be able to compete with that, but they’d have to compete on extra services that the government bank didn’t offer.
In the 2030s you could tackle education and housing. All state-owned universities could offer education with a $0 tuition and all textbooks available digitally for free. Maybe for some majors you’d have to agree to provide some public service to offset the cost of that education. Like, a doctor might have to agree to serve for 5 years in a remote area that typically doesn’t have good medical coverage. Or, a lawyer might have to spend 5 years working as a public defender. For housing, the government could buy and own housing. Any citizen could get an apartment and pay a low monthly rent directly to the government. Subsidize that rent so that if someone couldn’t afford to pay any rent, they could still live there. Private homes could still exist, and would be more spacious and more luxurious, but everybody would at least be able to start with something decent.
Then you could tackle transportation. Tax private vehicles and use that to fund public transit. As transit got better, fewer and fewer people would feel the need for the luxury of their own vehicle, but those who did could continue to subsidize public transit for the rest (instead of the current situation where cities subsidize drivers).
Then you could look into food. Maybe everyone gets the equivalent of food stamps. Maybe instead of throwing money at private farmers to grow corn, making corn so cheap that it’s almost free, resulting in awful things like high fructose corn syrup in everything, the government could be responsible for some basic crops, and allow private farmers to grow specialty things / luxuries.
Media would be easy – just set up something like the BBC but for the US. Most other countries in the world have something similar.
Bit by bit, just chip away at all the for-profit things and allow the government to either take it over entirely, or to provide a bare-bones version that was available to everybody, while allowing people to keep running their own private for-profit ones that offer a more luxurious experience for people who want to pay more.
have more things be run by the government rather than for-profit enterprises
Who has these things happen and how?
What happens to pensions/retirement savings
These are still paid. Socialism is concerned with the means of production, not what amount to bank accounts.
land ownership
If it’s a personal residence, it’s cool. If it’s a business’s privately-owned land, it’s up for grabs if the local community has a better use for it
inheritance
See the above distinctions. Money is secondary and personal property is fine, private property is liable to be taken.
the apartment your are renting out to pay for your own rent
Either the cost of your rent is dramatically reduced or your housing is turned into some type of cooperative, so there’s no need to exploit someone else to make rent.
I would like to encourage you to read Engels’ “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”.
Summer cottage? Family farm?
One fairly straightforward plan is the nationalization of housing. If you own and occupy your primary residence, you may stay. If you have a secondary residence, you can keep it as a vacation home. If you own more than that, they’re going to go to the state. Pick two. If you’re a renter, and you occupy that place, it’s now yours. Anytime someone is moving, the government has the right to first refusal, which it will always utilize. Effectively, the governments buys the house back each time, and then sells it again to someone new. If you die your home can go to a family member/designated person. No one may more than 2 homes, no one may sell a home to another individual directly, though the transfer/sale of a home to a specified individual can be arranged through the government. All rents/mortgages are income based, and payments end after 5 years.
Cuba has done this fairly successfully. Yugoslavia had a similar system. No, it’s not the best system imaginable, nor is it super popular with the
fucking leechesowner class, but it’s viable, doable, and simple enough to set up while insuring that all people may be homed.This is also the way it works in Singapore, where you essentially lease an abode for life
The way I heard it explained that made the most sense is personal vs private property. If it’s something a person uses regularly. Personal property. Otherwise public property that can be leased short term for production and business use. But never owned by a large parasitic business/corporation that will horde resources and foul the land with no concern for others.
the government has the right to first refusal
the transfer/sale of a home to a specified individual can be arranged through the government
And time and time again this has lead to people in the government abusing this power and assuring for themselves and their families a completely different standard of living than the rest of the population. I’ve lived in a socialist country and the end was not pretty.
It sounds great on paper and has proven great on small scales (with the option to leave the community if you want), but on larger scales human nature always messes things up.
Sure, so let’s try nothing, because the current system works so well. I mean, what with us having solved homelessness, having equality, and fixing the climate, I can’t imagine why we should do something different.
I understand that you’ve had a bad experience, and I also understand that the real world examples of nation states claiming to be socialist have been less than ideal, but, as a species, we have to decide what is more important, because we’re running out of time. I’m not a Soviet fan boy or a tankie, I’m an anti authoritarian, libertarian socialist. But it’s a bit like the US election right now. I don’t like Kamala, but I’ll take her over Trump, and continue to work outside of that to achieve my actual goals. I don’t like state socialism, but it’s better than what we’ve got. If the biggest problem with socialist states has been corruption in the upper echelons of power, then that is excellent real world data to draw from when we considering alternatives to both our current system and the experiments of the past. Strict transparency, more citizen involvement, less concentration of power. Sure, again, not my ideal system, but it’s something better. We have examples to draw from, both in failures and successes. Yugoslavia had a lot more personal freedoms than the USSR, and a strong focus on worker cooperatives. Cuba has managed to create one of the best healthcare systems in the world with shoestrings and belt buckles. The USSR gives us an example of just how quickly progress can be made in areas like industrialization, crucial information that could help us in the transition to renewable energy. The US and Western Europe have created citizenry that are unwilling to accept, at least in theory, authoritarian, iron-fist control. We absolutely can create something that blends these philosophies, but it is imperative that it’s focus be on the creation of an egalitarian society that works towards ending tyranny, which includes the tyranny of workers, and seeks to solve the climate crises. We do not have a choice if we want to survive the next few decades.
Sure, so let’s try nothing, because the current system works so well.
Not where I was going with it. There are definitely a lot of things that should be done, especially in the US, which I wouldn’t even call socialist, just common sense (like universal healthcare). But you can’t tell people “you’re not all equal” and suddenly they all believe it. That’s why most socialist countries were also authoritarian. Maybe over many generations of progressive change things can go differently.
Most socialist states have been authoritarian because most of them of were authoritarian before their socialist movements. They are a product of their own cultures. In addition, most are authoritarian because they’re attempting to recreate the successes of the Soviet revolution, and using their system as a baseline.
Also, my first paragraph in that comment was aggressive and I apologize for that. I should have come better than that. But the fact remains, socialism is not the problem. Authoritarianism is. They’re not one and the same, nor is one required for the other.
Human nature? Which part of human nature? Humans are multifaceted. Also, there has never been an example of socialism in practice, even moderate social democracy that secured domestic mineral and oil resources for its own people, that hasn’t come under direct attack, invasion, embargo, sanction, etc., by western capitalist powers. It usually isn’t human nature messing things up, its direct capitalist imperialist intervention.
