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.
yeah, so the way that i see it is that communism is a specific subset of socialism with very clearly defined restrictions, however i think it suffers from a generally similar problem, regarding the lack of specificity at least. Capitalism manages to do away with it on a fundamental basis by simply moving that to the markets itself. I guess to preface this entire comment, i see the lack of market flexibility as a fundamental issue with everything other than capitalism, as it’s a decentralized system that works to fit the market needs.
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.
This is one of my primary concerns when i see people talking about economic socialism, there is no clearly defined mechanism of operation for it.
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.
it also depends on the period of time as well, you could make the argument that under lenin it was communist/socialist, but under stalin it was more authoritarian/dictatorship. It certainly made strides and advancements from the previous state that russia was in at the time, so there’s something to be said about that, although it’s pretty clear to most people that this was primarily due to industrialization and increasing productivity, which levels off in a goods market eventually.
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).
i’m not sure how applicable this is, since communism and capitalism are economic systems, the chinese government would be more authoritarian capitalist than anything. And as you said “socialism” as defined is a very broad goal, so it’s really hard to even interpret that statement to begin with.
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.
yeah i’m just sort of surprised that with the modern age being here and present and what not, that somebody hasn’t tried simulating a few hundred variants of a socialist economy to write a thesis on yet, it shouldn’t be difficult, and i’m sure it would make for an interesting read. It’s definitely an odd problem to have with something so popular among farther left types. Even the far right nazis know what they want to do when they get into government lol.
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.
to be clear, i’m not inherently dismissing socialism, i’m just dismissing the particular issue i see present with it. And while the equality aspect is arguably true, i feel like you could just as easily apply socialist policy to a capitalist system and get a similar result, while retaining the very clear operation of capitalism.
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.
idk i guess i just feel like we kinda hit the nail on the head with the “decentralized self regulating market economy” idea from the get go. There are problems with it, and notable issues for sure, but that’s why the government exists, to take care of these problems. There are also some interesting ethical implications you get into with either system as well. That’s a whole other discussion though.
It makes perfect sense if you understand how nuance works. But I think there is where the problem lies- YOUR confusion stems from your inability to understand it.
They’re not wrong. And I’m not going to apologize for not feeling like explaining it to you, but I’ll advise that you start by learning what nuance actually means.
This is one of the most inane threads I’ve ever seen on Lemmy. Nuance is having a fine understanding of a topic, while the line I’m quoting is taking a complicated topic and boiling it down to a truism.
well yeah, i’m reading economic socialism down through the lense of capitalism. Obviously it’s going to be a little bit restrictive, this is lemmy, not a PHD thesis.
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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.
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yeah, so the way that i see it is that communism is a specific subset of socialism with very clearly defined restrictions, however i think it suffers from a generally similar problem, regarding the lack of specificity at least. Capitalism manages to do away with it on a fundamental basis by simply moving that to the markets itself. I guess to preface this entire comment, i see the lack of market flexibility as a fundamental issue with everything other than capitalism, as it’s a decentralized system that works to fit the market needs.
This is one of my primary concerns when i see people talking about economic socialism, there is no clearly defined mechanism of operation for it.
it also depends on the period of time as well, you could make the argument that under lenin it was communist/socialist, but under stalin it was more authoritarian/dictatorship. It certainly made strides and advancements from the previous state that russia was in at the time, so there’s something to be said about that, although it’s pretty clear to most people that this was primarily due to industrialization and increasing productivity, which levels off in a goods market eventually.
i’m not sure how applicable this is, since communism and capitalism are economic systems, the chinese government would be more authoritarian capitalist than anything. And as you said “socialism” as defined is a very broad goal, so it’s really hard to even interpret that statement to begin with.
yeah i’m just sort of surprised that with the modern age being here and present and what not, that somebody hasn’t tried simulating a few hundred variants of a socialist economy to write a thesis on yet, it shouldn’t be difficult, and i’m sure it would make for an interesting read. It’s definitely an odd problem to have with something so popular among farther left types. Even the far right nazis know what they want to do when they get into government lol.
to be clear, i’m not inherently dismissing socialism, i’m just dismissing the particular issue i see present with it. And while the equality aspect is arguably true, i feel like you could just as easily apply socialist policy to a capitalist system and get a similar result, while retaining the very clear operation of capitalism.
idk i guess i just feel like we kinda hit the nail on the head with the “decentralized self regulating market economy” idea from the get go. There are problems with it, and notable issues for sure, but that’s why the government exists, to take care of these problems. There are also some interesting ethical implications you get into with either system as well. That’s a whole other discussion though.
Drag has never heard of that. Then again, drag has never heard of wet deserts or bland spices either.
surprised that you haven’t heard of bland spices, but i guess it’s all relative.
As for deserts, snow is very water based. As is ice. Antarctica is very ice.
It makes perfect sense if you understand how nuance works. But I think there is where the problem lies- YOUR confusion stems from your inability to understand it.
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to be clear, this is a complete and blatant misrepresentation of what i said.
I literally called it an “approaching zero” problem.
They’re not wrong. And I’m not going to apologize for not feeling like explaining it to you, but I’ll advise that you start by learning what nuance actually means.
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well yeah, i’m reading economic socialism down through the lense of capitalism. Obviously it’s going to be a little bit restrictive, this is lemmy, not a PHD thesis.
Again. Not going to explain it to you.
That much is obvious, but probably not for the reason you think.