[jmyeet]

> In 2014, BP had around 85,000 employees across 1180 companies. If you showed a person in 16th century England those numbers, they’d think you were referring to an entire economy.

This is ahistorical. I present to you the Dutch East India Company [1]:

> The Dutch government formed the VOC in 1602. At its peak, the Company had 57,000 employees, 150 merchant ships, and a private military force with 40 warships and 10,000 soldiers

Standard Oil also springs to mind as being absolutely massive, particularly in terms of percent of GDP.

That being said, I agree with the general point that the idea of "free markets" in a noeliberal dystopia are kind of ridiculous. But the alternative doesn't necessitate central planning either.

The US in particular is a country of contradictions. Capitalism is popular although most people can't define it. Socialism is rejected although almost nobody can define it. The US Military is venerated despite being one of the most socialist institutions in the country.

Think about it. In the military all your basic needs are met. Housing, food, medicare care, education. You pick a job you're qualified for (based on the ASVAB and line scores). The military trains you do that job. You get paid while doing all this. Then you do that job.

Yet Americans, despite lauding the military, will soundly reject every American having their needs met in the same basic way that the military does.

[1]: https://www.curationist.org/editorial-features/article/the-d...

[CuriousCosmic]

> This is ahistorical. I present to you the Dutch East India Company [1]:

VOC was literally an entire economy. They had exclusive ownership and control over all Dutch colonies in "the east" and represented the entire economy of the former "Dutch East Indies" (largely Indonesia and Malaysia today).

[HPsquared]

The military thing comes with responsibilities though, they don't just give people all those things for free. Desertion is strictly not allowed. Human rights prevent this arrangement in the private sector.

[TacticalCoder]

> The US Military is venerated despite being one of the most socialist institutions in the country.

That is because even many libertarians (i.e. not just capitalists, socialists, communists) understand that national defense, internal security, justice, and diplomacy are functions that the state should take care of.

There are very few who believe we should live in total anarchy.

Now unlike most other political currents, some believe that the aforementioned roles are the only role a government should serve (in french those roles are called the "Fonctions regaliennes de l'etat", literally "Roles kingly of the state").

It's really strange to use the army as an example of "socialism" when it's one of the really rare thing nearly everybody agree is a role belonging the state.

[lucozade]

They're not making the point about the military being state owned. They're making the point that the military is run almost identically to how a socialist state would be run.

It's absolutely not the only way that a military could be run, and many haven't, but is, presumably, the way that the military organisers consider it to be most effective.

Military equipment, in contrast, is not generally run in quite such a socialistic fashion though it's a long way from a capitalistic free market.

[jmyeet]

Exactly.

Consider the Roman military [1] (emphasis added):

> From c100 BCE, Roman legions were reorganised into 10 cohorts of 400–500 heavy infantry, each with six centuries of about 80 men. These continued to provide their own weapons and armour until the first permanent and entirely professional Roman army with a central command and logistics structure was formed in 31 BCE.

In fact, one's position in the Roman army was largely determined by what one was wealthy enough to provide. Consider the cavalry (equites) [2]:

> From the beginning of the 4th century bc, non-senators were enlisted in the cavalry; they provided their own horses (equites equo privato). By the 1st century bc, foreign cavalry tended to replace them in the field and thus to restrict the equestrian order to posts as officers or members of the general’s staff

A military doesn't have to provide equipment. It doesn't have to fulfil basic needs. It doesn't even have to be voluntary. Or paid. But modern militaries in developed countries do basically all of those things.

[1]: https://jmvh.org/article/roman-warfare-ships-and-medicine/

[2]: https://www.britannica.com/topic/eques

[wesselbindt]

How would you define socialism and capitalism?

[psadauskas]

The loose analogy I use is Democracy is to Feudalism as Socialism is to Capitalism.

In a feudal government, the laws are created by the wealthy landowners with complete control over how the people should live. The peasants have little say in how things should be run, and few options to leave.

