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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

I highly recommend reading Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng [0]. It's a factual, first-hand account of the China's Cultural Revolution and what living in a communist / socialist society is really like from an educated person's perspective. My inlaws escaped Saigon when it fell and say the picture is very accurate.

The socialist downfall of countries are all unique, but follow similar paths. I encourage people to understand the causes of them and how brutal and arbitrary these governments are.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_and_Death_in_Shanghai

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I think we need to be more careful with our terminology than using the terms "communist" and "socialist" interchangeably. Presumably, the real problem we're talking about is state-controlled economies, regardless of the ideologies that set them up.

Several countries that are fairly socialist have higher living standards than the U.S., where "socialism" is an epithet for some reason. McCarthy lives on I suppose.

Venezuela's problem is totalitarianism. In a socialist country, it is possible for the government to be governed by law and have limits placed on its power. That is not what's been going in in Venezuala.

Those successful European countries let the economy operate and tax it. Venezuela runs the economy, including setting prices of basic necessities, which then become unavailable because it turns out the government cannot set those the way it thinks it can.

Indeed, this is the difference between socialism in a free market and socialism in a command economy. While the former may try to influence the market (through social programs, state investment, money supply), it still must bend with the winds of market forces.

The latter is an imposition of structure irrespective of the market: It might be seen more as a rigid body that can stand in certain conditions but begins to buckle once the wind changes.

There's no such thing as Socialism in a free market, that's a contradiction in terms. Socialism means non-free market, and uses extreme violence to accomplish its ends of nationalizing wealth and production (which are inherently linked). And indeed, very liberal applications of force is the sole means to accomplish such a thing, which is why all attempts at Socialism throughout history always involved the equivalent end result of a dictatorship and extremely violent suppression of the population.

Socialism requires at a minimum the nationalization of the means of production. If what you're talking about doesn't involve that, then what you're talking about isn't Socialism.

I understand that 51% of Wikipedians on the page for "Socialism" have come to this conclusion, but it may trouble you to know that 51% of Wikipedians on other pages about other aspects/flavors of socialism do not agree, let alone political scientists as a whole.

I'm sorry to be so snarky about this, but "socialism means command economy" is the Scholar's Checkmate of Internet political science debates, and I'm think we benefit by not dignifying it.

Curious to hear how you use this perspective to rationalize the government structure for providing public goods in the U.S., such as defense, roads, and the court system.

Is the U.S. not a free market economy in your view?

> There's no such thing as Socialism in a free market

There's no such thing as a free market, either.

> Socialism means non-free market

Laissez-faire Capitalism ignores that the ideal efficiency of a free market requires the absence of externalities, which are present in the real world.

Socialism attempts to address the existence of externalities (though socialist theory often won't frame it in those terms) through compensatory mechanisms (which may involve outright government control and planned economy, or may, especially in many current strands of socialism, instead include mechanisms to internalize externalities so that the behavior of the imperfectly free market better approaches the efficiency of the ideal free market than an actually unregulated market would without effort to address externalities.)

> and uses extreme violence to accomplish its ends of nationalizing wealth and production (which are inherently linked).

Nationalizing means of production is not an end of socialism, though its a means of some forms of socialism in assuring that the means of production are harnessed to serve the common good of society. Other forms of socialism change (compared to capitalism) the balance of power in firms between labor and capital as a means of harnessing production to serve the common good, others adopt market regulations which serve to internalize externalities so that forces in the regulated market will naturally direct the means of production to serve the general good.

> Socialism requires at a minimum the nationalization of the means of production.

No, it doesn't, if you are referring to "socialism", the political philosophy. If you are referring to "socialism", a particular the phase on the road to communism in Marx's Communism (and thus the "socialism" of Leninsm and its descendants which, while abandoning much of Marx's theory, kept this part), then, yes, socialism does involve that, but note that Marx's Communism was one of many kinds of socialist philosophies of its time, and that the "socialism" phase in Marx's Communism (and, for that matter, Marx's Communism as a whole) is not representative of (though it may be one example of) socialism as a political viewpoint.

I think most socialists would agree that more democratic control of the means of production in general, as compared to laissez-faire capitalism, is a distinguishing feature of socialism. I do not think most socialists would agree that state ownership of the means of production is essential (and, indeed, many would argue that significantly revising the capitalist concept of ownership and property rights in the means of production are necessary to socialism, and that the nature of that revision of what ownership means is more important to socialism than where ownership is located. Socialism as simply state-ownership is a minimally challenging way for capitalists to approach socialism, because it avoids even discussion of the essential difference between socialism and capitalism, which is the challenge to the capitalist understanding of property and ownership.)

I think you're definition has some good elements - about nationalizing wealth and production, but I don't get where violence has anything to do with socialism. I've always considered Socialism to be "socializing" the provision of some goods instead of relying on the free market. Providing things like Street Cleaning, Birth Certificates, Roads, military, coast guard, street lighting, traffic lights, Police Services, K-12 education, Courts are all examples of common socialized goods by that definition. Different countries seem to socialize more (or less) than others. Some countries provide some spectrum of (more or less) socialized fire departments, health care, ambulances, emergency care, homeless shelters, etc...

With that in mind - countries like the United States, particularly in the latter half of the 20th century, are quite socialist in comparison to previous eras (though obviously somewhat less so than other countries).

10000 years ago the entire world was not socialist but communist, and none of what you mentioned happened.

It was the formation of class societies of workers and parasites 10000 years ago which led to violence, suppression of the population etc.

The term "socialism" has more than one meaning. Classically, it referred to the means of production being owned and controlled directly by the society, either through the state or workers collectives.

Later the word "socialism" came to also mean a market economy in which the government intervenes to a considerable degree, as in European-style social democracy.

