# Socialists: What are your views? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 23, 2010, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156 "2010-04-23T22:30:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2010, 2:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/81 "2010-04-29T14:59:16Z")
> [@A.Selene](#): > > Please fight my ignorance. How do we do this? How is this possible? I see bureaucrats as a natural outgrowth of laws, as someone must administer them. I am assuming we have laws in Socialist Land, so how are they administered? Who makes sure they are followed? How are these local decisions at workplaces aggregated into a national policy? I feel that in these sort of discussions, there are an overabundance of people with little experience or knowledge of how complex organizations or governments actually work. By definition, socialist governments are buerocratic. The socialists on this board do a lot of handwaving that “the people will decide” but they don’t really go into the details of by what mechanism those decisions will be made and enforced. A free market requires less beurocracy because people are able to buy and sell products and services at whatever price they can negotiate. The purpose of a buerocracy is to manage whatever infrastructure might be required, enforcment of agreements made and maybe to assess and verify the authenticity and quality of the items being traded. Any information as to the actual value of the items traded is automatically and inherently communicated in the price. When you shift to a more socialist model where allocation of resources are based on need, the amount of information needing to be processed increases dramatically. What defines “need”? Whose need is greatest? What products and service are needed? Where can we get them? Who decides? How do they decide? How are we sure that their decisions are fair? Some person or organization will ultimately make each of these decisions for each person. People must apply for some good or service and then be evaluated according to some set of criteria. And if the powers that be decide their need is not great enough for whatever reason, they must go without. > [@A.Selene](#): > > Sounds good to me. 🙂 Sounds like a union, or like the small business I work at, where the boss listens to worker feedback, no union required. Or any good company that seeks to empower and leverage the knowledge and experience of their employees. ---
**Author:** ![A.Selene](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3ec8ea/32.png) [@A.Selene](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/A.Selene)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2010, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/82 "2010-04-29T15:41:57Z")
> [@Olentzero](#): > > No. We are not in agreement. But there are a few points that need addressing. Care to elaborate? As msmith has explained as well, a bureaucracy will only expand in a socialist system. > [@](#): > > False dichotomy. Collective decisions do not automatically exclude you, the subject. You are still involved in the decision.. So we will collectively decide what people need. What if I like regular coffee, but we decided we will only make and drink decaf. Too bad? I want to work as a teacher, but we need more janitors, so I get assigned to be a janitor. Too bad? I want to read, but we decide its not worth the time to have someone write them. Guess no more literature. It’s absolutely insane to cede the power to make all decisions to a majority decision. Many, many things should be left as a person’s choice. > [@](#): > > Explain, then, why there are such things as blowout sales, when store owners try to move inventory that hasn’t sold for a long period of time at reduced prices. If the system were actually able to accurately gauge demand, should there be no unsold excess? For the same reason every system fails at times: people are imperfect. In a free market, we have a multitude of people making decisions about what to buy, sell, create, and so forth. Some will make mistakes and fail, while others will make correct decisions and succeed. Please remind me why this phenomenon is an argument against the free market. It’s a symptom of an economy. > [@](#): > > No, it’s not ‘failed practice’. As I believe I (and others) have said in this very thread, socialism cannot be built in one city or one country or one region. So your system is unworkable unless you subjugate every person in the world, regardless of how they wish to live? This is not convincing me of the worth of socialism. > [@](#): > > How do you explain the recurrence of economic crises, and capitalism’s seeming inability to prevent them? We had the Great Depression, which only World War II managed to relieve; we had the stagflation of the 70s, and now we’ve got this mess in which the banks get $70 billion in bailouts while unemployment skyrockets. If the free market is so great and so efficient, why can’t it fix these problems? Because it’s not perfect - no system is. It’s like democracy. The free market is the worst economic system there is, except for all the others we have tried. And considering the standard of living in those places embracing a free market economy, I’d say it works pretty damn well. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2010, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/83 "2010-04-29T15:57:59Z")
> [@Olentzero](#): > > Sorry to burst your bubble of personal incredulity, but yes in fact I _ **do** _ believe it’s a science and I’ll set _Capital_ against Keynes’ elitist sniffling about mud and fishes any day of the week to back that assertion up. Look, the fundamental conceptual flaw in Marxism is that it claims to be “scientific,” but isn’t, and in fact is derived from completely unscientific Hegelian idealism. That does not automatically make Marx’ conclusions wrong, but it does automatically make them suspect. A secondary flaw is that although Marx’ academic training was in pure philosophy, he completely ignores the philosophical question of ethics. He nowhere makes an actual moral argument for the superior justice of socialism or communism or capitalism, or the right of the proletariat to revolt or expropriate. He seems to have regarded all that as so self-evident as not to merit discussion. As Bertrand Russell pointed out in his [_History of Western