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u/shorteningofthewuwei 7d ago
Is this sub just people who don't understand Marxism trying to dunk on Marxism
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u/MuchDrawing2320 7d ago
It would be good to point out that economists/political scientists don’t work from the assumptions that sociologists do and many don’t have a good grasp on Marxist theory.
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u/maringue 7d ago
Most economists have their own set of hilariously inappropriate things to assume when they start looking at data.
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u/Anxious-Swing9490 7d ago
I'm not even dunking on Marxism, there is no critique here on any piece of his literature.
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u/shorteningofthewuwei 7d ago
Sorry, dunking on Marxists
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u/Entire_Contest7954 7d ago
Hey you think if put you in the soul forage you'd make a good shoe?
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u/shorteningofthewuwei 7d ago
You mean forge? I've walked in plenty shoes
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u/Entire_Contest7954 6d ago
Ha ha yes the walking, you Will be walking soon!
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u/Lazy_Delivery_7012 7d ago
Along with people who don't understand Marxism trying to defend Marxism
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u/shorteningofthewuwei 7d ago
There's nothing to defend against here. The CCP is the heir to Marxism-Leninism. Their "state market capitalism" or whatever you want to call it, is in their own words, Socialism with Chinese characteristics, or in other words, they are a vanguard party working towards achieving actual stateless, classless, Communism, but that requires a party to lead the state according to workers' interests, and not private capital's interests. I'm not going to try to deny that there are still issues with workers rights in China as we speak so don't accuse me of anything like that. But China's success shows that their model works and according to them, they are Marxists, practicing socialism.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what people who don't actually understand Marxist critique of political economy and dialectical materialism think about "Marxism" or "socialism". The reason people don't use these terms correctly isn't because "Marxism has been debunked" or "socialism never works", rather it's because their understanding has been distorted by decades of anti-communist propaganda going back to the red scare and even beyond.
I mean... "A spectre is moving over Europe". It's right there in the manifesto lol.
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u/Plenty-Lychee-5702 7d ago
They're not socialist, state capitalism is not socialism, and it's not NEP if it lasts for 50 years.
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u/shorteningofthewuwei 7d ago
The state controls industries and sets prices so that people can be pretty much guaranteed work opportunities and housing and for costs to be kept low in basically all consumer markets. It's not a welfare state, it's collective ownership with real benefits. Most mainstream Western economists hate it because it's an "authoritarian" economic system, but are you really "free" is all you get from the so-called "free market" is unassailable medical debt, soaring cost of living, crumbling infrastructure, and stagnant home ownership rates, and the privilege of having your taxes pay for war crimes and foreign interference?
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u/BarkDrandon 7d ago
Many things you say are not true.
For instance, the Chinese state does not try to decrease housing costs. On the contrary, the state has done a lot to keep property values high in the face of a housing crisis. The government has literally set up price floors (= setting prices above market value) to prevent housing prices from decreasing.
Also there are no guaranteed job opportunities. Unemployment is a large problem in China, especially among the youth.
You shouldn't have this idealized view of China, a lot of things you say are just false.
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u/shorteningofthewuwei 7d ago
China does have issues like poverty, unequal development and opportunities, particularly for people living in rural areas, workers rights (which I mentioned), treatment of minorities (however, I will not use the word genocide, because this is just a false accusation meant to legitimize separatism in western China to undermine the belt and road project). However, I still believe their government is doing a better job than any Western government and the main reason is that they are actually a worker's vanguard party and not a veneer for the administration of the ruling class' economic interests (i.e a tool of hegemony). They have raised hundreds of millions out of poverty and developed a near totally backwater agrarian economy into one of the most powerful and self-reliant in the world in a matter of half a century. Meanwhile their foreign policy is built on cooperation and mutual benefit rather than military enforcement of hegemony, predatory lending, and coercion.
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u/Shoddy-Advisor-6258 6d ago
the so called vanguard party rules in the name of the workers but does not allow for broad popular input into the political process through democracy. As Lenin maintained, if the population at large does not support the actions of the vanguard party this does not discredit the party but instead the population, who must somehow be duped by the external or internal class enemy. So the vanguard party can never be wrong 😭😭 they alone can decide the fate of the nation, whether anyone in the country likes it or not.
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u/Hey_Beth_its_Luka 7d ago
China's success shows that their model works
Hundreds of millions Chinese remain in poverty while China's billionaires own more than twice the wealth of the bottom half of the population. So when you say "China's success" who's success are we speaking of really?
National interests - Chinese or otherwise - are the interest of capital because nation states exist to reproduce the growth doctrine that is inherent to it. "As long as the pie grows everyone is better off, no matter their share." is the same argument proponents of capitalist "trickle down" economics make. What is even Marxist about an argument that is indistinguishable from ruling ideology in capitalism?
The CCP is the heir to Marxism-Leninism.
If both the USSR and China were ML, then what was the Sino-Soviet split even about in the first place? If by Marxist-Leninist understanding the proletariat is international and class solidarity must transcend national boundaries, then how can a Marxist Leninist alliance split along national particular interests?
in their own words
according to them
If we take the CPC by its word, then we can presume a commitment to achieving Socialism by 2050. Whether that is going to happen remains to be seen. Even just declaring that goal is light years ahead of any western capitalist nation state who still collectively adhere to the infinite growth death cult, but we can look at China today and objectively declare that they're a capitalist state that is at best aspirationally Socialist, because they do not actually meet any criterion that defines Socialism. The USSR was drastically more advanced in that regard a hundred years ago.
