General What is Socialism?

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kneeblock

Drapetomaniac
Apr 18, 2015
12,435
23,026
For one time only, I will take you out of the echo chamber of decades of Cold War propaganda and Twitter activism on the left and right and attempt to advance a useful history of socialism for you that should clarify what the term means. As someone likely to be teaching this stuff in the very near future, this is a useful exercise for me, so feel free to push on certain points or ask questions.

In its crudest terms, socialism simply means the socialization of producing and distributing goods and services across a society. The idea that this could be useful predates Karl Marx and existed in many societies around the world, but often with exploitative labor relationships. Marx's innovation was to take the particular political economic system that existed in his time, industrial capitalism, and subject it to a ruthless critique. He wasn't the first to have done so, but he was the first to have done so comprehensively. He attacked the system at multiple points for resting on logical fallacies, historical processes of dispossession and disenfranchisement, and exploitation of labor, and forecast that ultimately it would implode. Key concepts included:

1) A labor theory of value, which is to say that everything in the market acquires value through the process of mixing human labor with materials.
2) A materialist approach to history, which is to say historical circumstances are best understood by looking at material circumstances, e.g. how are needs being met, what is scarce and what is plentiful, who controls resource allocation, etc. This allows us to analyze the creation and maintenance of classes over time, e.g. the working class (proletariat), the bourgeoisie, etc.
3) A theory of alienation, to explain how workers are set into competitive relations with one another and are separated from the fruits of their labor, that is, how processes of industrial production essentially make people cogs in the wheel. People are connected to things instead of each other.
4) A critique of primitive accumulation, which is to say understanding that the foundations of producing capital came from taking things out of common usage and making them privately owned, often arbitrarily and with violence.
5) A critique of commodity fetishism, which is to say the belief that there is a relationship between commodities and money that explains an economy, rather than relations between people. Marx posited instead that no item had an intrinsic value and instead value was predicated on subjective social determinations. In other words, there is no such thing as an "invisible hand."
6) That base determines superstructure, which is to say that the whole system of productive relationships needed to keep a society functional determines what politics, economics, culture, ideology, etc are possible.

Now Marx posited plenty of other concepts and I recommend reading his books to find out more. Capital Vols. 1 and 2 are probably where he lays things out most comprehensively, but most people who have brief brushes with Marx seldom read anything beyond the Communist Manifesto. While Marx's theory is much more complicated than what is listed above, I pulled these key concepts out because I think they're most useful to understanding the way socialism gets invoked today. Some of them have been critiqued or disputed extensively since he wrote them. Others have been substantially reinterpreted based on the exigencies of the moment. Marx himself was notoriously wishy washy about the means by which capitalism would fall, at times expressing sentiments in favor of its active overthrow and at others saying it would naturally give way to socialism. The best he did say was that the people will have to make the revolution for themselves based on their own particular circumstances in the time when capitalism meets its demise.

After Marx and Engels passed on, socialism went through many twists and turns as various thinkers around the world pondered what to do with this critique and how to make it relevant to make the revolution for themselves, so to speak. And this is where we get into trouble, because like most people, a lot of Marx's fans only read the Communist Manifesto and never bothered to read most of the rest of his work all that closely. In said manifesto, Marx posits what I consider to be the great poison pill of communism, which is the "dictatorship of the proletariat." Outraged by what he saw going on in the Hungarian Revolution, Marx believed for a time that the only way out of the domination of the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" was the total overthrow of the bourgeois class by the working class using force, if necessary, to abolish class altogether. Several years later in his "Critique of the Gotha Program" (i.e. social democracy), Marx would criticize approaches that favored just letting society evolve into communism as essentially weak and revisionist. Later, he tempered that critique saying it was possible if there was a robust democratic system to bring about such change, but he didn't believe such opportunity existed in his home country of Germany in the mid-late1800s, and given the circumstances, it's hard to argue he was wrong. In any case, many a would be revolutionary enthusiastically took up the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat as a way to force change in their own society. The question became who was the proletariat?

In Russia, like China, and later Cuba, Korea, and Vietnam, this was a complicated question. Marx had laid his system out for industrial capitalist societies and basically said little about agrarian societies with large peasant classes. Bourgeois capitalism was a necessary precondition that he believed societies had to pass through (and ultimately that the whole world had to pass through) before socialism could take hold. Most of the above mentioned nations weren't really ready. So what did they do? For the most part, they took three steps: 1) Liquidation of the propertied class through seizure of assets and wealth; 2) Development of a revolutionary "vanguard" party that had experience with bourgeois capitalism and would guide the process of social transformation within the confines of the nation (rather than as part of a larger international project), and 3) Proletarianization through a redistribution of citizens throughout the countries and massive educational and industrial production projects to forcefully create an industrial working class.