American conservatives have also recently come to label New Deal-style liberalism as "socialism."

I think it would be helpful for productive discussion if people labeled which meaning of the term they are using, and acknowledged that it also has other meanings.

Let me add that the state-ownership version of socialism could be totalitarian or democratic. I am not aware of any countries in the world today that have a state-ownership version of socialism and are democracies. Venezuela, from what I understand, has a partly state-owned economy, and is semi-totalitarian.

update: let me explain some why I think that discussion can be more productive if people acknowledge the term "socialism" has more than one meaning, and are clear about which one they are using.

There are many different economic and governmental systems that are labeled "socialist" including, among others, the totalitarian, total state-control system of the old Soviet Union and the democratic, semi-socialist system of the UK after WWII and up until Margaret Thatcher.

What is needed is to discuss how the various systems work and what are their outcomes, good or bad. This is a complicated and difficult discussion. If people insist on either labeling all of them as "socialist" or only one, then people get into endless, fruitless debates over who is right, and it greatly undermines the more factual discussion about specific different systems and why they go right or wrong. The comments to this link are a good example of what I am talking about. But if everyone agrees there are different definitions, then they can focus on the more important part of discussing the systems themselves.

> countries that are fairly socialist

Please describe the ways in which some countries are "fairly" socialist but aren't actually socialist. I'm not aware of a single example of a socialist nation succeeding in any regard towards creating prosperity for its people. Nor am I aware of a successful national experiment in socialism in the last two centuries of various attempts. Every historical attempt has ended extraordinarily badly, universally failing to accomplish high living standards.

None of the Scandinavian nations are even remotely close to being socialist. They all rely on the market economy, they all embrace Capitalism to significant degrees, they all have property rights enshrined into the core of their economies, they all allow for the vast accumulation of wealth without forced redistribution, they all allow for the private ownership of production, they all allow for the accumulation of and investment of capital privately, they all utilize equity and bond markets that can be bought and traded freely (another critical point to Capitalism), and on it goes. They're all substantially closer to Capitalism than Socialism, which is course why they're able to pay for their large welfare states and other actual Socialist nations universally fail at that. Sweden for example famously had drifted too far toward being an over-burdened welfare state - circa the 1970s and 1980s - and had to de-regulate and de-tax their economy, which then resulted in boom courtesy of increased Capitalism. The nations you refer to, are actually welfare states, not Socialist - there is a very big difference.

"they all have property rights enshrined into the core of their economies, they all allow for the vast accumulation of wealth without forced redistribution"

I disagree. These nations do not allow vast accumulations of wealth. They have significant taxes that actually prohibit vast accumulations of wealth, by design. It's also a form of forced redistribution, because you are required to pay excessive tax rates..and if you don't, you be sent to prison or be subjected to some form of punishment.

In fact, if you look at the average wages across all industries in a country like Sweden, they are relatively the same.

Here are some stats: http://lostinstockholm.com/2012/01/10/average-salaries-in-sw...

Why are they the same? Because the government will tax the money away before you can ever get to those higher amounts.

"The nations you refer to, are actually welfare states, not Socialist - there is a very big difference."

I feel like this is the 'no true scotsman' argument all over again. At a certain tax rate, the government owns the means of production.

We can keep playing semantics and call it 'socialist' or 'welfare state', but the reality is that no matter what you call it, high taxes and excessive government regulations is not something that is conducive to a prospering nation.

Even look at California as a small example: The high tax rates and regulations have started squeezing out the middle class and in many parts of the state, you only have two classes of people: poor and rich.

The Nordic countries implement "social democracy" in some form or other. At least they used to, as you mention Sweden has seen its economy liberalized far beyond the US in some sectors these days (Schools, for example).

In the end it's just a question of whether Social Democracy with a free market is half socialism or if it isn't. Not really a useful debate. The roots of social democracy just like all other forms of socialism of course is the workers movement and Marx is very present still in the Social democratic parties' program declarations.

Social democrats accept the market economy. They are socialist in the sense that they are proponents of redistribution/wealth equality, and workers influencing or even owning the means of production (The former through unions having seats in corporate boards, the latter through later scrapped ideas like workers owning corporations through funds, "wage earner funds").

These social democratic ideas try to adapt Marxist theory to a liberal democracy and market economy. Is social democracy socialism despite accepting a market economy? Depends on who you ask. It's simpler to just use the term social democratic instead of socialist. Having a large welfare state is really orthogonal to how the money for said welfare state is raised (Norway for example could in theory have supported its welfare state without much social democracy or socialism).

Is this why IKEA, which is one of the largest non-state owned Swedish companies is set up as Netherlands-based entity (INGKA Holding), ostensibly for tax evasion purposes?

Sweden does have a lower corporate tax rate than the U.S., though the U.S. tax code offsets this by providing a multitude of different deductions for business expenses. Among other things, government imposed fines are tax deductible as per the U.S. Tax Code. When it comes to personal tax rates, Sweden's rate is much higher than the rate in the U.S. (http://taxfoundation.org/blog/how-scandinavian-countries-pay...)

Not debating the validity of your larger point here, but your assertion re Sweden being economically free as compared to the U.S. isn't that accurate. It is a very much a socialist nation that is also very prosperous.

I never argued that Sweden was more economically free than the US (although frankly they may be at this point, US federal regulations have increased drastically in the last 40 years, the regulatory burden is far larger than it used to be). I said that Sweden was in a two decade long economic slump, and only climbed out of it courtesy of de-regulation and de-taxation of their economy. I'd be happy to link to several articles covering this historical fact; the Swedish architects of that event have talked openly about how and why they did it.