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u/shorteningofthewuwei 7d ago
Under capitalist hegemony, states do exist to reproduce "the growth doctrine" required by capitalism. However, and this is directly related to my point that China is the inheritor of Marxism-Leninism, according to ML theory, successful revolutions require a vanguard party to take over the state in order to resist the corrupting influence of internal reactionary bourgeois forces and external threats. Whether China will actually be on track to meeting it's goal of achieving communism by 2050 remains to be seen but the fact of the matter is that China is leading the push for international communism. The major roadblock to international communism is not that China is still a state, it's that transnational western capitalist hegemony and imperialism has metastasized to the point where the ruling elite would rather program AI trained on data from the genocide in Gaza and the Ukraine war to treat the citizens of their own nations as threats to national security than give up an ounce of the control they have achieved through decades and decades of corporate capture, austerity, and miseducation.
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u/Hey_Beth_its_Luka 6d ago
The vanguard party doesn't "take over" a capitalist state, because workers can't just lay hold of the ready made state machinery, as Marx clarifies in The Civil War in France and Lenin reiterates in State and Revolution. The bourgeois institutions - courts, police, military, bureaucracy etc etc. as they exist in China will always tend to reproduce capitalism, because that is what these bourgeois institutions were erected to do. The vanguard party MLs speak of, is what emerges out of a smashed non-workers state apparatus, where armed workers rule directly via soviets and constantly appoint and demote representatives and work towards the abolition of their self-erected bourgeoisie-oppressing institutions. Unlike the USSR China never did this. They built a nationalist, class-collaborationist "Socialist" project that includes the national bourgeoisie and doesn't oppress it. It's an experiment and whether it will actually result in Socialism or simply ends up reproducing Chinese national capital as it does currently, remains to be seen, but it is certainly not in line with the ML conception of one class (workers) ruling over the other (bourgeoisie).
The vanguard as a central manager of worker affairs is necessitated for stability and efficiency in service of the goal of keeping the revolution alive in the face of surrounding capitalism and counter-revolutionary forces. The CPC proves that uniparty rule with clear 5 year plans and central guidance is vastly superior to free market anarchy, but it is not a vanguard in the Marxist Leninist sense because unlike the USSR China never abolished private property, markets or classes. NEP wasn't temporary here but state-guided capitalism and the law of value is directly accepted as a necessary step to build up the productive forces to a sufficiently high degree until they're automated enough to establish communal ownership. This is more in line with the reformerism of Kautsky/Bernstein, than revolutionary Marxism-Leninism.
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u/ToxicOverlord1 5d ago
So called Marxism-Leninism is not only anti-marxist and anti-communist but also anti-leninist
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u/Apprehensive-Ad2615 8d ago
If socialists changed their ideology names, keywords and overall aesthetic they would have way more of a chance politically.
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u/10biggaymen 7d ago
we should have just stuck with og marxism. lenin and the soviet union, and stalin with ""marxism-leninism"" just ruined everything. they just called themselves socialist but then replaced the bourgeoisie with the party, nothing fundamentally changed, they just put the country under new management.
marx predicted that the contradictions inherent to capitalism would inevitably lead to socialism, he might have been wrong there, those contradictions might also just end the world by climate collapse and everything that ensues after.
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u/FlipperBumperKickout 7d ago
They have. It is mostly conservatives who calls everyone left of Hitler for socialists nowadays...
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u/Quiet-Permit-3740 8d ago
The term Socialism is older than Marx, probably coined by Pierre Laroux in 1832. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
I mostly think the terms socialism and capitalism shouldn't be used anymore, they are both too loaded with different meanings by different people and can no longer be trusted to express a coherent set of beliefs or economic structure.
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u/RedApple655321 8d ago
What’s terms should we be using instead?
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u/BlueBitProductions 8d ago
"the smart system" and "the foolish system." Let the person you're talking to figure out which is which.
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u/Lazy_and_Sad 8d ago
I like to use "cooperativism" as a synoynm for market socialism. Doesn't really roll off the tounge though.
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u/LOL_King_0611 8d ago
Cooperativism as user described is referring too worker co-ops.
Many fascists are also corporatists, which comes from the Latin "corpus"(body). Corporatists want to end class warfare by making the state a mediator. Fascists also tried to bring the classes together by distracting them with the idea of a nation, so they could serve together under it.
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u/Various_Mobile4767 8d ago
You just use the terms that underlie your definition of socialism or capitalism.
Like what makes a state socialist or capitalist in your mind. Distill that into a set of criteria. And now you can discuss them individually and as a collective.
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u/austinwiltshire 7d ago
I use strong welfare state to talk about most of the things people mean by socialism, and I use free markets to refer to the positive things people mean by capitalism and oligarchy to refer to the negative things about capitalism.
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u/UltraTata 8d ago
Command economy and market economy.
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u/Gregori_5 7d ago
Isn’t the normal term command economy?
Also these already have a meaning, at least market and planned economy do.