Philosophy,_](http://books.google.com/books?id=iQZ6Xk9VdtAC&pg=PA782&lpg=PA782&dq=history+of+western+philosophy+marx&source=bl&ots=cvt_bjQhkF&sig=PNrbOWNYXunjD2ZaLELvqrlHAOQ&hl=en&ei=LYF1S8ydJZOWtgeRhsC0Cg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CA8Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false) in the 19th-Century intellectual zeitgeist, history was progress and progress equated to justice. To Marx, Communism was demonstrably the Next Stage, therefore a superior stage in all respects including ethical. > [@](#): > > Marx fitted his philosophy of history into a mould suggested by Hegelian dialectic, but in fact there was only one triad that concerned him: feudalism, represented by the landowner; capitalism, represented by the industrial employer; and Socialism, represented by the wage-earner. Hegel thought of nations as the vehicles of dialectic movement; Marx substituted classes. **He disclaimed always all ethical or humanitarian reasons for preferring Socialism or taking the side of the wage-earner; he maintained, not that this side was ethically better, but that it was the side taken by the dialectic in its wholly deterministic movement.** He might have said that he did not advocate Socialism, but only prophesied it. This, however, would not have been wholly true. He undoubtedly believed every dialectical movement to be, in some impersonal sense, a progress, and he certainly held that Socialism, once established, would minister to human happiness more than either feudalism or capitalism have done. These beliefs, though they must have controlled his life, remained largely in the background so far as his writings are concerned. Occasionally, however, he abandons calm prophecy for exhortation to rebellion, and the emotional basis of his ostensibly scientific prognostications is implicit in all he wrote. > > Considered purely as a philosopher, Marx has grave shortcomings. He is too practical, too much wrapped up in the problems of his time. His purview is confined to this planet, and, within this planet, to Man. Since Copernicus, it has been evident that Man has not the cosmic importance which he formerly arrogated to himself. No man who has failed to assimilate this fact has the right to call his philosophy scientific. > > **There goes with his limitation to terrestrial affairs a willingness to believe in progress as a universal law. This readiness characterized the nineteenth century, and existed in Marx as much as in his contemporaries. It is only because of the belief in the inevitability of progress that Marx thought it possible to dispense with ethical considerations. If Socialism was coming, it must be an improvement.** He would have readily admitted that it would not seem to be an improvement to landowners or capitalists, but that only showed that they were out of harmony with the dialectic movement of the time. Marx professed himself an atheist, but retained a cosmic optimism which only theism could justify. > > Broadly speaking, all the elements in Marx’s philosophy which are derived from Hegel are unscientific, in the sense that there is no reason whatever to suppose them true. > > Perhaps the philosophic dress that Marx gave to his Socialism had really not much to do with the basis of his opinions. It is easy to restate the most important part of what he had to say without any reference to the dialectic. He was impressed by the appalling cruelty of the industrial system as it existed in England a hundred years ago, which he came to know thoroughly through Engels and the reports of Royal Commissions. He saw that the system was likely to develop from free competition towards monopoly, and that its injustice must produce a movement of revolt in the proletariat. He held that, in a thoroughly industrialized community, the only alternative to private capitalism is State ownership of land and capital. None of these positions are matters for philosophy, and I shall therefore not consider their truth or falsehood. The point is that, if true, they suffice to establish what is practically important in his system. The Hegelian trappings might therefore be dropped with advantage. A third flaw is that Marx’ general predictive theory of history contains an obvious inherent contradiction: If sociopolitical change in history is driven mainly by material/economic forces, an inescapable corollary is that history is driven by **technological change.** But, **technological change is inherently unpredictable.** We can predict it will go on happening, unless and until civilization collapses, but we cannot predict the details. How could Marx have predicted, or taken into account in his theories, the socioeconomic effect of automobiles or the Internet or atomic bombs? In his day, there was no way of knowing, there was no way **engineers** could know, whether such things ever would be possible. In our day, we have no way of knowing whether any of the world-changing technologies discussed as part of a [Technological Singularity](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=559690) – nanotechnology, controlled nuclear fusion, brain-computer interfaces, genetic engineering on humans – ever will be possible. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2010, 5:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/84 "2010-04-29T17:58:08Z")
> [@Olentzero](#): > > Explain, then, why there are such things as blowout sales, when store owners try to move inventory that hasn’t sold for a long period of time at reduced prices. If the system were actually able to accurately gauge demand, should there be no unsold excess? Demand is not fixed. It varies and is dependent on price. Blowout sales are not a “failure of the system”. It is a demonstration of the adaptability of the system that sellers can maximize value by gradually reducing prices to react to market conditions. > [@Olentzero](#): > > No, it’s not ‘failed practice’. As I believe I (and others) have said in this very thread, socialism cannot be built in one city or one country or one region Why not? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2010, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/85 "2010-04-29T18:08:47Z")
