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Comment by platz | Hacker News Reader

It appears you would reject the premise of running a co-op in a capitalist society because it does not start from a fundamentally pure starting position, or alternatively such a co-op is really a capitalist entity for the same reason and so pursuring such an entity is not a concern of socalists but rather capitalists.

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>It appears you would reject the premise of running a co-op in a capitalist society because it does not start from a fundamentally pure starting position

No, not at all. In fact, I support local co-ops. My (and Marx's) only contention is that it is not sufficient to call this "socialism" or "socialism within capitalism", or "a socialist part of capitalism" because socialism is by definition the ending of the specific historical production of commodities and class society. A co-op is an admirable thing to run, but it's not "socialism".

So, you just want to have a semantics debate then, about who gets to define what certain terms mean. That's admirable, but I'm not sure is what OP's article is really about.

No. My point of dispute is that "socialism" is qualitatively different (in actual substance, not just terminology) from "social democracy", that "social democracy" does not answer to what "socialism" is. To my understanding, the author is using the word "socialism" to refer to what I am using it to refer to, but misunderstanding it.

I can generally agree that the author may be misunderstanding or misusing it here, yes

The author probably wasn't using the word 'socialism' in the technically correct way that you've explained, If you just take it for what he meant though then I think his point still stands

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