Personally after examining and leaving on the table both Anarchism and Marxism, I went on to study Nietzsche, the Frankfurt school, reformists like Bernstein, and old school socialists like Proudhon. I’ve just landed far-left-of-liberal. There’s plenty of precedent for that too, for example in Rousseau and Rawls.
And going to europe, I basically just want what they have. So that’s socdem.
Personally I don’t think cooperativists would have any push back at all in socdem circles. Germany and France are socdem and they are basically national-unionist as it is, basically having labor boards which act as unions in all companies everywhere, and which guarentee co-determination.
From my study of history the only problem that socdems actually have is they tend to get lazy, and don’t defend their gains or keep pushing reform. Socialists do this too they just wont admit it, look at Cuba and the USSR and how many children wanted to emmigrate to capitalist countries.
That’s why socialist internationals exist.
Sure but if you are a cooperativist you don’t think that’s illegal. You think private groups should be able to own the means of production. Shareholder capitalism just where workers are the shareholders.
The end of private property means there is only public property. It means the entire circle of all groups which call themselves socialists collectively vote on how work and distribution are accomplished. Note I didn’t say state, because “true socialism” is international.
It’s a big big BIG philosophy, not a minute change in how things are done relative to the status quo. If you believe in reformism, where you make one change to the status quo, like replacing companies with cooperatives, you likely have more in common with social democrats than socialists.
My only reason for doing all this debating is to try and tell all the “market socialists” on this page, who I used to agree with, to stop using the socialist label, BECAUSE you will go out in the world to socialist groups and find yourself in very radical spaces, not reformist spaces. You will be hanging out with people who want to violently upend the global economic order, not collaborating with others in an attempt to politically change nations.
Instead you want to go hang out with unionists and socdems and cooperativists.
Hmmm, then what are all those socialist internationals still lying around…. Marx and Engels literally believe that socialism was the alternative to capitalism, and capitalism is global. Socialism is an international movement, and basically can not exist “in one country” like Stalin tried. It is an era of history not a thing you do in your backyard.
Yes socialist internationals literally tried to end things like WW1 and WW2. They wanted international worker movements to stand up to capitalist militaries at home and stop the fighting, take over all governments all at once, then aide revolutionary struggles around the world, until eventually socialism was achieved in place of capitalism. People like the DSA,PSL,etc and other international socialist participating groups still largely support this plan.
Logically you might do that, but linguistically you certainly would not. Words drift in meaning all the time. No other country actively calls itself utopian. Many still actively call themselves communist, and are led by people who call themselves communists, and think they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do.
Think of the term Christian. Christian used to mean people who did what Jesus said to do, or maybe what Paul said Christian meant in that book we all have. But now, academically, Christian means any tradition which claims to be following Jesus, which includes Mormons and Jahovas Witnessess and Catholics and that weird doomsday cult down the road. If you wanted to clarify, you’d say “Pauline Christianity” or more likely “Lutheranism” or something. Only Christians clap back and say things like “true Christianity” because of course they would.
I hate to say it but small and or temporary implementations of “true communism” do not break the trend. Let them fight a war against overwhelming capitalist powers and then call me back.
I did in other comments. Usually because he utterly destroyed those other socialists in arguments. Proudhon is basically the main pre marx socialist, invented mutualism, I like him, but it’s just easier to say you’re a mutualist, because Marx wrote against him and most socialists see his ideas as primitive or wrong or “utopian”.
Then there were the Christian socialists. They are somewhat accepted. But you know, in Christian circles.
Libertarian socialism is either what people call market socialism, which simply isn’t socialism, or anarchism, which is actually communism. But anarchists, which market socialists see themselves as being on the spectrum of, are actually a different intellectual tradition than Marxism.
Some groups have historical reasons to use the term socialism that are not Marxists, but if you go to a socialist group around the world and claim you are one of those (like I did) you basically will be stonewalled. These days socialist traditions are the Marxist traditions, and the rest are usually anarchist traditions.
The examples you gave were or aren’t strong enough to survive and spread global revolution, so they don’t count. Literally that’s the criteria.
We need a new word for non Marxist socialists. Social democrats is that word.
Sure but words have philosophical pre-definitions and real world usages. It’s also possible that the pre-definitions are impossible, and that all attempts to achieve them lead to something else, it’s natural then that that something else becomes the new meaning of the word.