> [@Olentzero](#): > > As I believe I (and others) have said in this very thread, socialism cannot be built in one city or one country or one region. You are asking a **huge** leap of faith of the whole world, then, if you want the whole world all at once to try it before it has ever been properly tried anywhere. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2010, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/86 "2010-04-29T20:40:46Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > That’s nice in theory, but how does anything actually get done? ? What, you think workers are incapable of directing their own efforts? ---
**Author:** ![villa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/bc79bd/32.png) [@villa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/villa)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2010, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/87 "2010-04-29T22:18:53Z")
Re: Socialism not being built in one state… > [@msmith537](#): > > Why not? Because socialism, especially democratic socialism, is a threat to those around it. When the Diggers began to establish an alternative form of communal living, the established powers and land owners sent troops in to destroy their communities. When the cooperative movement established alternative forms of control of the means of production, the capitalists cooperated to force them out of business. When even the weak, statist revolutionaries in Russia overthrew the Czar, the Capitalist powers sent troops in to attempt to reverse the revolution. Even in early US history, laws were passed preventing whites from living in Native American villages and communities, and people who chose to live there were often forced back into “regular” society. ---
**Author:** ![villa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/bc79bd/32.png) [@villa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/villa)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2010, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/88 "2010-04-29T22:26:41Z")
> [@A.Selene](#): > > Care to elaborate? As msmith has explained as well, a bureaucracy will only expand in a socialist system. Try [Steven Marglin: What do Bosses DO?](http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/marglin/Papers_Marglin) State socialism is bureaucratic. However, capitalism is also adept at creating layers of bureaucracy, as anyone who has worked in an American corporation can attest. ---
**Author:** ![A.Selene](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3ec8ea/32.png) [@A.Selene](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/A.Selene)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2010, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/89 "2010-04-29T23:48:27Z")
> [@villa](#): > > Try [Steven Marglin: What do Bosses DO?](http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/marglin/Papers_Marglin) > > State socialism is bureaucratic. However, capitalism is also adept at creating layers of bureaucracy, as anyone who has worked in an American corporation can attest. Sorry, poorly written sentence on my part. I didn’t mean the only kind of society a bureaucracy can grow in is a socialist society (of course it exists in any kind of society), but that in a socialist society, bureaucracy will only grow - it will not wither away and die. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2010, 1:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/90 "2010-04-30T01:05:51Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > ? What, you think workers are incapable of directing their own efforts? It’s not that I don’t think they are. Structuring organizations to maximize efficiency is a complex subject and it only gets more complex as the organizations grow in size. > [@villa](#): > > State socialism is bureaucratic. However, capitalism is also adept at creating layers of bureaucracy, as anyone who has worked in an American corporation can attest. I would say that the way a large modern corporation works is a strong argument against socialism. Internally, corporations are actually very socialist. All employees are more or less given the same services. Resources are allocated according to the decisions of various committees. And employees are always expected to act in the greater good of the company. ---
**Author:** ![Torpor\_Beast](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/71e660/32.png) [@Torpor\_Beast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Torpor_Beast)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2010, 11:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/91 "2010-05-01T11:30:53Z")
Relevant to this thread: **Happy May Day everyone! [Mead](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sima_%28mead%29), wine & doughnuts for all!** ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2010, 11:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/92 "2010-05-01T11:47:56Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > It’s not that I don’t think they are. Structuring organizations to\*\* maximize efficiency\*\* is a complex subject and it only gets more complex as the organizations grow in size. You’re assuming the antecedent here. What if you don’t want to maximise efficiency? What if you want to maximise _employee satisfaction_ instead? See, that’s the kind of thing you can do when you remove the profit motive as your main motivation. ---
**Author:** ![Torpor\_Beast](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/71e660/32.png) [@Torpor\_Beast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Torpor_Beast)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2010, 12:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/93 "2010-05-01T12:13:25Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > I would say that the way a large modern corporation works is a strong argument against socialism. Internally, corporations are actually very socialist. All employees are more or less given the same services. Resources are allocated according to the decisions of various committees. And employees are always expected to act in the greater good of the company. Looks like you’re equating socialism with Communist Russia again. I’d say that corporations would be more of an argument against oligarchy and totalitarianism. The top level decisions are, after all, made by a small clique that doesn’t answer in any way to the people below them. Who in turn delegate power to mid-level executives, who again are not answerable to the employees below them in the hierarchy, and so on. Your luck at getting promotions might depend many other factors than your suitability for the job, etc. And yes, you are always