No, socialism is when the government controls the means of production. Regulating how capitalism functions or providing social programs is not “socialism,” and it isn’t helpful to conflate these buffers against capitalism with actual socialism.
"The Jewish nigger Lassalle….It is now completely clear to me, that, as proven by the shape of his head and the growth of his hair, he stems from the Negroes who joined the march of Moses out of Egypt (if his mother or grandmother on his father’s side did not mate with a nigger). Now this combination of Jewry and Germanism with the negroid basic substance must bring forth a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like.
Marx's conception of Capitalism as a mechanistic system was not only his life's work, it was also his greatest error.
Capitalism is not a mathematical structure, an abstract system, a platonic form, a physical model "but with people, too." To think of capitalism in such terms is an error of kind, a category error. Capitalism is not system, capitalism is an apologia, a defense of a political economy.
Adam Smith was the first to articulate this defense at length. He defended the vastly inegalitarian political economy of his day (from which he benefited tremendously) using the principles he had laid out previously in his most important work, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments." The defense said that as long as everyone behaved correctly, the people at the bottom of the deeply inegalitarian political economy would benefit along with those at its top.
That's all Capitalism is-- an excuse.
Once you have shaken off the burden of Marx's fundamentally incorrect framing, it becomes suddenly clear why capitalism doesn't seem to die, why it comes right back again time after time, through war and stock market crash and every other sort of capitalism.
No matter what we do, we continue to build and maintain societies with vastly inegalitarian political economies. And as long as we keep doing that, we will keep excusing them. It does not matter how different these political economies might be, we seem to find it very easy to adapt Smith's apologia to each of them.
This says nothing about Socialism, but Marx rather famously never said anything about Socialism, either-- he left it to Lenin (and others) to figure out what sort of political economy should be used after his imaginary structure underwent the imaginary collapse he imageined for it.
What it does, do, however, is free us from the burden of struggling to shoehorn political economies as wildly different as those of, say, Singapore, Sweden, and Somalia into this would-be universal framework called "Capitalism." Free of the burden of Marx, we can see that there is no such framework, and that these are all distinct political economies. We can now start to re-analyze them, using the fundamental questions we have left alone for too long:
"What are the rules of the game in this particular political economy? Who gets what, and how?" "What happens when someone breaks the rules in this system?" "What are the consequences of these rules, if they play out undisturbed for a while?" "Who can change the rules, when necessary?"
But seriously - it would be interesting to know the origin of the phrase "state ownership of the means of production": the standard definition of socialism in internet discourse (except in the "that's why they nazis were leftists" shtick) . Is is actually a quote from Marx?
@2 Mudede is saying that the core prediction made by Marx was that Capitalism as he understood it in the 19th century was unstable. And would therefore have to change to a more stable state. And he called that transformed state socialism. So Mudede's saying that if you broaden the definition of "socialism" from that doctrinaire definition, Marx was in some way right. Its sounds a bit trivial stripped down that far, but Charles isn't submitting it as a phd dissertation.
Marx was wrong in his framing of the whole question, though. The Modernist folly (of which Marx is a prime example) was the notion that there were steady states in history.
@11 Yes, Feebles, "it's useless to fight the political economy I am excusing" is also a very useful and common piece of the excuse.
Look, there are shelves upon shelves of book-length variations of the apologia available. It would probably save you a lot of effort to just link to one or two on Amazon, rather than try to repeat the whole exercise yourself, one anonymous SLOG comment at a time.
The idea that "Capitalism" is any sort of abstractable system at all is the core of Marxism, not the core of Capitalism.
Banks and corporations and other economic entities are defined by the political system. They can't exist without it. There is no "market" without a politically determined definition of property and rules that distinguish legal trade from theft or fraud. Each political economy has its own rules, and small differences in rules can have large differences in outcomes. it makes no sense at all to attempt to analyze widely diverse political economies as if they were all instantiations of a single framework.
