The government doing things is not socialism

[DrZoidberg]

A nation that is not democratic is not socialist.

Oh, give it a rest with your attempts to redefine perfectly fine dictionary definitions. I'm not even going to ask you why you think that, because I'm sure you'll launch into yet another irrelevant tirade. You don't get to decide what words mean. Perhaps work on your acceptance of that?

 

[untermensche]

A nation that is not democratic is not socialist.

Oh, give it a rest with your attempts to redefine perfectly fine dictionary definitions. I'm not even going to ask you why you think that, because I'm sure you'll launch into yet another irrelevant tirade. You don't get to decide what words mean. Perhaps work on your acceptance of that?

Total ignorance is not an argument.

If you don't have democracy you can't have socialism.

It is an essential feature.

No dictatorship is socialism. The USSR under Stalin was not socialism. Nazi Germany was not socialism.

 

[DrZoidberg]

A nation that is not democratic is not socialist.

Oh, give it a rest with your attempts to redefine perfectly fine dictionary definitions. I'm not even going to ask you why you think that, because I'm sure you'll launch into yet another irrelevant tirade. You don't get to decide what words mean. Perhaps work on your acceptance of that?

Total ignorance is not an argument.

If you don't have democracy you can't have socialism.

It is an essential feature.

No dictatorship is socialism. The USSR under Stalin was not socialism. Nazi Germany was not socialism.

USSR was democratic. China and Iran are also democratic. What I think you mean is that they're aren't, liberal democracies? Democratic just means that there's a system where by the population casts votes. Ancient Athenian Greece was democratic, in spite only about 30% of all living in Athens could vote. Nazi Germany was socialist. Because the government put considerable effort into helping the poor and unfortunate. Not all the poor and unfortunate. But the selected many who were deemed desirable. That's straight up socialism.

You've put a bunch of qualifiers onto words that aren't intrinsic to the words. It just makes discussing things with you complicated. You calling everybody who is correct, "ignorant" does not change that. You can use whatever mean words you want. It still won't change reality. Not even if you call me "poopy pants".

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Socialism - a mix of free enterprise and govt control. The French govt has stakes in major businessman can exert control. They directly control aspects of the system. Extreme socialism was post war France and Britain. Govt ownership of major business setting wages. Divestitures occurred during the Thatcher era. China is an authoritarian form of socialism. Until the last decade or so international athletes kept only a fraction of earnings and were not allowed to hire private trainers.

Wrong. Socialism - collective (read government) ownership of the means of production.

 

[Gun Nut]

I always thought (and could be wrong) that Socialism is an economic model, like capitalism... Capitalism is based on a free market where private individuals own property, businesses, set prices... supply and demand dictate the success of business, who hire individuals to work for negotiated / competitive salaries. As opposed to Socialism, where the government owns the businesses, the property, and everything... and prices / wages are set by the government.

Social policies are not socialism any more than capital punishment is capitalism.

If you expect there to be Police, EMS, Fire, education, and sanitation services provided to you as a property owner, are you a socialist? Of course not.

 

[untermensche]

Total ignorance is not an argument.

If you don't have democracy you can't have socialism.

It is an essential feature.

No dictatorship is socialism. The USSR under Stalin was not socialism. Nazi Germany was not socialism.

USSR was democratic. China and Iran are also democratic. What I think you mean is that they're aren't, liberal democracies? Democratic just means that there's a system where by the population casts votes. Ancient Athenian Greece was democratic, in spite only about 30% of all living in Athens could vote. Nazi Germany was socialist. Because the government put considerable effort into helping the poor and unfortunate. Not all the poor and unfortunate. But the selected many who were deemed desirable. That's straight up socialism.

You've put a bunch of qualifiers onto words that aren't intrinsic to the words. It just makes discussing things with you complicated. You calling everybody who is correct, "ignorant" does not change that. You can use whatever mean words you want. It still won't change reality. Not even if you call me "poopy pants".

The qualifiers are there. Democracy is an essential aspect of socialism.

I am merely educating you about this.

And if you don't want people to call you names you should refrain from saying things like the Soviet Union under Stalin was a democracy.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Socialism - a mix of free enterprise and govt control. The French govt has stakes in major businessman can exert control. They directly control aspects of the system. Extreme socialism was post war France and Britain. Govt ownership of major business setting wages. Divestitures occurred during the Thatcher era. China is an authoritarian form of socialism. Until the last decade or so international athletes kept only a fraction of earnings and were not allowed to hire private trainers.

