Capitalism is economic tyranny Socialism is economic democracy.

I have yet to hear a clear definition from a socialist. It's always a moving target. Perhaps you'd like to provide one.

 

Our pal thinks socialism is some bored 20thC aristocrat's semantics vanity. Thinks that a bunch of people who refer to themselves as 'workers', running a business, is somehow socialism. Calls ordinary enterprise (aka CAPITALISM) socialism, because X, Y, and Z own it, instead of A, B, and C.

LOL .. you can't make this stuff up.

 

Socialism was the Soviet and Maoist systems that socialists the world over praised as brilliant successes -- until it became indisputable that they had failed catastrophically. Then they became "state capitalism." Whatever socialist system is actually implemented, and inevitably fails, will somehow be discovered not to have been socialism after all.

 

Getting an actual definition is like trying to nail Jello to the wall.

 

"What socialism is, actually, is a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned and regulated by the [workers’] community as a whole, rather than by private individuals.” - https://www.socialism101.com/basic

"Socialism is a new social and economic order in which workers and consumers control production” - https://www.socialistpartyusa.net/

Notice nowhere here do we find a definition of socialism as government ownership and/or control of the MoP.

 

According to most involved socialists, socialism would be a socio-economic system in which the dominant form of business structure is workers’ collective ownership of the MoP and consequently workers’ collective and democratic control.

Marx was concerned with class relationships. So according to Marx the main feature identifying socialism would be essentially a reversal of the relationship between employer and employee. Specifically, it would be workers collectively acting as their employer previously acted, performing the tasks of the employer in managing the business, in addition to tasks of production. This would be the end of private ownership of business for private profit.

Every activist who struggled to end capitalism and replace it with socialism in the last 100 years has described socialism as the liberation of the working class from capitalist exploitation by ending private ownership of the MoP for private capitalist profit, and replacing it with worker ownership and control of the MoP for the benefit of society as a whole.

Capitalist propaganda says socialism is government ownership and control. But this fails to change the relationship between employer and employee, and Lenin talked about such an arrangement and called it “state capitalism”.

 

Which is where the normative part comes in. Instead of being what people naturally do, it's what people ought to do.

Who would be against workers setting up businesses and controlling the means of production? If it is a truly dominant form of business structure, it ought to attract significant investment. But that's not what you meant. You mean that it's a dominant structure because all others are excluded. By whom, I wonder?

The propaganda isn't wrong. Socialism has no theory of wealth creation. When people aren't doing what they ought to be doing, someone has to apply force.

 

Someone has to impose that order.

 

So .... private individuals.

 

So who actually owns the businesses, if they're not private enterprise?

There's only one answer ... and we both know what it is.

 

And every one of them was a privileged fop, playing dress ups. How many established working collectives, to model the benefits of the system they claimed to champion? How many of them eschewed their capitalist lifestyle? How many of them left the evil capitalist nations?

If you want insight into collectivism, talk to actual collectivists. The people walking the talk. It's not like they're rare, since it's the fundamental model for most of human society .. always has been. Look beyond your white western aristocrats, and talk to the ordinary peasant who shares his modest home with three generations.

 

You added the word, "workers,'" which is not present in the original and changes its meaning. "The community as a whole" means, in practice, that community's government.

How could they possibly exercise such control but through government?

See above. Government ownership is collective, so it is socialism, as in the USSR, Maoist China, Cuba and North Korea. The only way socialism can be anything but government ownership is if it is voluntary and private, like Mondragon or the Israeli kibbutzim. But that is not what socialists intend. They intend to establish socialism by force, using government power, for people who do not want socialism as well as those who do.

 

Not clear enough. What are "the means of production."

I am an electronics technician. I have the ability to build production equipment. I have built production equipment that I use to produce things that I sell. If I build a piece of production equipment in my garage, does that constitute "means of production." If it doesn't qualify what would? If it does who owns it? How do they know they own it? How do they know what to do with it? If I don't own it, what is my incentive to build it? Is it illegal for me to build a piece of production equipment for myself? How would such a law be enforced?

Is land a means of production? If I produce food, for example, on an unmanaged patch of forest am I obligated to keep that food to myself? Is it illegal for me to labor to produce food without approval? Is it illegal for me to trade that food in exchange for something someone else has produced?

 

They can't answer, because it's all just a bunch of nonsense.

