CDR: Re: would it be so much to ask..

Ken Brown k.brown at ccs.bbk.ac.uk
Fri Sep 22 06:23:18 PDT 2000



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 :-)





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