Jim Choate wrote:
Yep, http://www.inet-one.com/cypherpunks/dir.98.10.12-98.10.18/msg00019.html has a rant about Rosa Luxemburg and various people redefining the word "socialism" so that it included only ideas they didn't like & excluded ones they did. It was a sort of reply to a thread started by Jim Choate:
Since I was mentioned in passing, socialism (at least the way I use it) is the central management of resources and people without private ownership. Facism is the central management of resources and people with private ownership (of course if you don't manage it the way they want they do take it away - so it does have a 're-definition' of ownership).
The trouble with that use of the words (though it is the most common one on this list I guess) is that it defines just about every nation-state that ever existed as "fascist" including the so-called capitalist countries: "if you don't manage it the way they want they do take it away" is more or less the situation in western Europe and North America right now. (Can anyone say "consent order"?) So we end up with words that don't really distinguish between the very different situations of say, the USA, & the old USSR, & Spain under Franco. Also of course most people who call themselves "socialists" (at least in Western Europe) say they don't want centralised state control of everything. You might say that socialism inevitably leads to an authoritarian Russian-style state (though if you did you couldn't use Russia as an example because it already had one of those before the revolution) but that's a different argument - you would be saying that all socialists are either deluded or lying, not (as you seem to be saying at the moment) that all governments are socialists. Now lots of socialists claim you can have socialism without authoritarian state - though of course no-one has demonstrated that on a large scale yet & I don't have a road map to get us from here to there. But then, you can't have capitalism (on a large scale) without some form of state either, because it depends on ownership that is defined by laws backed up by the threat of force. It seems much easier to me to define socialism in opposition to capitalism. So capitalism is just an economic condition in which the suppliers of capital (banks, shareholders, landlords, governments, whatever) control productive enterprises. And socialism is the condition in which some other part of society controls enterprises - whether state governments or local governments or direct democracy or some non-state community or whatever. Using this sort of definition, on a small scale, socialism and capitalism are difficult to tell apart... a family-owned farm could fairly be described as either (private ownership equals worker's control if there are no landlords, shareholders, governments, or banks involved). And the word "fascism" is best used to describe the sort of nationalist authoritarian politics that went on in Italy and Spain in the 20th century. It could be compatible with either capitalism or (state) socialism.
Oh well, another of those COTUS half-baked rants...
A very interesting document, but not of any legal force in the 95% or the world outside the USA :-)