Can you name the ways in which Sweden is a Socialist nation? I'm aware of very few things that can even be argued to define them as such. Quite the opposite, their overwhelming characteristics economically are that they heavily rely on the market economy determined by individual business owners and investors rather than a command economy dictated by the State.

- Do they allow private ownership of property, including the means of production? Yes, Sweden's economy is almost entirely driven by private businesses.

- Does nearly all of their economy function around private business ownership? Yes.

- Do they allow the existence of so called capital classes? People whose wealth is primarily existent in capital, investment, real estate, etc.? Yes.

- Do they force the redistribution of wealth, so as to attempt to prevent the existence of rich and poor classes? No.

- Do they allow the private ownership of real estate, farm land, etc? Yes.

- May the government arbitrarily nationalize your wealth, investments, or business? No, that would be a rare event in Sweden.

- Do they primarily function via the free market economy of non-coerced trade? Or is all trade primarily dictated by the State? Right, almost entirely free trade.

- Does the State determine all investment priorities for all businesses? No, quite the opposite, businesses are free to set their own priorities, build new products at will, choose how they allocate capital.

- Does the State dictate most allocations of capital? No, the opposite.

Things like healthcare, slightly heavy economic regulation, education - are the primarily arguments I'm aware of regarding Sweden, however those define them as a welfare state, not a Socialist state. The US for example has vast free healthcare, housing, and food systems, along with a massive entitlement system, which is why the US is also a welfare state (and not primarily a Capitalist nation as it was a hundred years ago).

> - Do they allow private ownership of property, including the means of production? Yes, Sweden's economy is almost entirely driven by private businesses.

Government spending as % of GDP is an excellent metric re size of the government relative to the private economy. This assumes that as a nation is more socialist, the size of the government will increase.

Sweden slightly over 50% (http://www.tradingeconomics.com/sweden/government-spending-t...) U.S. 20% (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S)

I don't doubt that private property ownership is permissible in Sweden, but the government dominates GDP as compared to any single private sector.

> - Do they force the redistribution of wealth, so as to attempt to prevent the existence of rich and poor classes? No.

Sweden has higher personal tax rates than the U.S. I dispute your "No." here.

> - May the government arbitrarily nationalize your wealth, investments, or business? No, that would be a rare event in Sweden.

It depends. The Swedish government is a highly functional one and will not act capriciously. I believe they will step in and nationalize wealth/real property if doing so was important to the wellbeing of the nation, whereas the U.S. even during the bailouts of 2008 went through great pains to avoid direct government ownership / control, even to the point of handing private equity firms free risk-adjusted money.

> - Does the State determine all investment priorities for all businesses? No, quite the opposite, businesses are free to set their own priorities, build new products at will, choose how they allocate capital.

Given the GDP % stated above, this is debatable.

> - Does the State dictate most allocations of capital? No, the opposite.

Same as the previous point.

You can stick your fingers in your ears and scream so that you won't hear reasonable people using the word "socialist" to mean things you don't mean when you say it, but that doesn't change the fact that reasonable people disagree with you about whether "socialism" implies "command economy".

That's entirely unnecessary and silly. Instead I'm going by the word of the very people that were instrumental in creating and spreading Socialism and its intellectual foundations to begin with: Marx, Engels, Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Trotsky, etc. No need to rely on arbitrary speculation.

To argue that Socialism means something other than a command economy, you have to disagree with all the major players that were actually responsible for defining Socialism to begin with. I choose not to do that and I accept their elaborate, very well documented descriptions of what it is. And I'm not referring to associationism or the cooperative movements, I'm talking about Socialism.

Reasonable people disagree with you that Marx, Engels, Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, and Trotsky have defined the word "socialism" with the precision you feel it now has.

Invoking Mussolini this way is a particularly telling example.

So is Hitler. Why not just simplify your argument to "The Nazis were National Socialists. Check and mate!"

> the very people that were instrumental in creating and spreading Socialism and its intellectual foundations to begin with: Marx, Engels, Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Trotsky, etc.

Its worth noting that your examples include:

(1) two members of the same early subset of socialism (Marx and Engels) and two later people known for involvement in the same descendant of the form of socialism embraced by the earlier two (Lenin and Trotsky), and

(2) two other people that aren't recognized as having an important involvement in anything recognized as a branch of socialism, though one of them was involved in a political party with "socialist" in the name (Hitler and Mussolini).

Its hardly a broad sampling of "the very people that were instrumental in creating and spreading Socialism and its intellectual foundations to begin with".

But what was totalitarian about it? All of the economically destructive measures (price controls, currency exchange rates, impositions on the rich/foreign investment) were immensely popular, right?

Yeah, not totalitarian policies, just stupid policies. Genghis Khan could become dictator and if he fixed those policies, the economy would improve.

I always find it strange that Genghis Khan is used as an example this way. He was solely responsible for one of the largest economic revolutions in history by uniting the Silk Road, standardizing a writing system, and ran a meritocratic society. So yeah of course he could fix it, he's one of the most successful rulers of all time by all metrics.

Edit: Yeah, obviously he and his conquest killed a lot of people. And yeah, in this case it was a metric of success for him and his empire.

I always find it strange that Genghis Khan is used as an example this way.

Mainly because he is seen as a barbarian conqueror, so people understand me if I use that phrase.

(whether he was or not is immaterial: though by modern standards, he was a barbarian conqueror and completely unethical)

He also murdered millions of peasants he saw no use for since rice farming was not on their list of priorities.

When conquering China it was often the case that academics were the first on the chopping block since they were presumably the ones most likely to cause trouble.

So yeah, he fixed the economy?

Uhhhh what about the metric of most civilians slaughtered? Just sayin' .... which metrics here constitute "success"?

Subsidies were indeed popular and probably anything chavez did. Then, popular and orwellian totalitarian are not contradictory.

