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Don't make the mistake of many on Hacker News thinking that the Soviet Union was a socialist society.

unimpressive 13y ago
As someone who is genuinely interested. Can you point to any examples of a socialist society? If no, can you explain how such a society might come to exist?
- rdl 13y ago
  Weren't the kibbutz in early Israel essentially socialist (or even possibly communist)? It doesn't seem hard to come up with functioning examples at a small scale (families, groups of families, etc.) with high group-cohesiveness and shared identity. It seems to break down at the nation-state scale, except perhaps during wartime or other emergency. It's interesting to think about whether socialism works in a society with extreme abundance ("post-scarcity"), at least for certain kinds of assets -- I could see cheaply-made material goods being essentially distributed in a socialist way while services performed by humans and "status" goods were highly capitalist.
  - jacoblyles 13y ago
    Families are socialist. So are some small native tribes. Large scale socialism by force tends to be a bit dystopian, though. They don't build walls to keep people out of socialist states.
  - mseebach 13y ago
    Socialism/capitalism primarily deals with the question of how to distribute scarce resources - which, by definition, is irrelevant in a post-scarcity society.
    - sageikosa 13y ago
      No, neither deals with scarce resources. Capitalism deals with investment and return on investment (via profit) as the directing agent of production. Socialism deals with distribution of "goods and services" according to some socially defined value system. The various socialisms may vary on how this value system is aimed or directed, but it is usually "republican" (for the people) in outer character so that popular support is maintained; even if it is benevolently dictatored for executive expediency.
      - mr_luc 13y ago
        First, great description. Second, he says "scarce resources," you say 'no, it doesn't deal with that," but then say that it deals with "distribution of 'goods and services.'" Isn't that the same thing, from a practical standpoint? Even if they aren't scarce in the sense that the society has enough to go around, their scarcity relative to the average citizen still depends on the efficiency of that distribution process. Maybe the system or theory of socialism technically 'doesn't concern itself with scarce resources', but I don't see why it makes his point less valid.
        sageikosa 13y ago
        > but I don't see why it makes his point less valid. >>Socialism/capitalism primarily deals with the question of how to distribute scarce resources - which, by definition, is irrelevant in a post-scarcity society. If (by his point) you mean his assertion that socialism and capitalism are irrelevant in a "post-scarcity society", do not forget he is asserting that there is no scarcity. Either goods and services are abundant and meeting "market" aggregate needs (post-scarcity), or they are not. Socialism assumes that the problems of production (and presumably service delivery) have been solved, so it is quite happy in a "post-scarcity" world, since it only has to distribute according to need, or to everyone, or something like that. Socialism is only concerned with distribution and doesn't care whether the resources (goods/services, or what-not) are scarce or not. It assumes distribution is irrelevant to production or availability of anything. Practically speaking, capitalism doesn't categorically solve scarcity or distribution , and only gets involved if there is a measurable expectation of return to be made in a market.
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    You might enjoy mutualism.
- falk 13y ago
  Socialism is essentially when the worker's own the means of production, so I'd look into worker owned companies. Here's a list of worker owned companies that have a Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_companies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_companie...
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  1. The Paris Commune 2. Revolutionary Catalonia 3. kibbutz-es 4. The Free Territory Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_countries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_countries Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities (anarchism is a form of socialism) (Also, actual Marxists do consider the USSR as Real Socialism (tm))
mseebach 13y ago
Yes, of course, if an experiment gets the wrong result, you declare the experiment faulty and try again. You should never let your ideas become polluted by empirical evidence.
- deadairspace 13y ago
  > You should never let your ideas become polluted by empirical evidence. Maybe you should take a leaf out of your own book and revise what socialism actually is, and how the USSR wasn't that.
  - mseebach 13y ago
    No, it's not socialist, because the socialist nation is a utopia, and thus practically unreachable. The USSR (and DDR, Cuba, Zimbabwe, pre-Deng China and so on), however, is what you get when you make an attempt at reaching it.
    - steveklabnik 13y ago
      There are two major branches of socialism: utopian and scientific, actually.
