They do it so wrong and it seems like countries like Norway ,Sweden etc seem to get the balance right.
When social-democratic countries screw up due to authoritarianism and corruption, it's 'because socialism'. When capitalist countries screw up the same way, and there have been a lot of them, it's because of the corruption.
It's the problem of people not wanting to properly discuss things and always fall back on blaming people based on labels.
They did it in a completely different way, though, and the funds were managed and executed differently. Norway helped establish a company and essentially behave as shareholders, with their share revenues going into a fund that reinvests it in stock internationally. They deliberately do not depend on it to subsidize social programs entirely and only withdraw 3% per year.
Venezuela's leadership actively controlled the fund and used it to support wide-reaching social policies that could only be sustained with new revenues, pushing more oil production and making it a larger percentage of their economy which ultimately caused massive failure when the oil prices went down, they were producing at high capacity already and they couldn't get rid of the social programs.
* wage labour being the dominant mode of sustenance
* a class structure still visible (in fact, is seems as though such a "Socialist" mode of production would have even more well defined classes than our current mode)
* private property, but rather than being owned by capitalists it is owned by the state
So "workers owning" means of production is not adequate for Socialism. Rather, there must be some kind of shift in terms of how society functions in general. There should be no trade, as trade is a side-effect of the operation of the law of value and exchange value, a dialectical contradiction only found in capitalism. There should be no state, as the state is what exists to defend private property and prop up class interests. Production should be entirely for useful qualities. All productive power of society should be owned by workers (this is your "owning the means of production") either by representation of a government (which is not a state, the distinction is important) or via some other apparatus.
For these reasons I am extremely skeptical when people describe countries such as Venezuela, which operate as capitalists, owners of property, on a global scale as "Socialist". If it is Socialism then it is certainly no Marxian Socialism.
Wha? How is state-owned property considered private property?
Also, I would have said Venezuela was socialist because the socialists in my country said it was. And I'm fairly certain members of their ruling class described their country's government as socialist.
It is also possible for society in general to act as a capitalist. The way Marx and other Socialists use the term "private property" is perhaps different to its modern meaning. Proudhon writes,
>There are different kinds of property: 1. Property pure and simple, the dominant and seigniorial power over a thing; or, as they term it, naked property. 2. Possession. “Possession,” says Duranton, “is a matter of fact, not of right.” Toullier: “Property is a right, a legal power; possession is a fact.” The tenant, the farmer, the commandité, the usufructuary, are possessors; the owner who lets and lends for use, the heir who is to come into possession on the death of a usufructuary, are proprietors. If I may venture the comparison: a lover is a possessor, a husband is a proprietor.
Not a good comparison. Manager and Owner would be a better example than lover and husband.
Yes, I agree - however, the fact that ALL citizens have a say is not irrelevant.
The case you're talking about is one where the State acts in its capacity as an agent of the citizenry, similar to how a manager can hire, fire or sign contracts within the bounds set by the owner or owners. It doesn't mean the manager owns any property, simply that he as an agent of ownership is currently in possession of it.
In the capitalist public/private sense, yes; in the socialist personal/private/social sense, this is social not private property (specifically, cooperative social property.)
The sense of “private property” opposed by socialism is not at all the sense which is opposed to “public property”.
It is entirely possible for people to create a super-capitalist, an image reflecting bourgeois nature, within a cooperative establishment.
Yes, because they are using a public/private dichotomy which makes a lot of sense distinguishing kinds of ownership within capitalism, but has nothing to do with the socialist use of the term, where “private property” is a central feature of capitalism, and it's alternative (when it concerns the means of production) is not something which exists in “pure” capitalism.
> because all citizens are allowed to have a say in the management of the property, not just some of them
And this is exactly why many schools of socialist thought see centralized state control, even in a democratic state, as generally private property; the particular workers whose labor is applied to the means of production have their control so diluted by other parties that the control is almost as completely alienated from them as in the case where they have no ownership.
That's interesting to me, because a situation where the workers whose labor was applied to the means of production retain complete control seems like private property to me.
A situation where the control of property is held by an agent of the commons doesn't seem private precisely because the commons includes people that have no ownership from applied utility. Essentially, it's as if no-one's labor has been applied at all and in those cases the resources belong to the public.
How? Within the socialist personal/social/private typology, not the capitalist public/private typology? The two are completely unrelated systems of categorization, which unfortunately share a name (but not the meaning denoted by the name.)
In Marxist theory, “private property” has a particular meaning: the means of production alienated from the particular workers whose labor is applied to them. In Marx’s specific theory, in the socialist stage of the Communist project, ownership by a state controlled by the proletariat makes such property no longer private not because it is owned by the state, but because the productive resources are controlled by the workers. But in the broader Marx-inspired movement and socialist using the same terminology (outside of Leninism and it's descendants, which not only accepts this but replaces democratic control with the direction of the vanguard), there is some controversy on this point, and many view state control as to removed from the immediate workers to eliminate the privation which is why socialists characterize such property as “private”.
Just don't come pushing for socialist policies that try to enforce government's ownership of everything.
I also encourage you to use the original definition of the term.
It is dishonest to keep claiming "socialism" is something different than what you get when you follow the procedures to get there. Yes, Marx promised something very different, but well, if you read his books you'll see he was way more of a politician than a scientist.
No, it didn't. I mean, the whole point of Leninism is “How do we skip past the requirement identified for Marx to have well-estsablished capitalism with proletarian class consciousness before proceeding to the socialist stage on the route to Communism?” Leninism abandons the essential context for which the Marxist program is designed. (And even then, the program wasn't particularly specific, unless you mean Marx and Engels program for the specific capitalist states of Europe in the mid-19th Century, which Russia was even more distant from then the generalized capitalist states of Marx’s theory.)
