socialism itself is just, kinda weird. From a philosophical perspective it makes sense and has clear distinctions. But from a practical view it’s just sort of. Capitalism but if it was more confusing for some reason. If you go too far into one direction, it’s just communism, and that’s not socialism, obviously. The other direction and it’s literally just capitalism, so it has to sit in this weird space between where you can’t engage with the best parts of capitalism (or it just weirdly handicaps parts of capitalism) and communism.
and then of course you’ve got people (probably grifters) like hasan piker who claim to be socialist while having millions of dollars, but doing literally nothing with it, because investing it wouldn’t be socialist, and you can’t really just give it away, because well, it’s a lot of money. I mean you could, but it’s also just, sort of redundant at that point.
Realistically he should be investing that money into a lot of different things, increasing returns on revenues, and creating a content creator collective or something silly like that, but to my knowledge he hasn’t probably because he’s either stupid or lazy. I don’t blame him for either of those things though.
socialism, particularly modern western socialism that’s based on capital needs a fundamental proof of concept work-through before we can really do anything with it, i think.
Capitalism, while it has problems, it at least makes sense on a fundamental human perspective. I own things, you own things, we own things, that also applies to capital as well. It’s so fundamentally tied to the human experience and history that it’s just sort of hard to deviate from. Even china does a lot of capitalism.
man that was much longer than i anticipated. Apologies in retrospective lol.
Anyway for the second part of the admittedly very old and dead joke by this point in the post. It’s a meme about socialism on the internet. (particularly a farther left space on the internet)
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. It’s the most obvious and classic form of anti-intellectualism and it certainly does not reflect a nuanced understanding of socialism or communism.
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.
socialism itself is just, kinda weird. From a philosophical perspective it makes sense and has clear distinctions. But from a practical view it’s just sort of. Capitalism but if it was more confusing for some reason. If you go too far into one direction, it’s just communism, and that’s not socialism, obviously. The other direction and it’s literally just capitalism, so it has to sit in this weird space between where you can’t engage with the best parts of capitalism (or it just weirdly handicaps parts of capitalism) and communism.
and then of course you’ve got people (probably grifters) like hasan piker who claim to be socialist while having millions of dollars, but doing literally nothing with it, because investing it wouldn’t be socialist, and you can’t really just give it away, because well, it’s a lot of money. I mean you could, but it’s also just, sort of redundant at that point.
Realistically he should be investing that money into a lot of different things, increasing returns on revenues, and creating a content creator collective or something silly like that, but to my knowledge he hasn’t probably because he’s either stupid or lazy. I don’t blame him for either of those things though.
socialism, particularly modern western socialism that’s based on capital needs a fundamental proof of concept work-through before we can really do anything with it, i think.
Capitalism, while it has problems, it at least makes sense on a fundamental human perspective. I own things, you own things, we own things, that also applies to capital as well. It’s so fundamentally tied to the human experience and history that it’s just sort of hard to deviate from. Even china does a lot of capitalism.
man that was much longer than i anticipated. Apologies in retrospective lol.
Anyway for the second part of the admittedly very old and dead joke by this point in the post. It’s a meme about socialism on the internet. (particularly a farther left space on the internet)
The confusion stems from the fact that you seem not to know what you’re talking about. Like at all.
This is a misunderstanding so fundamental that it’s a completely beaten dead horse of a joke.
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.
Saying “if you do too much socialism, it’s communism” is exactly the opposite of a nuanced understanding. Please read a pamphlet.
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. It’s the most obvious and classic form of anti-intellectualism and it certainly does not reflect a nuanced understanding of socialism or communism.
Again. Not going to explain it to you.
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.
Drag has never heard of that. Then again, drag has never heard of wet deserts or bland spices either.
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.
Very well said. Nice write up.