- finnw 13y ago
  Verbal irony rarely works well on HN
  - maaku 13y ago
    It does when it's dressing up an actual, valid point.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  Especially given that Marxism is a science, and has undergone major changes as things are learned. Hence "Marxism" vs. "Marxism-Leninism" vs. "Marxism-Leninism-Maoism." Edison: "I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb."
sageikosa 13y ago
Yeah, it's not like they used "Socialist" in the full name of the republic or something...</deadpan> For anyone interested who doesn't understand the spectrum of socialist organization, read almost any book by Ludwig von Mises (start with "Socialism", where he catalogs the socialist orers of the early 1920s) and work your way forward.
- hackerboos 13y ago
  >Yeah, it's not like they used "Socialist" in the full name of the republic or something Like North Korea uses Democratic?
  - dsego 13y ago
    It was an attempt at humour, notice the deadpan end tag. Deadpan is dry humour, just imagine Ricky Gervais, Steve Carell or Zach Galifianakis saying the sentence out loud.
  - sageikosa 13y ago
    We can surely judge whether North Korea is democratic (in fact, very few places are "truly" in the Hellenic Athenian Greek sense: democratic). Judging whether something is "truly" socialistic is arguably harder, since while the goal of democracy is a system by which the public expresses its favor or disfavor for laws and policies; socialism's goals (each according to its need) may not be achievable at all (at least if we look at the long term track record (1)). If that is so, all we are left is what a socialist regime intends, and whether it organizes itself (at least formally) as a socialist order. (1) From a long term track record, there "problem" of the perfect social organization hasn't been "solved" by anything. We can, however, see that some things are "less wrong"...
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      I think you are confusing one articulation of a motivation for socialism with what socialism is; when Marx used that slogan he wasn't explaining what socialism was, but what, in his view, it could enable once fully realized. What socialism is is public ownership/control of the means of production.
mathieuh 13y ago
Except that apart from Trots and left anti-communists, Real Communists do consider the USSR to have been socialist, with declining purity of socialism post Stalin's death.
- hackerboos 13y ago
  >Real Communist Stalinists would consider the Soviet Union to be socialist. Marxists (what I'm assuming you mean by a 'Real Communist') would disagree.
  - mathieuh 13y ago
    As a communist who talks to other communists (admittedly mostly Maoists and 'Stalinists' (which is really a pejorative invented by Trots to demonise Actual Socialism ('Stalinists' are simply anti-revisionist Leninists)), I say that Marxists who apply more than a simple liberal analysis to the USSR would agree that it was in fact socialist.
    - steveklabnik 13y ago
      Marxist here, I concur. You do have to admit that many people who are new to their studies or people who have a more superficial understanding of socialism often do assert that the USSR wasn't 'real' socialism as a means of distancing themselves from its 'failures.'
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      The Marxists I've known have tended to have the view that the Soviet Union (and this generally applies to Leninism and its descendants and implementations generally) was socialist in both the superficial structural sense (in that it features government control of the means of production and exchange, to a very large degree), and in terms of its propaganda. Beyond that, there has been less agreement, but many have held the view that the USSR either was not socialism (sometimes referring to it as specifically as "state capitalism") or that it was an approach to socialism, but one which was fatally flawed by (and this is, in some respects, my synthesis of their criticisms, rather than one that was articulated by any one interlocutor) the adaptations to apply socialism without first having institutionalized the bourgeois revolution which precedes the socialist revolution which resulted in property-like (if not formally "property") personal social authority structures which shared features with both the property structures of feudalism which are at the roots of the problems addressed by the bourgeois revolution, and the those of the capitalism that are at the roots of the problems addressed by the socialist revolution, which mostly resulted in the net effect of the implementation of Leninism (and its variations applied elsewhere) being to spread a distorted form of socialist ideology in a society in which elements of both the bourgeois revolution and the socialist revolution were present but where the revolutions as such still needed to occur in the normal order but were arrested (in some cases, less than completely--certainly, even in the mid-1990s, most who held some form of this view seemed to think that at least China was very definitely progressing through the bourgeois revolution) by the identification of the status quo order with the socialist revolution.