expected to act for the greater good of the company. The two systems do resemble each other to a sad degree. Luckily, corporations are regulated to limit the worst abuses of power, and people are, in theory, able to walk away from them, should they not like what they’re getting. Personally, I don’t believe that pure socialism is workable in the real world. Much like anarcho-capitalism. They have very different starting points, but will both ultimately lead to totalitarianism, through simple human greed and lust for power. ---
**Author:** ![transprog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@transprog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/transprog)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2010, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/94 "2010-05-01T22:33:23Z")
I may be a little late to this thread by I figured I’d add another perspective. I don’t shy away from the word socialist but neither do I often refer to myself as one. I was really glad to see a thread like this one, because with the word socialism being thrown around a lot these days, it’s obvious many people need some terms clarified. So regarding the definition of socialism, one could ask 5 socialists and get 6 definitions. So I’ll give you my definition and anyone who engages me should use that definition. In other words I have no interest in defending other definitions. I use the more traditional (pre-marxian) meaning of socialism, which is a socio-economic system that involves the social control of the means of production. Seems simple and (purposely) vague enough. To me, more specifically, the social control means direct worker control based on the concept of affected interest. Affected interest is the believe that people should participate in the decisions that affect them. It can also be argued that government control (nationalization) is a form of social control, but I disagree. On the issue of bureaucrats, I believe that a socialist society has almost everyone being like a bureaucrat (making decisions), which is to say that hardly no one will be. I don’t know if people will understand this, so I’ll spell it out. The people will make decisions or elect people to make those decisions in the realms that affect them. As workers they will run companies cooperatively. In larger companies this may involve “bosses” being elected for set periods of time and being immediately recallable, if they lose favor. There are still bureaucrats for more national tasks, but I see them as being needed less is such a society (a bureaucrat being defined as a paid unelected official that has some power over the lives of others, either through allocating resources or making economic, political, etc. decisions). This all looks good in theory, but in practice it will be a lot more messy. But I embrace the spirit of experimentation. The role of government is to encourage democracy in the workplace and the expansion of cooperatives. The reason I don’t consider myself really a socialist (according to the more popular definition) is because I embrace aspects of capitalism, specifically aspects of the free market, which I agree help efficiently to regulate allocation of goods. I’m more of a workplace democrat. I’ll leave it at that for now. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2010, 12:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/95 "2010-05-02T00:30:37Z")
In my case, two intellectual sources stimulated me to take start taking democratic socialism (as distinct from ordinary liberalism) seriously as a cause: 1. Martin Gardner’s [_The WHYS of a Philosophical Scrivener_](http://www.amazon.com/Whys-Philosophical-Scrivener-Martin-Gardner/dp/0312206828/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272759783&sr=1-1) 1983, in particular the chapters, “THE STATE: Why I Am Not an Anarchist,” “THE STATE: Why I Am Not a Smithian,” and “LIBERTY: Why I Am Not a Marxist.” 2. My personal hero George Orwell, who everybody knows as a critic of Stalinism, but who, I was surprised to discover, remained a socialist to the end of his life. From [_The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius_](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part14) (1941): > [@](#): > > Socialism is usually defined as “common ownership of the means of production”. Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does NOT mean that people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and furniture, but it DOES mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines, ships and machinery, are the property of the State. The State is the sole large-scale producer. It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of production and consumption. At normal times a capitalist economy can never consume all that it produces, so that there is always a wasted surplus (wheat burned in furnaces, herrings dumped back into the sea etc etc) and always unemployment. In time of war, on the other hand, it has difficulty in producing all that it needs, because nothing is produced unless someone sees his way to making a profit out of it. In a Socialist economy these problems do not exist. The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them. Production is only limited by the amount of labour and raw materials. Money, for internal purposes, ceases to be a mysterious all-powerful thing and becomes a sort of coupon or ration-ticket, issued in sufficient quantities to buy up such consumption goods as may be available at the moment. > > However, it has become clear in the last few years that “common ownership of the means of production” is not in itself a sufficient definition of Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a class system. Centralised ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. “The State” may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and privilege can return, based on power rather than on money. > > But what then is Fascism? > > Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes. Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and—this is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathise with Fascism—generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly. The mere EFFICIENCY of such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction, is obvious. In seven years it has built up the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen. > > But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human INEQUALITY, the superiority of Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world. Outside the German Reich it does not recognise any obligations. Eminent Nazi professors have “proved” over and over again that only nordic man is fully human, have even mooted the idea that nonnordic peoples (such as ourselves) can interbreed with gorillas! Therefore, while a species of war-Socialism exists within the German state, its attitude towards conquered nations is frankly that of an exploiter. The function of the Czechs, Poles, French, etc is simply to produce such goods as Germany may need, and get in return just as little as will keep them from open rebellion. If we are conquered, our job will probably be to manufacture weapons for Hitler’s forthcoming wars with Russia and America. The Nazis aim, in effect, at setting up a kind of caste system, with four main castes corresponding rather closely to those of the Hindu religion. At the top comes the Nazi party, second come the mass of the German people, third come the conquered European populations. Fourth and last are to come the coloured peoples, the “semi-apes” as Hitler calls them, who are to be reduced quite openly to slavery. > > However horrible this system may seem to us, IT WORKS. It works because it is a planned system geared to a definite purpose, world conquest, and not allowing any private interest, either of capitalist or worker, to stand in its way. British capitalism does not work, because it is a competitive system in which private profit is and must be the main objective. It is a system in which all the forces are pulling in opposite directions and the interests of the individual are as often as not totally opposed to those of the State. Well, it was a lot easier to believe, in Orwell’s day, that state socialism so defined could “solve the problem of production.” Lately I do not think of socialism as something that is to come **after** capitalism; rather, I think of a vigorous socialist political movement as something capitalism needs to keep it civilized. And I think this is the general consensus among most self-ID’d “socialists” in Europe and throughout the industrialized democracies today. Nevertheless, I should note, even the Stalinist model of totalitarian socialism has not been discredited to quite the extent conservatives assert. It **does** work – for limited purposes, i.e., heavy capital formation. In 1924 Stalin took control of a backward, agrarian country, marginally industrialized by the onset of WWI and that little industry devastated by that war and the Russian Civil War, and – by methods which were bloody, brutal, repressive, wasteful, but **effective** – by 1939 had turned it into an industrial power capable of going head-to-head with Hitler’s Germany; and Germany had always been at the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution. **No way** could that have happened, if Russia had had a free-market system during that period. OTOH, central economic planning, lacking the constant corrective feedback of competitive market performance, is spectacularly inept at any kind of fine-tuning. Moreover, it does not encourage innovation very well. No state planner would ever have thought of something like the Sony Walkman, or the Pet Rock, or fabric softener. (Whether that is an argument for or against Stalinism is open to debate.) From [_Economics Explained,_](http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Explained-Everything-About-Economy/dp/0684846411/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-0323301-0796122?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182793941&sr=8-1) by Robert Heilbroner and Lester Thurow: > [@](#): > > The reason it [the Soviet system] did last [as long as it did] is that in the beginning the system very much resembled a military operation. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin confronted an almost totally disorganized society, and tried at first to build a “socialism” that was partly capitalist – private farming and private small enterprise – and partly socialist, in the form of state-owned banks and large centers of production. Russia staggered along under this mixed system for a few years, without either great success or great failure, but after Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin took command and rapidly instituted the highly centralized system we have sketched in. > > Stalin’s methods were ferocious and bloody, but they were successful in bringing about an immense accumulation of wealth, much as did the ruthless ways of the ancient pharoahs of Egypt and emperors of Rome or China. The difference was that whereas the latter built palaces and cities, Stalin built factories, steel mills, hydroelectric plants, and railway systems – the ingredients of an industrial economy. The fact that Stalin’s Russia was strong enough to resist Hitler’s armies – and efficient enough, after its reconstruction following World War II, to impress the world with its industrial and military capabilities – shows that Soviet central planning was by no means a failure in its initial years. That is why “military socialism” may yet be a model for development efforts in the future. China is today a semi-military socialism which appears to be successfully negotiating the early stages of industrialization, much aided by a carefully supervised free market sector attached to the planned core. Hence the collapse of the Soviet system should not lead us to the snap judgment that centralized socialism is no longer on the agenda of the coming century. That is indeed likely to be the case with the North, but it is not a foregone conclusion in the troubled countries of the South. I also respect socialism as the only truly **internationalist** political movement of any kind that has had any importance in the past two centuries. I’ve always believed the world and humanity would be better off as a single state. Of course, when self-described Socialists or Communists have actually come to power, they usually turn out to act like nationalists, or even imperialists. So it goes. I wonder if there is any future for internationalism as such (as distinct from neoliberal economic globalism). ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2010, 12:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/96 "2010-05-02T00:45:18Z")
