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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
>>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".
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.
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'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.
Is the U.S. not a free market economy in your view?
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.)
It was the formation of class societies of workers and parasites 10000 years ago which led to violence, suppression of the population etc.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!"
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".
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production. Which always has significant societal drawbacks.
So there _are_ countries with genuine socialist policies that--while contentious and somewhat controversial--are nothing like the Venezuelan catastrophe.
Citation about developed countries where it is true desperately needed.
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.
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.
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.
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 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".
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.
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.
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.
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 don't know about "free trade," though, what sorts of alternate definitions are people using for that?
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.
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.
OK, but the universally accepted term is democratic socialism, which is quite accurate. "Capitalism" implies a lot more than just free markets.
[1] http://www.thelocal.dk/20151101/danish-pm-in-us-denmark-is-n...
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 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...
There are already specific, well-known terms that capture the real problem with states like Venezuela or the Soviet Union. For instance, "command economy".
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".
Also you attribute statements to me that I did not make, then say these statements you made up and attribute to me are wrong.
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.
Besides, Venezuela considers itself socialist. "21st century socialism", they proudly named it.
It's like buying a product that says "high quality" something on it.
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.