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Capitalism is essentially property and markets. It's a system that almost works by itself as a force of nature (not that it's a good idea to let it work that way). Social democracy is capitalism with a welfare state attached. In practice, all western democracies are social democracies, or "mixed economies" to some extent. Some more than others, with Sweden being more social democratic than the USA. Some people think Sweden is socialist (you hear American politicians defend socialism with that line occasionally), but they aren't socialist because they have private ownership and markets just like the USA. Even the USA is a mixed economy social democracy to some extent, something you'll occasionally see hardcore libertarians pointing out to their chagrin (because they want to go full Mad Max). Wanting to have more welfare in the USA is not what socialism is, because giving the poor more benefits while retaining markets and property would still essentially be a capitalist system. And if you're going to define socialism as a subset of capitalism then the term is useless (the term social democracy is right there for you to use!). In practice, what socialism has meant in an economic sense so far is command economies. Command economies have never worked and probably never will, barring some as-yet nonexistent technological solution. If command economies don't work, and socialist intellectuals have not come up with a better idea than command economies, then why are there still socialists? I think Socialism is more of a posture than a serious idea as it stands, so it can mean whatever you want to it to mean. It's very emotionally motivated, a seething hatred of capitalism being a good rule of thumb for who a socialist is even if it doesn't provide a definition of socialism. With that in mind I'd say socialism is whatever capitalism isn't. If capitalism is markets and property, then socialism is no markets and no property. If capitalism is the USA, then anything that's not the USA is socialism (go dictators!). This leads to a certain amount of contrarianism and oikophobia among western leftists.
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Feb 4, 2019 03:51
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 01:49 |
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I'll grant that point, OwlFancier. Whether something works or not depends on what you consider "working" to be so that was rhetorically lazy of me. Market economies work in the sense that they have provided our societies with unrivaled prosperity compared to historical and contemporary alternatives. It is less worse than all the alternatives that have been tried at creating wealth for the majority of people in the aggregate. This doesn't mean that the poor don't have legitimate grievances. Command economies don't work because of a currently unsolvable flaw where they cannot figure out how to centrally plan the distribution of resources if an efficient manner.
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Feb 4, 2019 04:14
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CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:This is absolutely false, the rise of the market society closely tracks with the rise of the nation state. Markets before capitalism were self limiting in nature. I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. I'll add the prefix of 'free' (or at least semi-free) markets and private ownership if that helps. Mukip fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Feb 4, 2019 |
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Feb 4, 2019 04:22
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I said 'creating wealth for the majority of people in the aggregate', not 'generating shitloads of money'. I consider that to be putting words in my mouth. Can we have a thread for once where people read others posts in good faith? The Soviet economy was very dysfunctional and that isn't a controversial statement. The average US or European citizen was much more materially wealthy. As for China, well, it's a capitalist economy now isn't it?
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Feb 4, 2019 04:32
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A command economy is one where instead of free markets determining the production of goods, government planners do. But even in free market economies, there's a certain amount of economic planning. There isn't really any such such thing in the modern world as a totally unplanned economy. But "more central planning than that other capitalist economy" is not the definition of a command economy. China is a capitalist mixed economy, it is by no means a command economy in the sense that people use that term. The sentence "creating wealth for the majority of people in the aggregate" is just normal English words, man. Wealth inequality is certainly an issue, but its not something any sane person is going to ditch free markets for command economies over.
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Feb 4, 2019 04:53
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Neither the Soviet Union or pre-Xiaoping China were ever on a competitive economic footing with the US.
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Feb 4, 2019 04:58
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But they absolutely did not work well at creating wealth for the average citizen in either China or the USSR. Both nations experienced famines and while industrialization occurred, the factories were not used efficiently to improve the living standards of their citizens compared to capitalist economies. And there's no way they could have been used efficiently, either. The problem with command economies is not that they are literally incapable of producing goods. The Soviets industrialized and then produced plenty of tanks because the state directed resources to that end. The problem they have no logical means of efficiently allocating resources to the production of goods, leading to overproduction or underproduction and then shortages of all sorts of things. This is a problem with command economies that remains unsolved in the modern day, it's got nothing to do with starting from an unfavourable position as an agrarian economy. Dude just go and actually read about it instead of dreaming up hot takes.
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Feb 4, 2019 05:13
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There weren't any Laissez-faire economies by the time the USSR and communist China were founded. The rest of your post is just a Gish gallop of sophistry so I'm done with this, you can have the last post if you like.
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Feb 4, 2019 05:46
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Mantis42 posted:Marx and most Marxists will tell you that Capitalism is an improvement over Feudalism and earlier economic models. It's by far the most dynamic and revolutionary socioeconomic force in human history. Our contention is that it is historically finite process, that it's own internal contradictions will inevitably destroy it even if it is not overthrown by revolutionary leftists. If the falling rate of profit doesn't destroy it, then the automation of most labor (physical and, someday, mental) will. If that doesn't destroy it, we are rapidly seeing that there are limits to growth simply from an ecological perspective. The economy can't not grow, that would be a recession or even a depression. A crisis. Yet it mustn't grow or we will face environmental collapse. Even if we somehow mitigate Climate Change (fat chance) there will always be another crisis over the horizon as the Bourgeois plunder the planet looking for value to extract. This is untenable. Capitalism certainly has issues, but nothing that inherently unsolvable imo. Marxists tend to make proclamations about how the future is going to turn out to justify their opinions about the present and I don't find it to be a very scientific methodology. quote:Large Capitalist firms like Amazon pretty much already do this in miniature. There's no reason why you couldn't have the same commodity production and distribution system except instead of Jeff Bezo sitting at the top collecting the surplus labor value you had, well, no one. Basically the same people who already handle the logistics of our economy except they get paid in labor vouchers and maybe they elect some of their own to a worker's council to oversee the everyday running of the organization. Paul Cockshott's work is a pretty good starting place to look into how a planned economy would work. That's an interesting idea. I can certainly see how somebody tried to use Amazon as a starting point to try and create a better command economy system. I'll look into hat because it sounds interesting if nothing else. I was actually idly thinking about something like that myself at some point, where you have an electronic Amazon-like system. You get a supply of digital tokens as part on your basic income and then you can spend the tokens to vote on what sort of consumer goods you want produced, and if enough people spend token on the same good then it gets produced in proportion to how many people want them. Although it's just shower thoughts on my part.
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Feb 4, 2019 06:09
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I have a problem with the term 'moderate socialism' since that's effectively (a version of) capitalism, and if we don't agree whether socialism is a version of capitalism or in opposition to capitalism then we have a confusion about language that needs to be solved. The term social democracy is right there for people to use and it's much better (less confusing) than moderate socialism. Plus, I don't think many people on the left or right are going to be satisfied with describing socialism as essentially a type of capitalism. And social democrats and socialists don't necessarily have much in common so it's useful to be able to tell the difference. Socialism is a much misused word in American politics imo (I'm British), with the right calling any and all distributive policies socialism while the left sometimes describes Scandinavia as socialism.
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Feb 5, 2019 04:15
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 01:49 |
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are you serious ....Revolutionary socialism is not social democracy.
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Feb 5, 2019 06:18
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