> [@Olentzero](#): > > **BrainGlutton** - nobody owns the copyright on physics, either, but we’re generally able to tell scientifically rigorous, correct physics from pseudo- or unscientific crap, aren’t we? Socialism is social science, but science nonetheless. Here’s an analysis that puts that in perspective: From [“Which Civilisation?”](http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2001/which_civilisation) by Michael Lind, _Prospect,_ 10/25/01: > [@](#): > > On the secular side of the civilisational divide, there have been three major traditions: humanism, rationalism and romanticism. These three traditions originated in Europe but now have adherents around the world. All three are essentially secular worldviews which do not need to invoke the authority of divine revelation or mystical gnosis (though some romantics are mystics or pantheists and some humanists have been religious believers). In respects other than their common secularism, the three traditions are fundamentally different from one another. > > Humanist civilisation crystallised in Renaissance Italy, before spreading to the Netherlands, Britain, and the US. This liberal, commercial, increasingly democratic civilisation has spread to other nations by emulation (Lafayette’s France, Atatork’s Turkey, Yeltsin’s Russia) and by conquest and conversion (post-1945 Germany and Japan). Humanists seek to ameliorate the problems of social life with the guidance of practical wisdom, derived chiefly from history, literature and custom, with little or no reference to supernatural religion or natural science, with the possible exception of the emergent sociobiology. Humanists tend to be modest as philosophers and cautious as reformers. Examples of great humanist thinkers and statesmen are Petrarch, Erasmus, Bacon, Montaigne, Voltaire, Franklin, Hume, Burke, Smith, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison. > > Rationalism, a world view underlying a number of secular creeds, first crystallised in 17th and 18th-century France. Rationalists reject the humanist distinction between practical wisdom and natural science. The goal of rationalists of all kinds is to devise a science of society, modelled on natural science, which can serve as the basis for the construction of a “rational” social order. Stephen Toulmin makes a useful distinction between the “reasonableness” of Renaissance humanists and the “rationality” of Enlightenment philosophes. The rationalist pantheon includes social engineers like Condorcet, St Simon, Comte, Fourier, Bentham, **Marx, Lenin and Ayn Rand.** (The “secular humanists” who support world federalism and utopian social reform are really rationalists). > > Romanticism, the third major secular world view, has spread widely from its original homeland, late 18th and early 19th-century Germany. Romantics reject both reasonableness and rationality, they exalt the inspired unreason of the artistic genius, the child, the primitive uncorrupted by civilisation. Rousseau, Emerson, Wagner, Nietszche and Frantz Fanon should be on a list of romantic prophets, and idealist philosophers like Kant and Hegel arguably are closer to romanticism than to humanism or rationalism. > > The American revolution, and the French revolution in its constitutional phases, were humanist. The French terror and the Bolshevik terror were rationalist. The second world war was a struggle of three secular civilisations: humanism (Roosevelt and Churchill), rationalism (Stalin) and romanticism (Hitler). The war by Islamic radicals against the US, Europe and Israel is, among other things, a conflict between religious and humanist civilisation. Now, I have the honor of calling to your attention, **Olentzero,** that you seem to have fallen prey to the rationalistic fallacy, assuming that you can construct a better society just by rigid reasoning from first principles, and that you share that fallacy exactly with the Objectivists; only the premises are different. But that kind of rationalism is not “scientific.” Science, by definition, begins with the assumption that you **don’t** have all the answers and you can’t get them by unaided reason, but only by reason combined with a guided process of research and experimentation; and your theories, however well-supported by the data, must never be taken dogmatically as “The Truth,” but always open to revision in light of new data. In this schema, I would place myself midway between the humanist camp and the socialist wing of the rationalist camp. I don’t necessarily believe in the state taking over the whole economy, nor any particular part of it; I just believe that reason **does** have very great power and as-yet-unrealized power to improve human society, and that we should move in a direction of greater community and equality-of-outcome **very gradually,** learning at every step from mistakes and the Law of Unintended Consequences. The first step is a basic political-electoral reform, to adopt [proportional representation,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation) so that some socialist parties can get a chance to run for office on their own terms and win at least minority shares of seats in some legislatures, propose some forms in their general desired direction, get some of those implemented, and, if those work out, maybe get rewarded by the voters with more seats next election. And then, maybe, eventually, socialism or something that can be called that with a straight face. Lenin was being incredibly hubristic when he declared, “We shall now proceed to build the socialist order,” assuming that just because his Bolsheviks had the right ideology they knew how to run something as complex as a national economy. Nothing is ever that simple. If you’re a Libertarian – consider how, if your ideas are valid, the same process described above could work in **your** favor: We get a PR system. The Libertarians run as Libertarians and get representation in some state legislatures in Congress, get seats on some committees, and are there constantly pushing to decriminalize this or deregulate that or abolish this tax or cut that spending allocation or eliminat this government agency. Sometimes, in the course of logrolling-bargaining for their votes to support a major party’s bill, they’ll get something they want. If it works out in real life as the Libertarians claimed it would, the public gets up and takes notice, and in the next election the Libertarians get more seats. They get some more reforms; maybe theyh don’t work out as intended, but with a little tweaking and tinkering, they turn out to be worthwhile and beneficial in a way that is obvious **even to persons who do not accept the Libertarians’ ideology or value system.