this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
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Stalin was a Communist leader of the USSR. He was not a dictator according to the CIA. Moreover, the idea that Socialists do not seek Communism is a bit strange, the two most major camps of Socialism are Marxism and Anarchism, neither of which has "Socialism" as an end goal. Anarchists seek direct implementations of full horizontalism and decentralization out of the shell of the old, so to speak, while Marxists seek full public ownership and central planning, ie they wish to implement Communism.
The idea of a stagnant, static, never-changing system is foreign to the overwhelming majority of Socialist ideologies, ergo it must continue to advance. This advancement in my opinion is of course going to be Communism.
Finally, the hammer and sickle is the symbol of Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet Union, which is used as the symbol for this community. You yourself do not need to support them, but using the term we in doing so is silly.
Right, communism and socialism aren't the same thing though, why are you conflating them? Regardless of sillyness.
Socialism, in my opinion, inevitably leads towards Communism if maintained. What matters is which has supremacy, Capital, or Humanity. I am not conflating them, but pointing out that Socialism, in the eyes of Marxists, is simply pre-Communism.
That makes sense! Thank you! I suppose communism can be seen as extreme socialism, in a way.
(I had to block some trolls before I found your comment, sorry for the slow response.)
Sort of. Socialism is simply when public ownership becomes the dominant and driving factor of an economy, typically marked by human supremacy over Capital, rather than the reverse. Since markets naturally centralize, they develop unique forms of planning suitable for their industries and sectors, paving the way for public aquisition and planning. Socialism trends towards full socialization, at which point classes cease to exist and as such class oppression ceases to exist, and "money" becomes superfluous, as there is no trade between institutions.
I think any extreme is probably a bad situation. Thank you for clarifying! I've got some thinking to do now.
Why is an extreme a bad situation? What if said extreme was an eradication of poverty? Eradication of racism? Extremes are not inherently superior to moderatiom, nor is the reverse true.
If you want a reading list, I have one linked on my profile.
An extreme version of capitalism would leave the weak and poor to die. And I'm pretty sure that in any financial/political situation you need some sort of constantly adjusted approach. Any extreme would fail to address the nuances (and humanity) of people, we're not humans after all.
When you say an "extreme Capitalism," what does that mean? That already happens. Moreover, what haooens when all of the companies centralize?
Maybe where you are, here we have tax funded social programs. And that would be called a monopoly, they're usually bad for everyone except the few people at the top.
Yes, how do you avoid that trending towards a monopoly? Competition forces centralization over time, and even extension into hyper-exploiting the Global South. Further, you absolutely have people dying out of being impoverished.
You have a government, and people fighting for their rights, etc. I don't think there is any type of system in which we can just sit back and know it won't need maintaining.
Where I live there's a law that a company without competition has to forcefully close. There's quite a bunch of shops kept alive solely by their competitor, who is forced to drive their prices down and service up because of the competition.
There's a reason regulation exists.
You're suggesting you de-develop companies and make them less efficient, rather than folding them into the public sector and further improving their efficiency. Once markets have done their job and left centralized, internally planned structures, the answer isn't to break them up and repeat the process of misery and squalor, but to further develop by folding it into the public sector. It's like you want to regularly pick up a race car and put it backwards on the track every time it gets close to crossing the finish line.
Competition naturally trends towards monopoly, there is no benefit to perpetually trying to move the clock back. Moreover, even with such laws, your country is still getting more centralized over time, only without worker control.
You need to seriously reconsider why you believe markets to be better than central planning at all stages in development.
I think some corporate shareholders and other private owners might not be too keen about their super profitable property being taken from them.
What you're describing is similar to the situation in china, where the government is able to claim property of random companies. Unfortunately for the chinese government, the world is bigger than china, and shareholders do run off with their stuff.
Yes, the shareholders therefore need to be subject to Proletarian supremacy. Revolution is required to advance.
As for China, part of the reason why it works is because Capitalists can't just up and take their factories, the government can sieze them, plus the size of the market and allowance for the existance of wealthy individuals stems brain drain, which proved to assist in the USSR's downfall.
Proliterian supremacy? You mean worker unionization or something? That's the kind of losing battle currently being fought in the usa.
I suppose we'll see the fall of China soon ish, then? They're not particularly small.
I mean revolution and instating worker supremacy, as has happened in AES states like the PRC, USSR, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, etc.
As per China, I specifically stated that they learned from the USSR and are doing the opposite of what contributed to its downfall. The USSR had very low wealth inequality, and suffered from brain drain where skilled individuals could be paid more in the US. The PRC is not yet developed enough to avoid that same fate if they cracked down even harder on their wealthier individuals, it's a gamble that has so far proved correct.
If you really believe that, you might want to watch the news for a change.