Wrong. Socialism - collective (read government) ownership of the means of production.

Isn't that communism or collectivism?

 

[PyramidHead]

It would be very hard for Karl Marx to base his ideas on Adam Smith's if Adam Smith didn't pre-date Marx.

Ok. I just got thrown off because you said he "introduced" the Smithian idea of yadda yadda... never mind then.

Before Marx we saw rich and/or powerful people as qualitatively different. They were rich not because of circumstance, but because they were better people. We don't think like that today. While personal qualities can impact your success in life, the context you find yourself in is more important.

We often forget how Marxist thought has impacted the world because we have forgotten how people thought before Marx.

If nothing else, Marx was pretty specific about his analysis of the situation in 19th century industrial capitalism, and one of the things he emphasized repeatedly is that the important distinctions in society are not to be found at the level of rich versus poor, or powerful versus powerless--that was the tradition that preceded him, after the French Revolution, literally how people thought before Marx. He saw things through the lens of workers who produce more than they consume, and non-workers who live off the surplus produced by the workers, with some variations in between.

I think you've read a very shallow interpretation of Marx. Sure, but how come the workers put up with that? Unless you explain how workers have come to accept that they produce more than they consume, you have no theory.

For sure, Marx talked a lot about that in his discussions about capitalist uses of the surplus value to reproduce and support the system. My only point in that comment was to note that for Marx, rich versus poor and powerful versus powerless were the old way of thinking about class divisions, and while he sympathized with those notions he felt they were incomplete. Plenty of people before Marx were well aware of those dichotomies; if they weren't, the French Revolution wouldn't have happened. So, yes, it's important for Marx to recognize differences and wealth and power, but he wasn't the first, and he made it clear (at least to me) that the missing ingredient was class analysis based on production of surplus.

Hmm.. on the topic of being simplistic.

I should also point out that the idea that socialism always leads to dictatorship is dumb, since in several countries in Europe it was socialist reformers who pushed the countries into becoming democracies (from monarchies).

Again, those people were called liberals. They overturned monarchic feudalism and replaced it with capitalism, and then Marx basically said "you didn't actually deliver on your promise of freedom, equality, and fraternity, and here is why". There may have been early inklings of socialism in some of those revolutions, but what emerged from them was the kind of society Marx wanted to REPLACE with some form of socialism.

You're talking about France and England specifically. As was Marx. I'm talking about what happened AFTER Marx published these texts about France and England. First democratically elected prime minister in Sweden and Denmark, socialists. NOT liberals. The second prime minister of Italy, was Crispi, socialist. Arguably the first fully free election. The monumental impact of Marx cannot be overstated. Before Marx nearly all the revolutions were liberal. After Marx (until the rise of fascism) they were all socialist. Some led to democracy, and some didn't.

Point taken, I mistook your original remark for being about the overthrow of the big dogs in the French and English empires.

Either way, democratic or not, none of those places are now socialist in the sense that they don't allow workers to directly manage the production of commodities and take ownership of both the means and the results of production. People in Sweden, as far as I know, still work for wages paid to them by non-workers who own businesses, and sell products in a market for more than what the workers received as wages for making them. Social democracy is great, don't get me wrong, but it's a stand-in for socialism, a way of giving people some of the wealth they produce in the form of state services funded by taxes on income and transactions. It kind of hinges on there being a capitalist framework underneath, and tries to mitigate its negative effects as much as possible (successfully in many cases, but maybe not permanently).

1. Social progress is dictated to a large extent by the material conditions of production, namely who produces a surplus through their work and who doesn't work but lives off the surplus.
2. Capitalism replaced feudalism, but did not remove the exploitation; both involve workers making surplus value for non-workers and having no say in its distribution.
3. When workers are alienated from the product of their surplus work and have no control over its distribution, they tend to revolt and exert control over production.

That's basically his whole story. It was consistently focused on worker power through struggle, autonomy of the producer class against capitalist domination, and the possibility of social transformation by changing the relationship between surplus value production and its appropriation/distribution. And all of it was derived from his observation that workers are who make a commodity usable or exchangeable in ways that the raw materials were not, and thus should be entitled to some manner of democratic control over the material abundance afforded by their sweat and toil. While pressuring the state to provide allowances to people based on their income might have the effect of improving the conditions of workers, who are generally poorer than their employers, this was not the main thrust of Marx's theory in my view.