But lets first understand that "the poor" are not created by the rich in latin america as socialists love to say, its been more than half a century of socialist/socialdemocrat rule and its obvious that they create the poor by making them dependant on the governments' favour. The famous barrios, fabellas and asentamientos are the creation of a socialist elite that uses the filantropy masquerade to get easy money through corruption, currency exchanges, inflation, etc.

I was addressing the comment's point about "checks on government". Specifically:

>>In a socialist country, it is possible for the government to be governed by law and have limits placed on its power. That is not what's been going in in [Venezuela].

My point is, there were in fact limits, and they went through the democratic process to have exceptions made to those limits. That's not totalitarianism, which would be "some figure saw the limits and bypassed them without approval anyway".

No Venezuela's problem is corruption,populism and incompetence. How comes Norway is freaking rich from the little oil they have and Venezuela can't even achieve the same thing with way more natural resources ?

I think you're referring to European Social Democracies. That's a different type of regime than socialism -- for the most part they don't try to own the means of production. Venezuela is nothing like one of those countries. Chavez built a sort of hybrid of "Bolivarianism" and socialism. They rejected "imperialist" ties, nationalized many industries and tried to develop more self-sustainability.

End of the day, there seems to be a need for balance between capitalist striving and government administration based on something other than profit/loss.

Most of the people who cry "socialism" in the US are inspired/motivated by people who control access to natural resources.

Just because a country has high taxes and a social safety net doesn't mean its socialist.

Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production. Which always has significant societal drawbacks.

In Norway, the means of production of petroleum is state-owned (majority at least), well managed, and will provide for the social safety of Norwegians for many, many, many years.

So there _are_ countries with genuine socialist policies that--while contentious and somewhat controversial--are nothing like the Venezuelan catastrophe.

> Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production. Which always has significant societal drawbacks.

Citation about developed countries where it is true desperately needed.

I think we need to be more careful with our terminology than using the terms "communist" and "socialist" interchangeably.

You might be surprised to learn that not even the Soviet Union considered itself communist (they considered themselves socialist transitioning to communist).

The reality is that "socialist" is a word without a clear definition, and it's better to avoid using it altogether if you want people to understand you. If by socialism you mean, "a country that takes care of the poor" than say that.

Arguing over the definition of the term 'socialism' is arguing over a definition, and a waste of breath.

I agree that it's a pointless argument, but that goes both ways. Plenty of people use the term "socialist" in ways that don't connote planned economies. Moreover, there are examples of state-run economies that are neither socialist nor communist.

The trouble is that when we talk about the positive aspects of socialism, we have an annoying tendancy to exploit the word to make Sweden an apology for Venezuela: we confuse "socialized services" with "command economy" and end up ignoring the real public policy failures of places like Venezuela.

And when we talk about its negative aspects, we tend to make Venezuela a cautionary tale against, say, single-payer health care.

I think "capitalism" and "free trade" are similarly without clear definitions, given the amount of time people spend arguing about them.

This seems to be a consistent truth. Perhaps we should develop tools to be able to converse with people who don't use the same definitions that we do?

I agree with you on capitalism, so it is another word I tend to avoid. I try to say things in a way that I will be understood.

I don't know about "free trade," though, what sorts of alternate definitions are people using for that?

People seem to have disagreements over how much regulation and what kind of regulation you would have before trade is no longer considered free trade.

Maybe give people a survey to assign a word2vec-like coordinate to their beliefs about each term, and then tell them which term is actually closest to their belief vector?

"Socialism" has a clear, simple definition. Socialism is the ownership and control of the means of production by the government for the people.

Its the mis-use of the term socialism and the details of actually implementing government ownership of the means of production that makes discussions so confusing. To pick a few examples, Obamacare is not socialism. Government assistance, as implemented in the US, is not socialism. A state run oil company, on the other hand, may be part of a socialist economy.

It's more complicated even than this, and, unfortunately, that means your argument isn't dispositive. There is, for instance, "market socialism", which describes public/private cooperatives. Sweden would call itself a "social democracy", rather than a "socialist country", but Sweden does some things that clearly cross the line in ownership and control of the means of production for some industries. Moreover: most countries with single-payer health care --- the UK, Canada, France --- have state control over one of the most important sectors of the economy! By your definition, they're (at least in part) socialist countries. But they would dispute the characterization.

It's not other people who are causing these problems by incorrectly using the terms. It's that reliably using the term "socialism" with any precision requires so much clunky verbiage that nobody --- on either side --- can use it correctly. When we use the term or see it used, we should raise a flag so that we all understand it's ambiguous, and leave it at that.

For what it's worth: by no definition does it make sense to call Obamacare "socialist".

Obamacare is socialist in the sense that it enabled a great deal of government control over the healthcare market, which is a rather large sector of the economy, almost indisputably one of the 'commanding heights'.

This is logic that suggests that any regulation of any major market is intrinsically "socialist".

Perhaps that's true, but if it's true it's only true in the sense that it illustrates how treacherous the word "socialism" is.

There is the saying "why own the farm If you can own the farmer?", which has been attributed to various totalitarians (and whose true origin I am unaware of), that highlights the fact that owning the actual means of production is unnecessary if you control the owner. This can be through regulation, corruption, or other means.

I don't see socialism as a 'treacherous' word, but 'socialism' is more a spectrum than a boolean variable. For instance, I am sure you are more socialist than I am, but that does not make you the same as Castro or Mao.

Careful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

I don't understand where you believe I am making a fundamental attribution error. I am an extreme libertarian or an anarcho-capitalist (depending on where you draw the line), and from what I've read in your posts over the last years, you are nowhere near that side of the spectrum(s), unless you usually argue in favor of things you disagree with.

eh, i don't know

this is like saying that "real-time" has clear, simple definition... except for all those times in which people writing medical software disagree with people writing videogames.

socialism is a word that doesn't let people communicate effectively. you say it meaning one thing, and people may understand in a multitude of ways. I think the advice to avoid using it is sound.