Rather than pulling a groundless act of superiority, can you actually address what I've said? Which part are you skeptical of? Rather than watching the news alone, you should read theory and history.
What china is doing right now, I recognized the similarity in their behaviour from the news. Then you claim they're doing the exact opposite?
The USSR had low wealth inequality by design, and was more publicly owned and centrally planned. This led to numerous benefits, but also drawbacks such as brain drain.
The PRC took the opposite approach. They allow billionaires to remain in the PRC, investing and developing Capital there and not elsewhere. They maintain a balancing act between capitilation and domination so there isn't the same Capital flight and brain drain, because you can still go to China to get extraordinarily rich.
The Chinese path presents a difficult contradiction towards their Socialist goals, but their method of "boiling the frog" has set it on course to continue surpassing the US while remaining entangled in the global economy, rather than isolated like the USSR was.
That makes a lot more sense, thank you for clarifying! China has been doing quite well in certain developments recently.
No problem!
Historically speaking, socialism and communism are terms that are synonymous and interchangeable.
That is certainly not the case today, but the disagreement over terminology largely comes about as a result of state led suppression of communists and Red Scare tactics. As it became more dangerous to identify oneself as a communist the result was that it became more desirable/safer to identify as a socialist and also to argue that socialism was distinct from communism.
And while I'm no linguistic prescriptivist and I recognize that semantic drift happens to nearly all terminology over a long enough time frame, the issue with this changing definition is that it does not come out of any theoretical grounding or ideological framework. It is a reaction to external pressure, and that reaction by different groups and different peoples leads to the situation today where there is very little agreement or consensus regarding what people are referring to when they use these terms. They have been effectively rendered useless for the purposes of political discussion unless you first begin with a lengthy preamble about how you personally define these terms.
One popular way of making this distinction is the framing that Lenin used. He described socialism in terms of the international class struggle in the epoch of imperialism (the epoch we were currently living through). The jist is that the communist theory of "The State" is that it is definitionally an organ of class domination/class warfare. It is the instrument through which one set of class interests are enforced upon the rest of society, and during the epoch of imperialism that instrument of capitalist class domination is wielded on a global scale. Therefore, any communist party seeking to put an end to the tyranny of the capitalist class will necessarily need a plan for opposing the counter-revolution of the capitalist class and the inevitable sabotage, acts of war, and attempts of the re-domination of the working classes during the epoch of imperialism.
In other words, the working classes would require their own state organ to enforce the interests of the working classes and protect against capitalist reaction and domination. If we are talking about this in terms of the common framing of the "endpoint" of communism being a "stateless, classless" society*, the argument goes that you cannot immediately jump to a stateless society so long as capitalism still has a stranglehold over the majority of the world and imperialist nations are still empowered to wage class warfare across the globe.
This analysis of the strategy and tactics required for the liberation of the working class was referred to as socialism by Lenin. So in this framework, Socialism is the strategy a communist party uses on the path to communism. If you would like to argue that a communist party working towards communism is meaningfully distinct from being communist, you are free to do so. But the distinction is quite slim.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have people inside the imperial core who describe themselves as socialists, or more commonly democratic socialists, and what they mean when they call themselves socialist is, "I want the system to remain relatively unchanged, but we should distribute the fruits of our country's imperial plunder more equitably by petitioning the capitalist state to administer more welfare and social programs such as universal healthcare."
This variety of socialist has very little relation to the historical usage of the term, and comes about much more directly as a result of that Cold war/red scare reaction I mentioned above. I would argue that this kind of socialism is little more than a rebranding of liberalism, but that certainly qualifies it as being distinct from communism.
On this forum at least, if you see someone talking about socialism they are much more likely to be using a definition closer to the first definition than the second one.
(*The framing of communism as a stateless, classless, moneyless society is a very sloppy framing, but is sufficient for this discussion)
Thank you for clarifying! I see how those perspectives can be difficult to understand with how similar they seem on the surface. I appear to have been taught a slightly different concept than most people here, if I understand correctly.
I have some thinking to do, I really appreciate the help. Thank you!
Prolwiki > Communism > Etymology
So yes, there is a distinction between the two, but I have a feeling this isn't the distinction you were referring to.
Could you be talking about Social Democracy? Because, that's not socialism, or communism. If you're interested in this distinction presented by Lenin, you might want to read Chapter 5 of The State and Revolution.
I have some reading to do, thank you for pointing me in the right direction! This is great!
Anytime comrade!
I call myself a socialist but do not support a full horizontalism or full decentralization. I support partials of both.
I do believe that optimizations for quality of life and value and stability are rarely at the ends of the spectrums, but sometimes somewhere in the middle and subjective to democratic agreement and changing based on reality.
I want my system to be flexible to have times of more centralization, times of decentralization, times of horizontality, times of independent nodes, etc.
