i’ve seen socialism defined as anything from early USSR under lenin, to capitalism but if private ownership of capital isn’t a thing anymore.
It’s incredibly broad depending on how you want to apply it. And technically, communism is actually a subset of socialism.
Capitalism is likewise pretty broad as well, but generally the ownership of capital is traceable and has some form of root ownership. Even things like stocks still have clearly defined ownership. Loans are weird, but the ownership there is clearly defined.
Under socialism loans may not even be possible, depending on how aggressive with it you are. Unless you lent to a third party, like a separate state/country i guess.
IDK what definition you’re working with here, but there isn’t much flexibility allowing you very much room to differentiate it here. I’m really not sure how you’re going to work out of this one to be honest.
Like philosophically, socialism is theoretically simple. it’s the implementation that’s hard. The idea is pretty simple, it’s the concept that there is no singular ownership, but collective ownership. You could define this as something like “anybody who has any investment in any product/good or service has ownership” but this gets sort of confusing. If i buy product from the goods company, does that mean i now own a “share” of the goods company? If i can, does this mean buying literal shares of the company would be “negative” shares? Or is this backwards, buying product produces a negative share, while investing provides a positive share. Does this influence the “shares” of the employees of the company? Are these the same shares? Can i simply out own the shares of any employee with (literal) capital? Or is buying product not applicable in this scenario. That seems reasonable to me, so we’ll omit that.
Where does currency even come from? The government? The global trade market? Who owns that? Since the money is in my possession, and it’s doing work for me, i must own it, at least partially, but it’s also capable of doing work for others, so do other people also own a part of the capital that i hold? That would be weird so let’s simply ascribe capital as a means of temporarily holding “schizo” capital.
so now we have a socialist society, that has private capital, and relatively isolated businesses. The employees own a share of the business. We still havent determined how that’s proportioned. But we can assume they do, so we have a relatively capitalist market, as that’s generally how a market is going to work most effectively (also that would literally just be communism at that point), unless you are either god, or the worlds most powerful supercomputer that can simply predict the needs of a market at a whim. Or you just allow no flexibility in the market (surely this won’t cause problems) with companies that don’t have direct ownership, which is not dissimilar to how the silicon valley works, minus the VC funding.
So we’ve basically just created capitalism, but different. Not that this is a bad thing. It’s just, an odd problem.
At the end of the day, it’s either going to approach communism, or capitalism, there is no distinct mechanism of socialism. I generally refer to this as an “approaching zero problem” as it has no clear definition, and if you go far enough you’re just going to end up back where you started, one way or the other.
So I guess the problem is that socialism and communism are kinda used in two different ways. One way refers to a political program, the other refers to a hypothetical stage of economic development.
The political programs are more clearly defined. Socialism is an umbrella term for a lot of specific anticapitalist political programs, of which one calls itself Communism. Communism is for people who like the Soviet Union and China, but there’s basically no smoke in that ideology in western countries, where Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism are your biggest left wing contenders.
But “socialism” and “communism” as stages of economic development are moving targets, impossible to pin down because they’re entirely hypothetical and there are only a couple countries that have even tried to achieve them. Was the Soviet Union communist? Well, it was lead by Communists in the political program sense, but I don’t think anyone would argue that it achieved communism in the economic and social development sense. Modern day China, too, is Communist in the political sense, but even by their own metrics they are still capitalist, and see socialism as a goal they are working towards (if you believe their rhetoric and don’t think it’s all just cynical, which many western socialists do).
So while the Chinese Communists have their own definition of practical socialism, western leftists are not in power and all of our ideas remain purely theoretical as a result. Add to this the fact that there is no major leftist political org in western countries for the socialists to rally around and you get more definitions of socialism and communism (the stages of economic development) than you can shake a stick at. This leads to the problem you’re describing, where socialism appears to have no solid meaning at all, because the notion of it is so phantasmal.
But I don’t think that you can dismiss socialism or its results as “capitalism, but different,” because the whole thing about socialism is that new power structures create new incentive structures and therefore even if there are some superficial elements of capitalism that remain - like the use of currency - under a socialist regime the outcomes should be more equal, fair, and democratic. There are numerous historical examples of these better alternative outcomes, but of course they’ve all been relentlessly propagandized against in Western countries so that the average person doesn’t realize that there is a better way to run society than the one they were born into.
