Hacker News Reader

Comment by methodover | Hacker News Reader

Plenty is said about it, you may have not been paying attention.

Take some money from everyone who can afford it, and more from the rich than everyone else. Redistribute it into education, roads, healthcare, food, research, national defense, police, and other things that benefit society as a whole (including the rich).

You might want to do some research on what socialism actually means, because though it includes the above, it is not defined by the above. You can tax and spend that money on social (and other) services, while retaining a capitalist economy. Which is what we and every other developed nation does.

Socialism is state control of the means of production, which though it does happen with certain industries in some countries (usually energy related), it's pretty rare.

View on HN

I cannot see Trias11's original comment as it has been flagged to death, but based on the reactions to it, I'd like to offer some insight.

Whenever there is a post about CEO pay (or the success of any other wealthy individuals) the reaction from the socialists/progressives always leaves us non-socialists wondering if whether our left-leaning compatriots are motivated more by an envy of the rich than by compassion for the poor.

The truth is, I very much doubt that we actually know what CEO pay "should" be. Nor do we know how much taxes should be. People (especially the rich) are taxed a probably a higher rate than at any other point in history, and yet there are stills calls to make them pay their "fair share". How much is fair? If you don't have a good answer in mind then the escalation continues until the answer becomes "all of it" and then you get the liquidation of the kulaks.

I lived in socialist society for 30 yrs and I know what it means and what are the consequences for people.

What you learn about it by flipping TV remote and checking your favorite social media is not what you'll actually be getting at the end.

And it's not going to be pretty.

> I lived in socialist society for 30 yrs and I know what it means and what are the consequences for people.

The only organized societies (at a state level) that have called themselves “socialist” are Leninist or descendants of Leninism; Leninism was (viewed generously) an attempt to adapt Marxist Communism to bypass the necessary (in Marx’s view) development through mature capitalism on which the socialist society, the next stage in the evolution to the communist end-state. Part of that adaptation is moving the development of a broad-based educated distributed ruling class from a prerequisite to the socialist transition to something which was to be built afterwards, with a narrow educated and ideologically pure vanguard assuming authoritative direction of the movement in the interim.

Modern Western forms of socialism, whether rooted in or identifying as Marxist or not (and many of them are neither) almost never are ideologically rooted in Leninism—for which there is no need, even if it worked well in its motivating case, in the developed world—or its descendants (with the exception that some of the far fringes are Maoist, but they are just a fragment of the fringes) and tend particularly to strongly reject vanguardism and authoritarianism in favor of more robust development of the democratic institutions of liberal democratic states. Western socialism is a continuation of the long arc of change in developed Western economies since Marx first described capitalism, not a recreation of the Leninists rejection of development through capitalism.

Whether Leninism is genuinely a socialism is a matter of fairly heated debate among self-styled socialists, but it is very clearly a very different thing than modern Western socialism, and it'd outcomes have limited, if any, value in assessing the merits of modern Western socialisms.

So something that has really confused me lately — I thought socialism had a relatively strict definition. AOC for example claims the label socialist, but as far as I can tell she’s not actually taken any socialist policy positions. It feels more like she, and others, are reclaiming the label. Basically attempting to change the meaning to mean nothing more than a liberal welfare state.

Am I on the right track there or not so much?

> So something that has really confused me lately — I thought socialism had a relatively strict definition.

Very few terms that refer to current (as opposed to purely historical) movements or identity groups have single, universally accepted, strict definitions. That's true or “socialism”, it's true of “capitalism”, it's true of “Christianity”.

> AOC for example claims the label socialist, but as far as I can tell she’s not actually taken any socialist policy positions.

AOC is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, which recently left the Socialist International because it viewed the latter as having slipped too far to the right and abandoned socialism by endorsing what the DSA saw as neoliberal economic policies. So, the DSA is to the left, ideologically, of the main global organization of socialist parties and groups.

Now, the DSA is also very much an incrementalist organization that sees socialism as a long-range goal, favoring what could easily be seen as evolutionary socialism. And AOC is one of I think three socialists between both houses of Congress, so it's not like even if she was an “as fast as possible” socialist ideologically she’d achieve much by, say, tabling a resolution to amend the Constitution to abolish private property in the means of production.

> I thought socialism had a relatively strict definition.

It does. It is social ownership of the means of production. As a democratic socialist AOC believes in worker ownership and democratically controlled market entities. Accordingly, she is very pro-union and pro government jobs programs. The GND has many aspects of a socialist jobs program. Free trade and higher education is a socialist position as well as a welfare position. Medicare for all is socialized insurance. 70% marginal tax rate is a way to limit the concentration of individual wealth and market/political control and while it is not inherently socialist it is extremely consistent with socialist values.

Most of developed capitalist countries have effectively "medicare for all". Making it about "socialism" is basically redefining socialism to be anyplace which is not USA.

No, it is not. In practice all governments have capitalist and socialist aspects. Having a single socialist program does not define a country as socialist.

The UK has nationalized healthcare- doctors are literally employees of the government. It doesn't really get more socialist than that, but it's still just a single program. The government as a whole, and the country as a whole, leans significantly more towards liberal capitalism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com