Why can't leftists agree on the definition of socialism? They've been at it for centuries now, you'd think they'd come to an agreement.
Why can't leftists agree on the definition of socialism? They've been at it for centuries now...
Carter Brooks
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Cameron Evans
Because by not giving their movement a definition, they don't have to defend their movement but just attack Capitalism's minor failures without needing to defend themselves
Ryder Peterson
Why can't stormniggers agree on the definition of white? They've been at it for a century now.
Gavin Moore
because it depends on the conditions and context of the country which the system arises in, nerd.
Unless you're referring to retarded American leftists in which case you're just strawmanning.
Juan Hill
What world do you live in where European leftists are not retards whose platform is anti-white rhetoric, transrights and unlimited immigration?
Hudson Sullivan
Socialism is a pretty simple and easy definition; As a right winger, I take Marx's definition that Socialism is the Government doing things.
Nathan Wood
This. Look at how skittish they are about being labeled and how they love labeling other groups. They know the power of labeling
Oliver Hughes
“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
Christian Young
That’s just saying that communism is destroying the current system.
Isaac Johnson
Communism is described as the free association of producers. It is described as the united material human community, as the end of divisions between humans, the end of the prehistory of humanity, the end of class society.
It's generally better described negatively, by what it's most definitely not, capitalism. No commodity production, no state, no division of labor, no wage-labor, no money, no classes, no private property, etc...
has not properly described an alternate socialist economy and how it should be structured.
Marx didn't write a blueprint for a socialist society because that contradicts his outlook as exposed in The German Ideology:
"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."
That being said in Critique of the Gotha Program Marx does try to imagine what early communism would look like, speaking of labor vouchers and such
Also very relevant from The German Ideology:
"In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic."
Noah Butler
>leftists
>"for centuries"
Mason Evans
"Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour power of the community. All the characteristics of Robinson’s labour are here repeated, but with this difference, that they are social, instead of individual. Everything produced by him was exclusively the result of his own personal labour, and therefore simply an object of use for himself. The total product of our community is a social product. One portion serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another portion is consumed by the members as means of subsistence. A distribution of this portion amongst them is consequently necessary. The mode of this distribution will vary with the productive organisation of the community, and the degree of historical development attained by the producers. We will assume, but merely for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour time. Labour time would, in that case, play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the proper proportion between the different kinds of work to be done and the various wants of the community. On the other hand, it also serves as a measure of the portion of the common labour borne by each individual, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social relations of the individual producers, with regard both to their labour and to its products, are in this case perfectly simple and intelligible, and that with regard not only to production but also to distribution." - Karl Marx, Capital Volume One
Dylan Cox
"Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning." - Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme
"If the ridiculous search for "content" is applied to a fully socialist society, we have all the more reason for saying that the formulae "workers' control" and "workers' management" are lacking in any content. Under socialism, society isn't divided into producers and non-producers any more because society is no longer divided into classes. The "content" (if we have to use such an insipid expression) won't be proletarian autonomy, control, and management of production, but the disappearance of the proletarian class; of the wage system; of exchange – even in its last surviving form as the exchange of money for labour-power; and, finally, the individual enterprise will disappear as well. There will be nothing to control and manage, and nobody to demand autonomy from." - Amadeo Bordiga, The Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism
Nathan Richardson
I can’t see any of this happening without near total automation.
Xavier King
"In modern legal theory, property is “perpetual”, while usufruct is temporary, limited to a pre-established number of years or the natural life of the usufructuary. In bourgeois theory, property is defined as “ius utendi et abutendi”, that is, ownership confers the right to use and abuse. Theoretically, the owner could destroy the thing he owns; for example, irrigate his fields with salt water, sterilizing it, as the Romans did to Carthage after having burned it to the ground. Today’s jurists engage in subtle discussions about a social limit to property, but this is not science, only class fear. The usufructuary, on the other hand, has a more restricted right than the owner: the right to use, yes; the right to abuse, no. Once the term of the contract of usufruct has expired, or when the usufructuary dies, in the case of a life estate contract, the land reverts to the owner. Positive law requires that it be returned in the same condition that it was in when it was delivered into the power of the usufructuary. Even the modest sharecropper who rents his little piece of land cannot neglect its cultivation, but must administer it like a good paterfamilias, just as the good landowner does, for example, for whom the perpetuity of its use or enjoyment consists in its hereditary transmission to his children or heirs. In the Italian Civil Code, the sacramental formula of the good paterfamilias may be found in Article 1001 and also in Article 1587.