** Eventually, through this process, the Libertarians become a major party, maybe even a majority party. And then we get something much nearer to a workable Libertopia than than what we would get (i.e., an American Somalia) if a Libertarian Revolution overthrew the state all at once. It is even conceivable that, after a few decades, we can achieve a society at which both Socialists **and** Libertarians can point and say, “Yes! **We won!** This is it! This is **exactly** what we wanted all along!” Now, maybe “democratic socialist” is not the right word for my position as described here. Maybe “progressive” is a better word. Fine by me, I have often argued on this board that “progressive,” as the word is used nowadays (as opposed to how it was used in [Teddy Roosevelt’s day](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_era)) actually means something well to the right of “socialist” and something well to the left of “liberal.” Certainly most self-identified American progressives, such as those of the [Vermont Progressive Party](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_Progressive_Party) or New York’s [Working Families Party,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Families_Party) are not demanding anything like class war, immediate expropriation and socialization of the means of production, etc., and do not seem to be influenced at all by Marxist thinking, not even in the attenuated way that the Democratic Socialists of America is. For more on how I perceive the difference, [earlier post of mine:](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=10539990&postcount=1) > [@](#): > > In [this recent article,](http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2008/it_ok_be_liberal_again_instead_progressive_8448) political commentator Michael Lind argues that “progressives” should drop that label and start calling themselves “liberals” again – revive that once-honorable name, instead of trying to distance themselves from the RW’s demonization of it by rebranding. Reasons given: > > 1. It’s futile – the RW is going to bash the center-left based on its policies, whatever name it uses. > > 2. [Neoliberals](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberal) have tried to appropriate the name “progressive” for themselves, which makes it rather confusing. > > 3. Radical leftists – socialists and Communists of various stripes – have done the same. > > 4. There is also risk of confusion with the [early 20th-Century Progressives,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_movement) whose politics were substantially different from all of the above. > > 5. The word “progressive” is “too German,” deriving as it does from Germany’s bureaucratically-oriented 19th-Century _Deustche Fortschrittspartei_ (the word _Fortschritt_ means "progress), whereas liberalism proper is rooted in values and civil liberties, not state action. > > 6. The most interesting objection: The world “progressive” implies “progress,” which is not necessarily a liberal value. > > > [@](#): > > > > Unlike progressivism and conservatism, liberalism is not a name that implies a view that things are either getting better or getting worse. Liberalism is a theory of a social order based on individual civil liberties, private property, popular sovereignty and democratic republican government. Liberals believe that liberal society is the best kind, but they are not committed to believing in universal progress toward liberalism, much less universal progress in general. Many liberals have been skeptical about the idea of unlimited progress and have believed that a liberal society is difficult to establish and easily changed into a nonliberal society. > > > > Because liberalism refers to a particular kind of social order, and does not depend on any implied relationship of the present to the past or future, liberals can be either progressive or conservative, depending on whether they seek to move toward a more liberal system or to maintain a liberal system that already exists. For that matter, liberals can be revolutionary, if creating or establishing a liberal society requires a violent revolution. Liberals can even be counterrevolutionary, if they are defending a liberal society from revolutionary radicals, including anti-liberal revolutionaries of the radical right like Timothy McVeigh or Muslim jihadists. > > 1. “Liberal” is, or could be once again, a badge of pride. It describes an American political tradition with an honorable history and great achievements to its credit. > > > [@](#): > > > > Those, then, are six arguments in favor of using liberalism to describe the center-left. I’ve reserved the seventh for last. The word “liberal” is a badge of pride. What is more embarrassing in 2008, to be associated with self-described liberals like Roosevelt and Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr. and Barbara Jordan, or with conservatives like Reagan and George W. Bush and Tom DeLay? I much prefer the public philosophy of the mid-century liberals, for all their blunders and shortcomings, to that of the three movements in American history that have called themselves progressive: the moderate-to-conservative progressives of the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s and 1990s; the deluded pro-Soviet progressives of the mid-20th century; and the Anglo-Protestant elite progressives of the 1900s, who admired Bismarck’s Germany and wanted to keep out immigrants and sterilize the native poor. > > All very good reasons, to be sure; very persuasive and cogently argued; but I object for the following two reasons: > > 1. The word “liberal,” as **Liberal** will shortly be showing up to remind us, also is prone to ideological confusion. In the 19th Century it meant more or less what we call “libertarianism” today, which, at least in its modern incarnation, is also very, very different from what Lind considers “liberal” as described above. > > 2. In my judgment, in contemporary American political discourse, the word “progressive” actually **means** something, and not what Lind seems to think it does. Specifically, it means something **well to the left of “liberal” and well to the right of “socialist.”