In a capitalist society, corporations are owned and operated by the wealthy, and they have complete control over the people at their jobs (and often outside it, too). The workers have little say in how things should be run, and cannot leave without fear of losing necessities like healthcare.

Democracy gives the people a say in how their government should be run. Socialism gives the workers a say in how their company should be run. We've managed to no longer be exploited by our government (but not completely), but we still have to live with being exploited by the wealthy.

[AndrewKemendo]

Very well put imo!

[jmyeet]

In terms of feudalism.

Feudalism was an economic system borne from the Divine Right of Kings [1]. But this was really just an excuse, much like every religious war isn't really about relilgion. Religion is just an excuse to seize land.

Anyway, under feudalism, a King controlled some portion of land. That King would typically have vassals who control part of it. Depending on the size, those vassals may themselves have vassals.

At the bottom of this totem pole was the serf. A noble would control all the land but would grant a serf the ability to use the land to grow a harvest and feed his family. Often the serf would live on that land. In exchange for this the serf would give a portion of his harvest to his lord. The serf may also owe the lord military service in times of war.

By late feudalism, instead of giving crops, the serf would sell their harvest at markets and pay the lord money. This led to the rise of the merchant class and ultimately paved the way for capitalism.

So what's going on here? In feudalism, the lord owns the means of production (being the land). The serf, through his labor, creates value by sowing and harvesting a crop. There is no value to the land without labor. So one can say the the lord is extracting the surplus value of the serf's labor. This framing and understanding was really formalized by Karl Marx later but the origin of the Labor Theory of Value [2] goes back to Ancient Greece and probably beyond.

So what is capitalism? Capitalism simply replaces the noble lord with a capital owner. That's literally it.

As the world industrialized the means of production expanded beyond farms and mines to factories. But everything else applies. A factory extracts the surplus value of the workers' labor to enrichen the factory's owner.

Instead of kings, we have Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the like.

So what Marx talked about was the workers' relationship to the means of production. Socialism in this context simply means the workers own the means of production.

So if you look at your local town or city, Walmart represents capitalism. The value of that labor and from that community is extracted to distant owners. If your town has a local family-owned restaurant, well that's socialism. The restaurant is the means of production here. The family who works there owns it.

A Monsanto-owned agribusiness? Capitalism. Family-owned farm? Socialism.

The crazy thing is that people like boutique hotels, farmers markets, family-owned farms, locally-grown produce and so on.

Some theory wonks migh tyell at me about syndaclism, Marxism, Marxist-Leninism or Mao third-worldism. Don't get lost in the weeds however.

The key part of this is that capitalism has almost nothing to do with markets (let alone "free markets", which is an oxymoron). Markets existed for thousands of years before capitalism did. Markets exist in non-capitalist countries.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_right_of_kings

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

[lazide]

A major difference here though is that in feudalism, you have one king with associated subordinates per physical area.

In Capitalism, anyone(*) with sufficient capital can become a king in a specific fief, and there are often many overlapping ‘kings’ in a given fief, competing.

Even labor.

It happens all the time, albeit is not ‘that easy’, either.

Socialism (depending on brand), means of production are usually controlled by the state, and that type of ‘inversion of control’ is rarely allowed. In most implementations, most of the economy is in those state owned/controlled entities.

Benefits (and costs) to the population then flow down from there.

* barring monopolies, which is why it’s so popular to stomp on them.

[jmyeet]

> ... you have one king with associated subordinates per physical area

Yes and no. Land changed hands. As recently as the 19th century, a distant relative of mine fled Eastern Europe from an area where he could be conscripted by either the Prussians or the Russians.

> In Capitalism, anyone(*) with sufficient capital can become a king in a specific fief

We're talking about social mobility here, basically. This existed in feudal times too. A Viking called Rollo became the first ruler of Normandy and didn't seem to come from noble beginnings. A direct descendant of his became the King of England by conquest. In fact every European monarch today is a descedant of Rollo.

