Socialism
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic and constructive discussion from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
A certain knowledge of socialism is expected, if you are new to/interested in socialism, please visit c/Socialism101 before participating here. Socialism101 will gladly help you by answering questions, providing resources etc.
Memes go in c/Lefty Memes
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, upvoting good contributions and downvoting those of low-quality!
Rules
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith discussion is enforced here.
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such,
as well as condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavour.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry.
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Xenial Xerus" when answering question 2)
6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
7. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Queerphobia
- Ableism
- Classism
- Rape or assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)
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I literally just paraphrased Marx's definition of that mode of production as seen in Critique of Gotha Programme, where he critiqued Lassallean utopian socialists who didn't know what they were fighting.
In this definition, socialist mode of production is when commodity production is abolished (which is the defining feature of capitalism) and replaced by producing for needs which is achieved via economic planning (since how else are you going to know how much to produce), value form is abolished meaning one cannot accumulate money/capital anymore, therefore ownership and class divisions it brings are also abolished since you can't extract surplus value anymore. The economic planning would also act as a regulator for work hours, meaning instead of working a set 8 hours every day a worker would have to work as long as it is socially necessary to fulfill all the needs, which would almost always be much shorter if you consider capitalist overproduction, inefficiencies and so on.
This was a major goal of communists and even some socialist reformists worldwide that wasn't historically achieved given how all of the revolutions happened in undeveloped countries (can't produce for needs if there's no factories to produce them) and failed to achieve internationalism (it's necessary, both for globalized cooperation for trade to build socialism and for defense against capitalist influences and aggression). Of course, after Stalin came along and shit all over this definition with his "socialism in one state" concept where the country started focusing on national interests in a way that wasn't different from capitalist states, that's when waters became muddied.
If you think this definition is invalid, what do you think socialism is then and how does it differ from capitalism?
It's a useless "definition." Commodity production doesn't have to be abolished for a mode of production to be called socialist. If that was true, no socialist experiment anywhere, at any time could be called socialist.
The abolition of commodity production might be an inevitable result of a socialist mode of production, but that hardly tells us anything about who it is that's doing the production and the who it is that is deciding what must be produced, does it? The who is important, don't you think?
And who will be doing the enforcing of this?
Blaming it all on Stalin isn't going to fly.
What is wrong with an understanding (I avoid the term "definition" like the plague) of socialism that actually offers the working class something?