Anyone who knows anything about history can smell how the unfreedom crept into these processes. Lenin was the one who came up with most of these ideas as Russia was the first to fall. Even then, there were plenty of Socialists who loudly disagreed with him, but given the Bolshevik victory following the turmoil in Russia, everyone lined up behind the winners. It's been argued Lenin was more egalitarian at heart, but he died early and Stalin was the one responsible for executing his vision, which, to put it mildly, didn't go well. The now deceased Marx's Germany found itself deeply fractured following World War I with the social democrats nominally in power, but disgraced by their failure to prevent the war in the first place. They advanced their idea of gradual socialism Marx had critiqued back in the 1870s, and young people dredged up those writings to criticize them. Meanwhile fascists of all stripes were on the march and ultimately engineered their way into power. In the early years of Nazi rule, policies of centralized redistribution were still normalized enough that the Nazis had to accommodate them (hence the name "national socialists") but this was largely due to the influence of the Strasser brothers and their followers who quickly fell out of favor with Hitler. Over in the Soviet Union, Stalin had purged all of his enemies by wartime, including his main political rival Trotsky, who he'd politically marginalized before he was ultimately murdered. So in the pre-Cold War era that was World War II, the world had Stalin's authoritarian state command economy with socialist characteristics, a vanquished social democratic party in Germany, imprisoned Communists in Italy and Spain, a briefly united Popular Front in France that collapsed and was persecuted under the Vichy government, while Britain's Labour party and the United States' Democratic party offered a liberal democratic platform that was both an alternative and a response to socialism's demand for the working class to be prioritized. Canada's liberal party is actually a fascinating divergence from this path as Laurier basically assembled a ragtag political coalition for awhile that was mostly faced with reaching full statehood until the postwar era.

Any road up, after WWII, a lot of things change. China goes red. Cuba follows. Other countries try and some are successful, some fail. This coincides with a massive decolonization process begun after World War I where Leninist-Marxism ends up seeming to many to be a useful alternative to jumping on the bandwagon of so-called liberal democracy being peddled by the former imperial powers. The Soviets are at least a credible benefactor so, as Marx said, the base determines the superstructure. Leninism (or a brand of it) becomes the primary way of understanding socialism, though the "revisionists" Marx scolded never went away. They became the various social democrats around the world. Orthodox or "vulgar" Marxists are still around too, often doing party building projects in and around developing nations. Mao has his own version of proletarianism as he considers the dispossessed and rural peasant class (who Lenin famously had no use for) as the true working class. His innovations would guide the theorization of Marxism in analogous societies in Asia and Latin America. Socialism became deeply tethered to decolonization, but it was highly variable which strand of socialism and in some cases it wasn't ideology guiding a socialist political turn so much as groups who decided it was better to throw in their lots with the Soviets (or later the Cubans or Chinese) than the North Atlantic powers. But that doesn't get socialism or those political actors off the hook. I've generally found "that's not the real socialism" arguments unpersuasive. In reality, no party or country's political economic system is any more or less real than any other's as long as it makes a good faith attempt to connect its definitions of the system to its historical roots and apply the system according to its particular circumstances. There are varieties of socialism just like there are varieties of capitalism. There are even circumstances where they mix at both the national and international level. One of the projects of historians over the past 50 years has been demonstrating the uneven ways the formation of the working class has emerged and showing how even as capitalism was becoming the dominant system in Europe, there was resistance and the articulation of alternatives that in some cases were incorporated into the society and in others were roads not taken. This demonstrates to us that liberal democracy and capitalism can be separated from one another as not naturally fitting together, as many capitalists would like to argue. WEB DuBois, for example, famously argued that post-emancipation Reconstruction was the most radical proletarianization and bourgeois class liquidation in the history of the world up to that point, before it was dismantled. Even still, we have the radical reinterpretations of citizenship that came via the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments as a legacy of that time. Had the government not kowtowed to Southern pressure, who can say what further changes that time might have wrought?

So how does this relate to would be socialists today? Well, if we've already come to see socialism as a moving target of sorts, then obviously it's subject to some interpretation. What's usually the most useful way to understand how "socialist" someone is according to their own self-declaration or either the media or their opponents applying that label is to try to trace their thought to a particular past instantiation of socialism. Who have they read? One of the phrases I used above was "a good faith attempt to connect...definitions of the system to its historical roots." If there isn't this historical dimension, socialism is just a word. It can be as reductive as nationalization of industry or as expansive as any human relations wherein we share things. Neither definition satisfies even the most basic tests of understanding history or politics. So the question for any person using socialism to define themselves, or that someone else is defining as socialist, is which of the many lineages of socialism are they saying they subscribe to? It's likely that there is some blend and overlap, so which ones have they selected from and what are the strengths and limits of those selections?

If we were to take Bernie Sanders as an example, he has in the past identified himself as a "New Deal Democrat," but also a believer in social democratic principles found among parties in Scandinavia. Some of his policies seem to straddle the line between the two, but one in particular proposes the liquidation of a service sector called the insurance industry in favor of a single payer system where the state satisfies all health debts. This certainly leans more toward the ideals of European social democracy in the late 1940s and early '50s than to Roosevelt in 1936. But it doesn't lean quite all the way to the Bolsheviks in 1918, who directly took over management of the entire healthcare system.

Now we can take Pol Pot, who we can say nationalized healthcare by seizing Western medical facilities and limiting their availability while also recommending local treatments and saving more serious medical industrialization for after rice production had sufficiently increased. Is this socialist? This process of proletarianization is considered a pre-modern stage in Marxist thought. Mao, who inspired the Cambodians, believed, somewhat contrary to Marx, that agrarian production was the key to prosperity. The Khmer Rouge were in the process of dictatorship of the proletariat, but they seemingly missed the part that said only until class relations themselves can be abolished. Stalin also seemed to miss this part. But then again, just because you have sex out of wedlock doesn't mean you aren't a Christian, so why get caught up in the details? I'll grant you, that's a pretty big detail, but jettisoning it doesn't necessarily mean you're not still doing or trying to do Communism. This loophole in the ideology where you can interpose authoritarianism and have someone neglect the next phase completely seems to me a near fatal flaw if you're trying to posit that Marx and Engels developed a complete system. But I doubt even Marx and Engels themselves would've said that. Marx doesn't really mention this idea much in his later writings and as I said earlier, he hedges on revolution vs. democratic institutionalism more than enough. It would certainly be difficult to say that a person who favors a transition to socialism in an industrialized country could have much in common with the Cambodian communists of the 1970s, because historical materialism tells us that the ideology and economics of our situation couldn't be more different.

