Don't make the mistake of many on Hacker News thinking that the Soviet Union was a socialist society.
Maybe you should take a leaf out of your own book and revise what socialism actually is, and how the USSR wasn't that.
Edison: "I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb."
Also, let me just say that I never expected to read a post like yours or type a post like mine into an HN comment box, kudos.
For anyone interested who doesn't understand the spectrum of socialist organization, read almost any book by Ludwig von Mises (start with "Socialism", where he catalogs the socialist orers of the early 1920s) and work your way forward.
Like North Korea uses Democratic?
Judging whether something is "truly" socialistic is arguably harder, since while the goal of democracy is a system by which the public expresses its favor or disfavor for laws and policies; socialism's goals (each according to its need) may not be achievable at all (at least if we look at the long term track record (1)).
If that is so, all we are left is what a socialist regime intends, and whether it organizes itself (at least formally) as a socialist order.
(1) From a long term track record, there "problem" of the perfect social organization hasn't been "solved" by anything. We can, however, see that some things are "less wrong"...
What socialism is is public ownership/control of the means of production.
What Socialism doesn't quite get is that production planning in the capitalist order is driven by the calculable profit and investment for any enterprise (even more so in large interdependent, yet independent, concerns); and that is only possible when private ownership (of everything involved, including capital) allows private risk and reward. Capitalism has never "solved production", nor will it ever. It maximizes for profit, not production.
Since I know socialism isn't capable of being put into practice, all I am left with is the intention of the bannerists who fly the Socialist standard. If they want to claim a socialist state has been established, I take them at their face. They have created a state that follows the reason for the social-control of production (needs fulfillment) even if they are doomed.
Its not really an ideological belief. That the public control of the means of production is possible is simple, demonstrable, tested fact. That it is desirable is (or depends on) an ideological position, but that's a different issue.
> It (Socialism/Marx) expected that once the "problem of production" was solved (by the capitalist order), the means to produce could be seized.
I don't think you really understand the Marxist view here. Its not that there was something that capitalism produced which socialism needed to seize. The idea that capitalism "solved" production was that that the displacement of the feudal system of property ownership by the systems of ownership which enabled capitalism removed the barriers that the feudal systems of ownership placed in the way of production. The "problem of production" that was "solved" by capitalism was the problem created by the barriers imposed by feudal property structures.
It wasn't about production planning in the capitalist order.
Socialism views capitalism's property structures as producing similar barriers to the desirable distribution of the outputs of production to the barriers that feudal property structures put in the way of production in the first place, which is the essence of the "problem of distribution".
> Since I know socialism isn't capable of being put into practice
Pretty much all the change in the nature of the economic systems of the West since the early 20th century has been due to socialism being put into practice. Modern mixed economies are pretty much entirely about changing the nature of (both subject and scope) of property rights from what they were in the system for which socialists like Marx coined the term "capitalism" to describe in ways which increase public control of the means production and exchange.
If something happens, it is, ipso facto, not impossible.
Stalinists would consider the Soviet Union to be socialist. Marxists (what I'm assuming you mean by a 'Real Communist') would disagree.
Beyond that, there has been less agreement, but many have held the view that the USSR either was not socialism (sometimes referring to it as specifically as "state capitalism") or that it was an approach to socialism, but one which was fatally flawed by (and this is, in some respects, my synthesis of their criticisms, rather than one that was articulated by any one interlocutor) the adaptations to apply socialism without first having institutionalized the bourgeois revolution which precedes the socialist revolution which resulted in property-like (if not formally "property") personal social authority structures which shared features with both the property structures of feudalism which are at the roots of the problems addressed by the bourgeois revolution, and the those of the capitalism that are at the roots of the problems addressed by the socialist revolution, which mostly resulted in the net effect of the implementation of Leninism (and its variations applied elsewhere) being to spread a distorted form of socialist ideology in a society in which elements of both the bourgeois revolution and the socialist revolution were present but where the revolutions as such still needed to occur in the normal order but were arrested (in some cases, less than completely--certainly, even in the mid-1990s, most who held some form of this view seemed to think that at least China was very definitely progressing through the bourgeois revolution) by the identification of the status quo order with the socialist revolution.
Large scale socialism by force tends to be a bit dystopian, though. They don't build walls to keep people out of socialist states.
Second, he says "scarce resources," you say 'no, it doesn't deal with that," but then say that it deals with "distribution of 'goods and services.'"
Isn't that the same thing, from a practical standpoint?
Even if they aren't scarce in the sense that the society has enough to go around, their scarcity relative to the average citizen still depends on the efficiency of that distribution process.
Maybe the system or theory of socialism technically 'doesn't concern itself with scarce resources', but I don't see why it makes his point less valid.
>>Socialism/capitalism primarily deals with the question of how to distribute scarce resources - which, by definition, is irrelevant in a post-scarcity society.
If (by his point) you mean his assertion that socialism and capitalism are irrelevant in a "post-scarcity society", do not forget he is asserting that there is no scarcity. Either goods and services are abundant and meeting "market" aggregate needs (post-scarcity), or they are not.
Socialism assumes that the problems of production (and presumably service delivery) have been solved, so it is quite happy in a "post-scarcity" world, since it only has to distribute according to need, or to everyone, or something like that. Socialism is only concerned with distribution and doesn't care whether the resources (goods/services, or what-not) are scarce or not. It assumes distribution is irrelevant to production or availability of anything.
Practically speaking, capitalism doesn't categorically solve scarcity or distribution , and only gets involved if there is a measurable expectation of return to be made in a market.
Meeting market demand with products or services is one of the means that capital uses, but is not the purpose of capitalism.
Insofar as that is true of socialist theory (its an element of Marxist historical perspective), it is not a general "problem of production", but the specific factors inhibiting realization of production possibilities presented by the structure of feudal property structures that socialism views capitalism (or, perhaps more specifically, the change to the structure of property rights which enabled capitalism) as having removed.
> whereas capitalism is the legal framework of risk/return on investment designed to allow the owner of capital to maximize profit (or grow capital).
Enabling capital owners to maximize profit is a very specific preference in how production and distribution in the presence of scarce resources should be prioritized. Yes, its what capitalism is about, to be sure, but it is simply not true to say that this somehow supports the point that capitalism is not about production.
Perhaps the original poster meant that the "conflict" between (currently-emerging) socialism and (obstructionist) capitalism will not be necessary in the future, since socialist pre-conditions will have been met. Marx touted the same thing; I'm not disagreeing with that.
I'm going to assume (for argument sake) that this "post-scarcity" world is one were labor is unnecessary for the continued production of existing products at existing output scales (ignoring for a moment changing demographics and perhaps the "need" for R&D to solve new problems).
That still leaves land, resource and capital in the production equation. Land: because production (including food production) has to occur somewhere, resource: because the raw materials are not uniformly located in the same locales as the production or the consumption domains (and indeed most are not infinitely collectible even where they are currently located), and capital: to manage the risk and rewards on the uncertainty of the success of any venture to change the status quo (which will alter itself anyway due to resource exhaustion and geolocated "demand/need" changes).
So...what I am saying is that the "problem" of production isn't solvable, any more than entropy (resource exhaustion) can be reversed. There is always natural variability in location and resource (spatially and temporally), that are managed through the risks and rewards of capital investment; risks quantified as loss, rewards quantified as profit.
Here's a list of worker owned companies that have a Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_companie...
Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_countries
Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities (anarchism is a form of socialism)
(Also, actual Marxists do consider the USSR as Real Socialism (tm))