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by int_19h 2739 days ago
One way to implement socialism is to simply withdraw protection for private (as opposed to personal) property on state level. A subset of that is to get rid of the state altogether, which obviously withdraws all protections that state might provide. Capitalism requires the ability to own and accumulate capital, but that only works if you can rely on the security of what you already own - and if society refuses to recognize your ownership, it's pretty hard.

Or one could go further and actively prosecute people who try to do anything "capitalistic" (e.g. offer services for pay). That is the model that USSR, and all countries in its sphere of influence, used.

1 comments

How is the extreme version (no state) different from Ancaps who want private police, fire, roads & private ledgers of property?

Encouraging individuals or groups to have their own notions of who owns what seems like a surefire way for warlords & petty tyrants to take over local economies.

It's different in the expectations from such a society by adherents. Ancaps believe that private property can exist in the absence of a state protecting it at scale. Anarcho-socialists think that private property is a social construct that requires the state to prop it up, and that would disappear if you removed the state.

There is a book by Ursula Le Guin, "The Dispossessed", that describes an utopian (to some extent; the book subtitle is "an ambiguous utopia" for a reason) anarcho-socialist society. Anarcho-syndicalist, to be precise. It's fiction, of course - but if you wanted to get the gist of how people who believe in this sort of thing imagine such a society would work, it's a great introductory crash course; kinda like "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is for ancap.