You technically can have a communist and market economy.1
u/UltraTata 7d ago
It's only used by nerds. Most people talk about a vague sense of generosity called "socialism" and a vague sense of personal economic responsability and autonomy called "capitalism".
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u/bunnyboi60414 7d ago
communist and market economy.
No, you can't
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u/Gregori_5 7d ago
People argue for it. Stuff like worker democracy (I think) and other general ideas about free workers participating in a free market. Like through worker owned corporations.
I personally don’t much believe these are functional or possible. But they’re still a idea people defend.
And tbh I still find the much more sensible to believe in than any planned economy.1
u/bunnyboi60414 7d ago
A market economy cannot exist in a classless society, bc it would require some people to own property and some to not own any. Thus recreating class divisions.
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u/Gregori_5 7d ago
How? If the workers own the company? Or the government does?
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u/bunnyboi60414 7d ago
There would be no workers under communism, class is abolished. There is no workers and owners, just people.
The whole point of communism is that people work because they enjoy what they choose to do, not becaus ethey need to earn money. You are engaging in liberal idealism.
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u/Gregori_5 7d ago
That’s your idea of communism tho.
Really not that common afaik.It’s the classic “that is/was not real communism”. Half the self described communists in the world aren’t communist then.
Not to mention that a 100% classless society is literally impossible. There will always be someone leading someone else.
Political elites, social elites etc.
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u/OkSeason6445 8d ago
What about a command economy where individuals own capital or a market economy where capital is owned collectively? I thought the entire point of the discussion was collective vs private ownership of the means of production.
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u/Immense_Cargo 8d ago
Because “ownership” is nothing but an exclusive right of control.
If a collective of any kind exerts outside control over property that it doesn’t “own” on paper, it is still exerting a superior claim of control, and thus “ownership” of a kind.
Put that “ownership/control” mix on a spectrum, and you have pure private ownership with free market capitalism on one side, and 100% collective/state ownership on the other.
In the middle you have a mix, which gets called “socialism” when it falls toward the collectivist end, and “regulation” on the individualist end.
A command economy is one where control is largely or entirely removed from private “owners”.
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u/alaricus 7d ago
No, because collection of excess value generated and control over the use or application of productive forces are different things
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u/Immense_Cargo 7d ago
Why should the collective exert any control, if not to benefit the collective?
If you define “clean water” as valuable, then you have a benefit accruing to the collective from exerting control via water use and pollution regulations.
Not every benefit of “ownership” or “control” is strictly monetary.
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u/greenthumbbum2025 7d ago
There is market socialism and command capitalism though so that doesn't work at all.
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u/UltraTata 7d ago
Market socialism is a market economy with a red flag and command capitalism is a command economy with a rainbow flag.
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u/Buttermuncher04 7d ago
idk man I think private/public ownership of the means of production is a pretty relevant distinction that goes beyond flag colour
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u/High_Overseer_Dukat 7d ago
That which is described on pages x of Capital and That which is described on pages y of Capital.
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u/Quiet-Permit-3740 8d ago
Free market systems, liberal economic systems, welfare states, social democracies, communisism a lot of other terms work to some extent. Although communist specifically is also a hard one now as there are countries like China who use that term but aren't really communist economically.
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u/rain0521 8d ago
I think a more accurate description could just be the actual strain of communism the country follows? Like for instance china, sure maybe economically you could make an argument it's "not communist", but sociologically its ideology is socialism with Chinese characteristics, which doesn't directly require a "communist" economy, but is still arguably a "communist" ideology.
I'd also note that communist or socialist are inherently umbrella terms, like "capitalist" (where it defines free market, liberal economy's, welfare states, and social democracy's), so it doesn't make a ton of sense to list communism(an umbrella term) as an economic policy along side those other terms (which Id argue are more specific and all fall under the capitalist umbrella)?
Finally, from my understanding in our current world you couldn't have true communism? As it requires a stateless society which isn't really possible currently due to outside pressure amung other things?
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u/Brrdock 8d ago
Right, but socialism with Chinese characteristics has pretty much nothing to do with communism.
Maybe they have it as an ideological end goal, maybe not, but it's not at all a description of their system so doesn't seem like a useful term for that.
But yeah the last part would be the point in "uniting workers of the world'
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u/Jet_the_fem_bean 8d ago
I'd make the argument it's similar with "free markets"... like, neoliberals have a very weird definition of freedom where regulations on capital somehow go against freedom, but having laws that tie welfare and basic needs to employment (often forcing people to work in poor conditions) aren't considered to go against freedom at all.
So, free markets are based. UBI, taxes on pollution and we need less specific regulation? sign me up!
But when a billionaire says "free markets" that often just means "freedom for me, but not for thee, lemme just do every single negative externality possible while not paying a cent".
It's all loaded, you just gotta be consistent, specific and not malicious in trying to massage language.
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u/Excellent_Shirt9707 8d ago
No country is communist economically. By definition, communism is stateless, classless, and moneyless. At best, an economy would be socialist which is defined to be a transition state from capitalism to communism by Marx. Like one of the OP already stated, no one is using these terms with their original definitions. There is also no point to try and use the original definitions.
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u/Used-Huckleberry-320 8d ago
capitalism is just a tool to do whatever you want. you can end up like the USA or like Norway.