Again... this is an incredibly shallow reading of Marx. It completely ignores the social dynamics or explains why any of this. You're just ignoring it, and assume that Marx just forgot about it. As did every left leaning or Marxist thinker after him. I think you've created a caricature out of Marxist thought.

That was basically my reaction to your take on his idea that workers create all the wealth in a society (just a minor mathematical blunder addressed in an edit, rather than the basis of his entire economic theory). We can agree to disagree; Marx has more interpretations than almost any theorist in history. For me, a reading of Marx that misses the element of class struggle and worker autonomy over the value they create, and tries to make it about the psychology of incentives or the right blend of state services in a capitalist framework, is lacking. There isn't a nuanced philosophical explanation to be found for "why any of this is", it's just the way things unfold when production is organized in a capitalist way. I probably put a greater emphasis on Marx the political economist than Marx the sociologist, it's true.

 

[PyramidHead]

Socialism - a mix of free enterprise and govt control. The French govt has stakes in major businessman can exert control. They directly control aspects of the system. Extreme socialism was post war France and Britain. Govt ownership of major business setting wages. Divestitures occurred during the Thatcher era. China is an authoritarian form of socialism. Until the last decade or so international athletes kept only a fraction of earnings and were not allowed to hire private trainers.

Wrong. Socialism - collective (read government) ownership of the means of production.

You're right that he's wrong, but you're wrong that collective ownership is government ownership. As long as... and really, really pay attention to this, because it's actually an important distinction. As long as the government is populated by people who do not have other jobs, i.e. the state is a separate body run by people whose ONLY JOB is to govern everybody else, government ownership of the means of production is essentially the same as private ownership with regards to class structure and social freedom.

To be socialist, the people who own the means of production and appropriate the outputs of production for distribution as they see fit must be literally the same identical people as the ones who use the means of production, who do the producing: the workers. There can be no proxy or representative for that, because then you just have workers being told what to do by someone who doesn't work, getting a wage based on what the non-workers plan to use the output for, and so the same class antagonism emerges with the same results.

If you want an example of socialism, look at cooperative enterprises and unwaged cooperative work done by friends and family for shared goals, like community gardens, employee-run shops, and bands where all the decisions are made democratically. The minute an outside party exerts control over the stuff workers need to work, even if that party is a so-called Revolutionary Party, you're just talking about another kind of boss who wants to rent you for most of the day/week/year and keep whatever you make. I'm trying to point out in this thread that socialism isn't that.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Socialism - a mix of free enterprise and govt control. The French govt has stakes in major businessman can exert control. They directly control aspects of the system. Extreme socialism was post war France and Britain. Govt ownership of major business setting wages. Divestitures occurred during the Thatcher era. China is an authoritarian form of socialism. Until the last decade or so international athletes kept only a fraction of earnings and were not allowed to hire private trainers.

Wrong. Socialism - collective (read government) ownership of the means of production.

Isn't that communism or collectivism?

Socialism still has private property, just not any private businesses. That means your house, your car, etc., are all your property.


Until and unless you try to do a business out of them. Oops. Hm, I wonder what that implies about prostitution.

The group of ideologies that includes both Socialism and Communism but excludes private ownership of the means of production are known as Collectivism.

Socialism - a mix of free enterprise and govt control. The French govt has stakes in major businessman can exert control. They directly control aspects of the system. Extreme socialism was post war France and Britain. Govt ownership of major business setting wages. Divestitures occurred during the Thatcher era. China is an authoritarian form of socialism. Until the last decade or so international athletes kept only a fraction of earnings and were not allowed to hire private trainers.

Wrong. Socialism - collective (read government) ownership of the means of production.

You're right that he's wrong, but you're wrong that collective ownership is government ownership.

That's really the most likely way that the collective will exercise their control of the means of production. And no, having the government control it is never "essentially the same as private ownership". Moreover, as I've talked about "manifest Socialism", "ideal Socialism", "manifest Capitalism", and "ideal Capitalism", you should be aware that I can see you switching from how it actually works every time it is tried to the ideal form. I'm calling you out on that.