If I gave a recipe for bread, and it always came out to be shit, that word “bread” would come to mean “shit”, even if the old book said “bread is not shit”
It is not, by definition, socialism. Socialism has other elements. Marx did not think it was socialism. He thought political economy also likely made it impossible, because it didn’t abolish capitalism. Socialism is the global abolition of capitalism in all its forms, capitalism being the private ownership of the means of production (a group of workers still privately owns a factory, its private unless its public), via all means it might re-emerge, it’s not a spectrum of redistribution of wealth or government intervention.
Marx’s critique of political economy says you can’t have a half capitalist half socialist system like that. If there is any form of money or profit it will pool. It will become political power. It will oppress the socialist tendencies, and just like you see in America, it will privatize them over time. It will eventually destroy any gains you made socializing the economy.
Capitalism is a centralizing/monopolizing force, and under Marxism the goal is to benefit from that centralization materially, simply bring it under the dictatorship of the proletariat. There are so many passages in Marx and Engels about “economic anarchy” (describing free markets, not anarchism) vs the prosperity that comes from central planning, the nationalization of the imperialist monopolies.
I just don’t think you’ve read anything. I’m not even that read and I know this shit.
“The entire body of workers have a say in the process of central planning” - you can have a democratic system where you vote on planning, true, but it’s hardly non-authoritarian. Imagine if our democracy decided all the material goods you could consume and all the work you must do? Would you be satisfied? No, because democracy at its best is slow, ineffective, and ultimately authoritarian. It’s how you do things when you have no other choice, not how you want to live, eat, and breathe each day of your life. Democracy is not freedom. Anarchy is freedom. It’s only benefit is its not literal fascism.
You are a Bernstein-esq social democrat with Proudhon-esq mutualist and cooperativist elements. Not a Marxist. Not a socialist under any modern use of the term.
I think you are the one who fundamentally misunderstands Marx’s critique of capitalism if that is all you think capitalism is.
Sure there is a contradiction between the classes, in the form of their conflicting interests, but there is also a contradiction in commodity production itself, in the materialist superstructure that makes up the concepts of money, wage, profit, etc. The ultimate goal of socialism is to do away with the value-form. Because the value form produces a contradiction between the exchange value and the use value of a product. Things are exchange values of each other under Marxist theory if they both contain the same socially necessary labor time. However, not all things which contain the same socially necessary labor time are necessarily of the same use value, indeed use value is not a quantitative metric but a qualitative one, and is the actually useful metric for human flourishing contained in an item. Diamonds and Uranium might both take the same labor time to get out of the ground, but how much of each do we need? Socialism ultimately hopes to provide people with use values, things they need, not simply trade things of equal labor values. If you don’t handle this you get into crises of overproduction.
The second contradiction in cooperativism (again these are textbook Marxist critiques not things I pulled out of my ass, you can actually search for the word cooperativism in Marx’s work, that’s what he calls it) is that workers still participate in a race to the bottom competing on working conditions. Two firms both make X. They each compete each other down in their profits until the profit is near 0, that is the tendency of profit to fall. Now how do they outcompete each other? On wages. On hours. On safety standards. Etc. one corporation willing to work harder, for less, less safely, will outcompete the other. That’s what he means when he says the workers become their own capitalists, and thus their own oppressors. They will democratically choose this even as a cooperative, because the system of capitalism oppresses them to do so, else they are outcompeted and go out of business.
So no, I understand this material. You do not.
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I mean it’s cool that this has become internet popular, but you go out into the world and socialist means Marxist. I did that, went to socialist groups, etc, socialist means Marxist. There are just lots of different kinds of Marxists.
It’s just that that’s not socialism either. You’re no true scotsmaning existing socialism, and idealizing not-socialism. You’re a social democrat, a cooperativist, maybe a mutualist, which is the right thing to be. You seek to manage contradictions, you don’t idealize their synthesis.
A workers cooperative is using a socialist mode of production to organize and run a private business.
Marx didn’t think so. You still produce commodities for the purpose of profit. You just become your own capitalist.
I made this a separate comment because it’s so common and also so absurd. Richard Wolff is wrong about this. A socialist mode of production where workers produce commodities for profit 🤣
I don’t see psychology, sociology etc. as something separate to nature.
Yes that’s what I said. Re separating “nature” and “biosphere”
unrealistic abstractions as excuses for oppression and extractivism.
The formalization of things into oppression and extractivist categories is also a system of morals and also contains absurdities. Of course we need to extract food from our environment, and of course we need to oppress oppressors, just for example.
Would be amazing. Legal piracy of everything, generics and knock offs, love it.