So in 2019, there are politicians around the world who are advancing various platforms that owe a debt to socialist theory, capitalist theory, liberal democratic theory, a cocktail of authoritarian theories, etc. Socialism as a world system doesn't seem like it's going to spontaneously emerge any time soon, but nations experiments with it as a critique and roadmap for identifying the excesses of capital are acting no less in the spirit of Marx than Hi Chi Minh was. I suppose in that sense, socialism is both a tool for "the ruthless criticism of everything existing," as Marx called it, and a guide to enacting radical redistributive social transformation, either quickly or slowly. The contradictions between justice and force are no more or less significant in socialism than they are in capitalist liberal democracies. So when questions arise of where socialism has "worked," they're operating at the wrong level of analysis. Capitalism has "worked" as a world system in the sense that it's survived, though it has certainly failed to produce prosperity or even basic survival for large numbers of people at various times. Politics typically decides how to allocate those market losses within nations. Fewer people are certainly starving and dying now than were under the feudal and mercantile systems that preceded it, but does that mean markets are the best possible way to distribute resources? By best, I mean fairest and most sustainable. That question, I suppose, is the socialist intervention.

Cold War politics mostly defined any use of socialism or communism as subscribing to ideals that actively advocated for the overthrow of democratic governments to take everything you earned so a bureaucrat of some kind could exploit you or throw you in a gulag if you were disobedient. It's not hard to see how this parody evolved considering the way socialist systems were being governed, but mostly this propaganda served to justify certain elites staying in power and the advancement of American imperial projects around the world. Most communist countries did the same, indoctrinating their people with ridiculous ideas about capitalism and democracy. Here and now, I believe it's possible to take a much more sober look at what these systems can mean, have meant, and should mean if we want to utilize them. There are plenty of terrible socialist ideas and terrible capitalist ideas and some good ideas that get attributed to both that aren't really representative of either. Neither have virtue on their own, but depend on whether and how the people get a say in using them.
 

Toelocku

*I Know What I Know if you Know What I Mean*
Dec 15, 2018
5,694
4,969
True socialism/communism can really only be done under heavy ethocentric authoritarian means as its not commensurate with human nature in general

Smart economic policy is balanced and sustainable socio-capitalistic/populistic in nature
 

sparkuri

Pulse On The Finger Of The Community
First 100
Jan 16, 2015
34,423
46,563
I too will attempt to clarify it.

Socialism: The souls right to breathe, crushed.
 

Leigh

Engineer
Pro Fighter
Jan 26, 2015
10,925
21,293
True socialism/communism can really only be done under heavy ethocentric authoritarian means as its not commensurate with human nature in general

Smart economic policy is balanced and sustainable socio-capitalistic/populistic in nature
Socialism and communism are not the same thing. Socialism is an economic philosophy that puts wealth and production in the hands of the people. Communism is economic and political and pretty much relies on a totalitarian one party state.
 

Toelocku

*I Know What I Know if you Know What I Mean*
Dec 15, 2018
5,694
4,969
Socialism and communism are not the same thing. Socialism is an economic philosophy that puts wealth and production in the hands of the people. Communism is economic and political and pretty much relies on a totalitarian one party state.
Can u name a actual socialist country that isn't authoritarian
 

kneeblock

Drapetomaniac
Apr 18, 2015
12,435
23,026
True socialism/communism can really only be done under heavy ethocentric authoritarian means as its not commensurate with human nature in general

Smart economic policy is balanced and sustainable socio-capitalistic/populistic in nature
I've heard this argument a lot and I think it needs a little definition.

First, requiring ethnocentrism and authoritarianism for socialism would necessarily mean that other systems where there is authoritarianism and ethnocentrism there is potential for socialist redistributive politics, which history shows certainly has not consistently been the case, and in fact many socialist governments have had wide ethnic variation. There's an argument to be made that expunging certain groups in hopes of attaining a kind of ethnic "purity" could prompt the state to then distribute all resources to its chosen group, but that would hardly be a socialist redistribution. It assumes that political uniformity is based in ethnicity, which essentially rests on old discredited ideas of racialization that were pretty roundly disproven by anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and biologists in the early 20th century. An early socialist, Karl Pearson, believed in this eugenics theory of social organization whereby the "lesser groups" should be exterminated. In fact, he invented many of the modern tools of statistics, including correlation, chi squared, p-values and others in an effort to prove this hypothesis. He felt the Mendelian geneticists were chasing a red herring by trying to find some causal mechanism for inheriting genes rather than just relying on strong correlation. This was basically in service of showing that certain populations were worth writing off as irredeemable. The Mendelians ended up being right, of course. But bad arguments about the relationship between race or ethnicity and politics or ideology persist, usually backed by spurious correlation, that is to say Pearson's system can still do what it set out to do.

