I appreciate the write-up, thank you! I feel like a lot of this is semantic differences. I’ve always thought of socialism as any public funds used specifically to help citizens (e.g. social security, medicare, unemployment, UBI, etc) and Communism to be the public owning and running the means of production, and distributing goods thereof, and the stateless, classless, moneyless society to be the ideal utopia it aspired to (similar to Star Trek). From your comment, I see that what I call Communism, you call Socialism (which explains a lot of confusion from discussions in the past with self-described Communists I’ve known), and the nameless Star Trek post-scarcity system you would call Communism.
Do you think it is possible to slow-roll the transition peacefully, though? If, for example, instead of the government bailing out industries, they bought out industries on the cheap, slowly growing and monopolizing like Google or Amazon have? Or do you think the rich would simply block that from happening?
To answer your question, Marxists analyze the state as an extension of a given ruling class in society. In capitalism, that means the state is under the control of the capitalists. Capitalists would never allow their sole sources of plunder be gradually taken from them unless the state had supremacy over them and was under the control of the working class.
The PRC actually kinda does what you’re talking about, but they can only do this because they implemented a socialist system following a revolution. The commanding heights of the economy are overwhelmingly publicly owned, and the state exerts strong control over the medium firms as well. As these firms develop, they become easier to fold into the public sector, and thus are absorbed or more directly controlled.
I appreciate the write-up, thank you! I feel like a lot of this is semantic differences. I’ve always thought of socialism as any public funds used specifically to help citizens (e.g. social security, medicare, unemployment, UBI, etc) and Communism to be the public owning and running the means of production, and distributing goods thereof, and the stateless, classless, moneyless society to be the ideal utopia it aspired to (similar to Star Trek). From your comment, I see that what I call Communism, you call Socialism (which explains a lot of confusion from discussions in the past with self-described Communists I’ve known), and the nameless Star Trek post-scarcity system you would call Communism.
Do you think it is possible to slow-roll the transition peacefully, though? If, for example, instead of the government bailing out industries, they bought out industries on the cheap, slowly growing and monopolizing like Google or Amazon have? Or do you think the rich would simply block that from happening?
No problem!
To answer your question, Marxists analyze the state as an extension of a given ruling class in society. In capitalism, that means the state is under the control of the capitalists. Capitalists would never allow their sole sources of plunder be gradually taken from them unless the state had supremacy over them and was under the control of the working class.
The PRC actually kinda does what you’re talking about, but they can only do this because they implemented a socialist system following a revolution. The commanding heights of the economy are overwhelmingly publicly owned, and the state exerts strong control over the medium firms as well. As these firms develop, they become easier to fold into the public sector, and thus are absorbed or more directly controlled.