I feel like if I told you to go and read a book on socialism, and how it functions, and what some theoretical structures for it would be, that would be kind of useless and repetitive, since you’ve probably gotten that before, it’s a pretty popular response. But I think that would probably be the best solution for your confusion here, any given book you decide to pick up or get recommended on the subject will probably be able to inform you better than some random person’s re-translation of the book.
If you have gotten that response before, then I gotta ask, along with everyone else that would’ve gotten that recommendation and then not done so, why you’d still be talking about a topic that you’re not willing to invest like, I dunno, 7-8 total hours in. Probably could’ve read das kapital, and taken notes on it, and then shot those notes at a professor or other talking head online or even just some other random commenter, and then probably been done with it in the amount of time you’ve spent talking about that shit on lemmy. And that’s probably the most dense and fundamental book on the subject if we’re not getting into weird french postmodern bullshit.
Random half-baked schmucks from all walks and different schools of socialism and communism are going to present you with a litany of different explanations as to what the system actually entails, that they’re probably half-remembering and then regurgitating from youtube videos, or whatever random collection of academic works they’ve gone in for. That’s obviously not the best way to learn about the system, or really to learn about anything. Means that you’ll get weirdass definitions like:
to capitalism but if private ownership of capital isn’t a thing anymore.
Which sounds pretty much completely incoherent at its face. I have no conception of what that would look like, because the ownership of capital is a foundational enough belief in capitalism to be what the system is named after. It’s like socialism but without any socialized stuff, or communism without communal ownership.
Like, I’ve never heard of socialism entailing that you buying a product a company sells entitles you to shares in that company. You’re not a worker at said company, that doesn’t really make any sense. You also later on talk about “schizo” capital (?), shit about where money comes from (you can answer this one in capitalism, as well. Also, money =/= capital), and the economic calculation problem, which, I dunno man. I’m not going to say so much that that shit’s made up, but it’s not really a big problem, and it’s also a problem that capitalism still basically has to reckon with at a fundamental level, it just ignores it and then decides to crash every decade or so, so that the market can “prune” itself or whatever bullshit. Go hit the paul cockshott vape pen, or go read the book about walmart or whatever.
Also just like. I dunno, maybe we don’t need 15 brands of peanut butter at the supermarket which are superficially different but fundamentally the same. Maybe we can get away with just having chunky and just having smooth. Maybe the measure of an efficient economic system isn’t that there’s shelves full of a range of insubstantially different products and then also that 30-40% of the food is wasted, maybe there’s a better measure of “efficiency” there. You can’t assume that the decision making choices of people in the market are 100% rational, maybe by assuming that they’re rational we just leave the corporate propaganda apparatus totally unacknowledged, which is exactly where that apparatus likes to be. You can’t assume that there aren’t externalized costs that aren’t factored into the initial price, like how suburbia is subsidized, like how climate change is happening. You can’t assume that there’s no monopolies, which are just going to sit on top of a singular element of the chain, do all the calculations completely internal to themselves, not communicate that with anyone else, and then effectively be a centrally planned authoritarian state for that particular sector of the economy which they and they alone control completely.
Most of all, I think that you can’t assume that the government isn’t totally conscious of all of these flaws, and have decided to ignore them at the behest of corporate donors. The can gets kicked down the street.
I feel like if I told you to go and read a book on socialism, and how it functions, and what some theoretical structures for it would be, that would be kind of useless and repetitive, since you’ve probably gotten that before, it’s a pretty popular response. But I think that would probably be the best solution for your confusion here, any given book you decide to pick up or get recommended on the subject will probably be able to inform you better than some random person’s re-translation of the book.
i probably should, although my specific interest is more in the sociological aspect of things, so while it would be rather informative it’s probably not ultimately what i’m looking for. Although it would solve the obvious problem here lol.
