[c54]

This reads to me as a somewhat quaint snapshot of politics from 30 years ago.

What the author is getting at is the overlapping of the bundles of individual policy stances that we give the label of a single ideology, the folding of the left-right political axis through higher dimensional space. People who agree on some things disagree on others and the old categories become less useful.

These days I think JREG is doing good work tracking political categories if you’re interested and don’t mind some irony-poisoned jargon check him out.

[Pxtl]

Yeah, I think we've all seen the term "socialism" prettymuch destroyed into having no coherent meaning beyond "when government does stuff" for as long as I can remember, for example.

I mean, I've seen people decry market-oriented solutions to problems (eg congestion pricing) as "socialism" which is broadly hilarious.

[pessimizer]

> "socialism" pretty much destroyed into having no coherent meaning beyond "when government does stuff" for as long as I can remember

This is actually the best definition, for certain values of government. What's bizarre is that a bunch of people gave communists ownership of the definition of socialism. The communists who never even described it specifically, just refer to it as a mythical state that spontaneously occurs after all of the revolution that they do actually describe. Even worse, those people tho give communists total ownership of the concept don't claim to be communists (because it's too strict, and requires too much reading.)

Socialism is when people cooperate to do things as a group to benefit the entire group. Socialism as a governance system is when that cooperation completely subsumes other methods of resource distribution and dispute resolution. To be clear: Socialism is when the (popularly sovereign) government does stuff, and the more stuff the government does, the more socialister it is.

Markets can also be socialism. Markets are artificial constructs within which transactions are enforced by an overarching power. If that power is popularly sovereign, and the markets are meant to equalize distribution without regard to the power of individuals, of course they're socialist. There has never been a "socialist" society that has not introduced markets. There are still market socialists, maybe look them up.

Markets can be used for any purpose, but a very obvious one is that if people all begin with the same amount of currency, but with a different array of needs, they can use markets to get rid of the things they don't need to get the things that they do, in a fair way.

"Socialism" instead has become popularly defined among a certain class as a society that has infinite wealth and distributes whatever anybody wants to whoever wants it, without requirement or delay, and allows people to contribute in any way that they see fit. It's just rich kid summer camp.

A million kinds of socialists showed up to the First International. Communists bullied them all out (and they would eventually be the "social fascists" who were a bigger danger than even fascists, and needed to be liquidated), and decided that they were the Workingmen now. Now, the children of the most elite classes on the planet dictate that real socialism is their socialism.

It's very hard to find out about a lot of those different socialisms, because how overjoyed they were to see a worker's revolution had happened in Russia, how they flocked to it, and how those people were slaughtered or forced to conform to Stalin's new socialism with classes (S++, maybe? The Fabians couldn't get enough of it.) Whatever Kronstadt hadn't said was said when Stalin explained how some people deserved larger apartments than others, and ruthlessly suppressed those who disagreed.

Read Owen. Learn about labor vouchers. Read anything but Marx and Engels.

Engels was a mill owner who was sleeping with his employees, and Marx was a brilliant economist who relied on Engels entirely for his financial support. Engels served a badly determined mishmash of socialist theories that were already ancient by the time he arrived, wrote a nice thing about the state of the English working class, and needed Marx to lend him intellectual authority.

Marx wrote Capital, which adds almost nothing new to economics and makes the same mistakes that all other economists were making at the time (it's basically Ricardo), but wrote it from the perspective of the individual, as opposed to nations, which was revolutionary. It was not a message to princes, it was a message to wage-laborers.

Engels frankensteined this into his own warmed over cliches, and never allowed Marx to publish a word that he hadn't scribbled all over. Please ignore them when thinking about socialism. We've done the experiments (although we started with peasants instead of a society well prepared by capitalism), and the first output was Stalin.

Maybe give the Left SRs a little attention, or remember Fanny Kaplan. It's a miracle that Bogdanov survived, but even the Bolsheviks couldn't bring themselves to kill the person who came up with the idea of "dialectical materialism" which they hopelessly butchered because Lenin clearly didn't understand what he was reading. Read Bogdanov. Lenin once "refuted" him by basically denying the existence of the material world, and sneering at those who believe in it. Lots of parallels there to today.

Sorry for hijacking your offhand comment. But congestion pricing is socialism.

[Pxtl]

But by the all-encompassing definition you have here, having a military is socialism. Paying bus fare is socialism. Running elections is socialism.

I'd argue that such a definition of socialism is so expansive as to be worthless.

[IAmBroom]

By the classical definition, a government-paid military and city-run buses are absolutely socialist organizations.

Running elections is not a means of production, so it can't be socialist.

[1718627440]

> city-run buses are absolutely socialist organizations

I agree totally.

As for the military, I'm not so sure. As far as I know every military is run by a state. A private army is generally called milita. A military is also not really providing value to the people, but rather providing value to the government, sometimes over the people. Mandatory public military on the other hand might qualify for that term.

[Pxtl]

I'm not talking about the city running the bus, I'm talking about the city charging fees for the bus.

Is it more or less socialist to ask users to pay for a government service at point of consumption?

[IAmBroom]

> Socialism is when people cooperate to do things as a group to benefit the entire group.

No, that's altruism: putting the group ahead of the individual.

Socialism is when the means of production are socially owned, instead of privately owned. It implicitly is altruistic by nature, but that's of course not guaranteed.

[1718627440]

> just refer to it as a mythical state that spontaneously occurs after all of the revolution

I think you have switched the terms here. Communism is what the mythical state is called. The political agenda leading to, during and after the revolution until that mythical state, is called socialism.

It's true, that socialism used to describe also a liberal way to curing poverty, but that split occurred over 150 years ago. Since then the parties that intend to keep democracy call themselves socialdemocratic and socialism is used exclusively for those calling for councils and revolution.

I'm a bit tired of hearing times and times again, that actually maybe socialdemocrats are also socialists. Socialdemocrats are not against private ownership, they just want it distributed differently. That's not socialist.

[nradov]

Nah. Don't waste your time reading about Owenism and labor vouchers. It's utter tripe, wishful thinking made up by some random guy with no connection to objective reality. The labor theory of value has never and will never work in practice.