Why is it that you believe the correct answer is "in the middle?" Moreover, why do you believe that you can simply stop the progression towards full public ownership, and therefore full centralization, assuming productive forces continue to develop? The point of Marxism is that there is no such thing as a stagnant system, and competition within markets further results in centralization, paving the way for public ownership to be superior.
I don't think I'd be "stopping" the progression, just that the progression is not towards some absolute idealistic end. (and to note in my ideal system, my individual ideals are secondary to the populations average), just that the natural maximum optimization, say of organizations type, an amount of organizations would be publicly controlled by a government, and an amount would be controlled by the employees themselves in a coop structure.
I think this makes sense as there will likely be products that a niche set of people want, but is not at such a scale that the government and the people behind it would want to dedicate collective resources towards it directly.
Fundamentally I believe the uniqueness and fickleness of people I believe will always outpace any collective structure, and so allowing for that to be represented in a society is key to success, and that entails organizations outside of collective-control which rely on consensus.
I do want a socialist system were all shares of an organization are either public ally owned or owned by the employees themselves, with no rent seeking capitalists involved.
The abolition of private property under communism is akin to the abolition of chattel slavery. So let me ask you this. Do you think abolition of slavery is too extreme and total slavery (whatever that means) is too extreme, and therefore something in the middle like only chattel slavery for a subset of the population is where the system will be optimized?
There is a lot of truth to your main point that centralization and decentralization are a dialectic, but I don't think you understand that they are a dialectic. Instead of seeing the dialectic, I think what you're doing is arguing against a strawman. Marxist theory does not posit that everything everywhere at all times in all ways should be centralized. Centralization and decentralization cannot exist without each other. The question is one of the relationship between the two. Stalin was not pursuing a policy of centralizing everything everywhere all the time, nor was the USSR. You are not arguing against a real position. You are accidentally landing on the Marxist position without understanding it.
Out of curiosity, have you read Marx? Much of what you're saying goes against standard Marxist consensus. As an example, cooperatives are not "Marxist," they allow accumulation despite eliminating bourgeois exploitation of proletarians. To that extent, they also must retain money, and trade, which becomes superfluous in the context of the rest of a Socialist society that would rather be fully planned.
Moreover, you are separating the idea of "government" from the "people" in a manner that confuses what Communism would actually look like. In retaining private property, you retain the conditions for Capitalism to emerge, and you retain groups that potentially stand at odds with the interests of the rest of the economy. This is why Public Ownership and Central Planning becomes superior to market-based systems once the productive forces have reached sufficient levels of development, and why Marxists say a system like that which you describe would eventually turn into Communism anyways as it works itself out to be more efficient.
If you want a starter guide, I recommend my own introductory Marxist reading list.
I have not yet, but i do plan to, thanks for the reading list, I will check into it.
At least at the moment and from what I know so far, I do not identify or align with Marxism or Communism, I do with socialism and i do not view socialism as some half step.
What do you say in response to the notion that no system is static, and ergo is either moving towards full public ownership and planning or is regressing? Markets have a tendency to centralize in order to combat a tendency for the rate of profit to fall, which leads to inefficiencies. At some point, these markets coalesce into syndicates with internal planning, at which point it becomes far more efficient overall to fold them into the public sector. There remains no use for said markets.
To me, the statement that markets will always remain useful in some aspect, same with private property, sounds similar to saying feudalism will always have some use, and even slavery. At some point markets will fade into obsolescence much the same way older modes of production did, alongside advancements in technology and production, same as what happened to feudalism and slavery.
I do agree that no system is static. But I do not agree that because all systems are dynamic, that all systems must veer to public ownership or are regressing.
I do not believe that all products, markets, niches, and so on are in the interest, nor supported by the entire public, but that some products, irregardless of the public interest can still be deeply important or wanted by a minority of people. Thus they should have a route to still be created, but the public not obligated to support it.
In an example, Potentially over time that once niche minority product becomes of such importance and dominance that the public begins to gain control and wishes to support and dedicate public resources to it.
This churning is what keeps the system dynamic, but it also does not conform to some ideal where all products and ideas must be started and filtered by the public interest and consensus.
Systems must veer towards their trajectories. Markets naturally centralize and develop their own internal methods of planning, at which point it is more efficient to fold them into the public sector and centrally plan them. There's no such thing as a company that stays the same size, nor is there a reason to not have them in the public sector when it is more efficient to do so and integrate with the rest of a planned economy.
Furthermore, being desired by a minority of the population doesn't mean cooperatives are more effective at accomplishing said goal. They can just as easily be folded into the public sector, the profit motive is unnecessary.
Further, even in centrally planned economies, there does not need to be such an even filter across the entire economy. Public ownership does not mean the end of choice. All in all, I think you're confused on what Central Planning and Public Ownership actually looks like.