Also what model of human nature are you using? I prefer the dialectical construction of Benedict Spinoza in his book Ethics, have you ever considered what you mean by it or where you picked it up from? I see a lot of hand waving about human nature from people, but no description of what it actually is. How do you know you aren’t using a flawed concept in your determination?
When socialists say they want to collectivize private property, they use a meaning of private property which equates to “means of production”, or “capital”. The goal is that there won’t be owners of capital earning money simply by employing other people to work the capital and stealing a part of what they produce (surplus value).
In your example, summer cottages and family farms aren’t means of production, so there’s no reason to redistribute them. Pensions and retirement were guaranteed to everyone even in the USSR, where women retired at 55 and men at 60, so I can guarantee socialists want you to have a pension. Small businesses that employ other employees would have to be collectivized eventually, which could mean that the owner simply becomes one normal worker in the business, working alongside the previous employees instead of above them. Regarding the apartment, you don’t need to rent out an apartment if the rent of your apartment costs 3-5% of your income (as was the case in the Soviet Union). Land ownership and inheritance are a bit grey. Obviously nobody wants to collectivize your nana’s wedding dress, or your dad’s funko pop collection. Obviously we would want to collectivize if you inherit a big factory, or 20 flats that your mom rented out. For things in the middle, it becomes a bit more grey, so there’s no easy answer. I bet everyone would agree that uprooting people isn’t generally a good thing.
The exact plan is something that would be developed based on the political-economic situation that led to the revolution in the first leave and the needs that arose. There can be no perfect prescription because one cannot predict the exact situation we will inherit.
Immediately following revolution in the Russian Empire, the Bolsheviks had to fight a war against invading capitalist forces and domestic capitalist revanchists. They implemented forms of fatm collectivization that were largely restorative of traditional practice but without feudal lords and while also attempting to industrialize. This went less efficiently than needed so they adopted the NEP, then abandoned it for further central planning once its purpose was fulfilled. They ensured housing for all, placed doctors, cafes, and housing at factories, invested heavily in infrastructure and education, promoted women as part of the workforce and larger society against patriarchal attitudes, and prepared for the inevitable further invasion by capitalists, this time the fascists. They built based on their ability to control the means of production by and for those who work and based on the conditions they faced. They faced poverty, landlordism, a poor level of industrialization and infrastructure, joblessness, external military threats, etc. They implemented many policies over time attempting to work around hurdles, most of them imposed by capitalist countries trying to destroy them.
In China, they faced an even greater level of landlordism, of petty landowners that would routinely exercise inordinate control over people’s lives and abuse them. China was even poorer than the Russian Empire, being a colonized country forced to subjugate its economy to foreign capitalusts. China had to fight a war against Japanese invaders and developed in the context of not just a liberatory nationalism but a betrayal of the communists by the KMT. They similarly had to industrialize, to deal with poverty, to deal with foreign aggression from capitalists that promptly encircled them and instituted sanctions. They achieved transformatiobs never before seen, of skyrocketing life expectancy, an end to famines, industrialization without stealing through colonialism.
When revolution comes to your country, what state will it be in? Will you have to kill neofascists that started a civil war? Will you need to rebuild a militant labor movement? Will there be an economic underclass most poised to contribute and then make demands of the transition?
Basically, when the working class has a liberatory victory, it can now more directly demand change. What changes will be a product of what is needed for the working class’s own interests. In Cuba many villages had no doctor and essential medical care required a group of people to carry the sick for a day or more. So they built hospitals and trained doctors. They now have the best medical system in the world for a country with their size and wealth.
Anyways with that said I’ll try to answer your specific questions.
Summer cottage?
lol who cares? A second home in a country full of homeless people!? I cannot be asked to care. Most likely it will be ignored because socialists are far too kind.
Family farm?
If you live in a rich, Western country these no longer exist. Farms are large agribusinesses owned by companies. Pappy had to sell his farm to them in the 70s and 80s.
What happens to pensions/retirement savings
These are numbers on a spreadsheet that are currently held by a bank or government. Their purpose is to guarantee retirement. During any real revolution the banks in question will be seized and repurposed, possibly even abolished depending on conditions, as they are the organ of society most antagonistic to us. There is no guarantee that the accounts will have anything in them nor that the government would have had any legitimacy to guarantee retirement before we won. They will try to take the money and run. They don’t care about your pension, lol. It’s just capital for them to lend out and make profits from.
Traditionally, socialists have simply guaranteed retirement via the state. An actual guarantee. And because socialists have also traditionally made so much of life available at no or low direct cost to the individual (housing, healthcare, transportation, food), this mostly just means you get to live your life exactly the same but just don’t have to work.
land ownership
If the socialists are competent they will make the state the owner of all land and then figure out how to use previously corporate land for the public good and find a reasonable compromise on personal land. But it really depends on the conditions of revolution. Is land reform a revolutionary promise? What land and for what purpose?
inheritance
Should probably be largely abolushed but this also depends on the revolution. Nobody is coming for granny’s keepsakes but you don’t get to inherit the slave plantation.
small businesses
This is a term used for tax purposes in certain rich Western countries. It’s not really meaningful for when to expropriate and plan, for example. Many industries should not even exist, they are parasitic, and this includes many small businesses. Smart socialists will not make decisions based solely on a tax bracket aside from needing to be practical about how to allocate transitions and planning resources. For example, China institutes more control over businesses as they become larger, both via government oversight and worker control.
the apartment your are renting out to pay for your own rent…
If you’re doing that you’re a financial idiot lol. Much better for the state to allocate your housing and keep you away from such decisions.
Socialists have traditionally guaranteed housing via various mechanisms, starting with building enough of it and ensuring it exists where people should be for economic activity. Connect it to transit, make it available bear industry and retail, etc.
Yeah, I know, these things tend to be out of reach for younger folks these days, precisely because of hyper wealth concentration.
Basically everything you mentioned is out of reach for the vast majority of humanity due to the capitalsti system. You’re describing things that only the petite bourgeouis in impeeialist countries even think about. This us a very small number of privileged people even in those countries.
So with billionaires and mega corps out of the picture, the question still stands.
It doesn’t stand at all, you are just unfamiliar with two centuries of working class political struggle and geopolitics. This is understandable, as Western educations do their very best to ignore most of it and misinform about the rest. One of the things they teach is the cartoonish impracticality of socialist systems that they describe with fanciful and false stories, basically fairy tales to appease reactionary capitalists that promote such propaganda in the first place and, for example, dictate what textbooks the Texas Board of Education buys and therefore the content in classrooms nationwide.