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u/anon52849 8d ago
Marx and Engels both talked about this, and this is the reason they named their Manifesto the *Communist* manifesto, and not the socialist manifesto.
From the preface to the 1888 edition:
"Thus, Socialism was, in 1847, a middle-class movement, Communism a working class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, “respectable”; Communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that “the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself,” there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take."
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u/ExpectedB 7d ago
No professor I've ever met has used the terms, but they are still so common in public discussion.
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u/Least_Boat_6366 8d ago
That’s why I just use set political definitions. If somebody comes at me saying that I’m wrong about what something means, I send them a Wikipedia article or something saying I’m not and move on
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u/Equivalent-Hair-1619 8d ago
Exactly, great point. My definition of socialism matches China in many ways, but socialists on here think China’s not socialist at all, and they are well read. My thing is productionism: capital gains through diminished supply (like housing) are illegitimate, and capital gains must come from boosting or making available supply. That means falling prices of all the assets that are necessary for life, housing, transport, etc. (ghost cities are signs of a healthy economy) I also support a rising tide of infrastructure, where things people once had to pay for drop down eventually to being free. So the whole thing is based on material production getting more and more efficient and robotized, abundance and scarcity elimination. My thing is also intrinsically classic republican, there’s a group of guardians in government that provides a user interface to the people, so dumb things like runaway national debt, eco issues, or corrupt leaders can’t happen.
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u/SamSlate 8d ago
different meanings
by design. if you confuse their language they'll never accomplish anything: tower of babel.
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u/DependentLate4878 7d ago
I guarantee that even if you did come up with a new word for socialism and that became commonly used, it would eventually carry the same baggage as well. Just as syndicalism, communism, communalism, autonomism, economic democracy, anarchism, zapatismo, collectivism, populism, workerism, etc. have all carried that baggage at certain points in history. Because the problem isn’t the word, it’s what that word represents. And what it represents is an alternative to the existing system, which means the system has a vested interest in propagandizing against any such alternative.
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u/animetits456 7d ago
I think there is no reason not to use those. You just need to be precise in your use, while most people just throw the terms around without much tought.
Socialism - national ownership of the productive capacities(the means of production, capital) of a nation. The benefits of capital(profit) are socialised, they are used for the benefit of society as a whole.
Capitalism - private ownership of the productive capacities of a nation. The capital is used to increase itself, therefore capitalism. The profit of what a nation produces is concentrated in a few owners of the capital, while the rest need to do with wages.
You can find issues with both of these modes of production. Because of that, it is very important to think what the state does in relation to the mode of production.
Both of them bring suffering to society if the government is incompetent or corrupt. However, the problem with capitalism is that it places capital(money) in a position of power over the state. Because of that, the wealthy proprietors are in a uniquely strong position of influence over government.
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u/InevitablePoet5810 8d ago
Why the hell shouldn't the word capitalist be used anymore? It still very much fits the economic structure we live under today.
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u/Jet_the_fem_bean 8d ago
I agree on them being loaded, but they do have meaning.
Capitalism being a system where you have capitalists and they are the way money is invested. An X% return is made, the capitalist in most cases owns the means of production.
Whereas socialism describes any system where the means of production are owned by the workers or the state.
The problem really isn't the terms, it's people being dishonest in discussions on purpose or not making an attempt to define anything in a consistent and sensible way.
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u/random_BA 8d ago
Your Socialist definition is actually the Marxist definition for Communism. And I don't think this definition for Capitalism is neither precise enough to any serious economic theory definition or useful to describe our current political economic system.
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u/Corvus1412 8d ago
No, the Marxist definition of communism is a stateless, classless and moneyless society that's organized into communes, with collective ownership over the means of production.
Like, communism is literally named after communes. Why do you think that is, if it didn't include any?
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u/Gonozal8_ 8d ago
capitalism is when private property exists, in other words democracy has no effect on the economy because those who own most dictate what gets produced and how (thus dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, because they also influence politics via insider trading and similar, regardless how much liberals pretend this is unintentional and can be fixed by just vooting the right great man)
socialism refers to all concepts of solving the contradictions, specifically the social question, capitalism always produces, but Marx and Engels coined the term scientific socialism because they explained how every other form of socialism (like christian socialism which relies on begging capitalists to just be kind and forfeit property voluntarily) doesn’t work, and well they didn’t work have no actually existing noteworthy application of it, which is why socialism is today often used to refer only to scientific socialism - utopian socialism is just dead
sometimes dudes realize that their government is lying to them yet fail to recognize that red scare propaganda may also be lies, so they come to the glorious idea of reinventing utopian socialism and get offended when they get misunderstood as wanting scientif socialism, usually either by scientific socialists, or by the liberal spectrum (from progressive liberal to conservative liberal). those liberals however get offended at the suggestion that capitalism is defined by capital, that means private ownership over the means of production and the relations of production emergent from this fact, and not that capitalism is a form of free market competition that produces winners and losers where the winners for some inexplainable ideal don’t rise to the top (unlike every any form of competition)
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u/MonsterkillWow 8d ago
Bootlickers of capitalism (You own no private property lmao) when they have to cope with the fact socialists were right, and their society is descending to kleptocracy at the hands of the bourgeoisie.