The biggest confusion I see is exactly this, people use "socialism" when they mean "welfare state".

> I think we need to be more careful with our terminology than using the terms "communist" and "socialist" interchangeably.

I was born in the Socialist Republic of Romania (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Republic_of_Romania) in the early 1980s, which was ruled by the Romanian Communist Party (which was the only allowed party). The situation was pretty much the same in all the former Eastern Block countries, with socialism being used interchangeably with communism, there were no debates in our local press about which one was which. I think "communism is different than socialism" is a Western-countries' thing, where Obama is called a socialist because he tried to make sense of the US health-care system (long story short: he's not).

And on a more general level of discussion, I'm not sure there really is a difference between the two. I've read some left-leaning literature (Marx's Capital I, his "German Ideology" and other younger writings of his, Lenin's "What Is to Be Done?", Kołakowski's 3-volume "Main Currents of Marxism", some Lukács, Jacques Rancière's "Nights of Labor: The Workers Dream in Nineteenth Century France") and no-where in those volumes there was a clear distinction made between "communism" and "socialism". The only nuance I can think of is Lenin's insistence that trade-unionist communism was a bad thing, because that involved making a pact with the "enemy" (the capitalists) and only settling for small gains, ignoring the bigger picture. He was of course right, from a workers' point of view perspective, you either control all means of productions or you risk still depending on the capitalists. 100+ or so years since his early writings the European working class is basically dead.

> The situation was pretty much the same in all the former Eastern Block countries, with socialism being used interchangeably with communism

Well, yeah, authoritarian (Leninist-Stalinist) Communist regimes weren't particularly eager to highlight that Leninist vanguardism was a sharp repudiation of central elements of Marxist Communism (and one that, after making some early marks, was singularly unsuccessful in establishing itself any place where capitalism and the elements Marx saw as necessary for moving on to socialism had ever existed, as opposed to other strands of socialism, both Marxist-derived and otherwise), and that Marxist Communism itself was one of many strands of socialist theory, and that all of the advanced "capitalist" economies of the West had -- largely as a result of non-Marxist, or at least non-Leninist, socialist forces -- long since departed from the "capitalism" critiqued by Marx for what the modern mixed economy, which is neither strictly capitalist nor socialist by 19th or early 20th century standards, keeping superficially the property structure of the former, with many structures inspired by the latter.

> I think "communism is different than socialism" is a Western-countries' thing

Well, yes, seeing socialism as broader than Communism is probably more common in places where the successful forms of socialism absolutely weren't Leninist Communism, often weren't other derivations of Marxist Communism -- and, in some cases, characterized Leninist Communist as "state capitalism" -- and had to deal with domestic opponents that wanted to paint them with the brush of Leninism-Stalinism and its atrocities than in one-party Leninist-Stalinist states.

When I say socialism and communism, I mean that the government regulates the economy or large pieces of it. Successful "socialist" western democracies are free-market economies that have higher taxes to provide a social safety net. I wish we could call that "empathetic capitalism".

> I wish we could call that "empathetic capitalism".

OK, but the universally accepted term is democratic socialism, which is quite accurate. "Capitalism" implies a lot more than just free markets.

Does it? What else does it imply that isn't a straightforward consequence of free markets?

Wrong- the generally accepted term is "welfare state".

No. Welfare state is the apparatus prividing social security and benefits for a population. It's not an ideology or a political system. Sweden has a large welfare state in the sense that we have free single payer health care, free education etc.

We are a social democracy in the sense that the current political climate and consensus is shaped by a few decades of social democratic rule. High progressive taxes etc are seen as norm and are of course necessary to finance a large welfare state.

However: How the money for a large welfare state like the Nordic ones is raised is orthogonal to whether it's being spent on a large welfare state or not. Had we had 10% military spending we'd have a much smaller welfare state than today, with the same taxes.

It's entirely possible for a country to have a very large welfare state without being the least bit socialist - especially if they have natural resources. If the swedish national mining Company (yes, a state owned Company!) suddenly found resources allowing taxes to be halved - we would.

The prior comment said that the correct term for a large social safety net was "democratic socialism", that was what I was responding to. This is a lie propagated by Bernie Sanders.[1] I agree that a welfare state is not necessarily socialist- that was my point! So, you think you are disagreeing with me, but you are perhaps missing is the point that, in the USA, Sanders continual lying about what Socialism means so that he can fit into the Democratic Party has confused the issue in many young people's minds.

The Swedish mining company LKAB is a socialist (state-owned) enterprise, however the entire economy is not composed of socialist enterprises, therefore it is clearly a mixed economy.

Relatively high taxes on their own are not "social" or "socialist".

[1]http://www.thelocal.dk/20151101/danish-pm-in-us-denmark-is-n...

I think you will have a hard time generating conclusive evidence for this argument. Doing so will force you to argue that well-known people who describe themselves as philosophically socialist are wrong about that.

Such as whom? Bernie Sanders is a politician clearly lying about the definition of socialism, while those he claims to want to imitate deny they are socialist.[1]

[1] http://www.thelocal.dk/20151101/danish-pm-in-us-denmark-is-n...

You can be irritated that the word "socialism" is ambiguous, but your irritation doesn't change the fact that it is. We should be careful trying to use the word "socialism" to mean things that it doesn't always mean. That's all I'm saying.

There are already specific, well-known terms that capture the real problem with states like Venezuela or the Soviet Union. For instance, "command economy".