The untold reality is that socialists are actually very practical and realistic people that build from the needs of the wider working class and have traditionally tracked commodity prices and investments and military funding allocations and run and led worker revolrs and run and led wars of liberation. We are practical to a fault and endeavor to understand the world as it is and what is needed to liberate ourselves from an oppressive system and offer a vision of: what if we built this world for ourselves and not bankers or a noncorporeal profit-generating machine?
i thought the crying guy was Hatsune Miku at first LOL
This cartoon makes some bad assumptions.
“the workers (aka the proletariat) own their own workplace” That’s one way to do it, or you could have that happen indirectly where the workplace is owned by the government and the workers “own” it indirectly. Most firefighters don’t work for a for-profit company, but it’s also not a firefighter-owned company that goes and sells firefighting services to businesses that don’t want to burn down. A worker-owned company might make sense in certain situations, say a clothing store. You wouldn’t necessarily want a central government owning all garment manufacturing and sales. A worker-owned collective is probably a better match. You might have a worker-owned sports store that focuses on selling sports gear, and a worker-owned wedding gown store that focuses on that market. Most people are more familiar with the government-owned model, and that’s also socialism.
“production is then planned by elected committees”… why? That’s the communist way, but that’s not necessarily how a socialist system has to operate. And, in many cases, an “elected committee” is absolutely the wrong way. In countries with state-provided healthcare, there’s a government minister who is in charge of health, and their ministry hires the experts needed to run the healthcare system. I definitely don’t think that system would be improved if an elected committee were in charge of running things. You might still have worker-representation in those setups. For example, the nurses could belong to a union, and a union rep would be part of decision making. But, an elected committee is a weird fit in many situations.
“increases in productivity continuously reduce the work week”… that’s just not likely. People who have high paying jobs could sometimes demand a shorter work week, and occasionally they do. But, often they want a more luxurious life in their time off rather than a less luxurious life and lots of time off. I’m not talking about CEOs and other people who are workaholics and own multiple mansions. I’m talking about dentists and engineers who are willing to keep working a standard 40 hour week so that they can take trips around the world, or buy a nice cottage near a lake, or treat their kids to nice presents.
This way of presenting socialism is going to give people the wrong idea.
In countries with state-provided healthcare, there’s a government minister who is in charge of health, and their ministry hires the experts needed to run the healthcare system. I definitely don’t think that system would be improved if an elected committee were in charge of running things
Maybe not running things, but the input of local committees could be very welcome. Increasing the number of specialists of some kind because of popular desire, putting a clinic in X part of the neighborhood because there are a lot of reduced-mobility people who could benefit from it nearby, transparency meetings where the expenditure is explained to the people…
“increases in productivity continuously reduce the work week”… that’s just not likely. People who have high paying jobs could sometimes demand a shorter work week, and occasionally they do. But, often they want a more luxurious life in their time off rather than a less luxurious life and lots of time off
Ideally, each worker would be able to decide what they want, and shift between different working hours on different stages of life. Construction worker who only wants to have the basics and a lot of leisure time? 20h workweek. Scientist crazy for research who wants to spend a lot of time in the lab? 40h workweek. Said scientist decides to have a kid and wants to reduce to 25h workweek? Done.
The idea is that workers would be able to make those decisions themselves instead of relying on the good-will of their corporate overlords, it doesn’t mean everybody has to be present in every democratic decision if they don’t want to, or that everyone needs to have identical working conditions.
Question. How can we be sure to trust that the elected committees do not turn society into an authoritarian regime? Would it work like standard western democracy, i.e. electing a party / parties to form a “government” (in this case committee; semantics)?
All committees are authoritarian regimes, if they have any power. Making any decisions with power to back it up is authoritarian.
The question is whether you want decisions made by 500 bankers and some military conteactors or by collective deliberative organs that respond to the needs of the people at large, and assuming the latter, how do you make them function robustly?
A smart approach would borrow from the successes of others while allowing a bit of experimentation. Most real-world sociakist systems have implemented both a bottom-up local governance system for some domains and top-diwo national level policies for other domains. There is a real-world practical need for both.
Re: The councils in this cartoon, they are referring to, more or less, workplace democracy. Practically speaking, this requires a similar system: workers deciding how to run their company but also there is a need for national/regional coordination, for capital investment, and to balance against the bourgeois tendencies of what is basically a wirkers’ cooperative.
A key promise of socialism is not to immediately establish utopia, but to set the groundwork for how we may develop society for ourselves. There may be a form of workers’ councils that you prefer but that I might critique as unworkable in the current world. But it would surely be something made possible by socialist steuggle over time, as the comic explains: we would work to decrease necessary work time, to live our lives more how we want to. Once free if, say, imperiakist wars and expensive dirty energy, perhaps local workers’ council politics can adopt a simpler, more fair and autonomous form.
Basically, deconstructing oppressive systems would be an ongoing process that would have to be weighed against what is “more important” (e.g. not getting nuked), not one leap. So the form taken would depend on the context of how we win, what threats we face, borroeing from others’ successes, and how our experiments go.
The key is in one of the words you’ve said:
ELECTED committee
You don’t have to trust that they won’t turn authoritarian. If you see authoritarian tendencies and you don’t like them, you vote them out.
Would it work like standard western democracy, i.e. electing a party / parties to form a “government”
That depends on who you ask. An anarchist will tell you no, a communist will tell you a different answer, etc. I’m a Marxist-Leninist so I’ll answer to that as a Marxist-Leninist.
In a Marxist-Leninist state, there is only one party. In the same way that your country only have one justice system, your country only has one socialized system of healthcare (if at all), etc, there would be need only for one party: the party that represents the interests of the workers. This party would have a vanguard of communist intellectuals (liable to being removed from their position by popular vote), who would be in a constant back-and-forth democratic dialogue with the workers and their representation in worker-councils. The needs and demands of the workers would be translated to Marxist ideology, which is flexible depending on the circumstances, the culture, and the society it’s applied to, and policy would be drafted, approved and adopted.
