What Is Socialism? (2020) | Hacker News Reader

What Is Socialism? (2020)

learn.robinhood.com

12 pointsAndrewBissell31 comments

Note: this article is currently getting dunked on social media for blatant historical factual errors, particularly "examples of socialist countries include Nazi Germany".

EDIT: Article was just deleted.

Their "What Is Communism?" is pretty funny too: https://learn.robinhood.com/articles/2VvHAZzhmlzTgx2KYKMZcI/...

Your comment is the only reason I even clicked the link (that, and idle curiosity of why Robinhood is posting links about economic systems). It strikes me as a high school term paper about socialism where someone got confused while they were copying-and-pasting from Wikipedia. Soviet Union was socialist? Mmm, I guess on some technicality, but I'm pretty sure they were the poster child (at least for posters produced in the U. S.) for communism.

And the only fleshed-out example is Venezuela? Not more positive examples like, say, UK or France that could be argued to have at least some socialist elements to their governance? Anyway, I'm arguing with something that probably came from a content farm somewhere, best get back to fixing that bug.

Nazi is short for National Socialism??

Socialists deny any connection here because of optics concerns, of course; but considering the number of people killed by the USSR, they should probably just find new branding altogether.

They called themselves that because the Nazis were, in large part, a reaction against the threat of communism. It was becoming scarily popular, and what better way to pre-empt the revolution than become an early, sorta-kinda-but-not-really incarnation of it?

As in: "yeah sure socialism is good but OUR kind, not that kind".

Ah yes, the famous beacon of democracy that is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea

It is alleged that a journalist asked Abraham Lincoln why he didn't just declare the slaves free and be done with it.

"If I called a lamb's tail a 'leg', how many legs would that lamb have?"

"Five."

"Four. Calling a 'tail' a 'leg' doesn't make it so."

Probably-not-true anecdotes aside, National Socialism might have had elements of socialism to it, but best I can read, it wasn't anything like the primary plank of the platform. I think sibling comment's explanation of a reaction to the Communism(tm) at their door might be most reasonable to explain the naming.

I think a lot of the confusion is around the difference between the party rhetoric, and the party actions.

Rhetorically, the Nazis in large part did rise to power on the basis of socialist rhetoric. They did claim to be socialists, supporting socialist policies. This is how they obtained votes.

In practice, not so much - and of course it turned into fascism.

For many, the salient point regarding the Nazi party is that people believed they were voting socialist, even if this was not the system implemented in practice.

They also famously brutalised, arrested, and exiled actual socialists (and other leftists) from pretty much the moment they came into power.

Heck, Dachau (yes, that Dachau) - established 1933 - was initially intended to hold leftist political prisoners.

When people cry "First they came for the socialists" when they feel their rights are being violated (or are on some slippery slope to being so), do they actually ever stop to think of what they are saying?

Is that somehow different from how Real Socialists brutalized, arrested, and exiled people they didn't like?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago

Literally no relation whatsoever to my point, but I guess it's not a discussion about Nazis without weird whataboutism instead of engaging with what was actually said.

What other point did you have? I don't seem to get it from your parent comment... unless you posted somewhere else or have two accounts?

How can this be considered whataboutism when it's the exact same thing in different clothing?

Imagine that you were discussing Nazi Germany's relations with Belgium during the second world war with someone, and were making the argument that clearly the Third Reich and Belgium were in opposition (considering little things like Hitler invading the country, or the resistance from Belgians during its occupation). Imagine that I then showed up with the absolutely stellar retort of "Is that somehow different from how Belgium invaded and occupied people they didn't like?", linking to the country's imperial/colonial history in Congo that resulted in the deaths of millions of people.

Do you understand how that could be seen as rather obnoxious whataboutism that's both entirely irrelevant to the discussion actually being had and misses the point by a mile?

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Karma is a bitch.

There have been thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of invasions, and probably hundreds of genocides in the last 10,000 years.

We've forgotten about this in modern times because the big bad US "takes care" of us with their aircraft carriers, but the time may come where our fate more closely resembles Syria and other places that the US doesn't favor.

Criticizing a country for invading is a bit hypocritical imo, since every country border that exists de facto exists because it's government conquered that land.

Or is this like the housing situation in San Francisco? "Fuck you, got mine".

Sure. It's common and expected for political mistreatment to include branches of a similar ideology. This is perhaps best illustrated by the concept of "der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen," or the narcissism of small differences.

Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20210129191423/https://learn.rob...

Oof. One hand must not be talking to the other at Robinhood. The timing of this article is abysmal.

It says it was last updated in October 2020. But thanks for pointing out that some might be confused, I just added the year to the headline.