> Successful "socialist" western democracies are free-market economies

Only in the sense that "free-market", in this context, involves substantial government regulation of market participants and activities in the manner that "free-market" is usually, in other contexts, used to signal the absence of.

> I mean that the government regulates the economy or large pieces of it

The Federal Reserve, bank bailouts, the government spending and government-backed monopolies that created the Internet we're typing on etc. The US "government regulates the economy or large pieces of it".

No one had a monopoly on "creating the internet". The government pays for basic, fundamental research, and as a consequence of those investments a new technology we call The Internet was created. A good use of public money, but trying to use the invention of the internet to argue that the US government is controlling the economy is a total misunderstanding of basic facts.

Government backed monopolies like Bell created the transistor, and government purchases from Fairchild kickstarted transistors.

Also you attribute statements to me that I did not make, then say these statements you made up and attribute to me are wrong.

No. Some of us would contend that the basic tenets of socialism cause a society to degenerate in the same way. Communism brings it on brutally, all of a sudden.

Besides, Venezuela considers itself socialist. "21st century socialism", they proudly named it.

The People's Democratic Republic of North Korea considers itself 'democratic' - it's even in the name!

As did east Germany. I can't think of a single country with "Democratic" in the name that was actually democratic?

It's like buying a product that says "high quality" something on it.

If you pay 40% taxes then you are 40% socialist.

In Belgium we pay: - 50% income taxes - 21% VAT (a kind of sales tax) - 14% Social security

50+21+14 = %85 Socialist.

Any taxes you pay above 50% brings you into the communist area [myself et al] so we are 35% communist.

(this was just for laughs)

Amen to this. For example, socialism is what constructs football stadiums in America.

No. Crony capitalism constructs stadiums.

Socialism means the state ("the people") owns the means of production.

As far as I can tell, manufacturing is not owned by the government and construction workers are not employed by the state.

Socialism just advocates for collective ownership, without specifying the scale or scope of that collective. It does not have to be the state government, and could, for example, be a group of football fans.

Public school systems construct stadiums and fund football teams.

Private universities also construct stadiums and fund football(and other sport) team.

Why should a sport team has anything to do with an educational facility? How does a football team...say...further the education of its college students?

How about the interstate highway system then? As far as I can tell, it is pure socialism.

The interstate system is a tax and spend program. If you're equating government spending with socialism, then you should probably revisit your understanding of each.

Some classify roads as a public good[1]. Of course, there are private roads as well.

The government owns the interstates, but that is just property, not a means of production.

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

It is also in some way, a disaster, but I think that's more about implementation rather than the use of public money.

Would you agree that the term collectivist encompasses both communism and socialism?

This distinction has nothing to do with the point I'm making.

This is not a distinction, but a generalization, or abstraction that better describes the phenomenon and your assertion that a state controlled economy may be contemplated without respect to the ideology to which it conforms is dubious.

This is probably an interesting semantic debate to have, but I have to apologize for being completely disinterested in it.

Which is why collectivism pops up murderously over and over with different names.

Do I understand you accurately to be saying "if you want participate in a debate with me on my terms you're i part responsible for all the evils of state-run economies"?

Aha now that is an interesting question and I'm glad you asked. I know that I personally would feel responsible if I saw collectivism murdering yet another society and did not call it out for what it is. If I for example saw that people were dying of lead poisoning but instead blamed evil spirits then clearly I would be responsible for mass poisoning.

"Agree with me or you're among history's greatest villains" is neither a novel nor persuasive rhetorical strategy. You should try a different approach.

I in turn don't find an attempt at a straw man all that convincing.

Depends on your definition of socialism. If you mean "all the means of production are owned by the state", then yes, that probably counts as collectivist.

But if by "socialism", you mean "what goes by that label in Scandanavia", then probably no, "collectivist" doesn't fit. It's just somewhat more government services than the US has, at the price of somewhat higher taxes.

"Somewhat higher" as a euphemism for "half again more"

He used "somewhat higher" twice. While I'd personally prefer smaller government, paying 50% more for 50% more services isn't nuts.

Right which is why I prefer to use collectivism which is prioritizing the group over the individual and would seem to subsume any definition of socialism you could ever reasonably give.

You sound like you think you're agreeing with me, but you're not.

I'm saying that socialism, as practiced in Scandanavia, is not collectivist. That means that, no, collectivism does not "subsume any definition of socialism you could ever reasonably give".

Taking X% of an individual's outcome and putting it into a pool for the collective good sure sounds pretty close to: "Collective ownership of the means to production". Doubly-so if that X is more than 50, as that means you are working more for others or the collective than you are for yourself.

Any who, I really think the definition of "Socialism" and "Socialist" require an overhaul in our current societal climate. I'd say that back when that ideology was conceived, people saw people in general and themselves as barely more than "resource" cogs, and that the rulers or state had some sort of "effectively-divine" right to rule them. I would argue that civilized and connected society has moved past that, to the point that anything remotely close to actual socialism or communism would be equivalent to totalitarianism in people's minds. It would be seen as barbaric, and contrary to people's right to exist.

Or rather, we need to be more careful in conflating the axises of political thought - communism does not necessarily require totalitarianism, but, like extreme conservatism, begets it.

Some blame socialism, others blame this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

> The socialist downfall of countries are all unique, but follow similar paths

The PRC just surpassed US GDP on some measures, whereas in the 1940s it was a western and Japanese occupied backwards basket case. Is that the downfall you mean?

Or do you mean Russia, which couldn't win a war with the Japanese in 1905, never mind Germany a decade later? The New York Times columns of 1918 said Mr. Lenin's government would fall any day now. What actually happened is as Europe and the US fell into depression in the 1930s, Russia was surging ahead and industrializing. It repelled an attack by a military alliance of virtually all of continental Europe in 1941 and Red Army soldiers planted the red flag in 1945. Then it launched the first satellite, man in space etc. After becoming a superpower, the central committee of the CPSU decided to pack it in in the late 1980s, and attune itself to the economic and political system of the rest of the world. Even Molotov never believed in "socialism in one country", and he was the one proclaiming it.