A good example of this in action is detailed in a book called “how the workers’ parliaments saved the Cuban Revolution”, by Pedro Ross. It details the immense level of popular participation in the drafting, approval, implementation and execution of policy in Cuba during the 1990s “periodo especial”, a huge economic crisis precipitated by the dissolution of their biggest trading partner, the USSR. Literal millions of people, through their unions and through worker councils, participated democratically in deciding which sectors of the economy they wanted to preserve most, which ones least, which workers are redundant and which aren’t, which goods and services should be prioritised in the planned economy, how to organize local organic farms everywhere (including workplaces) in order to minimize food imports… All of this happened in a back-and-forth, multi-year exercise, between the top representatives of the government, the specialists (e.g. economists, hospital directors, transit company directors, etc.), and the direct representatives of the people through the worker’s councils. It’s truly one of the most explicit and overwhelming examples of democracy that I’ve ever encountered.
What do you think about people who claim only having one party is undemocratic? I do believe there should be a certain freedom to form parties of your own and eventually run for election, but this is standard in most western countries and I’m unsure if I’m missing some benefit to only having one party. Genuine question by the way.
I’m not the person you asked and they surely have a better answer, but I thought I’d throw some things out there:
A lot of what are understandably called “one party states” are not technically one party. The DPRK has like three other parties and I’m pretty sure there are countless parties all over the PRC. It’s still reasonable to refer to these countries as one party states because they have some kind of constitutional provision preventing any other party from taking power at the highest levels, but they still use multiple parties as a means of representing diverse interests.
Our comrade VI evidently knows way more about Cuba than I, but something I happen to know is that, when you run for office in Cuba, you are not the candidate of any party, you are effectively independent. I think that they conceptualize what a party is in a very different way. In America, the political parties are literally private entities, with all the legal ramifications that entails, and are effectively companies pushing brands in order to get money from donors via held seats (that’s a crude generalization, but I think it works well enough). In the “one party states” I know of, the “one party” is considered to be part of the governing apparatus itself, rather than something that exists outside it seeking to influence it. It’s all a conjoined project that way.
I personally think that, assuming there is actual democracy in terms of the government needing to enact the popular will, a one party state is probably a more coherent way of having society united in its various projects, even if the proverbial ship needs to change course now and then for whatever reason. That’s just my feeling though, and it’s mainly informed by the overwhelming sense one gets if they follow American elections that they are engineered at every level to be anti-democratic.
Thanks for being open to discussion, I appreciate it. I’ll start talking about the reality of multi-party systems and liberal democracy.
Generally, multi-party systems aren’t democratic if we adhere to the definition that “the power of legislation is in the hands of the people”, which I think would be a good premise for a parliamentary multi-party system. Ideally, you’d choose a platform in elections, which has a given program, or even create your own platform if you don’t feel represented enough. Then, this platform supports its program in a Congress, and votes through representatives to pass legislation according to its program. Sounds good, but let’s examine whether the policy that people want to enact is actually passed, and whether policy that people don’t want to enact is passed.
We can start with the case of the US. The vast majority of Americans support an extended universal healthcare system of some sort. The technical details are a bit hazy, but the reality is that most people would support such a system as poll after poll shows. Yet, the years pass, and there’s basically no progress in this direction, how is this democratic? How come if a majority of people support this, it’s not pushed forwards and legislated? It’s the same with abortion rights, a vast majority of Americans believe in legal abortion rights for women, yet no legislation is passed in that regard and many states actually go backwards. A majority would support increased taxes on the extra-wealthy and on big companies. Study after study show that public opinion is one of the worst predictors for policy, i.e., there’s barely any correlation at all between polls on policy, and actual passing of policy. Can we say that there’s an actual democracy in the US, when the interests of the people don’t correlate with legislation?
I’ll talk about Europe now, since I’m Spanish and it’s a closer example to me. Recently we assisted to the outrageous example of Macron unilaterally skipping Congress to increase the retirement age against the desires of basically the entirety of France. Huge protests broke out, he was vilified in social media, and all polls showed that this was an extremely unpopular decision. Yet it passed. The same happened all over the EU during the 2010 Euro crisis. Austerity policy was enforced by the authorities everywhere: lowering expenditure on healthcare, education and public retirement pensions, reducing investment in infrastructure, increasing taxes such as VAT… Again, this was extremely unpopular and against the desires of most people. It’s been a decade and a half since then, and these austerity policies are still in place. VAT is still higher than it was, expenditure in healthcare and education hasn’t increased to the levels prior to the crisis… Yet another example of blatant anti-democracy. If the policy isn’t carried out with the will of the people, the system isn’t democratic.
I could go on giving examples of failed cases of policy in multi-party systems, but now I’ll do the opposite and bring examples of multi-party systems that actually applied popular policy.
Salvador Allende was a Chilean leftist politician in the previous century, who was elected by a majority of citizens to carry out nationalizations of the mining industry (the heart of the economy of the country at the time), and to improve the welfare state. His term didn’t last very long at all, because when popular policy started being actually enacted in a democratic fashion, a fascist coup murdered him and replaced him with a fascist dictator.
In the Spanish Second Republic, a similar thing happened. In the 30s, a very progressive leftist government was elected, and promised to carry out land reform, i.e. expropriation from big landowners and redistribution of land to the farmers in a country which was primarily agrarian. It suffered the same fate: a fascist coup, a bloody civil war, and almost 40 years of fascism.
In Iran, under the administration of Mosaddegh, a leftist secular politician who wanted to make sure that the Iranian oil was profiting the majority of Iranians instead of the Shah and a few British companies, nationalised the oil industry. This was met with economical blockade, with paid actors pretending to be communists destroying private property to agitate people, and fake protests organized by the mafia funded by the MI6 and the CIA ousting him from the government.
Now let’s go to a period in which actually progressive policy was passed in Europe in a popular and democratic fashion: the post-WW2 period. Under the looming threat of a socialist revolution, and the high level of labour organization through unions, the governments of Europe were successfully pressured into passing meaningful legislation on the limit of working hours per week, on progressive tax systems, on welfare state (healthcare, education and pensions)…
So it seems to me, that the only way to make governments pass actually progressive and democratic policy that most people agree with, is through the organization of workers and the threat of a communist revolution. That, if people just vote socialists into power without organizing labor, they suffer coups, that if they vote social-democrats they get austerity and antidemocratic policy. What percentage of Europe agreed to increase the military budget after the start of the war in Ukraine? I’m not trying to argue whether that’s a good or a bad policy, I’m just saying all polls showed it was an originally unpopular decision, yet it was carried out.
If the only way to enforce governments to enact popular, progressive and democratic policy, is through the organization of labor, then why would I want multi-party systems instead of a system of representation of workers in a single, unified, democratic structure?
I know it’s a long answer, but I appreciate it if you made it to the end.