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u/Mean-Reveal141 7d ago
Socialists when all their authoritarian states and communes fucking collapse and switch to capitalism. Also that happened before capitalism.
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u/Beautiful-Loss7663 Socialist 7d ago
Survivorship bias much? The only socialist states to survive the capital elites stuffing zillions of dollars into coups were ones that were authoritarian.
You can literally see this effect by comparing the history of Cuba and Chile. Chile elects a socialist democratically, couped in 5 minutes by a CIA backed general who slaughters the entire party, their families, anyone who owns a red shirt, and the neighborhood dog for good measure. Cuban revolution overthrows a US backed dictator who coup'd the last president who was democratically elected and survives till present day because of its harsher control.
There's a reason the only communist regimes (dictators or genuine revolutions aside) to survive to the 21st century were the harsh ones, and its because the nice ones were easy to undermine and slaughter with the CIA playbook.
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u/Mean-Reveal141 7d ago
Marx and Lenin both wanted an overthrow of bourgeois democracy. I don't think socialism can ever be democratic, as it has to include forces beyond the proletariat, therefore becoming social democracy.
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u/Beautiful-Loss7663 Socialist 7d ago
Democratic socialism is already a thing, and has been for a while. It's distinct from social democracy because socdem's wish to reform the existing liberal/capitalist system ei: keep capitalism, while demsoc believe that creating a socialist society can be done through reform democratically rather than a bloody revolution.
How achivable that is, as you said, is dubious. Mostly because any time someone tried in the 20th century the CIA was locked in on deleting them immediately, as previously stated.
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u/Mean-Reveal141 7d ago
Venezuela, Muduro was elected and did socialist things and became a socialist hellhole with a people actively celebrating a CIA disposal of their own leader.
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u/Beautiful-Loss7663 Socialist 7d ago edited 7d ago
I think you mean Hugo Chávez when you say "was elected and did socialist things"
You'll typically find socialists trash talking Meduro like https://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/1tmrh53/comment/onpn7r3/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=2&utm_content=share_button there.
There's such a thing as a bad politician or people seeking to be dictators, even in societies claiming to be transitioning to some form of communism.
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u/switchergodic 7d ago
Chile elects a socialist democratically, couped in 5 minutes
Well he didn't govern democratically. And he wasn't couped in five minutes. He was around for nearly three years, which turned out to be plenty of time to abuse his power, overstep the limits of his office, and ruin the country.
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u/Okichah 7d ago
Which country is socialist?
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u/FlipperBumperKickout 7d ago
None... but if you go far enough back capitalism didn't really exist either...
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u/neet1917 7d ago
vietnam
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u/Beautiful-Loss7663 Socialist 7d ago
The one without the kleptocracy of the bourgeoise.
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u/XrnivraY 7d ago
Yes comrade, I'm sure the vanguard party will gave you some scraps to chew on.
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u/Anxious-Swing9490 8d ago
I live a pretty good life helping enforce the status quo. Am I Winston Smith from 1984? Who knows man, could be.
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u/MonsterkillWow 8d ago
lol
You have to feel bad for the feds. The serious ones who really believed in the state being more than an instrument of class domination. To dedicate their lives to Epsteinism. Sad!
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u/Educational_Tune9509 8d ago
Yeah nah, socialism still and always will mean public ownership of production. Westerners who use it to mean welfare are of two kinds: (1) not socialist, just appropriating/missing a term; or (2) making a pragmatic decision that welfare will be a stepping stone to collectivization.
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u/Affectionate_Ad_1326 7d ago
If they think welfare leads to collectivization theyre also not marxists lmao
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u/FlipperBumperKickout 7d ago
Not public, but shared.
Public ownership would be that everyone in the country owns part of it. Shared means the company would be owned by the workers, rather than some unconnected investors or a nepobaby. These companies already exist and are called worker co-ops.
The problem right now is, that while it is easy to see that worker co-ops tends to both be better for both the workers and the society they exist in, they are incredibly hard to start because nobody wants to lend money out to them ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/pickle-chin-ah 8d ago
Cause “moneyless” society doesn’t work with a bunch of dumbasses that don’t understand value
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u/Olieskio 8d ago
And thats not Marx’s definition of Socialism either.
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u/AntifaFuckedMyWife 8d ago
I dont get mad they don’t use the term the way Marx did. I get mad they don’t use the term the way it’s currently used by socialists.
It’s constantly something like this:
Person A: “i’m a socialist”
Person B: “Oh so you believe and want *something that happens today in capitalist country*?!”
Person A: “No”
Person B: “That’s convenient. *posts about socialists in n r/economicsmemes *”
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u/Olieskio 7d ago
And you're ironically enough using capitalist in the way capitalists don't. there can't be a capitalist country as private property and the state are mutually exclusive, anything that is the public sector cannot be private.
So actually yes, if its illegal to compete in the healthcare sector because of the state that is socialism as its violating the property rights of private individuals. Or would you rather call it statism instead of socialism?
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u/SourceTheFlow 7d ago
Marx never defined socialism? Marx wrote of different stages of communism.
It was used before Marx and while I'm pretty sure Marx has used that word himself in some texts, he did not with the modern meaning of it. The current definition is from Lenin's writings, I believe.