If you have gotten that response before, then I gotta ask, along with everyone else that would’ve gotten that recommendation and then not done so, why you’d still be talking about a topic that you’re not willing to invest like, I dunno, 7-8 total hours in.
i haven’t although that’s mostly because i don’t really talk about socialism, i mostly engage with other political things i find more pressing/interesting. My previous bit explains most of it though.
Random half-baked schmucks from all walks and different schools of socialism and communism are going to present you with a litany of different explanations as to what the system actually entails, that they’re probably half-remembering and then regurgitating from youtube videos, or whatever random collection of academic works they’ve gone in for. That’s obviously not the best way to learn about the system, or really to learn about anything. Means that you’ll get weirdass definitions like:
yeah, which is why i made the point about needing some sort of real proof of concept application that we can work with more completely. Because right now the existing literature base is either, very old, or very academic, and while there’s nothing wrong with academic works, it should probably get some more attention outside of that. If for no other reason than to stop people from making shit up about it lol.
Also just like. I dunno, maybe we don’t need 15 brands of peanut butter at the supermarket which are superficially different but fundamentally the same. Maybe we can get away with just having chunky and just having smooth.
ironically, i’d be willing to bet money those are all owned by one singular company, just sold under different names with slightly different manufacturing between them.
Technically, the reason you have different brands of peanut butter is the same the reason you have things like federated lemmy instances. We could have one centralized lemmy instance, but if one of those peanut butter manufacturers for example, laces all of their production batches with the death chemical for example, you can simply just use a different one. (not that this currently applies)
Maybe the measure of an efficient economic system isn’t that there’s shelves full of a range of insubstantially different products and then also that 30-40% of the food is wasted,
from my knowledge, most of that food waste is farther down the consumption chain. A lot of production waste product is going to be reprocessed and consumed via other means, livestock feed being one example. A large example of food waste currently is stores throwing out perfectly good food rather than simply giving it away or something. Another big problem is food waste at the individual level. A lot of food ends up being wasted by the ultimate consumer of the food itself.
You can’t assume that the decision making choices of people in the market are 100% rational, maybe by assuming that they’re rational we just leave the corporate propaganda apparatus totally unacknowledged, which is exactly where that apparatus likes to be.
this is true, but i think rationality is a potentially dangerous and arbitrary distinction here. If the economy were operating under rationality it would probably stop feeding elderly people as they can’t do any work and don’t provide much in the way of productivity, for example. I think markets need to be balanced somewhere between rationality, and market needs. Capitalism has the very distinct ability when compared to socialism/communism of allowing the market itself to stabilize on what is provided and what gets consumed. An interesting example of this is the internal combustion engine, once built to run on what was ostensibly a waste product from refining oil, is now the primary use case for refining oil. If gas gets too expensive, people will move to other things like EV’s for example, although there’s arguments against this, for example transportation is generally pretty important. I think a market functioning like this under a socialist/communist economic system is either going to be very very difficult to correctly implement, or that it will end up removing a significant degree of personal freedom and liberty from day to day life, which is not something i’m fond of from a conceptual level for multiple reasons.
You can’t assume that there’s no monopolies, which are just going to sit on top of a singular element of the chain, do all the calculations completely internal to themselves, not communicate that with anyone else, and then effectively be a centrally planned authoritarian state for that particular sector of the economy which they and they alone control completely.
yeah, and this is why the US isn’t a free market capitalist state. It’s a relatively free market with restrictions that are supposed to prevent this kind of thing, and have before in the past. For example your previous peanut butter example, that’s why there are literally 15 different brands. If there was only one, it would literally be a monopoly.
Most of all, I think that you can’t assume that the government isn’t totally conscious of all of these flaws, and have decided to ignore them at the behest of corporate donors. The can gets kicked down the street.
this is true, and i think this is the ultimate reason behind that schizo rant i went on in my previous comment. You simply cannot assume something about any given system. A lot of those comments i made might be rather silly, but it’s not like its improbable of happening in a socialist system based on capital either.
capitalism sits in the unique position compared to socialism where it has a self regulated market flow. Any state planned economy is not going to function like this in any significant capacity. And that’s arguably a significant drawback of any system.