Second, the issue of "human nature" bears addressing because no theory of social organization can go without dealing with it. Similar to old race theories, there is no scientific evidence of anything representing a fundamental human nature. It's certainly fine to believe in one and there are plenty of theories to make that argument. Maybe it comes from somewhere and is bestowed upon us. Maybe it's somehow encoded in our DNA or is the aggregate of that special 2% of our genome that makes us distinct from chimpanzees, but if so, science has yet to discover it. Not in neuroscience or genetics or any other usual suspects. Philosophy has probably traveled the furthest down that road, but the reigning consensus has mostly overthrown human nature in favor of investigating relations. That is to say relations between humans and the world, between one another, between objects and humans and between objects and objects. This fits, though not perfectly, with Marx's theory of historical materialism. Marx isn't really operating at the level of what we are fundamentally. He's looking at how to understand what we do. One of the most significant things about his theory was that he eschewed appeals to human nature as somehow fundamentally this or that, which had guided Enlightenment philosophers of capitalism like Adam Smith and several of his utopian socialist contemporaries. Instead, he posited a system that said let's look at the actual situations of social organization on the ground and apply a scientific process to understanding how they got that way, what we can extrapolate about where they'll go, and what interventions can be made. Social relations, not some essential essence, governed the nature of being human.

Even if we were to grant that somehow human nature did exist, bestowed by a creator through a soul, etc., we'd still have to admit that we live in a system of social organization pretty far removed from a state of nature. Market economies are only around 400 years old and industrial capitalism as a world system is only around 150, but many parts of the world didn't come into it until much later, if we can say they have at all. Human history is of course variable and long (around 200,000 years old by the most recent estimates I'm up to date on), so it seems logical that if anything our social organization would have evolved away from the state of nature rather than toward it.

The last point worth mentioning is your use of populist, which I'm always curious about. How do you suppose a society can be simultaneously socio-capitalist and populist?
 

Toelocku

*I Know What I Know if you Know What I Mean*
Dec 15, 2018
5,694
4,969
I've heard this argument a lot and I think it needs a little definition.

First, requiring ethnocentrism and authoritarianism for socialism would necessarily mean that other systems where there is authoritarianism and ethnocentrism there is potential for socialist redistributive politics, which history shows certainly has not consistently been the case, and in fact many socialist governments have had wide ethnic variation. There's an argument to be made that expunging certain groups in hopes of attaining a kind of ethnic "purity" could prompt the state to then distribute all resources to its chosen group, but that would hardly be a socialist redistribution. It assumes that political uniformity is based in ethnicity, which essentially rests on old discredited ideas of racialization that were pretty roundly disproven by anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and biologists in the early 20th century. An early socialist, Karl Pearson, believed in this eugenics theory of social organization whereby the "lesser groups" should be exterminated. In fact, he invented many of the modern tools of statistics, including correlation, chi squared, p-values and others in an effort to prove this hypothesis. He felt the Mendelian geneticists were chasing a red herring by trying to find some causal mechanism for inheriting genes rather than just relying on strong correlation. This was basically in service of showing that certain populations were worth writing off as irredeemable. The Mendelians ended up being right, of course. But bad arguments about the relationship between race or ethnicity and politics or ideology persist, usually backed by spurious correlation, that is to say Pearson's system can still do what it set out to do.

Second, the issue of "human nature" bears addressing because no theory of social organization can go without dealing with it. Similar to old race theories, there is no scientific evidence of anything representing a fundamental human nature. It's certainly fine to believe in one and there are plenty of theories to make that argument. Maybe it comes from somewhere and is bestowed upon us. Maybe it's somehow encoded in our DNA or is the aggregate of that special 2% of our genome that makes us distinct from chimpanzees, but if so, science has yet to discover it. Not in neuroscience or genetics or any other usual suspects. Philosophy has probably traveled the furthest down that road, but the reigning consensus has mostly overthrown human nature in favor of investigating relations. That is to say relations between humans and the world, between one another, between objects and humans and between objects and objects. This fits, though not perfectly, with Marx's theory of historical materialism. Marx isn't really operating at the level of what we are fundamentally. He's looking at how to understand what we do. One of the most significant things about his theory was that he eschewed appeals to human nature as somehow fundamentally this or that, which had guided Enlightenment philosophers of capitalism like Adam Smith and several of his utopian socialist contemporaries. Instead, he posited a system that said let's look at the actual situations of social organization on the ground and apply a scientific process to understanding how they got that way, what we can extrapolate about where they'll go, and what interventions can be made. Social relations, not some essential essence, governed the nature of being human.

Even if we were to grant that somehow human nature did exist, bestowed by a creator through a soul, etc., we'd still have to admit that we live in a system of social organization pretty far removed from a state of nature. Market economies are only around 400 years old and industrial capitalism as a world system is only around 150, but many parts of the world didn't come into it until much later, if we can say they have at all. Human history is of course variable and long (around 200,000 years old by the most recent estimates I'm up to date on), so it seems logical that if anything our social organization would have evolved away from the state of nature rather than toward it.

The last point worth mentioning is your use of populist, which I'm always curious about. How do you suppose a society can be simultaneously socio-capitalist and populist?
There is variation within ethnocentric populations but its the vast pressure of conformity that gave the kibbutz in israel the ability to do communism with any effect

In modern western life this is not possible

Socio-capitalistism IS populism

The vast majority here in the US love new deal/great society programs as well as meritocratic compensation incentives

Its neocon and neolib corporate media-mic kleptocracy thats caused these economic problems

Nobodies buying marxist bullshit...i want balanced sustainable populist programs that long term empower the middle class and cares for the poor

The problem is that a legitimate leader who gives a shit about the people is nowhere to be found
 

yuki2054

graded martial artist
Nov 8, 2016
3,226
1,773
I've heard this argument a lot and I think it needs a little definition.