A good example of this in action is detailed in a book called “how the workers’ parliaments saved the Cuban Revolution”, by Pedro Ross.
That sounds like a fascinating book! I’ve always been interested in the nitty gritty of how the Cuban democratic process works, and this book seems accessible and is just under 200 pages (not including the appendices/bibliography) so I might actually get through it.
Here’s a temporary download if anyone wants to grab it (it’s also just on libgen if you prefer to find it yourself)
Thanks for posting the link!
Rather than a dry, aseptic description of the Cuban institutions and form of government, the book reads as a historical account of the process that took place in the years of the Periodo Especial.
The second half of the book, for some reason, is a recount of the Cuban revolution and its historical causes, which you may or may not skip reading depending on what your purpose is with the book.
Thanks for providing a link!
gestures broadly at elected officials now
What’s your point?
Yes and no. Most Marxists advocate for a form of Whole-Process People’s Democracy, or Soviet Democracy. Essentially, the idea is that, rather than just having state, local, and federal elections (as a brief example), there are far more rungs you can directly elect and participate in. This ideally holds people accountable better than western democracies do.
I’ll jump in with an extra question here if I may:
So say you have two companies, doing more or kess the same thing, company A and company B.
If the workers in those companies detain their respective means of production, why wouldn’t they want to do what we see today:
“Hire” the best ones from the other company, grow so they all get more of it, intimidate concurrence etc? I mean it’s not just because there are lots of bosses instead of just some, that it will solve those problems?
Also, if company A does well, won’t people apply for work there, but ot for company B that (say) does less well? Wouldnt company A try to limit hired if they don’t fall in line with what they are thinking/doing etc.?
I just see the same system but with artificial blocks for the most obvious things, blocks people (who want it, I mean those crazy prycopathic bosses will still be around, they’re just not a CEO any more) will just work around.
Moneyless society is such BS. Have fun writing an IOU for 30 avacados
The very concept of money has changed a lot for the past 200 years. In Marx’s time, the dominating view of money was that of a trading good like any other. Economists wrongly believed that money had appeared through barter, that primitive economies were barter economies, and that money, originally as fragments of precious metals, appeared from its convenience of being small and relatively weightless, easy to divide, long-lasting and impervious to rotting, etc. properties. Nowadays we understand that money appeared as a quantifier of debt, in centralized economies where one central authority would request goods and services to be provided by the subjects of that authority. These debt-notes would eventually turn into money.
Many modern economists understand money not as yet another commodity, but as a debt-measuring utility. Money would be, in short, a quantification of the right to request something from society. “Moneyless” society was understood at a time where money was poorly understood. For example, if you fix the prices of most goods and services, or even provide them at no cost, then what’s the point of money? Many people argue that the Rouble in the late USSR (70s onward) wasn’t really a currency at all. If money stops being a good indicator of the amount of goods and services that you can obtain, is it really money anymore?
This just goes to say that Marxism is open to discussion, and that everything should be analyzed with the most current and applicable knowledge, and be subjected to the harshest scrutiny. You’re very welcome to discuss the implications of a moneyless society, I just suggest that you do it in a more well-versed and less authoritative way than you did in your last comment.
I’m not sure where to start to reply since your last paragraph indicates that you have taken my slight at moneyless socety as a challenge, I’m guessing it’s a concept that you believe in. You provided a bit of information about money but you didn’t provide any insight into what a moneyless society might look like and you didn’t provide any information to convince someone that this is a feasible concept. Your closest attempt seems to be a comparison between money as debt and money as a store of value, where they are different versions of money. In order to be without something I suppose you must define what it is that you are without, though- so you did do that. What you didn’t do is provide any convincing information for a moneyless society. The question about whether the Rouble was really money is a question about the definition of money. Any token or note that can be exchanged for an item of value is money. In a bartering system you will have IOUs (Promise notes) as items are delivered on different schedules. Without money people will be waiting around with IOUs waiting for goods to be delivered. I don’t think it could ever work. I do appreciate the conversation as you’ve made me think about organizing society in full scale as opposed to organizing society into smaller groups each with their own ability to do everything, like work camps. As for your suggestion that I discuss things in a less authoritative way- it’s just sarcasm. A moneyless society would suck. Waiting around with an IOU for avacados that you are owed for eggs that you produced is going to be terribly inefficient and a lot of extra work.
You provided a bit of information about money but you didn’t provide any insight into what a moneyless society might look like and you didn’t provide any information to convince someone that this is a feasible concept
That’s simply because I’m not particularly well-versed into the advantages or disadvantages of moneyless societies, and I’m not particularly for or against them, if anything I’m im favour of the existence of a centralized currency as we have now. My point was only that discussion is l best done when nuanced and interested, and not “but avocado”. My point was also that Marxist terms are to be discussed and revised at all times, and maybe you’re right and moneyless societies aren’t the best alternative given our modern knowledge of money.
Regarding the second half of your paragraph, my problems with IOUs are a bit different. The problem with non-centralized, promise-based forms of money, is that they’re very prone to being violated, and that barter is a very inefficient form of exchange of goods and services. I’m not well-versed in the concept of a moneyless economy, but I’m a bit more well-versed in the nature of money. For example, money’s worth doesn’t come from “everyone agreeing that it’s worth something for some reason”. It comes from taxation. A central authority, in this case the state, imposes compulsory taxes using the monopoly of violence, in a given currency. The fact that people will have to pay their taxes in that particular currency, means that they need to obtain that currency in the first place to pay said taxes. This makes people more likely to engage in economic activity with that currency, since it’s suddenly very useful for everyone in order to pay their compulsory taxes. Taxes are also very useful as a redistribution mechanism. All in all, a central currency whose monetary policy is decided collectively by the workers in a democratic fashion, can be argued to be a useful thing for a democratic communist society. I’m sure there are arguments against this but I’m not very well versed in the critique as I said.
Conclusion: question everything, but let’s do it in a serious way to improve our knowledge and to possibly envision better societies.
Are you familiar with the bartering system? Rather than money, you would judge the value of the object by how much you needed it. If you really wanted the avocados, you would ask the person who had avocados what they would trade. If you didn’t have what they wanted, you can bargain or try someone else who has avocados who wants what you currently have.
Basically, a money less society goes back to a very simplified society. You won’t be able to get everything you want and will have to, sometimes, settle for what you currently have. It also gives you the ability to trade your skills.
So, you go back to the avocado trader and tell them that you’ll build an avocado shed for them in exchange for a crate of avocados. You both negotiate, exchange and then move on.