What they're actually talking about is plain old private enterprise (which doesn't change just because Joe and Bob own it, instead of Fred and Steve). If it's NOT private enterprise, then it's owned by the State - but they deny the State would own it. You see the problem? All just waffle.

 

In reality, of course, that just means control -- and effective ownership -- by those of the parasite class who are most skilled in political manipulation of the workers' collectives. Anyone who has ever attended a union meeting knows exactly whom I am referring to.

But did not understand them:

See? Marx did not understand that the class division was not between employer and employee, but between the productive -- employers and employees -- and the privileged, especially landowners. Class is always based on power, and employers have NO POWER to do anything but offer workers access to economic opportunity they would not otherwise have. If he just chooses not to deal with the employer, how is the worker any worse off than if the employer had never existed? The actual class division is therefore the power division: landowners have the legal power to DEPRIVE workers of access to economic opportunity they WOULD otherwise have. Unlike the employer, the landowner indisputably does make the worker worse off than if he had never existed. Socialism merely consists in blaming the employer for what the landowner does to the worker (capitalism consists in blaming the worker for it).

Socialists, like capitalists, refuse to know the difference between the producer, who, by his labor, discharges the contractual function of arranging for all the necessary factors to be applied to production, thus obtaining rightful ownership of what he causes to be produced, and the owner of the means of production, who just charges the producer a fee -- usually in the form of interest or dividends rather than a flat rental amount, unless it's for real estate -- for use of their property.

And every single one of them consciously and deliberately refused to know the difference between owning "means of production" that one has created and owning others' liberty rights to use "means of production" that were already available anyway, just as you refuse to know it..

It's childishly naive to think workers' collectives -- under the control of the most politically savvy and ruthless -- will manage the means of production for the benefit of society as a whole rather than that of the political operators in charge.

There's no other way to impose socialism on a whole society.

Lenin was a liar, trying to blame capitalism for the failures of socialism. As proved above, the relationship between employer and employee is not the problem. The relationship between landowner and land user (i.e., everyone) is.

 

Well what they're actually talking about is the ability to control things they don't currently control. The argument is framed to let them feel like it's unfair that they don't control these things, and that it would be fair if they did. It's not very well thought out though, because for the most part they don't know how the things they want to control work. It's one of the primary reasons they don't control them in the first place. Also missing is any evidence at all that through group control the means can be used to produce what's best for the group. (and ostensibly the individual who advocated for group control). It always makes me chuckle that the people who express concern for systemic DEI, also subscribe to the application of universal systems to provide them.

My evidence is that if they did know how these systems worked, they could simply work them to produce, distribute, and collaborate exactly as they see fit.

The "means of production" is not some pile of magic beans. It's not a McGuffin that is tangent to production. It's a thing that has to be produced. So produce some means and use them however you want.

 

"The means of production" is an anti-concept Marx contrived to prevent use of the valid economic concepts of natural resources (which classical economics called, "land") and producer goods ("capital").

Socialists think the problem arises when you give someone else an opportunity to benefit from what you have created, by working as your employee.

More to the point, how do you rightly exclude others from the land they would otherwise have been at liberty to use themselves?

 

Natural resources do not have to be -- cannot be -- produced. Yet control of them, and exclusion of others from using them, are necessary to production. There's the rub.

 

Exactly this.

100%

 

False. Natural resources are useless unless they are produced. Gold doesn't leap up out of the ground, appropriately determine it's own value, decide it's own best use, and enter itself into the production process. It's not just laying on the ground. It's in the ground. It must be located. Refined. Use must be developed and the opportunity cost of these uses must be determined.

Land as a resource is no different. You don't step out on the land, speak the word grape, and a vineyard suddenly appears. The vineyard must be produced, cultivated. Infrastructure must be established to irrigate, harvest, process and package the resource for distribution.

It's not a resource until it's actually used resourcefully.

 

Socialists can seldom if ever answer these questions. They are pragmatic reality getting in the way of their ideology.

 

They've never even THOUGHT of these questions, in most cases. That tells you how genuine they are.

 

So a decentralized system of employers is somehow oppressive while a system ran by a centralized government is not.....hmmm.....I wonder how those who live in North Korea feel about that?

 

Not true. Cooperation has been normal since “cave men” formed tribes.

By the masses.

huh?

 

…in every society with every economic system.