> It is dishonest to keep claiming "socialism" is something different than what you get when you follow the procedures to get there.
Marx is not the first or definitive socialist; socialism existed before and is broader than Marxist theories, so even if Russia and other Leninist states were an example of direct application of Marxist process, this would still be an example of mistaking a particular subset for the whole.
Judging Marxism by Leninist examples is like judging Christianity by Protestant Fundamentalism; judging socialism on the same basis is like judging Abrahamic monotheism by the Protestant Fundamentalism.
We have skipped this one too if you didn't notice. In most of the world, proletariat (manual laborers) are a niche.
Proletarians are and since their emergence the vast majority of the working population.
Sweden has vast private wealth, including a very large number of millionaires. Or just take a look at the list of their billionaires.
Sweden's economic boom coincided with large reductions in the size of the state, including both regulation and taxation policies, not increases. They have a 22% corporate income tax rate along with a favorable operating environment that encourages entrepreneurship, which entails ownership of private property.
If you look across Sweden's economic engine, it's overwhelmingly private in nature, not state owned and operated. Their growth mostly didn't come from state enterprises, it came from domestic business formation and expansion. Land and housing is commonly privately owned, as in most market economies. Sweden overtly violates almost every tenet of Socialism.
There are very few things about Sweden that are in fact Socialistic at all (healthcare is a big one, which is heavily socialized for most of the planet). At this point they may be more Capitalist than America is, their economy has fewer economic regulations per dollar of GDP for example.
Aside: I really take umbrage with Bernie describing Denmark as a socialist success story, when their success seems to be linked directly to liberalization.
So either they are socialism and socialism works, or they're not socialism and socialism cannot be used as a reason to deny these to the US. You don't get to dismiss these as socialism and then claim Sweden is not socialist.
But this is the problem with labels like socialism and capitalism. They can be used with varying definitions to prop up bad arguments.
I laughed at that. Most of them live in in England, Switzerland and New York.
Socialism is a big tent with many different branches[0]. They share the goal that they want more economic equality and less inequality, but disagree on how to get there. Marx was a big proponent of State Socialism with the state owning everything, but he had a number of very vocal opponents like Bakunin, who claimed Marx's ideas would lead to tyranny.
Social democracy is a more moderate form of socialism that tries to mix socialism, democracy and capitalism. Libertarian socialism or anarchism considers the state to be the source of inequality, and wants to accomplish equality without a state or with a very different kind of state.
[0] mixed metaphor alert!
There's no doing it right if your end game is basically communism; but if you have a clear purpose for some prejudicial taxes, and ultimately respect some form of property rights, then it can sometimes work out for many decades, as it has in Norway (though I would argue that Norway's system, as it is today, is unsustainable as well, but not in a Venezuela kind of way).
There are numerous examples of people and businesses which own private property and employ people in exchange for wages in Venezuela. The fact that such activity is highly taxed or limited is irrelevant to the point about private property being defended and respected. For it is private property which can ensure the cycle of M-C-M' which we see respected and the functioning of money as the general equivalent form of Value.
I'd agree with that, but with the exception of wealth (and possibly property) taxes. I might accept that real property must be rented from the state to accomplish certain goals, but I'm not so sure other property can be. In reality, if the rates are low enough, even a wealth tax is not a mortal threat to property, but it is still questionable (which is why it seems some Norwegian parties are looking to ditch it). Last time I said this, I was dragged into a bickering match, but: wealth taxes have many of the properties of rents, which sets them far apart from income, consumption, and excise taxes.
Transactional taxes (income, consumption, excise, even inheritance [though I oppose this one for double taxation reasons]) pose no threat to property rights, they just ultimately change the true price of goods and services. Property and wealth taxes pose a threat to property rights, since they threaten the property directly.
But that's not what people are talking about here anyway, they're talking about literal seizures of private property.
Your flat out wrong. Easy example: The government nationalized a GM vehicle factory within the country and then a few weeks later GM officially withdrew.
Does that sound like Venezuela respects private property to you? A nationalization like that would never happen in Western Europe
Although in this case it's financial institutions on the verge on bankruptcy, and they were nationalised to save them, with the goal of eventually privatising them again.
Nationalisation versus privatisation is a complex subject, and I think there are things that absolutely should be nationalised. Essential infrastructure where no real competition is possible, for example. Like railroads or mail. I suppose it can make sense for the countries oil reserves. But the important part is that whichever way you move on that scale, you do it in a responsible way and ensure that a fair price is paid for them.
It is possible to name examples of other countries seizing property or stealing from innocent people. Neither of these examples disprove the idea that these states respect and defend private property, or that they respect and defend personal property. The US has seized the personal property of many people. Does this mean that the US police do not act to punish people who steal?
In the US the police routinely steal private property for their own purposes with little or no due process. Just because they arrest thieves who happen to not be police doesn't mean they respect and protect your property rights. One could say they are protecting their own ability to seize your private property.
I am firmly in the belief that the American people have not had strong property rights for a very long time.
I don't think that's what people are thinking of when they say something like Venezuela doesn't respect private property. They are thinking of the seizure of ranches and companies so they can be redistributed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Texas_Intermediate#/media...
I actually agree with much of what you wrote, but let the argument stand on its own, please don't use non-factual content to (note: the Iranian oil coming back into the "open" market might have been related) overstate things.
We can't normalize "truthful hyperbole."
One of the big impact of the cost of Venezuelan crude is its high content of sulfur, which makes refining more expensive, but to this day, Venezuela is one of the few countries where even with a low barrel price, the activity is profitable, or at least it should be.
But when you have a state company that has quadrupled its payroll, paying for all kinds of social services in the country, corruption, all while also diverting funds from investment, you make the operation run at a loss.