First, requiring ethnocentrism and authoritarianism for socialism would necessarily mean that other systems where there is authoritarianism and ethnocentrism there is potential for socialist redistributive politics, which history shows certainly has not consistently been the case, and in fact many socialist governments have had wide ethnic variation. There's an argument to be made that expunging certain groups in hopes of attaining a kind of ethnic "purity" could prompt the state to then distribute all resources to its chosen group, but that would hardly be a socialist redistribution. It assumes that political uniformity is based in ethnicity, which essentially rests on old discredited ideas of racialization that were pretty roundly disproven by anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and biologists in the early 20th century. An early socialist, Karl Pearson, believed in this eugenics theory of social organization whereby the "lesser groups" should be exterminated. In fact, he invented many of the modern tools of statistics, including correlation, chi squared, p-values and others in an effort to prove this hypothesis. He felt the Mendelian geneticists were chasing a red herring by trying to find some causal mechanism for inheriting genes rather than just relying on strong correlation. This was basically in service of showing that certain populations were worth writing off as irredeemable. The Mendelians ended up being right, of course. But bad arguments about the relationship between race or ethnicity and politics or ideology persist, usually backed by spurious correlation, that is to say Pearson's system can still do what it set out to do.

Second, the issue of "human nature" bears addressing because no theory of social organization can go without dealing with it. Similar to old race theories, there is no scientific evidence of anything representing a fundamental human nature. It's certainly fine to believe in one and there are plenty of theories to make that argument. Maybe it comes from somewhere and is bestowed upon us. Maybe it's somehow encoded in our DNA or is the aggregate of that special 2% of our genome that makes us distinct from chimpanzees, but if so, science has yet to discover it. Not in neuroscience or genetics or any other usual suspects. Philosophy has probably traveled the furthest down that road, but the reigning consensus has mostly overthrown human nature in favor of investigating relations. That is to say relations between humans and the world, between one another, between objects and humans and between objects and objects. This fits, though not perfectly, with Marx's theory of historical materialism. Marx isn't really operating at the level of what we are fundamentally. He's looking at how to understand what we do. One of the most significant things about his theory was that he eschewed appeals to human nature as somehow fundamentally this or that, which had guided Enlightenment philosophers of capitalism like Adam Smith and several of his utopian socialist contemporaries. Instead, he posited a system that said let's look at the actual situations of social organization on the ground and apply a scientific process to understanding how they got that way, what we can extrapolate about where they'll go, and what interventions can be made. Social relations, not some essential essence, governed the nature of being human.

Even if we were to grant that somehow human nature did exist, bestowed by a creator through a soul, etc., we'd still have to admit that we live in a system of social organization pretty far removed from a state of nature. Market economies are only around 400 years old and industrial capitalism as a world system is only around 150, but many parts of the world didn't come into it until much later, if we can say they have at all. Human history is of course variable and long (around 200,000 years old by the most recent estimates I'm up to date on), so it seems logical that if anything our social organization would have evolved away from the state of nature rather than toward it.

The last point worth mentioning is your use of populist, which I'm always curious about. How do you suppose a society can be simultaneously socio-capitalist and populist?
Thanks for contributing these...

I'd say the main flaw with your essays, is that it fails to take in to account the directions Marxism (who died in Britain btw), and Socialism, evolved to after his death. Specifically I would recommend researching Gramsci (the prison notebooks) (also look at his idea of hegemony, how society is fought for by the press, education, and other key spokespeople/ideals and ideas), linguistics, feminism (for example the right to vote, and the glass ceiling to wages, which still exists today), the LGBT community, the enviroment/climate change, and other post modernist ideas to name a few...

Marx was one of the three founding fathers of Sociology, the other two being Weber (pronounced Faber), and Durkheim (who developed the idea of anomie in his book Suicide, which addresses how often poorest and most disenfranchised members of society, are more likely to commit suicide, often young males).

And so when addressing Marxism, /communism and socialism, it is important not to overlook these other key thinkers, and themes in this journey. I would also recommend researching, the sociology of war, and medicine, for further colour and arguments.

My thesis (Sociolgy) was on the modes and models of mental health, covering a range from the eugenics period which actually predated Hitler, although he took it to an extreme, and then also some of the directions I have mentioned above, but specifically with regards to mental health.

Finally for Marx Socialism, and Communism, had no soft future. I'm not saying that there hasn't been something of a blend. Today. Surely there HAS been, not to mention China or South America. Just that the way he saw it Revolution, which would be bloody at times, was the necessary outcome, necessary to bring about the overthrow by the proletariat of the Bourgeoise ruling elite.

Further comments and constructive thoughts, will be appreciated, thanks!

Yuki
 

BeardOfKnowledge

The Most Consistent Motherfucker You Know
Jul 22, 2015
60,547
56,268
Some of his policies seem to straddle the line between the two, but one in particular proposes the liquidation of a service sector called the insurance industry in favor of a single payer system where the state satisfies all health debts. This certainly leans more toward the ideals of European social democracy in the late 1940s and early '50s than to Roosevelt in 1936. But it doesn't lean quite all the way to the Bolsheviks in 1918, who directly took over management of the entire healthcare system.
Can you explain the difference between Bolshevik and European healthcare models? I don't mean right down to the nuts and bolts I mean as a general overview, they seem pretty similar to me.
 

yuki2054

graded martial artist
Nov 8, 2016
3,226
1,773
Can you explain the difference between Bolshevik and European healthcare models? I don't mean right down to the nuts and bolts I mean as a general overview, they seem pretty similar to me.
After world war 2, the European governments decided that we would look after our people. That's all!
 