To be socialist, the people who own the means of production and appropriate the outputs of production for distribution as they see fit must be literally the same identical people as the ones who use the means of production, who do the producing: the workers. There can be no proxy or representative for that, because then you just have workers being told what to do by someone who doesn't work, getting a wage based on what the non-workers plan to use the output for, and so the same class antagonism emerges with the same results.

So no voting for representatives, it must always be the Town Hall form of democracy. Great for very small groups. Let us see what happens when the group gets to be, oh, say, about 1,000 people or more.

 

[PyramidHead]

Isn't that communism or collectivism?

Socialism still has private property, just not any private businesses. That means your house, your car, etc., are all your property.


Until and unless you try to do a business out of them. Oops. Hm, I wonder what that implies about prostitution.

The group of ideologies that includes both Socialism and Communism but excludes private ownership of the means of production are known as Collectivism.

Socialism - a mix of free enterprise and govt control. The French govt has stakes in major businessman can exert control. They directly control aspects of the system. Extreme socialism was post war France and Britain. Govt ownership of major business setting wages. Divestitures occurred during the Thatcher era. China is an authoritarian form of socialism. Until the last decade or so international athletes kept only a fraction of earnings and were not allowed to hire private trainers.

Wrong. Socialism - collective (read government) ownership of the means of production.

You're right that he's wrong, but you're wrong that collective ownership is government ownership.

That's really the most likely way that the collective will exercise their control of the means of production. And no, having the government control it is never "essentially the same as private ownership". Moreover, as I've talked about "manifest Socialism", "ideal Socialism", "manifest Capitalism", and "ideal Capitalism", you should be aware that I can see you switching from how it actually works every time it is tried to the ideal form. I'm calling you out on that.

To be socialist, the people who own the means of production and appropriate the outputs of production for distribution as they see fit must be literally the same identical people as the ones who use the means of production, who do the producing: the workers. There can be no proxy or representative for that, because then you just have workers being told what to do by someone who doesn't work, getting a wage based on what the non-workers plan to use the output for, and so the same class antagonism emerges with the same results.

So no voting for representatives, it must always be the Town Hall form of democracy. Great for very small groups. Let us see what happens when the group gets to be, oh, say, about 1,000 people or more.

You vote for representatives, but the representatives are from the population of workers, and continue being workers after being voted as representatives. And at any time, for any reason, they should be recallable by a simple vote. This is hard to imagine for some, but you have to put it in the context of everyone working 20 hours a week on average. Lots more time for multitasking and genuine representation.

I'm not shifting among definitions of socialism or capitalism, and I have clearly defined multiple times what I mean by those terms and why I believe these definitions to be useful. If some part of a horrible autocratic system has actual socialist elements, I won't deny it; Stalin's collective farms are one example of a functioning socialist mode of production within a larger state-run economy. I hate to admit it, but in revolutionary Russia the only instance of worker-owned production happened there, under Josef Stalin. Not a good look, but it didn't last long and was soon swallowed up by the state anyway. Either way, I own that as a socialist and learn from it. Not gonna be lectured on consistency as I'm not being inconsistent.

'Bosses ordering workers around while workers make stuff or provide services for wages, then go home and leave the tools and products in the hands of the bosses, who sell the products for more than they paid to make them and keep the difference'

is a style of labor organization that arose with the fall of feudalism and the rise of industry, and is shared by all economies that most people agree are capitalist, so this is the definition I will continue to use; the identity or political position of the bosses makes no difference to me.

'Workers making stuff and providing services, producing more than they themselves need to survive, and then deciding what to do with the surplus and how to distribute it to people who don't or can't work for whatever reason'

is the system our species relied on for many tens of thousands of years as hunter gatherers, at the very least, and is what humans to this day do in informal, unwaged contexts all the time. Marx called this communism, others called it socialism, I'm fine with either word.

Please point out where I deviate from these usages if you think I'm equivocating.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

I'm not shifting among definitions of socialism or capitalism, and I have clearly defined multiple times what I mean by those terms and why I believe these definitions to be useful. If some part of a horrible autocratic system has actual socialist elements, I won't deny it; Stalin's collective farms are one example of a functioning socialist mode of production within a larger state-run economy. I hate to admit it, but in revolutionary Russia the only instance of worker-owned production happened there, under Josef Stalin. Not a good look, but it didn't last long and was soon swallowed up by the state anyway. Either way, I own that as a socialist and learn from it. Not gonna be lectured on consistency as I'm not being inconsistent.