It’s more work because you have seized the means of production by making things yourself in order to trade, rather than off shoring to someone else who is likely not getting paid at all. This is why the wealthy absolutely don’t want this system because it’s more work for them, while in the lower class it’ll give more control back. When balancing, there will always be people who lose and people who gain.
Hey so the barter system never really existed, not in any real way. There were absolutely communal living pockets, like peasant villages in Russia, but barter would not work as a basis for a socialist society. You seem to have some interest in this stuff, so I think you should read Marx and Engels, and work your way through some of their economic stuff till you can work through Capital. Its a fucking fantastic book, but its pretty difficult, especially solo. Lots of great resources out there though, like David Harvey’s lectures and the Reading Capital With Comrades podcast. But start with Socialism: Utopian and Scientific which will prepare you for their analytical style, then read Wage Labor and Capital, or Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Sorry if you’re already familiar with some of this work but I figured from reading your comment that this stuff might still be new to you.
It sucks we were taught about the barter system in school, but that’s just some shit Adam Smith made up, he didn’t have any historical or material basis for it. Yet they still teach it as part of the liberal illusions about capital and private property.
Interesting read and I can see how the lack of a monetary authority leaves less chance for exploitation. However, in 2024 we’ve lived for about 8 years in a world with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is decentralized and immutable. It has made the world take a second look at the concept of money. I don’t see how cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin should not exist in your society. Rather than carry an IOU for avacados I can just take my Bitcoin or whatever over to someone who has avacados in stock. You wouldn’t want that ability?
Socialism probably won’t be moneyless. Communism is moneyless but that’s a long ways away and there are no shortcuts. In any case, the value form is a nightmare, and has to be overcome. Ever heard of alienation, like from a Marxist perspective? The idea is that the extrinsic social relation we call “value,” has become so internalized that we can’t tell the difference between ourselves and commodities. On some level, we are always comparing things to other things, a new vacuum cleaner holds more value than a used pencil for an extreme example. Everything is reduced to what it is worth money-wise, which is a development that is unique to capitalism. And we even do it to ourselves and each other, comparing ourselves based on how much money we make, or how much cool stuff we have. So much so that Marx simplified this whole complex social clusterfuck called alienation as, “material relations between people, social relations between things.” And this is all tied to the value form, which is not a social necessity, but under our current system it is. Capitalism steals our humanity and turns it into value which is a measurement taken in dollars. And I don’t know about you, but I’m not too keen on having my time, labor and humanity robbed from me, but more importantly I’ll never get it back unless we take it back, all of the workers together demanding only what we already own, and what was taken from us.
Username does not check out
After reading this, i now understand less about socialism.
What part is confusing?
If people who make things own them, who manages the “big picture” ideas? CEO pay tells me that requires the power of thousands of
peasantsworkers.Elected officials and councils.
This comic makes a ton of logical leaps, by which i mean that it assumes that the reader is already familiar with certain information and leaves it implied. More broadly, it seems to assume that the audience already agrees that communism is the best. I’m particularly annoyed at the second pannel describing a command economy in a very short and unconvincing way, as if the audience already knows and agrees.
I have a rudimentary knowledge of political taxonomy and this is very very confusing.
But you know what, at least it’s written in plain language. A mistake that communists often make is using their vocabulary (alienation, ideology, bourgeoisie) as if everyone knows what it means, i’m glad this isn’t the case here
“But what if one day I get generational wealth? I better vote against anything that might reduce poverty and wealth inequality!” - republican voters
I wonder if some common pitfalls like too much party control over committees, lying about quotas for financial gain, and the vulnerabilities of a society in revolt could be squeezed in, or perhaps covered in a second image.
Orthodox Marxism isn’t always enough, and is not beyond revision and improvements (hence the many neo-marxists). Critical Theorists have addressed Marxism as well as Capitalism after all.
That said, the post is good and educational as is, and has my up vote.
See you at the first plenary session comarades!
It surprises me so that any functioning democracy isn’t automatically socialist.
It infuriates me that our countries are called „democracies“. Why is our economy not democratic than? The economy is mostly ruled like any feudal empire.
Well, it just goes back to the root of the word. Ancient Greece, where the word democracy comes from, was far from what we would call a democracy nowadays.
Not only did they own slaves (who obviously could not vote) but the only people that could vote, as far as I remember, were landed men. If you were not a man, or did not own land, you could not vote.
But yeah, I agree with your point.
Most of them are, to limited degrees. America has the Post Office, interstate roadways, public education for children, public libraries, and many other government services that are fundamentally socialist in nature.
We don’t call them that because of propaganda. And many in government (especially on the right) work very hard to destroy those systems because they are socialist and empower workers.
The idea of letting the “free market” manage these things is insane and always leads to bad outcomes, we have tried this before. People who say “economic planning doesn’t work” only exist because economic planning allowed them to live freely and be educated enough to form those big words instead of being locked to the land they were born on as peasant workers.
Words I can agree to.
That’s the central question of Reform or Revolution, and why the majority of Leftists believe Reform to be too unlikely to outright impossible, and therefore Revolution the correct path. Rosa Luxemburg wrote about it in Reform or Revolution.
But why is reform not happening?
To greatly simplify a complex and still contested issue, Capitalist States are designed to prevent it. Using the US as an example, the two party FPTP system is designed to prevent third parties from winning, leaving the only 2 parties that can gain the bulk of Capitalist support. Even in the event of Leftists winning, the Military will often coup the leader with the help of the US, like Allende in Chile.
Because the bourgeois were happy to get power when they were excluded from it in the monarchy, but they are very much not happy to leave peasants get any power.
Francr history is very telling of this. The question of how the elections should be made was a hot topic. Representative democracy is something the bourgeoisie wants because it allows it to stay in power. Because the bourgeois are better armed to be elected than the people. Rousseau warned of this even before the first French revolution.
I’m sure the US revolution went the same way. The crazy US voting system looks very much like it was crafted for the bourgeois to stay keep all the power.
Market socialism also exists, just to remind everyone.
If you Google “define socialism”, you’ll get a sentence saying socialism is when tve means of production are owned OR regulated by the people.
So you can still have what we have right now, no need for any sort of fundamental change, except proper regulation, meaning actually good labour laws and proper taxation for the wealthy.
Finland and other Nordics are arguably market socialist.
And yes, I know how many will disagree. Here in Finland, less so.