As someone who is genuinely interested. Can you point to any examples of a socialist society? If no, can you explain how such a society might come to exist?

rdl 13y ago
Weren't the kibbutz in early Israel essentially socialist (or even possibly communist)? It doesn't seem hard to come up with functioning examples at a small scale (families, groups of families, etc.) with high group-cohesiveness and shared identity. It seems to break down at the nation-state scale, except perhaps during wartime or other emergency. It's interesting to think about whether socialism works in a society with extreme abundance ("post-scarcity"), at least for certain kinds of assets -- I could see cheaply-made material goods being essentially distributed in a socialist way while services performed by humans and "status" goods were highly capitalist.
- jacoblyles 13y ago
  Families are socialist. So are some small native tribes. Large scale socialism by force tends to be a bit dystopian, though. They don't build walls to keep people out of socialist states.
- mseebach 13y ago
  Socialism/capitalism primarily deals with the question of how to distribute scarce resources - which, by definition, is irrelevant in a post-scarcity society.
  - sageikosa 13y ago
    No, neither deals with scarce resources. Capitalism deals with investment and return on investment (via profit) as the directing agent of production. Socialism deals with distribution of "goods and services" according to some socially defined value system. The various socialisms may vary on how this value system is aimed or directed, but it is usually "republican" (for the people) in outer character so that popular support is maintained; even if it is benevolently dictatored for executive expediency.
    - mr_luc 13y ago
      First, great description. Second, he says "scarce resources," you say 'no, it doesn't deal with that," but then say that it deals with "distribution of 'goods and services.'" Isn't that the same thing, from a practical standpoint? Even if they aren't scarce in the sense that the society has enough to go around, their scarcity relative to the average citizen still depends on the efficiency of that distribution process. Maybe the system or theory of socialism technically 'doesn't concern itself with scarce resources', but I don't see why it makes his point less valid.
      - sageikosa 13y ago
        > but I don't see why it makes his point less valid. >>Socialism/capitalism primarily deals with the question of how to distribute scarce resources - which, by definition, is irrelevant in a post-scarcity society. If (by his point) you mean his assertion that socialism and capitalism are irrelevant in a "post-scarcity society", do not forget he is asserting that there is no scarcity. Either goods and services are abundant and meeting "market" aggregate needs (post-scarcity), or they are not. Socialism assumes that the problems of production (and presumably service delivery) have been solved, so it is quite happy in a "post-scarcity" world, since it only has to distribute according to need, or to everyone, or something like that. Socialism is only concerned with distribution and doesn't care whether the resources (goods/services, or what-not) are scarce or not. It assumes distribution is irrelevant to production or availability of anything. Practically speaking, capitalism doesn't categorically solve scarcity or distribution , and only gets involved if there is a measurable expectation of return to be made in a market.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  You might enjoy mutualism.
falk 13y ago
Socialism is essentially when the worker's own the means of production, so I'd look into worker owned companies. Here's a list of worker owned companies that have a Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_companies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_companie...
steveklabnik 13y ago
1. The Paris Commune 2. Revolutionary Catalonia 3. kibbutz-es 4. The Free Territory Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_countries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_countries Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities (anarchism is a form of socialism) (Also, actual Marxists do consider the USSR as Real Socialism (tm))

mseebach 13y ago

Yes, of course, if an experiment gets the wrong result, you declare the experiment faulty and try again. You should never let your ideas become polluted by empirical evidence.

deadairspace 13y ago
> You should never let your ideas become polluted by empirical evidence. Maybe you should take a leaf out of your own book and revise what socialism actually is, and how the USSR wasn't that.
- mseebach 13y ago
  No, it's not socialist, because the socialist nation is a utopia, and thus practically unreachable. The USSR (and DDR, Cuba, Zimbabwe, pre-Deng China and so on), however, is what you get when you make an attempt at reaching it.
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    There are two major branches of socialism: utopian and scientific, actually.
finnw 13y ago
Verbal irony rarely works well on HN
- maaku 13y ago
  It does when it's dressing up an actual, valid point.
steveklabnik 13y ago
Especially given that Marxism is a science, and has undergone major changes as things are learned. Hence "Marxism" vs. "Marxism-Leninism" vs. "Marxism-Leninism-Maoism." Edison: "I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb."