Easton Ward
>I can’t see any of this happening without near total automation.
hold my green tea
Leo Gomez
Therefore, society will have only the use and not the ownership of the land.
Utopianism is metaphysical, Marxist socialism is dialectical. In the respective stages of his gigantic theoretical construction, Marx can successively support:
a) large-scale property (even capitalist large scale property, although the wage workers employed in such property are mere beasts of burden) against small-scale property, even when the latter does not hire wage labor (no reference is made, for the sake of decency, to the small farm, like that of the French tenant farmer of 1894 or the Italian tenant farmer of 1958 who, by employing human beasts of burden, adds to the reactionary trend of micro-parcelization);
b) state property, even if it is capitalist, against large-scale private property (nationalization);
c) state property after the victory of the proletarian dictatorship;
d) for the higher organization of integral communism, only the rational use of the land by society, and putting the disgraced term of property in Engels’ museum of old rubbish." -Amadeo Bordiga, The Revolutionary Program of Communist Society Eliminates all Forms of Ownership of Land, the Instruments of Production, and the Products of Labour
Isaac Rivera
That is not what you’re describing. China is a ethnonationalist state socialism with capitalist elements. It’s probably easier just to say it’s fascist.
Jackson Green
"Transition stage: The proletariat has conquered political power and renders all non-proletarian classes politically powerless, precisely because it cannot “get rid” of those classes in an instant. This means, the proletarian state controls an economy, in which partly, even if in decreasing amount, both a market-based distribution as well as forms of private disposal of products and means of production exist (these be fragmented or concentrated). The economy is not yet socialist, it’s a transition economy.
Lower stage of communism, or if you want, socialism: society disposes already generally of products, which are allocated to members of society by quotas. This function doesn’t require commodity exchange or money anymore – one cannot let Stalin’s statement pass, according to which the simple exchange without money, but still based on the law of value, should bring us closer to communism: rather it is about a kind of regression to bartering. The allocation of products on the contrary follows from the center, without return of an equivalent. Example: If a malaria epidemic breaks out, in the affected region quinine is distributed for free, but solely one tubule per person.
In this phase, not only compulsory work is necessary, but also the recording of the performed labour time and its certificate – the famous “labour voucher”, so much discussed in the last century. The peculiarity of this certificate is, that it cannot be kept in reserve, so that any try to accumulate it leads to the loss of the performed labour quantum without compensation. The law of value is buried.
Engels: “Hence, on the assumptions we made above, society will not assign values to products”.
Jeremiah Nelson
Higher stage of communism, which can be unhesitatingly called integral socialism: the productivity of labour is in such a way, that, apart from pathological cases, neither coercion nor rationing are necessary, to exclude the squandering of products and human energy. Free consumption for all. Example: The pharmacies are distributing quinine free and without constraints. And if one would take ten tubules to poison himself? He would obviously be just as stupid as the people, which confuse a rotten bourgeois society with socialism." - Amadeo Bordiga, Dialogue with Stalin
Kayden Cook
Actual Socialists (Marx, Badiou, Bukharin, etc.) agree it means no commodity production or wage labor. barnie bros that call themselves Socialists are just welfare capitalists.
Jose Stewart
> China
> ethnostate
There are more than a dozen different ethnic groups in the PRC.
Cooper Jackson
>he hasn't accepted the new Chinese world order by 2200 where the entire planet will be centrally planned from Beijing and 90% automated