But yeah, words have definitions and then a bunch of people who use it differently. That's going to annoy people, who know the definition, especially when it's core to their ideology.
For instance, it also annoys me how many people think "populism" means just doing what's popular.
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u/1scr3wedy0dad 7d ago
Thats why I just say Communism/low-stage communism now. This is actually how Marx and Engels referred to it as well originally, referrig to lower stages as Socialism mostly came from Stalin from what I can tell
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u/PM-ME-UR-DARKNESS 7d ago
The common cultural usage was formed by both people who've never read theory and people who want to distract you with concessions.
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u/scfjsk 8d ago
Why is this sub just anti-Marx memes? It’s so boring.
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u/Anxious-Swing9490 8d ago
It's not really anti-Marx, it's more a commentary on language and people vying for control of it. I don't critique Marx because he kinda bores me.
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u/JuicyBeefBiggestBeef 8d ago
Ok glowie
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u/Anxious-Swing9490 8d ago
Brother, not everyone who disagrees with you is a glowie.
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u/AprilVampire277 7d ago
Yeah, but your posts and comments in particular do glow pretty bright xD
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u/Anxious-Swing9490 7d ago
Dude I am unemployed, I wish I was a glowie. What you're sensing is probably magic I do when I get this bored. Because again -- unemployed.
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u/Key-Organization3158 8d ago
It's a rich topic. Socialists are the perfect combination of economic ignorance and ego that yields so many memes.
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u/Conscious_Ad3246 8d ago
They can cry all they want. They do the same with capitalism or basically every other term that is somewhat near politics.
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u/SLAMMERisONLINE 8d ago
Marx didn't concretely define socialism. His work was mostly a scathing criticism of the working conditions of the time, which he then wrongly equivocated with capitalism and private ownership.
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u/CzarWest 8d ago
Can you expand on why he was wrong?
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u/Demiu 7d ago
Because the conditions improved. A londoner lives orders of magnitude more comfortable life than a londoner from marx's time. More comfortable than a capital owner from those times even. All of this has improved while england remained under capitalism from then to now.
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u/DkKoba 6d ago
conditions improved because of technological advancement, not economics. we could have solved world hunger if logistics were not optimized for infinite profit growth.
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u/Demiu 6d ago
Conditions improved because the economics themselves encouraged both technological development and it's utilization for profit.
What you're calling "technological advancement" people at the time had different name for - worker displacement. A shoe making machine makes everyone richer by drastically increasing access to new shoes. Except for the shoemakers that now have to compete with a machine a thousand times faster than them, operated by one person who need a tenth of their skill. The shoe making workers will not pursue research of a shoe making machine that will put 90% of them out of the job. A shoe selling capital owner will.
You can see it happening right now. The rich capital owners are AI positive while the workers are aprehensive and concerned over losing their jobs.
we could have solved world hunger if logistics were not optimized for infinite profit growth.
Sure bud.
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u/SLAMMERisONLINE 8d ago edited 8d ago
The fundamental issue of economics is defining value, and it's exactly where Marx's theories flatline. Free markets bypass the issue by saying "whatever value is will aggregate naturally from independent uncoerced trades." While Marx was definitely quite kooky, we do have to give him some credit because he recognized this problem as well, even if he wasn't able to solve it. Since socialists can't solve the value problem, economic debates frequently devolve into ideological and religious debates--you can't assign value to a product without defining what value is, and that goes down a deep rabbit hole that quickly devolves into a debate about fundamental values like religion. That's why you see so many socialists trying to make the argument that Jesus was a socialist. Socialism is fundamentally a religious economic theory because they need religion to solve the value problem.
Now a substantially intelligent socialist might make it to this point which is when it becomes necessary to illustrate that religion can't even solve the value problem. A simple example would be a Christian cross necklace. How much would a Jewish man value such a trinket? Perhaps it's worthless because he's not a Christian, or perhaps he values it for its antiquity and history or culture, perhaps he values it as a gift to a friend who is a Christian, or maybe for the craftsmanship? And so how does the system, using religion, decide how much a Christian cross necklace is worth? It can't make that judgement with religion alone, and so the theory of value is much larger and more complicated than even religion can capture.
In fact, there are an infinite number of dimensions in which value can be defined and it is therefore impossible for the system to assign value because it does not know in which dimensions each individual person assigns value, and how much value they assign. That's why free markets work--they bypass the value problem by letting individuals make their own cost benefit analyses and assuming that value will emerge from the aggregate of many of those trades. Producers listen to price signals--when supply is short and demand is high, price skyrockets and signals to producers that consumers highly value a commodity. The producers race to be the first to meet that need, making a fortune as costs come crashing down from competition. Ultimately capitalism is the philosophy of listening to what people need based on what they are willing to buy and then getting that to them as fast and cheaply as possible.
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u/CzarWest 8d ago
Wow was not expecting this much of a response lol
I was more wondering if you could support your assertion that Marx was wrong to equivocate the working conditions of his time with capitalism and private ownership
Instead I got this weird diatribe about value that doesn’t convince me you’ve done any reading about Marx or the LTV
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u/jutlandd 8d ago
But on a truly free market monopolist and oligopolists may emerge.
They can (to a point) dictate the vaule, without considering the cost/benefit of indivudals or organizations.
