I believe when you wrote "socialist" you meant "authoritarianist"? Please don't mix-up those two concepts
What I wanted to say is "realsocialist" a la former Soviet Union or East Germany. I think part of the confusion is that I live in Germany, where socialist always means that kind of one-party authoritarian system. By this definition, e.g. Bernie Sanders would be a (left-wing) social democrat, but not a socialist.
I know for example in France, the middle-left-wing party calls themselves socialist... I believe they are slightly left of what you'd call "liberal" in the US.
No, it doesn't. There are plenty of anti-authoritarian self-styled socialists in Germany.
How is the distinction hard to understand? Socialism is a system characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to capitalism, which is characterised by private ownership of the means of production. Both are ideologies.
You could have compared to Soviet or East Germany directly if you wanted to make a point about totalitarian regimes.
Also, I'm pretty sure Germans don't consider socialism to be an authoritarian ideology. Maybe you're confusing it with national socialism (nationalsozialismus => nazism).
I'm not sure why the opinion of Germans matters here, they have the same capitalist economy that the US and the rest of Europe do.
Historically, every attempt to build a socialistic society has led to tyranny. One can wonder, if this might be an inevitable consequence along the path to attempt socialism.
But we have managed to build several capitalistic societies which did not fall into tyranny (although some did).
http://wrightstories.com/attempts-to-fly-before-the-wrights/
You would never think of signing such a petition in Pinochet's Chile or Stroessner's Paraguay and those weren't socialist.
Socrates is a man.
Conclusion, all philosophers are men.
If not, then I guess we're talking about some form of authoritarianism.
To talk about "socialism" in a sense that doesn't break the non-aggression principle (necessary for non-authoritarianism), you need to think of volunteer communes. IOW, use pooled money (just think of it as a necessary evil) to buy 1,000 acres, build a master-planned community, and offer residency to people who pitched in to buy it, and then use socialism as the guiding ideology within that commune. If it doesn't work and people want to leave, they can leave.
That's a non-authoritarianism version of socialism. If you think there are others that exist in practice, I implore you to look into every true socialist country in history, including the currently failing state of Venezuela, wherefrom there is a mass exodus underway.
The same argument goes for the US. All developed countries have taxes and most people agree that they are necessary. I Besides, I don't feel Sweden is more authoritarian than the US because it has higher tax rates or more public services.
This is the problem with these uninformed, emotionally-driven debates about ideologies; everybody thinks it's "me vs you", rather than trying to understand anything in depth.
The discussion is courteous. You're free to clarify your thoughts if you think you were misunderstood.
In which case every nation on earth is authoritarian, and the word has no more useful meaning when discussing governments than the observation that governments attempt to maintain a monopoly on use of force. Both are universal. Doesn't matter if you're suppressing fraud in a balls-out capital-dominated economy or offering healthcare in more mild social democracies, someone disagrees and the jackboots come out.
So now we've established that capitalism (the real thing, mostly practiced by large cartels), "capitalism" (the U.S. mixed economy), socialism (I'm not stepping in that one) and "socialism" (the mixed economies of western Europe) are all authoritarian. Can we move past this boring, useless debate point, please?
People keep saying: "This isn't true socialism." Well, then true socialism seems to be nothing but a pipe dream that in reality can't be implemented and hence should either be revised or replaced by a better concept.
The definition is not complicated: have key industrial assets, notably transport infrastructure, owned by public authorities.
Even worse though: Most totalitarian countries fit that description, too.
One describes the methods of organization of the state and its economy; the other describes the goals of the government of the state.
And would view many other countries as socialist, if they have things like national medical insurance and free college tuition. Except China. China for some reason is viewed as comfortably capitalist, despite the pictures of Chairman Mao on the currency and at Tienanmen Square. And except Russia, whose authoritarianism is admired.
Talking perception here, not reality. The perception of people who used to be a marginal group of extremists but now have many people in positions of Governor, house of representatives, etc.
And unfortunately they now have a real shot at the White House in the personage of their tribal Duce (a pathological egomaniac whose politics are unclear and span all ends of the spectrum within any given time period).
For the purposes of western companies with ties to China, they have capitalism - after all, allowing child labor in sweat shops is very capitalistic.
On the other hand the state controls a majority of enterprise assets even though the number of enterprises fully owned by the state is around 30%. And they also impose their will on privately owned companies, with the market not being free.
Also, don't confuse capitalism with democracy ;-)
Consider that Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto spent a whole chapter tearing into other socialist ideologies, ranging from ideologies they saw as reactionary and anti-democratic and even feudal, to utopian systems that were basically anarchist.
Socialist ideologies have historically spanned the spectrum from extreme libertarianism (the term libertarian was first used for a political system by a French anarcho-communist that was so anti-authority he criticised Proudhon - a prominent early anarchist - for not going far enough) to systems that basically argued for technocratic feudal systems with welfare.
Using the term without specifying more is meaningless if you are talking about a specific ideology or system rather than generally about systems with certain shared characteristics.