sageikosa 13y ago

Yeah, it's not like they used "Socialist" in the full name of the republic or something...</deadpan> For anyone interested who doesn't understand the spectrum of socialist organization, read almost any book by Ludwig von Mises (start with "Socialism", where he catalogs the socialist orers of the early 1920s) and work your way forward.

hackerboos 13y ago
>Yeah, it's not like they used "Socialist" in the full name of the republic or something Like North Korea uses Democratic?
- dsego 13y ago
  It was an attempt at humour, notice the deadpan end tag. Deadpan is dry humour, just imagine Ricky Gervais, Steve Carell or Zach Galifianakis saying the sentence out loud.
- sageikosa 13y ago
  We can surely judge whether North Korea is democratic (in fact, very few places are "truly" in the Hellenic Athenian Greek sense: democratic). Judging whether something is "truly" socialistic is arguably harder, since while the goal of democracy is a system by which the public expresses its favor or disfavor for laws and policies; socialism's goals (each according to its need) may not be achievable at all (at least if we look at the long term track record (1)). If that is so, all we are left is what a socialist regime intends, and whether it organizes itself (at least formally) as a socialist order. (1) From a long term track record, there "problem" of the perfect social organization hasn't been "solved" by anything. We can, however, see that some things are "less wrong"...
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    I think you are confusing one articulation of a motivation for socialism with what socialism is; when Marx used that slogan he wasn't explaining what socialism was, but what, in his view, it could enable once fully realized. What socialism is is public ownership/control of the means of production.

mathieuh 13y ago

Except that apart from Trots and left anti-communists, Real Communists do consider the USSR to have been socialist, with declining purity of socialism post Stalin's death.

hackerboos 13y ago
>Real Communist Stalinists would consider the Soviet Union to be socialist. Marxists (what I'm assuming you mean by a 'Real Communist') would disagree.
- mathieuh 13y ago
  As a communist who talks to other communists (admittedly mostly Maoists and 'Stalinists' (which is really a pejorative invented by Trots to demonise Actual Socialism ('Stalinists' are simply anti-revisionist Leninists)), I say that Marxists who apply more than a simple liberal analysis to the USSR would agree that it was in fact socialist.
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    Marxist here, I concur. You do have to admit that many people who are new to their studies or people who have a more superficial understanding of socialism often do assert that the USSR wasn't 'real' socialism as a means of distancing themselves from its 'failures.'
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    The Marxists I've known have tended to have the view that the Soviet Union (and this generally applies to Leninism and its descendants and implementations generally) was socialist in both the superficial structural sense (in that it features government control of the means of production and exchange, to a very large degree), and in terms of its propaganda. Beyond that, there has been less agreement, but many have held the view that the USSR either was not socialism (sometimes referring to it as specifically as "state capitalism") or that it was an approach to socialism, but one which was fatally flawed by (and this is, in some respects, my synthesis of their criticisms, rather than one that was articulated by any one interlocutor) the adaptations to apply socialism without first having institutionalized the bourgeois revolution which precedes the socialist revolution which resulted in property-like (if not formally "property") personal social authority structures which shared features with both the property structures of feudalism which are at the roots of the problems addressed by the bourgeois revolution, and the those of the capitalism that are at the roots of the problems addressed by the socialist revolution, which mostly resulted in the net effect of the implementation of Leninism (and its variations applied elsewhere) being to spread a distorted form of socialist ideology in a society in which elements of both the bourgeois revolution and the socialist revolution were present but where the revolutions as such still needed to occur in the normal order but were arrested (in some cases, less than completely--certainly, even in the mid-1990s, most who held some form of this view seemed to think that at least China was very definitely progressing through the bourgeois revolution) by the identification of the status quo order with the socialist revolution.