Sheepdog

Protecting America from excessive stool loitering
Dec 1, 2015
8,912
14,237
For one time only, I will take you out of the echo chamber of decades of Cold War propaganda and Twitter activism on the left and right and attempt to advance a useful history of socialism for you that should clarify what the term means. As someone likely to be teaching this stuff in the very near future, this is a useful exercise for me, so feel free to push on certain points or ask questions.

In its crudest terms, socialism simply means the socialization of producing and distributing goods and services across a society. The idea that this could be useful predates Karl Marx and existed in many societies around the world, but often with exploitative labor relationships. Marx's innovation was to take the particular political economic system that existed in his time, industrial capitalism, and subject it to a ruthless critique. He wasn't the first to have done so, but he was the first to have done so comprehensively. He attacked the system at multiple points for resting on logical fallacies, historical processes of dispossession and disenfranchisement, and exploitation of labor, and forecast that ultimately it would implode. Key concepts included:

1) A labor theory of value, which is to say that everything in the market acquires value through the process of mixing human labor with materials.
2) A materialist approach to history, which is to say historical circumstances are best understood by looking at material circumstances, e.g. how are needs being met, what is scarce and what is plentiful, who controls resource allocation, etc. This allows us to analyze the creation and maintenance of classes over time, e.g. the working class (proletariat), the bourgeoisie, etc.
3) A theory of alienation, to explain how workers are set into competitive relations with one another and are separated from the fruits of their labor, that is, how processes of industrial production essentially make people cogs in the wheel. People are connected to things instead of each other.
4) A critique of primitive accumulation, which is to say understanding that the foundations of producing capital came from taking things out of common usage and making them privately owned, often arbitrarily and with violence.
5) A critique of commodity fetishism, which is to say the belief that there is a relationship between commodities and money that explains an economy, rather than relations between people. Marx posited instead that no item had an intrinsic value and instead value was predicated on subjective social determinations. In other words, there is no such thing as an "invisible hand."
6) That base determines superstructure, which is to say that the whole system of productive relationships needed to keep a society functional determines what politics, economics, culture, ideology, etc are possible.

Now Marx posited plenty of other concepts and I recommend reading his books to find out more. Capital Vols. 1 and 2 are probably where he lays things out most comprehensively, but most people who have brief brushes with Marx seldom read anything beyond the Communist Manifesto. While Marx's theory is much more complicated than what is listed above, I pulled these key concepts out because I think they're most useful to understanding the way socialism gets invoked today. Some of them have been critiqued or disputed extensively since he wrote them. Others have been substantially reinterpreted based on the exigencies of the moment. Marx himself was notoriously wishy washy about the means by which capitalism would fall, at times expressing sentiments in favor of its active overthrow and at others saying it would naturally give way to socialism. The best he did say was that the people will have to make the revolution for themselves based on their own particular circumstances in the time when capitalism meets its demise.

After Marx and Engels passed on, socialism went through many twists and turns as various thinkers around the world pondered what to do with this critique and how to make it relevant to make the revolution for themselves, so to speak. And this is where we get into trouble, because like most people, a lot of Marx's fans only read the Communist Manifesto and never bothered to read most of the rest of his work all that closely. In said manifesto, Marx posits what I consider to be the great poison pill of communism, which is the "dictatorship of the proletariat." Outraged by what he saw going on in the Hungarian Revolution, Marx believed for a time that the only way out of the domination of the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" was the total overthrow of the bourgeois class by the working class using force, if necessary, to abolish class altogether. Several years later in his "Critique of the Gotha Program" (i.e. social democracy), Marx would criticize approaches that favored just letting society evolve into communism as essentially weak and revisionist. Later, he tempered that critique saying it was possible if there was a robust democratic system to bring about such change, but he didn't believe such opportunity existed in his home country of Germany in the mid-late1800s, and given the circumstances, it's hard to argue he was wrong. In any case, many a would be revolutionary enthusiastically took up the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat as a way to force change in their own society. The question became who was the proletariat?

In Russia, like China, and later Cuba, Korea, and Vietnam, this was a complicated question. Marx had laid his system out for industrial capitalist societies and basically said little about agrarian societies with large peasant classes. Bourgeois capitalism was a necessary precondition that he believed societies had to pass through (and ultimately that the whole world had to pass through) before socialism could take hold. Most of the above mentioned nations weren't really ready. So what did they do? For the most part, they took three steps: 1) Liquidation of the propertied class through seizure of assets and wealth; 2) Development of a revolutionary "vanguard" party that had experience with bourgeois capitalism and would guide the process of social transformation within the confines of the nation (rather than as part of a larger international project), and 3) Proletarianization through a redistribution of citizens throughout the countries and massive educational and industrial production projects to forcefully create an industrial working class.

