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House votes to condemn socialism, with 8 Democrats joining Republicans (thelemmy.club)
submitted 5 days ago by to c/progressivepolitics@lemmy.world
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[–] 7 points 5 days ago (1 child)

My argument is that socialism requires workers to hold power over the state and the commanding heights of the economy. Public and private sectors are not independent of each other, and as a consequence the class that dominates society shapes and molds both sectors to serve their interests.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 days ago* (1 child)

    I actually agree with you - by definition of socialism, that's true, and very often we label things "socialism" when it's just "publicly funded services". In Canada we have single-payer health care - it's not true socialism because only some workers only hold power, but that's if they have a union (nurses).

    But there's two points to be made:

    1. Nothing about postal service, road maintenance, or trash collection bars them from being actual socialist programs - they could all be owned and operated by the workers, so the OP comment kind of stands, kind of.
    2. I'm of the opinion that the meaning of words can change over time, especially as they get used more commonly in their derivation than their original definition. I think Socialism might be one of those things that is changing meaning. Even though we don't have true socialism, does a tax based government ever achieve "socialism"? We as tax payers will never own or control the thing being funded - the government does. They're just a middleman between us and services (private and public), and we'll never really have true socialism.

    So you have the right attacking social services as "socialism bad", you have the left defending social services as "socialism good", and then you have others saying "none of that is socialism" and pulling their hair out. We're at this point where when someone says "socialism", it's actually talking about social services provided by the government, even if it's, by definition, incorrect.

    Edit: we, as tax payers, should object to funding social programs that are just funding private businesses. I've seen local governments end their self-run trash collectors and instead contract out private businesses that do a horrendous job - they cut every corner possible, and it's pure corruption by politicians to funnel tax money to private companies.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 days ago

    The biggest problem is that you are removing the state from the class struggle. The state operates in the interests of the ruling class of a given society, be it capitalists or workers. Tax-funded programs in socialism aren't not socialist because a worker government is still socialist. It isn't about "true socialism," it's about understanding how the class struggle actually operates.

    A useful comparison is the inverse of welfare under capitalism, which is private ownership under socialism. China is a good example, which has private ownership for non-critical secondary industries. It uses this marketization to help build up the productive forces to a level where planned economy can more effectively take over. This isn't a "capitalist sector" in the truest sense, it exists explicitly to build up higher forms of socialism.

    You cannot cut a part of a whole system out and individually judge it in a vacuum. The necessary context that it exists in must be understood.

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