The land here is simply the means of production, just like Amazon is. Amazon has many owners but is it that different really?

Social mobility in modern times is more limited than you might expect. ZIP codes tend to be strong predictors of your economic outcomes. This is exacerbated by our existence being laden with debt. Student, medical, housing, etc. It's why a lot of people use terms like "neofeudalism" as all this debt makes is increasingly indistinguishable from brick kiln workers in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India. This is by design because a debt-laden worker is a compliant worker.

> Socialism (depending on brand), means of production are usually controlled by the state

That's more communism. Even so, the state is comprised of and answerable to the workers. Even then I'd rather have the state capture "profit" to build roads and schools rather than some guy buying another mega-yacht.

A lot of people, myself included, focus on the workers owning the means of production because this can be done incrementally and we'd all be substantially better off if our megacorps were instead collectives.

[AnimalMuppet]

"Incrementally owning the means of production" can look like a lot of things. Contributing to a 401k that's invested in an index fund. Employers granting shares to employees. Unions owning shares in the company. I'm sure there are others that have not occurred to me.

Do you have a preferred approach, or is the big thing just getting workers to own at least part of the means of production?

[jmyeet]

> Contributing to a 401k that's invested in an index fund

At an earlier point in my life I used to believe in this, what some people will call things like "shareholder democracy". I've changed my tune on this. I now think it's incredibly destructive to society in the same way that private property is destructive because the majority of people are homeowners.

Why? Because it fools people to think they're beneficiaries of the system when they're really not. If you own a house, it serves a basic need. If you buy your house for $200k and it goes up to $500k, you haven't really gained anything if every house has increased in value similarly. You still need one unit of housing to live in.

Compare that to someone owning 1000 houses. Well they've just made a huge profit. So the entire housing prices always going up thing is just theft from the next generation. It's creating massive personal wealth at the expensive of a lifetime of debt for many.

401ks have the same effect on the stockmarket. You might think of yourself as a capital owner because you own a few shares of Amazon but you're not. A capital owner, by definition, derives wealth from their capital. A worker derives wealth from their labor. Note that someone like LeBron James is a worker in this scenario. Another myth is that socialism is a poverty cult. It is not.

Anyway, so we have a government that become sinvested in keeping the stockmarket going up. This benefits a few capital owners disproportionately and creates lots of negative externalities as we allow capital owners to skirt safety, steal from workers, steal from the government and so on all because governments become afraid that the stockmarket might go down. Doubling your Amazon shares from $100k to $200k doesn't substantially change your life. Bezos going from $100 billion to $200 billion creates massive problems.

> Employers granting shares to employees.

This is a little different and depends on the scale. As tech workers, getting RSUs in Amaazon or Google has the same (negative) effects as a 401k and allows Larry Page and Sergey Brin to accumulate $100B+ for really no reason.

But if the share is more substantial and/or the ownership is mostly or wholly worker-owned then you've arrived at the workers owning the means of production.

This can happen at scale. Consider Mondragon Corporation in Spain [1].

> Do you have a preferred approach

It's a difficult question because the money from the wealthy corrupts every facet of government and life. Consider something as simple as giving people Internet access. The best solution, and it's not even close, is municipal broadband. Yet we have national ISPs that have successfully lobbied to make this illegal in many states.

Likewise, we have a government that tends to bail out failing businesses rather than doing what they should do and simply nationalizing them. Imagine where we'd be if, after the 2008 GFC, the banks who had created this problem were nationalized and instead re-organized as community owned and operated banks.

America has become very anti-labor. Again this was by design. Union membership sits around 10-11% IIRC. We have a society that celebrates hyper-individualism when collectivism would benefit everybody. People delude themselves into thinking they can individually negotiate with trillion dollar companies and come out ahead. Even if you're in a high-demand field like tech, that power you may think you have is fleeting. Big Tech is doing everything they can do undermine labor and suppress wages, including the current trend for permanent layoffs (ie constantly laying off ~5% of their workforce).

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-mondragon-be...