Anyone who knows anything about history can smell how the unfreedom crept into these processes. Lenin was the one who came up with most of these ideas as Russia was the first to fall. Even then, there were plenty of Socialists who loudly disagreed with him, but given the Bolshevik victory following the turmoil in Russia, everyone lined up behind the winners. It's been argued Lenin was more egalitarian at heart, but he died early and Stalin was the one responsible for executing his vision, which, to put it mildly, didn't go well. The now deceased Marx's Germany found itself deeply fractured following World War I with the social democrats nominally in power, but disgraced by their failure to prevent the war in the first place. They advanced their idea of gradual socialism Marx had critiqued back in the 1870s, and young people dredged up those writings to criticize them. Meanwhile fascists of all stripes were on the march and ultimately engineered their way into power. In the early years of Nazi rule, policies of centralized redistribution were still normalized enough that the Nazis had to accommodate them (hence the name "national socialists") but this was largely due to the influence of the Strasser brothers and their followers who quickly fell out of favor with Hitler. Over in the Soviet Union, Stalin had purged all of his enemies by wartime, including his main political rival Trotsky, who he'd politically marginalized before he was ultimately murdered. So in the pre-Cold War era that was World War II, the world had Stalin's authoritarian state command economy with socialist characteristics, a vanquished social democratic party in Germany, imprisoned Communists in Italy and Spain, a briefly united Popular Front in France that collapsed and was persecuted under the Vichy government, while Britain's Labour party and the United States' Democratic party offered a liberal democratic platform that was both an alternative and a response to socialism's demand for the working class to be prioritized. Canada's liberal party is actually a fascinating divergence from this path as Laurier basically assembled a ragtag political coalition for awhile that was mostly faced with reaching full statehood until the postwar era.

Any road up, after WWII, a lot of things change. China goes red. Cuba follows. Other countries try and some are successful, some fail. This coincides with a massive decolonization process begun after World War I where Leninist-Marxism ends up seeming to many to be a useful alternative to jumping on the bandwagon of so-called liberal democracy being peddled by the former imperial powers. The Soviets are at least a credible benefactor so, as Marx said, the base determines the superstructure. Leninism (or a brand of it) becomes the primary way of understanding socialism, though the "revisionists" Marx scolded never went away. They became the various social democrats around the world. Orthodox or "vulgar" Marxists are still around too, often doing party building projects in and around developing nations. Mao has his own version of proletarianism as he considers the dispossessed and rural peasant class (who Lenin famously had no use for) as the true working class. His innovations would guide the theorization of Marxism in analogous societies in Asia and Latin America. Socialism became deeply tethered to decolonization, but it was highly variable which strand of socialism and in some cases it wasn't ideology guiding a socialist political turn so much as groups who decided it was better to throw in their lots with the Soviets (or later the Cubans or Chinese) than the North Atlantic powers. But that doesn't get socialism or those political actors off the hook. I've generally found "that's not the real socialism" arguments unpersuasive. In reality, no party or country's political economic system is any more or less real than any other's as long as it makes a good faith attempt to connect its definitions of the system to its historical roots and apply the system according to its particular circumstances. There are varieties of socialism just like there are varieties of capitalism. There are even circumstances where they mix at both the national and international level. One of the projects of historians over the past 50 years has been demonstrating the uneven ways the formation of the working class has emerged and showing how even as capitalism was becoming the dominant system in Europe, there was resistance and the articulation of alternatives that in some cases were incorporated into the society and in others were roads not taken. This demonstrates to us that liberal democracy and capitalism can be separated from one another as not naturally fitting together, as many capitalists would like to argue. WEB DuBois, for example, famously argued that post-emancipation Reconstruction was the most radical proletarianization and bourgeois class liquidation in the history of the world up to that point, before it was dismantled. Even still, we have the radical reinterpretations of citizenship that came via the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments as a legacy of that time. Had the government not kowtowed to Southern pressure, who can say what further changes that time might have wrought?

So how does this relate to would be socialists today? Well, if we've already come to see socialism as a moving target of sorts, then obviously it's subject to some interpretation. What's usually the most useful way to understand how "socialist" someone is according to their own self-declaration or either the media or their opponents applying that label is to try to trace their thought to a particular past instantiation of socialism. Who have they read? One of the phrases I used above was "a good faith attempt to connect...definitions of the system to its historical roots." If there isn't this historical dimension, socialism is just a word. It can be as reductive as nationalization of industry or as expansive as any human relations wherein we share things. Neither definition satisfies even the most basic tests of understanding history or politics. So the question for any person using socialism to define themselves, or that someone else is defining as socialist, is which of the many lineages of socialism are they saying they subscribe to? It's likely that there is some blend and overlap, so which ones have they selected from and what are the strengths and limits of those selections?

If we were to take Bernie Sanders as an example, he has in the past identified himself as a "New Deal Democrat," but also a believer in social democratic principles found among parties in Scandinavia. Some of his policies seem to straddle the line between the two, but one in particular proposes the liquidation of a service sector called the insurance industry in favor of a single payer system where the state satisfies all health debts. This certainly leans more toward the ideals of European social democracy in the late 1940s and early '50s than to Roosevelt in 1936. But it doesn't lean quite all the way to the Bolsheviks in 1918, who directly took over management of the entire healthcare system.

