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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

Socialism isn’t a planned economy. That was one attempt, the Marx-Leninist attempt in the USSR, at socialism. Socialism is the fundamental reordering of society to benefit the lowest wrung. You can have socialism with markers still, which is what is done in syndicalist style socialism. You can have limited social programs as a form of socialism as per social democrats. Or you can have more extreme radical direct democracy. There are thousands of ways to implement socialism, not all of them are the same.

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> Socialism is the fundamental reordering of society to benefit the lowest wrung.

That is not the definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

> You can have socialism with markers still, which is what is done in syndicalist style socialism.

Co-ops have never operated outside the bounds of a democracy with a State. Notwithstanding, they don't appear to scale very well. The most common use case is related to agriculture, though there's a single mid-scale company in Spain that ancoms like to tout.

No one wants to take on all the risk of starting a business while socializing all the profit, hence, we don't usually see these spring up. But if the model is so good for workers, naturally, you'd expect popularity to rise. They've been around a long time and we're still waiting for that to happen.

> You can have limited social programs as a form of socialism as per social democrats.

That's just mixed economy, part of the fabric of Liberalism. Socialism necessitates the elimination of Capitalism.

Capitalism is not markets. Liberalism is says nothing about social programs, liberalism is about unrestricted markets and decoupling people from castes and traditions.

Did you read your link to socialism? It agrees with what I said.

> Capitalism is not markets.

Capitalism is markets + the right to private property and gains. It's not a philosophy.

> Liberalism is says nothing about social programs

Social Liberalism does, which is the prevailing Liberal school of thought today.

> Did you read your link to socialism?

ctrl+f "lowest rung"= 0 results.

Redistribution isn't just about "the lowest rung" or most impoverished, social ownership is intended to be utilitarian. Not unlike Liberalism.

Capitalism is private ownership. Markets are human, completely predating capitalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

People always discover that certain things they want require centralized planning, like welfare, a strong military, or high tech goods. The problem with socialism in practice is that it always ends up being more about being anti-capitalism than pro-syndicalism or pro-direct democracy, so you always end up with a scenario where power gets more centralized to the state.

You can’t reorder society to benefit the “lowest wrung[sic]” without planning at least some extent of the economy through directed means. Yes yes, there’s a bunch of variations of this but they’re just window dressing for the underlying ideology, usually to make it more palatable for the less bureaucratically natured among us.

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