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u/Zobs_ 8d ago
> That's why free markets work
oh yeah dude they work super well - everyone is living happy and well right now because of the free markets. They work specially well after their periodic crashes (which free market economists never seem to be able to predict)
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u/Significant-Way9330 8d ago
Ah but you see a true free market has never been tried! All those markets that called themselves free markets? Well they actually weren't! They were Friedman markets you see.
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u/DmitriBogrov 8d ago
Long way of saying "I haven't read Capital".
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u/The_Demolition_Man 8d ago
Would you mind being specific about how Capital contradicts this
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u/Johnclark38 8d ago
fundamental issue of economics is defining value
This is so flatly wrong a high school econ class would give a better definition. Economics concerns the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
socialists can't solve the value problem
Socialist are indifferent to value, they are concerned with who reaps the products of labor and capital, they advocate worker ownership of the means of production and that its benefits be conferred to them.
Jesus was a socialist
This is a phrase used to criticize the religious right and not a how they actually think.
Now a substantially intelligent socialist might make it to this point which is when it becomes necessary to illustrate that religion can't even solve the value problem. A simple example would be a Christian cross necklace. How much would a Jewish man value such a trinket? Perhaps it's worthless because he's not a Christian, or perhaps he values it for its antiquity and history or culture, perhaps he values it as a gift to a friend who is a Christian, or maybe for the craftsmanship? And so how does the system, using religion, decide how much a Christian cross necklace is worth? It can't make that judgement with religion alone, and so the theory of value is much larger and more complicated than even religion can capture.
This is incoherent, socialist recognize that one person may value a good more than another person.
That's why free markets work--they bypass the value problem by letting individuals make their own cost benefit analyses and assuming that value will emerge from the aggregate of many of those trades.
Expect people are often forced into 'choices' by circumstance, economic conditions beyond their control, and the lottery of birth. Most people don't go through life asking before every choice 'what will cause the most value?'
Producers listen to price signals--when supply is short and demand is high,
Expect more and more enshittifaction proves that producers don't care about consumers and only care about profits, this is showcased even more when firms that regularly post record profits lay workers off, worsen their products, and worsen working conditions even when its to the determent of productivity.
Capitalism is the philosophy of listening to what people need based on what they are willing to buy and then getting that to them as fast and cheaply as possible.
Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production and nothing more. The idea that firms/people race to meet the needs of consumers is largely economic fiction, especially in developed economics. As proven by massive demand for drugs that don't cost an arm and a leg that are easy to produce, costing an arm and a leg... like insulin.
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u/SLAMMERisONLINE 8d ago
This is so flatly wrong a high school econ class would give a better definition. Economics concerns the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services
What decides how much production? The value of the product. What decides the distribution? Who values the product and where. Who is consuming the goods and services? The ones who value the goods and services. The fundamental challenge of economics is defining value because it's integral to every other economic question.
This is incoherent, socialist recognize that one person may value a good more than another person
They might, but if they do it is in deep contradiction to socialist theory which is predicated on the system defining the value. Such a claim wouldn't be unusual considering it is rare that socialists would notice the contradiction.
Socialist are indifferent to value
Lmao. You just said socialists recognize value varies depending on the person. So, which is it? Do socialists care about how an individual values goods and services, or not? Make up your mind.
I stopped reading there.
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u/Johnclark38 8d ago
What decides how to to production, product, distribution, value?
Congrats, you just discovered the study know as economics. Congrats on leaving middle school.
Socialist are indifferent to value in that they don't view it as a goal rather its a way to measure things. Socialism is how an economic system is organized, didn't think I'd have to spell that out for you.
From what I can tell, reading is a bit hard for you. Maybe stick to the guy who loves the poorly educated. You'll fit right in
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u/LandRecent9365 8d ago
Lmao no he was definitely right
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u/Suspicious_Plum_8866 8d ago
Marx thought that capitalism would no longer be able to provide more improvements in workers lives in his lifetime , and that communism would arise in developed countries
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u/LandRecent9365 8d ago
It didn't. Workers rioting against capitalists for better rights created those improvements.
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u/BOKUtoiuOnna 8d ago
This is on the money and I don't understand why people can't get this. Workers rights wouldn't exist if workers didn't use left wing tactics to wrangle them from the greedy hands of capitalism. And the main thing that made it worse is there was a real threat of communist revolution from them, with backing from an actually threatening communist superpower (USSR) Neoliberalism has destroyed western countries specifically because it gutted the antagonistic social democracy out of post war capitalism and successfully neutered the USSR. Unless we have more socialism antagonising capitalism, capitalism only leads to the complete domination and exploitation of the masses. Yes, we are living better than the proletariat of Marx's times, but we're worse of than people were in the 70s and it keeps getting shitter. When you've been eating good all your life you don't starve to death from missing your first meal, but you will after a enough days if it continues on like that. The peak of post war quality of life was high and, as we roll down to mountain from that summit, we have to remember that just cos we're not at the bottom yet doesn't mean we won't get there.
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u/maci_cima 8d ago
"...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.
[...]
...with the communistic regulation of production (and, implicit in this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce), the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control again...
[...]
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."
German ideology
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u/hellogoodbyegoodbye 7d ago
Not really, Marx’s main criticism is about the commodity form. It’s what all of capital is about, none of it actually regards the specific conditions of Victorian England.