Whoops, missed that!

The debates about what counts as socialism and what counts as capitalism are really unproductive, because people are engaging in redefinition wars, just as we've seen with modern activist redefinitions of other terms. I think it is more useful to talk about specific elements of capitalist or socialist governance and then map those to the countries that feature those elements. This way we can speak more precisely about things like tax policies, free market competition, safety nets, etc. in isolation rather than wage a broad war of labels and fearmongering.

With that in mind, I think in the US what a lot of politicians on the left are advocating for when they preach socialism is not so much socialism, but transferism: https://fee.org/articles/transferism-not-socialism-is-the-dr...

> Transferism is a system in which one group of people forces a second group to pay for things that the people believe they, or some third group, should have. Transferism isn’t about controlling the means of production. It is about the forced redistribution of what’s produced.

Completely agree, Socialism is a very broad church, some interpretations are more hardline than others.

I've never heard of the term "transferism", it's quite a peculiar thing.

I can't not see all of the progressive taxes, heck, even percentage taxes, as manifestations of the same thing: basically, higher earners provide more money into the shared pool for everybody to use (I am ignoring all the tax loopholes used by richer folks for the sake of discussion).

Sure, I don't think compensation between jobs should differ that much, but we are basically going the roundabout way in trying to equalize them.

As such, it seems that everything (like percentage taxes vs "fixed fee") is "transferism" according to the quote you give, thus the value of the terminology is somewhat diminished.

A decade ago in secondary school I learned of capitalism as an economic system where [the vast majority of] the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit through the purchase of labour, and of socialism as a broad umbrella term for economic systems where the means of production are socially owned (and that there are various kinds of social ownership) and self-managed by labour itself. As far as I am aware these are the definitions that have been in play for the century and a half or so that the theories have even existed. In my experience they only get weird redefinitions (such as socialism apparently being "whenever the government does something") in particularly polarised countries (cough the US cough). Sure, people arguing from ignorance or disingenuity are technically having a debate, but why on earth is everyone listening to them?

Beyond that, speaking more precisely about tax policies (statism), free market competition (market economics, laissez-faire) and safety nets (social welfare) is an endeavour all societies should partake in, sure. But it's also orthogonal to the axis of capitalism vs socialism. Having a higher marginal tax rate, regulating markets, and/or implementing a welfare state doesn't magically remove the private ownership from a capitalist system. Similarly, charging no taxes (or even not having a state at all), operating a free market and/or not having a social security system wouldn't make a system that runs on social ownership any less socialist.

It's like attempting to resolve a debate between functional programming and OOP by saying we should focus on specific elements of the two so that we can speak more precisely about things like static/dynamic typing instead. That does not answer the original question at all.

> It is about the forced redistribution of what’s produced.

That makes it sound like all taxes should be voluntary. Even most libertarian's believe in some kind of "FORCED" tax for an army.

I would argue most -isms are academic and the world is much less binary and they're thrown out to create some kind of dividing line. Some extreme version of the -ism on one side and the completely rational justified version of sanity on my (groups) side.

so vote for my group or send my group money to fight the other group.

In the US, socialism is a pejorative term arbitrarily applied to some government services, but not to others. For instance, if the government pays doctors or social workers, that is socialism, but if it pays police or soldiers, that is not socialism. And if the government pays corporations when they encounter financial difficulty, that is not socialism, but if it pays individuals, that is socialism.

It isn't arbitrary. Services favored by the Republican Party aren't considered socialist (because they're the ones employing the pejorative,) whereas services favored by the Democrats are.

archive.org link - https://web.archive.org/web/20210129191423/https://learn.rob...

And for the “what is communism” article referred to below:

https://web.archive.org/web/20201021210843/https://learn.rob...

Under capitalism, each person is entitled to the wealth they create from their ...labor ...

Jesus Christ. Even Capitalism's biggest cheerleaders don't pretend that anyone is entitled to the wealth they create through their labour; most of them cheerfully acknowledge that the boss takes a cut of that wealth and that's how the whole thing works.

I mean, the back and forth arguments about the precise definitions of Capitalism and Socialism go round and round, but there are a few core precepts that seem to be pretty well agreed.

Yep. But, without the boss providing the capital with which labor can provide that wealth, there isn't much wealth to begin with, which makes that a dubious critique of capitalism, when there are way better ones (or at least ones of unsocialized, "Après moi, le déluge", American capitalism).

From my reading, GP comment was not critiquing capitalism, but the statement about where wealth resulting from the labour ends up.

And you start off with agreeing to it, so it's even more perplexing why do you see it as a critique?

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