[js8]

The parent post is not even the worst offender. In his (otherwise good) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_Things_They_Don%27t_Tell_Yo..., Ha-Joon Chang completely flips the meaning between free markets and capitalism.

I would say that capitalism is not only characterized by private ownership of capital, but also by free market for labor, which could be almost considered a complementary feature (other side of the same coin).

On the other hand, socialism primarily rejects free market for labour in favor of worker emancipation and participation in decision-making. So both socialism and capitalism are compatible with free markets; it's the labor market where the opinion differs.

(As a socialist, I would add, salaries cannot be treated in economics the same way as e.g. price of apples, because apple doesn't care what its price is.)

[inigyou]

Control by billionaires is incompatible with free markets. A billionaire will always use his power to close up the market and grant himself a monopoly.

Socialism isn't even well-defined.

[ralusek]

Socialism is completely incompatible with free markets. Free markets typically stop being opinionated beyond the concept of enforcing contracts/consent, i.e. people are allowed to structure their economic relationships with one another however they want, they just have to respect their agreements.

Socialism is a prescriptive ideology, it is concerned precisely with the nature of the economic relationships people make. Labor theory of value. "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs." Workers own the means of production. To the degree that people are able to freely structure their economic relationships with one another, then the vast majority of those relationships will look nothing like the prescriptions of socialism. To the degree that the economic relationships are made to look like the prescriptions of socialism, then the economic model would fail to be described as a free market.

This is why in a free market/"capitalist" economy, communes can exist, Mondragon can exist...because you can structure your relationships with one another however you want. It's just that most people don't like that structure. "Capitalism" itself doesn't care at all if that's the way people want to distribute equity and control of the corporation. Now, if you want to structure an arbitrary economic relationship in a socialist communist country...good luck.

[rapnie]

>> Capitalism is ... OTOH socialism ...

> No, socialism is not ... and capitalism is ...

I often wonder if these classifications have long outlived their usefulness, and only lead to endless, often heated, ideological discussions about their definition. To the extent that those benefiting most from observably-broken-form-of-global-capitalism can use that as a tool to sow division and strife and ensure nothing changes. The gist of your and parent's comment is the interesting bit, where new systems and mechanisms are discussed.

[bit-anarchist]

I don't think it's a tool for sowing division. There is a significant group of self-proclaimed socialists who proudly stan the Soviet Union and Mao's China, so I think it's more of a case of ideologies being more messy than they seem.

Personally, I don't care as much about the label themselves as I do about the relationships they describe behind.

[inigyou]

Socialism isn't well-defined except that it's Not Capitalism and claims to be better than capitalism. Even Hitler called himself a socialist!

[bit-anarchist]

Not sure why this comment is downvoted. In the context of Marxian Socialism and Command Economies, it's very much true that socialism is incompatible with free markets.

Going even further, without a free market for labour, there's no true worker emancipation. Even with "worker-ownership" (read corporate-ownership under a democratic governance), each worker's power is still diluted by the governing body (which, funnily enough, means socialism strengthens capitalism as "control by those who own capital" while weakening capitalism as "free markets").

[js8]

> Not sure why this comment is downvoted

I didn't downvote it (obviously), but, for starters, it confuses socialism with communism (and also makes a typical categorical error in assuming that FEATTATEATTN is an implementation rather than desired value).

Second, it confuses capitalism (existing systems) with free market (some kind of ideal). It also pretends "free market" is a value neutral proposition. That completely ignores real-world role played by property, information, money and other multiparty relationships that socialism (and other regulations) try to address.

Third, it ignores the fact that socialism has been, not extensively, but successfully, implemented in the real world. (Mondragon and other worker coops, postwar tripartity models of worker participation in company control, etc.)

Lastly, it treats "free market" as an all-or-nothing proposition, which is never the case. There is, for example, no free market for nuclear bombs or for human children, and for a good reason.

Which brings us to your second paragraph, why rejecting free market can emancipate the workers. Treating labor as a commodity means that the person who performs the labor loses their decision power to the market, and so they lose freedom. Thus socialism demands that you do not separate human from the labor, and so they should always have a say over conditions in which they perform the labor. (This is different from other commodities, which, being inanimate objects, do not have a say about how they are used.) Accepting that free market for labor shouldn't exist is not really that different from accepting that free market for slaves shouldn't exist; in both cases there is human freedom attached which shouldn't be simply subjugated to the decisions of the "free market".

I would also say that worker coops show that your 2nd paragraph is empirically untrue. (Which is also bad for that model, because they often struggle to find capital, most of it being owned by capitalists who demand control over it.)

[bit-anarchist]

In regards to socialist/communist confusion, OP primarily refers using the term "socialism", except at the end where they use "socialist communist countries", likely referring to the self-proclaimed socialist countries that strive/strived towards communism. (I'm not sure FEATTATEATTN means here)

> There is, for example, no free market for nuclear bombs or for human children, and for a good reason.

Reasons that don't contradict OP's: "Free markets typically stop being opinionated beyond the concept of enforcing contracts/consent." Nuclear bombs only current purpose is indiscriminate eradication of human life and child trafficking is well... child trafficking. They all break consent. The same can be said about slavery, but not labour.

Which brings to the core of this discussion: the free market of labour. The addition of the free market of labour cannot, on its own, result in loss of self-control by either party. Removing it, however, rewards those who benefit the most from the current arrangement, which is most likely to be the employers.

While commodities, and other conventional properties, indeed do not have a will of their own; once appropriated, they become an extension of the will of their owner. With this in mind, labour, capital and commodities aren't different: neither the human actions applied to make bread, nor the machines needed to make bread nor the bread itself care about their prices or how they are used, but their owners do. In both cases, the same human freedoms are being affected in the same way. Slavery is special because the traded resource in question is another human being, someone capable of self-ownership, and the slaver isn't simply dictating on, for sake of simplicity, non-essential part of their body as with labour and commodities, but the slave's whole body and life, thus violating the consent part.

Which segways to your final paragraph. When I mentioned "worker-ownership", I was specifically alluding to worker coops. They not only do not prove what I said untrue, they, both theoretically and empirically (but mostly theoretically, yet), prove it true. One empirical part is the fact that Mondragon's increasing reliance on contractors, for instance. But, more interestingly, is the fact that, presuming that all ~70,000 Mondragon employees are members (they aren't), each would have around 0,0014% share. Given that Mondragon works under indirect democracy, this share doesn't even translate to direct influence. Is this painting the image of worker emancipation? Notice how the corporate power over the individual is still strong - sure smells like capitalism, as defined as "control by those who own capital", except "those" here is a corporation, which is not that different from today.

Given that you brought the slavery, likely for the analogy with wage-slavery - trying to fix workers by making their employers democratic is like solving slavery by making their slavers republics. The proper solution is to give direct private ownership over the means of production to all, but that's likely economically infeasible (but who knows, society where everyone is a capitalist like this would be neat). However, we can fix the issue with coops previously by keeping them small, but to handle the large contingency of workers and their diversity, a lot more coops would need to exist. Furthermore, these coops would need to be able triage workers that fit into their culture, and worker would need to be able to chose coops that satifify them. That implies a free market of labour. It points to the issue being more located in the concentration of power on people, not individuals, which means socialism can't do anything to fix this, specially if it implies getting rid of the free market of labour. Perhaps pushing for coops can help prevent corporate power concentration, but a healthy free market of labour is critical.