Yes, but you do shift between "ideal" and "applied" whenever it is advantageous to you to do so.

'Bosses ordering workers around while workers make stuff or provide services for wages, then go home and leave the tools and products in the hands of the bosses, who sell the products for more than they paid to make them and keep the difference'

You leave out a few things, your definition is inadequate. Let us say it is a small business, so the boss is also the owner.

The boss purchased the means of production with his own money. The boss purchased the raw materials with his own money. The boss paid the worker to use the means on the materials, again out of his own money. Then the boss sold the finished products, reimbursing himself for the expenditures he already made. So according to you, the worker is entitled to take home the means of production. Why? Because he used tools supplied by someone else?

is the system our species relied on for many tens of thousands of years as hunter gatherers, at the very least, and is what humans to this day do in informal, unwaged contexts all the time.

It was also a time when predators found humans to be very tasty, the average life expectancy was much lower than it is today, and the population of the earth was a mere fraction of what it is today. It is no surprise that you long for those days of yore, when we had "tribes" or "bands" instead of "cities" and "countries" and "society". An-Prims are not very distant from An-Coms.

Please point out where I deviate from these usages if you think I'm equivocating.

The only equivocation is that you like to switch between the ideal and the manifest without warning. Of course ideal socialism is better than manifest capitalism because ideal socialism doesn't have all the pesky faults that anything in the real world (socialist or capitalist) is burdened with.

 

[steve_bank]

pyramidhead, I am a child of the 60s/70s. I can sympathize with what you are thinking through.

I spent 30 years in engineering and saw all kinds of social group dynamics. The kind of family cooperation you talk about only works in small groups. As size and complexity grows hierarchical structures natural evolve. I have seen it happen. When it does not evolve as com[plecity grows it becomes design by committee which never reaches a conclusion and agreement. Witness Congress.

There are a few communes still around the last time I checked. The Farm in Tenn was started by a guy named Stephen Gaskin. The original history was not on the web site last time I looked. Rules evolved. If you had sex you were engaged. If a woman got pregnant you were married. It stared out with hippies, drugs, back to the land.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farm_(Tennessee)

They devoped a successful farm and developed good relations with neighbors. They opened a sate certified school.

Israel was founded as a socialist state based on collectives or kibutz. Back in the 70s I attend a presentation by an Israeli looking for students to summer on a kibbutz. There were farming and industrial kibbutz. The one he was from had a pool, amenities, and a car pool where you could check out a car. Meals were in common. What put me off was people carrying assault rifles.

It works in a limited system. Soviet and Chinese collectivization failed miserably. Mass starvation. When China alloed framers to grow and sell produce above the state quota agricultural production grew.

In a broad sense our system is libertarian. The economy runs mostly by itself without intervention or direct controls. Itruns on voluntary cooperation. When you fully comprehend it it can be scary in a way. It all seems to work on a mass scale.

The boss/worker master/slave comparison is more 19th century. Modern business is made up of people. What goes on today requires hierarchical structure.

Keep in mind the IRA of a bus drivel based in in investment in business. It is all linked in a complex dynamic, owner-worker is a meaningless view.

There are positives and negatives. On the plus side if you do not like the cold Northeast you can move to the warm Southwest if you want. There are no controls. I knew people in the 70s who worked the winter and spent the summer in places like Yosemite rock climbing. There is the old movie Endless Summer about beach bums who spend their time surfing around the world. \\In your system could that happen? Can some 20 year old make a living snowboarding or skateboarding?

Our system definitely maximizes freedom to choose a path.

All large scale collectivization experiments have ended in limiting choice of life path.

The challenge for the comm8ng generations is how to maintain that while keeping the system balanced. Personally I do not think the system can last. The wealth concentration at the top sooner or later will Crete enough anger that instability will occur.

On the plus side the material goods the average person has today is staggering compared to when I was born. Average folks here in Seattle routinely go to Las Vegas or Hawaii. Circa 1900 being wealthy meant hot water, hot food, good water, heat, and good clothes and shelter.

When you make a critique you have to take a very broad view, not just marxisst rhetoric.

Power to the people and I'll see you on the barricade comrade...

 

[steve_bank]

Socialism - a mix of free enterprise and govt control. The French govt has stakes in major businessman can exert control. They directly control aspects of the system. Extreme socialism was post war France and Britain. Govt ownership of major business setting wages. Divestitures occurred during the Thatcher era. China is an authoritarian form of socialism. Until the last decade or so international athletes kept only a fraction of earnings and were not allowed to hire private trainers.

