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I wonder, what's your standard for socialism? Can you give any example of a socialist society?

by ttt0 6y ago

1984athrowaway 6y ago
I'm not the parent, but: that the workers control the stuff they use to produce things with. It only exists in patches today, as worker coops. To make it work in a market economy, it turns out you need a bunch of supporting infrastructure (popular banks and so on) because workers are individually poor. (Greg Dow has done some work on how these structures may be organized, and what the primary problems of worker coops are.<1>) So by this standard, the closest to socialism that stuck around for a while would've been Yugoslavia. However, the political side of that country left quite a lot to be desired, given how it tore itself apart after Tito died. That the workers leased all their equipment from the state also led to some serious soft budget constraint problems, to my knowledge. And by this standard, neither the USSR nor China was or is appreciably socialist. The state substituted itself for the will of the workers and then claimed that since it owns everything, as a representative of all the workers, the workers own everything. It doesn't quite hold water, IMHO. <1> One funny corollary is that it's easier to set up a worker coop the more the costs are variable instead of huge up-front costs: so it would be easier to arrange a software company that way than an industrial refinery, since computers are comparatively cheap. Though maybe not if it's into ML.
- ttt0 6y ago
  And libertarians say that what we have now isn't real capitalism because of social programs, taxes or because society isn't organized around NAP or whatever. Who am I supposed to believe here? In my opinion it seems just like when some people are quick to call everything communism, but get defensive when you make the slightest critique of capitalism. Just in the opposite direction. I wouldn't even care what terms are we using to describe what, if it wasn't that we're generally operating on this false dichotomy of capitalism vs communism, with nothing in between.
  - rjbwork 6y ago
    It's clear we live under capitalism. Private entities own the means of production and employ (largely) non-owners to engage in wage labor using those means. The profits accrue to shareholders who often do no actual labor in the enterprise. There is very little economic nationalization, relative to what is possible, in the United States and in the west in general. A couple of examples of minimal nationalization are the Norway and Alaskan oil funds. There is also very little in the way of worker control or profit sharing except at the very top of the economic ladder, for example certain tech companies/startups and wall street workers. Libertarian purists eschew the idea of a state putting any limits on markets or enterprises for reasons (there are actual reasons, as you can read in their literature, I just don't wish to expound on them), but to argue that any limit on an enterprise somehow makes the system not capitalist is an absurdism.
    - ttt0 6y ago
      That's not my point, my issue is the boundary between socialism and capitalism. Depending on who you're going to ask, they will give you an unreasonably high standard for one and say that everything short of that is the other. The other commenter said that the Soviet Union was not socialism. Then what was it? Because I assure you, it wasn't even close to capitalism as you know it today. If we'd to stick to the original definition of capitalism as it was coined by Marx, probably everything would fall under it and it'd render both of these terms completely useless for any discussion other than autistic political philosophy that most likely won't have much to do with the real world.

I wonder, what's your standard for socialism? Can you give any example of a socialist society?

by ttt0 6y ago

I wonder, what's your standard for socialism? Can you give any example of a socialist society?

1984athrowaway 6y ago

I'm not the parent, but: that the workers control the stuff they use to produce things with. It only exists in patches today, as worker coops. To make it work in a market economy, it turns out you need a bunch of supporting infrastructure (popular banks and so on) because workers are individually poor. (Greg Dow has done some work on how these structures may be organized, and what the primary problems of worker coops are.<1>) So by this standard, the closest to socialism that stuck around for a while would've been Yugoslavia. However, the political side of that country left quite a lot to be desired, given how it tore itself apart after Tito died. That the workers leased all their equipment from the state also led to some serious soft budget constraint problems, to my knowledge. And by this standard, neither the USSR nor China was or is appreciably socialist. The state substituted itself for the will of the workers and then claimed that since it owns everything, as a representative of all the workers, the workers own everything. It doesn't quite hold water, IMHO. <1> One funny corollary is that it's easier to set up a worker coop the more the costs are variable instead of huge up-front costs: so it would be easier to arrange a software company that way than an industrial refinery, since computers are comparatively cheap. Though maybe not if it's into ML.

ttt0 6y ago
And libertarians say that what we have now isn't real capitalism because of social programs, taxes or because society isn't organized around NAP or whatever. Who am I supposed to believe here? In my opinion it seems just like when some people are quick to call everything communism, but get defensive when you make the slightest critique of capitalism. Just in the opposite direction. I wouldn't even care what terms are we using to describe what, if it wasn't that we're generally operating on this false dichotomy of capitalism vs communism, with nothing in between.
- rjbwork 6y ago
  It's clear we live under capitalism. Private entities own the means of production and employ (largely) non-owners to engage in wage labor using those means. The profits accrue to shareholders who often do no actual labor in the enterprise. There is very little economic nationalization, relative to what is possible, in the United States and in the west in general. A couple of examples of minimal nationalization are the Norway and Alaskan oil funds. There is also very little in the way of worker control or profit sharing except at the very top of the economic ladder, for example certain tech companies/startups and wall street workers. Libertarian purists eschew the idea of a state putting any limits on markets or enterprises for reasons (there are actual reasons, as you can read in their literature, I just don't wish to expound on them), but to argue that any limit on an enterprise somehow makes the system not capitalist is an absurdism.
  - ttt0 6y ago
    That's not my point, my issue is the boundary between socialism and capitalism. Depending on who you're going to ask, they will give you an unreasonably high standard for one and say that everything short of that is the other. The other commenter said that the Soviet Union was not socialism. Then what was it? Because I assure you, it wasn't even close to capitalism as you know it today. If we'd to stick to the original definition of capitalism as it was coined by Marx, probably everything would fall under it and it'd render both of these terms completely useless for any discussion other than autistic political philosophy that most likely won't have much to do with the real world.