By any reasonable dictionary (as well as classic definition), capitalism is defined by private property of the means of production. Socialism is defined by common ownership of the means of production, not “regulation”. What you call “market socialism” is just regulated capitalism.
Nothing wrong with having any position, and we should strive for what’s best instead of trying to correspond to certain terms, but what you suggest is, by definition, not socialism.
And I kinda hate it when we move the goalposts, especially with American politician calling literally any bit of social policy “socialism”. No it’s not.
No it isn’t.
Capitalism doesn’t have a monopoly on privately owned businesses.
“By any reasonable definition” you seem to mean “this is what I think for some reason I’m not even entirely sure of, and I’m too lazy to even Google what you said”.
Now see, which should I believe, the actual consensus of the literature on economics and political philosophy… or some random dude online who’s rhetoric of “byaah no no that’s just capitalism socialism is communism” I’ve seen literally thousands of times?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_ownership
However, the articulation of models of market socialism where factor markets are utilized for allocating capital goods between socially owned enterprises broadened the definition to include autonomous entities within a market economy.
Cooperatives, while not being owned by a single private person, are still held by private people.
You can cry all you want but capitalism isn’t synonymous with market economy.
Well regulated capitalism is just socialism. Capitalism strives for the least regulation possible, because it enables maximising profits, which actually is the definition of it as a political ideology. Striving for more capital.
Here’s something which will rustle your jimmies even more.
You know we Nordics are social democracies right?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism[1]
Social democracy has been described as the most common form of Western or modern socialism.[11][12]
In the 21st century, it has become commonplace to define social democracy in reference to Northern and Western European countries,[39] and their model of a welfare state with a corporatist system of collective bargaining.[40] Social democracy has also been used synonymously with the Nordic model.[
Generations of socialists have been critical of social democracy. Generations of capitalists have been saying that social democracy is the closest we will ever get to socialism. So who should I believe, the western consensus of capitalist academia, beholden to big money donors for research grants, or the most brilliant, brave and capable intellectuals of the past 200 years, such as Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, DuBois, Lenin and (for a bit of Nordic flair) Pannekoek?
Because what is the Nordic model really? A huge part of the Nordic economy is defense contractors, which means your social democracy is paid for with mass death, imperialism and immiseration. Also, as a member of the western hegemon, Nordic countries enjoy the fruits of neocolonial exploitation of Africa, Asia, South America, etc., not very socialistic to prop up a class of war mongering rich, even if they pay marginally higher taxes than elsewhere.
This debate has existed for a long time, but to socialists it is settled. The Wikipedia entry for the Gotha program of 1875 calls it “explicitly socialist.” And even by today’s standards, it was and would be fairly progressive; calling for workers rights, universal sufferage, etc., but to many of the members of the first socialist international it was controversial because it relied on an upper class of politicians and business men to administer the social reforms. Karl Marx wrote his “Critique of the Gotha Program” tearing apart every point of the short document as another form of class rule, and even created some problems for his socially a connected partner Friedrich Engels by calling Ferdinand Lasalle, a popular reformer, politician and architect of the Gotha program, a petty dictator in waiting. He could not have known that Lasalle was in fact conspiring with von Bismarck to enact a plan of social democracy that would serve as a cover for a new regime of class domination that would undercut the socialist movement with moderate reforms, while making the working class beholden to the political/economic upper class.
These reforms can be taken away over time, which we are seeing in European social democracies over the last 40 years; leaving only the naked coercive competitive drive of capitalism to govern all social relations.
And like, I’m an American, my country is the imperial epicenter for neocolonialism imperialist expansion, bourgeois decadence, exploitation and immiseration (for now.) My experiences with people from Nordic countries who I have met have been overwhelmingly positive. Your social democracies are superior to our laissez faire capitalism, they make more sense, are more stable and less subject to natural instability cycles inherent to the system. Nothing is cut-and-dry, there are blended forms of political and economic organization, just like there are blended classes, and new forms are always emerging as history marches. If you want to believe that your social democracies are an island within capitalism, that’s mostly true! But to a socialist, it is not socialism. Quoting a Wikipedia article at us when most of us are acutely aware of how it is used by businesses and governments to shape our remembrance of history and the ideas with which we use to shape the world, comes off as incredibly weak and unconvincing, especially when so many of us spend years studying independently, having discussions and organizing our communities. You can quote wikipedia but it will never convince a socialist. I hope you become more mindful of where you are getting your information and whom that particular interpretation of facts serves. Spoiler alert! Its the owners of private property, the means of production, which have always shaped history and defined the classes and antagonisms inherent to them.
You seem to cite Wikipedia. How about opening articles on capitalism and socialism before you go any further?
This should help you get up to speed before you accuse me of making stuff up.
Wikipedia has sources, as you well know.
You’re not making a point. I did. I quoted specific parts of specific articles, backed by verifiable sources.
You can’t fight it, because you’re just a kid pretending to understand the thing you couldn’t even be bothered to Google before opening your ignorant mouth about it, and now you feel shame when someone shows you how wrong you were, by quoting specific parts which specific claims, again, backed by credible sources.
Your reply “no but uh it’s like Wikipedia so it’s like bad and look here’s the article to capitalism. What? No I’m not gonna make an argument, I’m feeling ashamed and I’m gonna pretend saying CAPITALISM really loud will win tve argument”
Yeah, like I said, I’ve seen that literally thousands of times.
Finland and other Nordics are arguably market socialist.
Absolutely not, they are Social Democracies. They are not progressing towards more worker ownership, but less, Capitalism still drives the system and the bourgeoisie still drives the state.
Trusting pure socialism to not accidentally starve its people through inept and lazy government decisions is like buying a PC with Windows 11 and hoping you won’t see ads because you trust the closed source code.
Yes, you can do this… I guess?
Everything socialism wants can be accomplished with market capitalism, AI, and UBI. We just need to get rid of the idiot religious folks voting against their interest (“oh no! trans people make baby jesus cry!”) and get rid of the liberals who want make government bigger and bigger and bigger (“Let’s put a tax on filling out the form! And make a new waiting period for something!”), and then we’d finally have a functioning society.
Trusting pure socialism to not accidentally starve its people through inept and lazy government decisions is like buying a PC with Windows 11 and hoping you won’t see ads because you trust the closed source code.
To clarify here, your example is what actually happens under capitalism. Literally, not figuratively. F(L)OSS is pretty anarchic/communist in nature.
Everything socialism wants can be accomplished with market capitalism, AI, and UBI.