Wrong. Socialism - collective (read government) ownership of the means of production.

We can disagree on definitions and interpretations. The modern reverence points on the extremes are the USA and the Soviet-Maoist systems, in between today is France, England, and the reborn China. Easier to reference reality.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Socialism - a mix of free enterprise and govt control. The French govt has stakes in major businessman can exert control. They directly control aspects of the system. Extreme socialism was post war France and Britain. Govt ownership of major business setting wages. Divestitures occurred during the Thatcher era. China is an authoritarian form of socialism. Until the last decade or so international athletes kept only a fraction of earnings and were not allowed to hire private trainers.

Wrong. Socialism - collective (read government) ownership of the means of production.

We can disagree on definitions and interpretations. The modern reverence points on the extremes are the USA and the Soviet-Maoist systems, in between today is France, England, and the reborn China. Easier to reference reality.

Yes, we can disagree, but one of us is using the textbook definition and applying it to reality, and the other is looking like a fool for pretending otherwise. No, France and England aren't "in between".

 

[bilby]

A nation that is not democratic is not socialist.

Oh, give it a rest with your attempts to redefine perfectly fine dictionary definitions. I'm not even going to ask you why you think that, because I'm sure you'll launch into yet another irrelevant tirade. You don't get to decide what words mean. Perhaps work on your acceptance of that?

Total ignorance is not an argument.

Then why the FUCK do you persist in trying to use it as one???

 

[untermensche]

Total ignorance is not an argument.

Then why the FUCK do you persist in trying to use it as one???

How exactly is socialism separated from democratic rule? An essential for any modern legitimate state is democracy.

Enough of your constant ignorance.

Make a point for once that requires the ability to think.

Go ahead. Try it. You might like it.

 

[PyramidHead]

Yes, but you do shift between "ideal" and "applied" whenever it is advantageous to you to do so.

Example?

You leave out a few things, your definition is inadequate. Let us say it is a small business, so the boss is also the owner.

The boss purchased the means of production with his own money. The boss purchased the raw materials with his own money. The boss paid the worker to use the means on the materials, again out of his own money. Then the boss sold the finished products, reimbursing himself for the expenditures he already made. So according to you, the worker is entitled to take home the means of production. Why? Because he used tools supplied by someone else?

Did I say anything about who is entitled to what? I supplied definitions, and by the first one, the system you describe is capitalism. You may disagree with my ideas about what should or should not be the case, but I'm struggling to see what part of my definition of capitalism as this very activity you describe is inadequate or leaves anything out.

is the system our species relied on for many tens of thousands of years as hunter gatherers, at the very least, and is what humans to this day do in informal, unwaged contexts all the time.

It was also a time when predators found humans to be very tasty, the average life expectancy was much lower than it is today, and the population of the earth was a mere fraction of what it is today. It is no surprise that you long for those days of yore, when we had "tribes" or "bands" instead of "cities" and "countries" and "society". An-Prims are not very distant from An-Coms.

I don't have the energy to deal with this chestnut of an objection, which is becoming so common that I might as well just say it to myself in the mirror.

My only motive in making that historical claim, which you do not dispute, is to show that there is nothing in "human nature" that prevents people from collaboratively performing work for their own needs and desires. The differences between the world of 2019 and the primitive communism of our ancestors are obvious, but you do yourself a disservice by assuming they must disqualify the same thing happening today. I mean, and I say this every freaking time, in what universe does having more technical capacity, better medicine, longer life expectancy, and protection from predators make it somehow harder for humans to work together for their goals, and not easier? Your only remaining salvo is the classic argument from scale: there are too many people now. This is sort of taken as a truism, but it has never been demonstrated or even seriously analyzed. If the workplace can be democratized, and work together with the community it affects, which is linked to neighboring communities, and it's democracy all the way up and down with representatives from the working populations at each level, where is this forbidden threshold of logistics where democracy breaks down irreparably? It's an incredibly weak objection.

Please point out where I deviate from these usages if you think I'm equivocating.

The only equivocation is that you like to switch between the ideal and the manifest without warning. Of course ideal socialism is better than manifest capitalism because ideal socialism doesn't have all the pesky faults that anything in the real world (socialist or capitalist) is burdened with.