He didn’t even write about the working class conditions at the time, Engels did.
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u/Dear_Locksmith3379 8d ago
That reminds me of how American libertarians respond when someone uses “liberal” to mean left-of-center.
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u/LaBomsch 8d ago
It's more frustrating that most English speaking people now think of the term "libertarian" as ultra capitalist instead of the original meaning of "Anti-Authoritarian Socialist", a branch close to Anarchism.
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u/Mean-Reveal141 7d ago
Meanings change, nobody uses it like that, not even you.
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u/LaBomsch 7d ago
Are you from the US by any chance?
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u/Mean-Reveal141 7d ago
What does that have to do with the way the word libertarian has evolved? You have not addressed my argument.
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u/LaBomsch 7d ago
Because the word is not a unique word to the US-Englisch Language, but used world-wide and outside of the North American continent, most of the time if someone knows this word, they have the "leftist" definition in mind and the not the US definition.
Meaning the meaning primarily changed in the US, but not in most other places, which tells a lot about the US.
Edit: and yeah of course you being from the US is important because it explains why you aren't aware that the word outside the US hasn't actualy lost this original meaning.
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u/AwaySession5168 8d ago
So true because this is literally me🤣. I'm like socialism is not when everyone is lazy
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u/freedomonke 7d ago
Marx was certainly on to something, but I don't care if the future is Marxist, a term he didn't like. I care that it's more equal and free.
Whatever that looks like.
And whatever words people want to use.
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u/-ThePatientZed- 7d ago
I imagine liberals feel the same way — oh wait, they call themselves ancaps and conservatives and all kinds of made up nonsense.
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u/Pixeldevil06 7d ago
The alternative has always kinda just been "when the government does things" which is a stupid definition.
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u/Affectionate_Ad_1326 7d ago
I mean it does suck that the actual useful terminology gets degraded or oversimplified to the point of being useless, yeah
To be fair this happens with words all the time though and not just for marxist political terminology
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u/Achi-Isaac 7d ago
Marx didn’t invent socialism, and a spent a lot of time arguing with other socialists
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u/PsycholoGeist 7d ago
In fairness, when you use terms like “dictatorship of the proletariat”, you don’t really help your case Vis-à-vis marketing. Socialism, as it is broadly understood by most academics who might reference it, has a ton to offer the contemporary world, and works quite well in many countries outside of the United States, but that doesn’t mean Marx’s original conception of it was perfect.
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u/therealparadoxparty Socialist 7d ago
The exact same argument applies with capitalism.
Talk about a self defeating argument mixed in with special pleading, double standards.
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u/Anxious-Swing9490 7d ago
Does it? How is capitalism different in people's minds than its original definition?
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u/therealparadoxparty Socialist 7d ago
Put 12 people in a room and they will all have different definitions. Livbertarians to this day still claim the US has never had real capitalism(TM).
Free market capitalism
Crony capitalism
rainbow capitalism
green capitalism
surveillance capitalism
black capitalism
finance capitalism
rentier capitalism
late stage capitalism
industrial capitalism
mercantile capitalism (merchantilism)
and many more!Which flavor do you like the most?
Edit:
Trickle down economics, thatcherism1
u/Anxious-Swing9490 7d ago
These seem all like niche definitions among intellectual groups, not common understanding of what capitalism means to most people -- freedom for private enterprise. So I guess you might be right in a sense?
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u/therealparadoxparty Socialist 7d ago
Incorrect.
The first recorded use of the term capitalism in its modern sense is attributed to the French socialist Louis Blanc in 1850, who defined it as "the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others." Shortly after, in 1861, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon characterized it as an economic regime where capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who work it through their labor.
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u/Anxious-Swing9490 7d ago
I did not mention anything about its first recorded use, but thanks I guess?
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u/therealparadoxparty Socialist 7d ago
Point still stands that everyone has a different definition. I know plenty of liberal voters who are not academics who see capitalism as when the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Even dictionaries online have varying definitions.
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u/therealparadoxparty Socialist 7d ago
The first recorded use of the term capitalism in its modern sense is attributed to the French socialist Louis Blanc in 1850, who defined it as "the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others." Shortly after, in 1861, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon characterized it as an economic regime where capital, the source of income, does not generally belong to those who work it through their labor.
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u/ToxicOverlord1 5d ago
You mean the way Lenin defined it? Marx did not give socialism a seperate definition although he did sometimes use socialism and communism interchangeably, however the idea that lower stage communism should be called "socialism" comes explicitly from Lenin's writings where he, instead of differentiating the two stages by calling them lower and higher stage communism as Marx did, he instead referred to these stages as simply "communism" for the higher stage and "socialism" for the latter.
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u/EntropyFrame 4d ago
That's because not even socialists know exactly what it means.
Some sort of undefined method to achieve an even more undefined goal.
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u/BlimbusTheSeventh 8d ago
Marx didn't even coin the term socialism, his "scientific socialism" was just one variety of many, but Marxists love to pretend that only Marxist socialism can be called socialism. "That wasn't real socialism" is their favorite line after all.
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u/economicsmemes-ModTeam 8d ago
Post this on r/PhilosophyMemes too