Hypothetically, maybe, however, the current hyper-commercial capitalism shows no signs of allowing UBI or passing on any benefit from AI and other automation to workers. There’s been a complete disconnect between productivity and worker compensation since the 70s, with the capital class pocketing every penny of the difference.
it’s not a bad point. you would just think with information free because of the internet, the lower classes would vote their economic interests instead of “these rich people ALSO think trans people are from satan, let me vote for them on this wedge issue and fuck myself economically”
Indeed. I really wish that evidence showed that to be the case, instead, it’s the fallacy that Chicago School economics falls for. Humans are NOT rational actors, at least, not all the time. There are also anti-social actors involved attempting to game the system for their benefit at others’ expense. Lots of things to account for where current economic systems abjectly fail to provide a fair and equitable society, often intentionally so.
ooo. i like a lot of what you’re saying, except that i think the market capitalism part should be less vital. i’m more in favor of a resource based economy which is overseen by AI. markets would become more of a hobbyist endeavor. some people need to have a little bit more than others and can’t help but express their type A personalities, so the markets are there for them to feel like they earned a little more than other people, but without the ability to become billionaires.
Also, UBI seems like a transitional phase solution. in a well regulated resource based economy, currency eventually becomes a vestigial appendage. i mean, it’s just a middle man of exchange now, and we’re only exchanging things because we can’t figure out how to distribute necessary commodities and incentivize people. i believe in a resource based economy where almost all needs are met and education in humanities is emphasized, people will be happy to do their 2.5 hours of weekly labor to keep a utopian system running.
We’ve been having market capitalism and IA for YEARS, why are we still having less and less buying power, life expectancy, healthcare access and so on?
Because decay is a natural state of the universe.
The exploitation will continue until people stop believing that the sky god will reward them later for abstaining from anal and toiling all day in the fields.
We just need to elect politicians who provide large amounts of UBI. The problem in doing this is we would need to also limit the amount people could reproduce so that food doesn’t run out in 20 years after people start fucking like rabbits. Doing this would be hard and probably require constitutional amendments since the wealthy have made procreation a constitutional right and the poor are too stupid to realize unlimited reproduction leads to a tragedy of the common in which those that endure the most unhappiness in the rat race are most easily able to reproduce. There would have to be Chinese-style awareness of populations and some penalties for not adhering to reproduction limits if the population grew too fast, and these penalties would have to be sufficient to deter people. Market capitalism and mild green (hampered a bit by UBI) along with huge taxes on environmental externalities is a much better way to allocate resources than just having a government committee benevolently decide things resulting in starvation later because people who are chosen for committees often say what is political rather than the truth of nature.
We just need to get rid of the idiot religious folks voting against their interest
How do you propose doing that? Murdering them en masse?
I am saying if they were all completely and utterly purged from society than the world would be a better place, however.
Why are you saying that?
I am not proposing that, it’s an exercise in futility. You can’t deprogram a cult member easily and even if you killed them all, more would replace them. You have to accept these idiots as a natural part of society, like skunks and porcupines, like an eclipse or a tsunami, and respond accordingly.
Everything socialism wants can be accomplished with market capitalism, AI, and UBI. We just need to get rid of the idiot religious folks voting against their interest (“oh no! trans people make baby jesus cry!”) and get rid of the liberals who want make government bigger and bigger and bigger (“Let’s put a tax on filling out the form! And make a new waiting period for something!”), and then we’d finally have a functioning society.
Why billionaires will let that happens under capitalism if that benefits them? You can’t fix capitalism, it works perfectly for people that owns the capital.
In a democracy people could just stop voting in Republican politicians who say “don’t do anal so you go to heaven” while they fuck the poor and stop voting in big spending Democrats who want to make the government as large, inefficient, and wasteful as possible.
If people are too stupid to vote in representatives because jesus doesn’t approve of anal and Democrats need to expand the size of government, then how the fuck would they be smart enough to coordinate a proletariat revolution, much less enact rules that won’t completely fuck themselves over once in power due to an ignorance of the laws of nature?
These are people who are upset trans people take hormones because it will upset the imaginary skygod, who only created man and woman, since intersex people also literally don’t exist in their idiot pea brains. Do you understand the extreme pea-brain stupidity of the average religious person? They believe jesus lives on a cloud, some of them think the world is flat, the level of moronitude is next-level.
It’s a good point in a dictatorship, but not when a large part of the populace is delusional gullible and stupid.
wtf you talking about the world is bigger than republican and democrats and you have countries where religion is not that big with signs of the problems of late stage capitalism.
You can’t have all people smart in capitalism without free good education, if education is a commodity the poor people become ignorant and easier to manipulate by the people who own the capital and they will manipulate them to vote for what is best for the capital. You can remove religion and the same problem will continue, you only solve people voting with the ass with education and that is really difficult within capitalism, like I said before billionaires will not let that happens.
it’s a decent point, so decent that i have no comeback at all
Well, people, including political leaders are corrupt, so this would never be practically possible, since people would just abuse the system and hoard resources, as always.
News flash, people have been abusing the system and hoarding resources for a while
I think that’s their point.
How?
The difference is that, in socialism, hoarding resources is illegal and prosecutable, whereas in capitalism it’s legal and encourage. Corruption is only defined when it touches the public institutions. Every behaviour that you’d consider corrupt in the public sector, is obvious common practice and even encouraged in the private one.
In the public sector, hiring an acquaintance or family member based on trust is illegal and punishable. In the private sector I’ll hire whoever I want for my company.
In the public sector, having a service done for your company such as a renovation of the office, if you hire based off friendship or trust, you are punished, you’re supposed to be efficient and impartial. In the private company it’s expected that you’d hire your friend to do the renovation.
In the public sector, lowering the wages of the employees to higher your own, is so obviously corrupt that it barely ever happens at all, and when it happens it’s absolute scandal. In the private sector we just call it “labour is paid based on your replaceability”.
The list of behaviours that we’d find corrupt and morally reprehensible (and legally punishable) in the public sector, and totally fine in the private sector, is endless. Can’t complain about corruption in the private sector when there’s not such thing, amirite? At least I’d want a system in which corrupt people are prosecuted and not applauded.
Well, that is true.
We currently live in a system where the owner class (capitalists) makes several times what you do and horde it, while you can barely afford to live.
I really don’t understand how your main criticism of a system where the workers make the decisions and take the profits, is that the workers might also horde the relatively smaller amounts that they produced. It’s still several times better than what we have now.
I just ment to say, nothing will change, no matter the political system.