Now we can take Pol Pot, who we can say nationalized healthcare by seizing Western medical facilities and limiting their availability while also recommending local treatments and saving more serious medical industrialization for after rice production had sufficiently increased. Is this socialist? This process of proletarianization is considered a pre-modern stage in Marxist thought. Mao, who inspired the Cambodians, believed, somewhat contrary to Marx, that agrarian production was the key to prosperity. The Khmer Rouge were in the process of dictatorship of the proletariat, but they seemingly missed the part that said only until class relations themselves can be abolished. Stalin also seemed to miss this part. But then again, just because you have sex out of wedlock doesn't mean you aren't a Christian, so why get caught up in the details? I'll grant you, that's a pretty big detail, but jettisoning it doesn't necessarily mean you're not still doing or trying to do Communism. This loophole in the ideology where you can interpose authoritarianism and have someone neglect the next phase completely seems to me a near fatal flaw if you're trying to posit that Marx and Engels developed a complete system. But I doubt even Marx and Engels themselves would've said that. Marx doesn't really mention this idea much in his later writings and as I said earlier, he hedges on revolution vs. democratic institutionalism more than enough. It would certainly be difficult to say that a person who favors a transition to socialism in an industrialized country could have much in common with the Cambodian communists of the 1970s, because historical materialism tells us that the ideology and economics of our situation couldn't be more different.

So in 2019, there are politicians around the world who are advancing various platforms that owe a debt to socialist theory, capitalist theory, liberal democratic theory, a cocktail of authoritarian theories, etc. Socialism as a world system doesn't seem like it's going to spontaneously emerge any time soon, but nations experiments with it as a critique and roadmap for identifying the excesses of capital are acting no less in the spirit of Marx than Hi Chi Minh was. I suppose in that sense, socialism is both a tool for "the ruthless criticism of everything existing," as Marx called it, and a guide to enacting radical redistributive social transformation, either quickly or slowly. The contradictions between justice and force are no more or less significant in socialism than they are in capitalist liberal democracies. So when questions arise of where socialism has "worked," they're operating at the wrong level of analysis. Capitalism has "worked" as a world system in the sense that it's survived, though it has certainly failed to produce prosperity or even basic survival for large numbers of people at various times. Politics typically decides how to allocate those market losses within nations. Fewer people are certainly starving and dying now than were under the feudal and mercantile systems that preceded it, but does that mean markets are the best possible way to distribute resources? By best, I mean fairest and most sustainable. That question, I suppose, is the socialist intervention.

Cold War politics mostly defined any use of socialism or communism as subscribing to ideals that actively advocated for the overthrow of democratic governments to take everything you earned so a bureaucrat of some kind could exploit you or throw you in a gulag if you were disobedient. It's not hard to see how this parody evolved considering the way socialist systems were being governed, but mostly this propaganda served to justify certain elites staying in power and the advancement of American imperial projects around the world. Most communist countries did the same, indoctrinating their people with ridiculous ideas about capitalism and democracy. Here and now, I believe it's possible to take a much more sober look at what these systems can mean, have meant, and should mean if we want to utilize them. There are plenty of terrible socialist ideas and terrible capitalist ideas and some good ideas that get attributed to both that aren't really representative of either. Neither have virtue on their own, but depend on whether and how the people get a say in using them.
Marx nails most things, but the term 'labor theory of value' is the most problematic part of his foundations and I noticed you have it sitting at number 1. I'd be careful about how you teach it. A lot of people get taught his complex as fuck theory as if it is somehow directly analogous to Ricardo's theory, then read some neoclassical dipshit debunking Ricardo under the pretense of debunking Marx and assume that it therefore voids every other part of Marx's analysis.

I would also advise using memes rather than coherent sentences when trying to teach the pack of retards on this forum anything.
 

kneeblock

Drapetomaniac
Apr 18, 2015
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23,026
There is variation within ethnocentric populations but its the vast pressure of conformity that gave the kibbutz in israel the ability to do communism with any effect

In modern western life this is not possible

Socio-capitalistism IS populism

The vast majority here in the US love new deal/great society programs as well as meritocratic compensation incentives

Its neocon and neolib corporate media-mic kleptocracy thats caused these economic problems

Nobodies buying marxist bullshit...i want balanced sustainable populist programs that long term empower the middle class and cares for the poor

The problem is that a legitimate leader who gives a shit about the people is nowhere to be found
The kibbutz is actually an interesting example because many modern kibbutzim would not identify as explicitly socialist, though some developed an appreciation for socialist politics in that setting. Similarly, it would be hard to call the Amish or Menonites in America socialist. They certainly don't identify as such. This confusion stems out of a view that all collective enterprise with redistribution is necessarily socialist, which means we could apply the classification to hundreds of groups over time who have striven together, particularly in agricultural settings. This isn't historically accurate though, as kibbutzes, like Amish landholdings are still based on systems of private property, enclosure, and market transactions alongside subsistence farming and collective practices. Kibbutzes also had the added dimension of being tied into the nationalist project in Israel, which was decidedly not socialist. Their founding comes from utopian socialist Zionism, which maps more onto older pre-Marxist understandings of socialism. But let's say we don't disqualify them and incorporate them into one of the various strains of what we can fit under the umbrella "socialism" stretching back to at least ancient Mesopotamia. If we do buy into this, we can hardly say they were able to maintain such a system as their existence was only possible due to their enclosure within a particular state formation. Also, owing to reforms over the past several decades, private enterprise and market relations have come to work alongside collective production and distribution, in some cases subsuming it.

On your other point, you say socio-capitalism IS populism. But if socialism at its heart is premised on individual sacrifice for the collective good and capitalism at its heart is based on unrestricted individual action in a market, how can it be populist, which is based on identifying a group as "the people" (usually the majority) and doing what they think is best at all times?