I don't distinguish between the ideal and the manifest, sorry. Capitalism is anything that satisfies the definition I'm using, and so is socialism. There is a lot of capitalism in the world right now, not "manifest", not "near-capitalism," but capitalism in full swing. There is almost no socialism, so there isn't a basis to elaborate on what its relationship with the "real world" would look like over time. I can only go by what is in evidence and draw conclusions from there.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Did I say anything about who is entitled to what? I supplied definitions, and by the first one, the system you describe is capitalism. You may disagree with my ideas about what should or should not be the case, but I'm struggling to see what part of my definition of capitalism as this very activity you describe is inadequate or leaves anything out.

When you disapprovingly state that under capitalism the worker leaves the means of production with the boss who only "orders them around", then one would be justified in concluding that you think those means should go with the worker. Since I filled in all the details you left out, you have to resort to "but I never said that." True. You said "all A is B', you said "all B is C" but you never said "all A is C".

I don't distinguish between the ideal and the manifest, sorry. Capitalism is anything that satisfies the definition I'm using, and so is socialism. There is a lot of capitalism in the world right now, not "manifest", not "near-capitalism," but capitalism in full swing. There is almost no socialism, so there isn't a basis to elaborate on what its relationship with the "real world" would look like over time. I can only go by what is in evidence and draw conclusions from there.

You should. The ideal form of each versus the form of each when implemented is not only an interesting study, it prevents you from pretending that the one is the other. In theory Socialism can work. In theory the car I designed works even though in practice the moment you turn the ignition it explodes killing the driver in a horrible fiery death.

Your definition of Capitalism, I've pointed out the parts you leave out. You didn't address those parts. That's rather interesting, in my opinion.

Bosses ordering workers around while workers make stuff or provide services for wages, then go home and leave the tools and products in the hands of the bosses, who sell the products for more than they paid to make them and keep the difference

The boss purchased the means of production with his own money. The boss purchased the raw materials with his own money. The boss paid the worker to use the means on the materials, again out of his own money. Then the boss sold the finished products, reimbursing himself for the expenditures he already made.

What is the worker entitled to then? What is the boss entitled to?

 

[Canard DuJour]

ENGELS : "Of late, since Bismarck went in for State-ownership of industries, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and again, into something of flunkyism, that without more ado declares all State-ownership, even of the Bismarkian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the taking over by the State of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of Socialism.

If the Belgian State, for quite ordinary political and financial reasons, itself constructed its chief railway lines; if Bismarck, not under any economic compulsion, took over for the State the chief Prussian lines, simply to be the better able to have them in hand in case of war, to bring up the railway employees as voting cattle for the Government, and especially to create for himself a new source of income independent of parliamentary votes — this was, in no sense, a socialistic measure, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, the Royal porcelain manufacture, and even the regimental tailor of the army would also be socialistic institutions, or even, as was seriously proposed by a sly dog in Frederick William III's reign, the taking over by the State of the brothels."


JAMES CONOLLY : "Socialism properly implies above all things the co-operative control by the workers of the machinery of production; without this co-operative control, the public ownership by the State is not Socialism – it is only State capitalism. The demands of the middle-class reformers, from the Railway Reform League down, are simply plans to facilitate the business transactions of the capitalist class. State Telephones – to cheapen messages in the interest of the middle class who are the principal users of the telephone system; State Railways – to cheapen carriage of goods in the interest of the middle-class trader; State-construction of piers, docks, etc. – in the interest of the middle-class merchant; in fact every scheme now advanced in which the help of the State is invoked is a scheme to lighten the burden of the capitalist – trader, manufacturer, or farmer. Were they all in working order tomorrow the change would not necessarily benefit the working class; we would still have in our state industries, as in the Post Office to-day, the same unfair classification of salaries, and the same despotic rule of an irresponsible head. Those who worked most and hardest would still get the least remuneration, and the rank and file would still be deprived of all voice in the ordering of their industry, just the same as in all private enterprises.

Therefore, we repeat, state ownership and control is not necessarily Socialism – if it were, then the Army, the Navy, the Police, the Judges, the Gaolers, the Informers, and the Hangmen, all would all be Socialist functionaries, as they are State officials – but the ownership by the State of all the land and materials for labour, combined with the co-operative control by the workers of such land and materials, would be Socialism."