For the record, though, I agree with you that the definition in the comment you reply to doesn't make sense - it would exclude many prominent socialist ideologies.
France is currently governed by a majority led by the Socialist party.
Many socialist ideologies reject the very idea of public authorities. Talking about them owned by the public would work better, but would exclude many other socialist ideologies.
E.g. Saint Simons original socialism involved a technocratic society where the actual key change was that people would be paid according to merit.
In Marxism too, that is the key defining aspect of socialism: Marxism sees the capitalist as not contributing work, but capital, and hence he's overpaid if measured by the merit of his work. (Marx was very clear on the distinction between socialism and communism as an end stage of a long period of development here: socialism would not involve full redistribution, but a process of redistribution by first levelling thing by paying people by merit, and then evening things out further by changing to pay based on need).
Public ownership in Marxism, is not a requirement per-se, but is seen as a consequence of the intent of giving everyone control over their own work and ensuring everyone is paid on merit.
This is the same in many other socialist ideologies, and hence you will also find distinctly socialist ideologies that accepts full private ownership, but instead e.g. relied on heavily progressive taxation as a means of reducing the difference.
You would be sort-of right that many socialist ideologies do share that characteristic, but it is not sufficient nor necessary in all instances.
> The definition is not complicated:
I probably should have been clearer, but that definition was explicitly the one adopted by the socialist parties who alternatively lead a majority of European countries (the “dozen of the wealthiest country in the world”).
There are other definitions of socialism, but I prefer to see how people practice it.
A whole lot of the people who consider themselves communist do too. In fact, the Bolsheviks murdered a huge number (tens of thousands is a very low end estimate) of communists who opposed them and who supported multi-party democracy.
Including a whole lot of communists who were members of the socialist parties that beat them in the elections to the constituent assembly shortly before their coup, but they also ended up murdering tens of thousands of members of their own party who opposed the authoritarian turn it took.
What actually happened in practice was a bloody civil war made democracy of any kind impossible. And out of the ruins of that civil war "pragmatists" like Stalin rose, purged the former revolutionaries completely, and restored the authoritarianism of the tsarist era.
If you look at the Communist Party of the 1930s there are none of the original Bolshevik (and fellow travellers) cadre left. They were all brutally assassinated. The most prominent being Trotsky but there were dozens of similar cases.
They got about 10% of the votes in the elections for the constituent assembly due to write the new constitution. They responded by overthrowing the Duma and calling off the assembly.
I agree with you that many of their members probably did support democracy - in fact, many of them lost their lives for holding on to that belief and resisting an increasing authoritarian leadership.
I didn't make the distinction mainly for simplicity because even if we draw a clear line and go all black and white and call every Bolshevik anti-democratic, the majority of socialist and communists in Russia were not Bolsheviks.
Part of the problem with the Bolsheviks, to me, stands with Lenins idea of the vanguard party, which was part of the issues surrounding the disagreement between Martov and Lenin that led to the split: With the idea that they made up a revolutionary vanguard, coupled with the fact that they were outlaws for a large part of their existence, they conditioned themselves to believe they "knew better" and that they would have support, and that anything indicating anything else was just another part of government or counter-revolutionary propaganda. Then with the creation of the Soviets following the February revolutons - standing against the Duma as an alternative seat of power -, they surrounded themselves with people who supported them, and this helped them legitimise to themselves the idea that they did actually have support.
When the constituent assembly elections provided evidence that showed they had pretty much no support outside of the big cities, it was easy for them to dismiss it as the result of "counter-revolutionary" activity etc.
The civil war certainly made it worse. It both provided good reason and an excuse to crack down on opposition. When parts of the opposition chose to fight on the other side because they had legitimate reasons to fear a party that had just conducted a coup, it just made it easier to crush them and write them off as traitors and counter-revolutionaries.
There were plenty of authoritarian capitalist countries, even those deemed "successful", e.g. modern Singapore or South Korea, Argentina, and others during periods of 20th century.
And on the other hand, there are democratic non-authoritarian socialist countries like Bolivia or even Venezuela.
"Socialism" can either be a common name for ALL the ideologies that branched from the original throughout history, or it can be a specific ideology that is closer to what we today would call "Communism". It's not entirely clear which is meant, if someone says "socialism" or that they are "socialists".
What about them? I think it is widely spread that socialism is like, if not the same as communism.
You must always assume that a US citizen does not know that social democracy existed before communism was even invented, and that liberalism has right-wing and left-wing branches.
It is possible to roughly translate between the jargons, though:
US progressive leftists ~ EU democratic socialists
US libertarians ~ EU right wing nutcases, confused anarchists (ardent US libertarians) or slightly confused liberals (moderate US libertarians)
US liberals ~ EU anti-capitalist scum (it's what it means translated, but nobody says that in the EU, of course)
I could go on but prefer to stop here, because there will always be some smartass who thinks he knows better and doesn't realize that words are just words and it's the concepts that count anyway. I'm prepared to get downvoted by butthurt Americans.