Some downfall, foreign-dominated backwaters rose to become world superpowers.

The China during the Cultural Revolution was not a success. Millions were murdered, people starved, and a terrible stain marks that period of China's long history.

It was the pro-capitalist reforms that turned China into the success it is today, and as China starts to falter with it's unmanageable debt and unproductive, government-directed parts of the economy, the reforms will inevitably be capitalist, pro-market solutions that remove the state and promote competition.

So yes, some economies can succeed despite their socialist, government-controlled economic policies, but when things start to fail, solutions all point to the markets.

> in the 1930s, Russia was surging ahead and industrializing

It (The USSR) was also busy having famines that claimed millions of lives. Because it was too busy selling gold and wheat to buy industry from Americans (that's who built all those plants).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

I think I'd skip an industrialization like that.

> I think I'd skip an industrialization like that.

Then you could enjoy Holodomor every day thanks to the unfortunate fact that you happened to occupy some prime Lebensraum.

Stalin was a mass murderer, but he ultimately made or allowed the correct strategy to put the USSR in a position to defeat Germany, which was a pretty good trick (to put it lightly).

As we know today, Germans never had any manpower to make use of much lebensraum. They were at Peak German at that time, after which their birth rate declined dramatically. They won't have the men to settle any of those lands they were supposed to colonize.

Anyway, USSR lost the most lives fighting Germany and gained least benefits out of that. Just check:

https://www.ifitweremyhome.com/compare/RU/DE

Arguably the social policies of Nazi Germany likely would have kept the birthrate high for another 2-3 generations, after that.. its hard to say. Alternative histories of Germany winning the war are many, and interesting (and scary) though experiments.

Nobody got 2-3 generations in their position, I think they could only aim for a half generation of high-ish birthrate. That's what USA got, and it was arguably less urbanized to begin with.

They'll still have massive debt and huge costs of security and investments in freshly acquired "lebensraum". Honestly I think they'll crumble anyway.

Your first paragraph is "the Nazis didn't have enough coal to burn 6M Jews"-level dishonesty. They would have found a way to populate all that sweet, sweet land, like any colonizer in the past or present.

I agree with the second one. The "spoils" claimed weren't much compared to the destruction inflicted on their country and people. That has nothing to do with my original comment though.

Do you see many colonizers in present? I don't.

I see rapid decolonization. Japanese leave rural areas and northern territories. Russians fled Central Asia, pushed off Caucasus, large swaths of land become anthropic deserts. French in no position to colonize Africa anymore, if anything they're getting colonized. Chinese flock to Southern coast and no longer push that hard demographically on Uighurs/Tibetans.

Germans don't even seem to flock to their Northern, Baltic shore. And it has better climate than absolute most of their supposed "sraum".

Arguable, Polish and Balts skip their countries for greener pastures. If anybody in EU will be lacking room they can move there any minute.

> Do you see many colonizers in present? I don't.

The main example of "old school" colonization (other than the Chinese example mentioned below) I can think of in 2016 is the Israeli colonization of the occupied territories.

Colonies provided wealth and a logistical advantage to their owners. UK and France both fought hard to hold onto theirs well past the end of WWII. More recently, Russia considered Crimea important enough to accept the economic punishment annexing it entailed.

> Chinese flock to Southern coast and no longer push that hard demographically on Uighurs/Tibetans.

Do you have a good source or book that I can read about this? I would like to know more.

> Germans don't even seem to flock to their Northern, Baltic shore. And it has better climate than absolute most of their supposed "scram".

The Nazis are not known for paying careful attention to the climate when drawing up their grand plans. Lebensraum was their official policy, and I doubt they would have left the local population alone, considering what they did to other undesirables.

I don't have good source on Chinese demography, picking info about it one line at a time.

Anyway, there's no reason to think that Germans would easily defeat post-Imperial Russian Republic (given no Bolsheviks and therefore no civil wars, no mass emigration, famines or murders). Soviets basically lost half of pre-WWII years on chaos.

Russia without Soviets would look more like 350M strong Norway than like 140M strong Nigeria how it ended up.

> I'd skip an industrialization like that

That's how the British empire industrialized (in India, Ireland) etc.

The western countries bordering Ukraine had food shortages the same year the Ukraine did, no mention of that.

Also if you read New York Times during this period, the reporters travelling the Ukraine said there were no famine conditions - the Times said this, not Pravda.

In the 1930s the US was also busy having famines that claimed millions of lives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

The Dust Bowl claimed millions of lives? You're link doesn't support that in the least. It doesn't even mention any famine.

Death by suicide was the most common, as we're seeing now in the more recent economic troubles. Starvation and job security is certainly a motivating factor in any crisis where that becomes a problem.

Do you really not see the difference between these two events?

I'm trying to draw parallels here, that sometimes shit happens. Russia's mismanagement of agriculture notwithstanding, sometimes you're up against forces you can't control.

There's a hell of a big difference between an inadvertent result of ill-considered agricultural practices and a deliberate campaign of genocide by starvation.

If there was a "deliberate campaign of genocide by starvation" happening, I'm sure I could look in the New York Times archives of the period and read about that. If I consult the archives, the reporters going through the Ukraine said reports of that were false.

Also, all of Europe had a bad crop that year, I guess the Soviets were controlling the weather?

There's a lot of hyperbole on both sides here. The Soviets at the time claimed Americans were starving by the millions, and of course Americans claimed the Soviets were starving by the millions.

