Real socialism is:
Mitchell Lama Housing Cooperatives
Food Cooperatives
Credit Unions
Employee Owned Companies
I define socialism as collective ownership of the means of production. By that broad definition, the public stock market — a quintessentially capitalist institution — would also be socialist, since corporations own most of the means of production in this country. So the definition needs to be refined a la Richard Wolff ... namely, DEMOCRACY inside an institution is socialism. One person - one vote. The extreme opposite of that is one share one vote where one person has so many shares that whatever he says goes:
https://medium.com/swlh/facebook-investors-cant-remove-mark-...
All of us who run a startup probably begin in a capitalist structure, but could be encouraged to transition to a socialist structure by giving employees more voting power once the business is thriving:
1. https://amp.ft.com/content/8a70b692-0967-11ea-b2d6-9bf4d1957...
2. https://www.hrcapitalist.com/2020/02/cards-against-humanity-...
I specifically thought to choose the domain “hrcapitalist” for their comments on this move to socialism:
”Cards of Humanity is doing an acquihire with a twist with this acquisition - they found a troubled company for sale, and believed in the talent that existed. BUT - this form of acquihire transfers wealth to the talent not directly to their bank account, but by giving them ownership in the company. That's a powerful retention tool, and if for some reason they can't make it work, the talent is sure to remember that Cards gave them a chance to save the company and turn it around through their investment and subsequent transfer of ownership. Moving acquired talent to ownership positions is a powerful play.”
This is what capitalists had to say about a move to socialism in this case.
I would argue that socialist institutions (much different than state-capitalism or its near-synonym: state-socialism) are preferred to capitalist ones, in the marketplace.
People form lines around the block stretching for years to get into the Mitchell Lama housing cooperatives in NYC. They have far lower costs than landlord-owned buildings, and yet the same level of facilities or better. They are effectively nonprofits, because they are run by and for the cooperators. Few vacancies because many people don’t want to leave, unlike the high turnover and 12%+ vacancy rate in privately owned buildings. I suspect credit unions vs banks are similar.
Workers in a company would not vote to ship their own jobs overseas or do massive layoffs.
So do I advocate libertarian socialism? Yes. I want to see more institutions be democratically governed, like many universities are close to it, etc.
Note: SOCIALISM is different than SOCIAL DEMOCRACY which is typically done on a city or state level to tax capitalist organizations and give public services and universal safety nets to everyone.
However, socialism isn’t a panacea. Newcomers are still hazed and treated just like countries treat peniless immigrants. So we need social democracy too. Perhaps one day social democracy will take place on a global level. (We are working on that at intercoin.org)
Finally... I should say there are better systems than socialism and capitalism, that involve UBI AND COLLABORATION rather than HUNGER AND COMPETITION. They are primarily gift economies found in the information space, and include:
Science
Open Source Software
Wikipedia
The Web
Cryptocurrency (as it was originally intended, ie scalable tech not the monolithic blockchain crap) was going to let the network be owned by participants and even VCs loved it for a hot second until the non scalability killed it (we’re working on that too).
Wikipedia vs Britannica
Web vs AOL
Science vs Private Alchemy
WebKit vs IE
You get the idea. Who wins? Hint: not the capitalism.