** It is the political position of America’s erstwhile NDP-inspired [New Party,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Party_(United_States)) or the [Working Families Party,](http://www.workingfamiliesparty.org/) or the [Vermont Progressive Party](http://www.progressiveparty.org/) – any of which is easily distinguishable from even such a moderate socialist organization as the [Democratic Socialists of America.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Socialists_of_America) Their politics is that of the social democrats of Europe. They don’t envision wholesale expropriation of wealth or socialization of all means of production, but they do regard greater socioeconomic equality as an important end-in-itself, and they do regard movement in that direction as a form of “progress,” and they do believe in the idea of “universal progress in general.” The American Greens – at least, the main body of them, the [Green Party of the United States](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Party_of_the_United_States) – are a branch of American progressives. (There is also a smaller and distinctly far-leftist, Marxist-influenced party, the [Greens/Green Party USA.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greens/Green_Party_USA)) And progressivism so defined is an **important** political tendency, far more important in American politics today than socialism as such – and, I think may become much more important in coming decades. The word “progressive” is worth preserving in American political discourse because it denotes that political tendency as no other term in current usage adequately does. ---
**Author:** ![Olentzero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/90ced4/32.png) [@Olentzero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Olentzero)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2010, 1:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/97 "2010-05-02T01:23:58Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Now, I have the honor of calling to your attention, **Olentzero,** that you seem to have fallen prey to the rationalistic fallacy, assuming that you can construct a better society just by rigid reasoning from first principles And you are wrong. Simply put, scientific socialist theory does not proceed from ideas and end up attempting to make the world fit those ideas; it observes the world as it is and tries to see which elements have the potential of pushing social evolution forward. I have done a fair bit of reading in several works by Marx and Engels in preparation for responding to Bertrand Russell’s criticisms, but I feel that the only refutation needed is a quote from the Communist Manifesto, written at the very start of Marx’ political life: > [@](#): > > [O]ppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, _ **or in the common ruin of the contending classes** _. Emphasis mine. It cannot be made much clearer than in this statement - before Marx analyzed the world economic system in _Capital_, at the very birth of a political career, that he in no way viewed the advent of socialism as automatic, as the result of the inevitable progress of ideas. Socialism, as all systems before it, would come about as the result of conscious struggle of an organized class - _ **not** _ as a result of ‘progress’ independent of human action. Marx’ inheritance from Hegel was the dialectic - a mode of thought brought down from the ancient Greeks - but he explicitly rejected Hegel’s idealism and (as shown in this brief sentence) stood the motor of social evolution on a firmly material basis. A blind faith in the inevitable progress of ideas could never admit to the possibility of an unacceptable outcome; a firmly scientific materialist outlook must of necessity admit that things could go wrong. Marx realized this from the very start, and his admission as such puts paid permanently to any and all accusations of idealism. I must stop here as far as this thread is concerned, as an impending personal tragedy will be commanding my attention for the next week or so. Nor do I expect that this is going to go all that far in convincing you, **BG** , so I’m also going to take this opportunity to make this the last I have to say to you directly on the subject. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2010, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/98 "2010-05-02T21:15:34Z")
> [@transprog](#): > > The reason I don’t consider myself really a socialist (according to the more popular definition) is because I embrace aspects of capitalism, specifically aspects of the free market, which I agree help efficiently to regulate allocation of goods. You can have a free market without capitalism. That is, you can abolish private ownership of the \*means \*of production, and retain a free market in the \*products \*of production in order to tap that (IMO, mystical) efficiency of the Invisible Hand. ---
**Author:** ![transprog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@transprog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/transprog)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2010, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/99 "2010-05-03T03:01:15Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > You can have a free market without capitalism. That is, you can abolish private ownership of the \*means \*of production, and retain a free market in the \*products \*of production in order to tap that (IMO, mystical) efficiency of the Invisible Hand. This was more or less my point. But many define socialism as the abolishment of the free market, I don’t. My post was more for them and not for people like us. I consider myself a socialist, but then again not wedded to the term. I agree that the Invisible Hand is mystical. Obviously (to me at least) the free market can’t be completely free. There needs to be regulation but that regulatory power needs to placed into as many hands as possible. People will have (more) power as producers and consumers. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2010, 12:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156/100 "2010-05-03T12:19:56Z")
IMO, people will have more power when they demand to be considered as people, not as producers or consumers or any other economic unit. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/socialists-what-are-your-views/537156.md?page=6)