Of course this is a point too subtle to work on Hacker News.

The data on both sides is wobbly to the point of being undependable. Until modern social security systems kicked in the number of people living in the US was largely a hypothetical quantity, especially in far-flung rural areas, the very sort of which were impacted by the Dust Bowl.

The 1930 census https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1930_United_States_Census seems to be fairly comprehensive, but you have to wonder how far into the wilderness these people were willing to go to tabulate who was living in the extreme edges of the American frontier.

The Soviets claimed a lot of things. Of course, so did, and still do, the United States. But it's not for nothing, I think, that you find no shortage of contemporary Soviet and Ukrainian, and modern Russian, attestations of the Holodomor - whereas on the other side of things, not even the furthest right-wing anti-FDR John Birchers ever made even the slightest attempt to claim that any such thing happened in the United States. No one denies the Dust Bowl was bad. No one in the US, as far as I've ever been able to determine, has ever even tried to claim the Dust Bowl was that bad.

Except there is a consensus that millions of people of people died in the USSR during that famine, Ukranians were hit hardest.

I haven't seen much talk of large scale deaths(>10,000)due to the dust bowl. In fact I can't really find much on dust bowl deaths (other then an uptick in the suicide rate) except in places that seem to be excusing the Holodomor.

No-true-Scotsmanism about the Soviet Union and communism is a hell of a hill to pick to die on in 2016. I don't envy you. But my sympathy is strictly limited by the fact that your choice of ideology causes you to bring it on yourself.

Note that a crop failure is not the same thing as a famine.

People and nations can buy and beg food, its political and economic systems which turn crop failure into famine. Hell sometimes you don't even need a crop failure.

> If there was a "deliberate campaign of genocide by starvation" happening, I'm sure I could look in the New York Times archives of the period and read about that. If I consult the archives, the reporters going through the Ukraine said reports of that were false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty

> "Lying was Duranty's stock in trade," commented Alsop. In his memoirs British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, then The Manchester Guardian's correspondent in Moscow, talked of Duranty's "persistent lying" [20] and elsewhere called him "the greatest liar I ever knew.".[21]

> It was clear, meanwhile, from Duranty's personal exchanges that he was fully aware at the time of the scale of the calamity. In 1934 he privately reported to the British embassy in Moscow that as many as 10 million people may have died, directly or indirectly, from famine in the Soviet Union in the previous year. Both British intelligence[22][clarification needed] and American engineer Zara Witkin (1900–1940),[23] who worked in the USSR from 1932 to 1934,[24] confirmed that Duranty knowingly misrepresented information about the nature and scale of the famine.

---

In contrast

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth_Jones_(journalist)

> he travelled to the Soviet Union and eluded authorities to slip into Ukraine, where he kept diaries of the man-made starvation he witnessed

> > I walked along through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, 'There is no bread. We are dying'. This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. I tramped through the black earth region because that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.

> > In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it and devoured it. The Communist subsided. I stayed overnight in a village where there used to be two hundred oxen and where there now are six. The peasants were eating the cattle fodder and had only a month's supply left. They told me that many had already died of hunger. Two soldiers came to arrest a thief. They warned me against travel by night, as there were too many 'starving' desperate men.

> > 'We are waiting for death' was my welcome, but see, we still, have our cattle fodder. Go farther south. There they have nothing. Many houses are empty of people already dead,' they cried.

Alsop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Alsop#Military_service_... "In subsequent years, Alsop also helped the Central Intelligence Agency in its intelligence-gathering activities, using his status as a foreign correspondent as cover."

Muggeridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Muggeridge "a forceful anti-communist. During World War II, he worked for the British government as a soldier and a spy."

Jones: (from your link) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth_Jones_(journalist)#Life... "In 1931 he was offered employment in New York City by Dr Ivy Lee, public relations advisor to organisations such as the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler Foundation, and Standard Oil, to research a book about the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1931 he toured the Soviet Union with H. J. Heinz II of the food company dynasty, producing a diary published by Heinz as Experiences in Russia 1931, a diary which probably contains the first usage of the word "starve" in relation to the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture. In 1932 Jones returned to work for Lloyd George and helped the wartime Prime Minister write his War Memoirs.

During the 1930s, he was a reporter for the Western Mail.[2] In late January and early February 1933 Jones was in Germany covering the accession to power of the Nazi Party, and was in Leipzig on the day Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor. A few days later on February 23 in the Richthofen, the fastest and most powerful three-motored aeroplane in Germany, he became the first foreign journalist to fly with Hitler as Jones accompanied Hitler and Joseph Goebbels to Frankfurt where Jones reported for the Western Mail on the new Chancellor's tumultuous acclamation in that city."

It's called the Cold War. Liars lied about liars. All of your sources are committed anti-communists willing to do whatever it took to bring down the USSR. Do you really think they wouldn't lie about this stuff?

Do you have a shred of evidence to suggest that they did? I mean, I realize that's a higher bar to clear than throwing around shitty implications and trying for the "well there really aren't any good guys here" schtick, but you're really going to have to come up with at least a little bit of substance if you want to be taken seriously here.

I imagine you will consider this book beneath even the level of "shreds", but since you asked... http://www.garethjones.org/tottlefraud.pdf

There's no good evidence for a massive famine due to the dust bowl people lost their saving but few people died.

A famine is different from a crop failure. Crop failures can help cause famines,but typically famines happen because political and/or economic failures. For example in cases of extreme authoritarianism(like the USSR and China - PRC) and colonialism(Ireland, Nepal).

see http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/01/arts/does-democracy-avert-...

It can be argued that the PRC has done as well as they have by not only embracing free market principles but by turning a blind eye to their own industries essentially cheating on the global stage. The west in general has done similar things but at nowhere near the scale.

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