But you can't begin to think clearly about any of that until you've rid yourself of the core Marxist conceit: the false conception of capitalism as an abstract clockwork system.
@7, I feel like there’s a deficiency of language here. The “socialism” that is being described here then needs a new word, to be more precise and for political reasons. The US has absolutely softened the edge of capitalism over the years. People love their Medicare, but they can be convinced to give it up if properly framed as the anti-capitalism.
@15 Black markets are defined by legal structures. The legal structure is what decides the market is "black" or not. Black markets can not be described without reference to politics.
There are no political economies in which political and economic power are separated. Economic power (even if we define it narrowly to simply mean "accumulated wealth") can not exist outside the political rules that define property and legitimate exchange. This is true in every political economy, regardless of whether its critics or apologists describe it as "capitalist," "socialist," or anything else. This is why the field of inquiry was originally named "political economy," not "economics."
All you are saying is that you prefer political economies in which there is some meaningful (if slight) distinction between the wealthy and the holders of political office (which is distinct from political power, let's not forget-- an officeholder or the office itself can be politically weak, and a person with no political office can be politically powerful). This has nothing to do with whether a political economy's critics or apologists describe it as "capitalist."
@18 Discovers harder working, more competent cavemen get warmer, dryer caves, better mates and healthier offspring.
Instead of improving their competency though ("Get skillz, yo!"), envious caveman goes to Hempfest and blames "capitalism", "patriarchy", "cisheteropatriarchy" etc etc.
@19 You're flagging, Feebles. You keep digging in the same spot over and over again, and don't understand why you aren't finding any nuts. Go get some rest, and start over from the top after your nap.
@23 That's a pretty banal distinction, though, isn't it? Pretty much every political economy has some resources controlled directly by the state, and other resources controlled indirectly by the state via definitions, rules of legitimate exchange, taxation, etc etc.
Different political economies are all over the place in the different ways they handle various resources. It has nothing to do with whether their critics or apologists describe them as "capitalist."
It seems to me like you very much want "capitalism" to describe some particular set of features in a political economy, but are having trouble figuring out why you can't seem to enumerate them.
The reason is simple: capitalism isn't a set of system features, that conception of capitalism is the central Marxist fallacy. Capitalism is an apologia applied to many political economies with all sorts of different characteristics.
You know who has caused the most death and destruction in the world in the past 100 years?
Intellectuals. It’s why calling someone “French educated” is an epithet. Particularly those who studied and attempted to deploy Marxist theory. Capitalists are why you live so well today compared to 1800.
Robotslave & Ken Mehlman,
This is an excellent discussion. Nice to read Sloggers engaged in spirited, civil and informed debate.
Keep up the good work.
@29 So prior to Deng, it wouldn't have occurred to you to describe China's political economy as "capitalist," but now you insist on it.
And what has changed is that the rules of China's political economy have been altered to create (or perhaps re-legitimize, if we look back into Chinese history before Mao) upper classes vastly better off than the rest of the participants in that political economy.
The difference is that there is now a vastly inegalitarian stratification that needs to be excused. There was no need to excuse China's political economy as "capitalist" prior to Deng, because social systemic inequality was not so great as to need an apology (there was political inequality, as you note, but this is true in every political economy except anarchism, which is systemically unstable even in the short term).
China's political structure is still strictly and explicitly Marxist/Leninist, i.e., Communist. Marx is still the central text of the CPC, and their single-party rule remains secure. The party still has direct control over much of the economy; executives from the top to four levels down in most large "private" companies (including all banks) are hand picked by the party, not the board of directors or the executive suite.
And yet many critics and apologists now feel a deep need to describe China's political economy as "capitalist."
This alone should tell you that "Marxism" and "Capitalism" aren't in opposition. And the reason they're not in opposition is that they're not the same kind of thing, that they're categorically different. Marxism is a critique of an idealized, abstract model of an imaginary economic system, with the conceit that this formalized fiction is "capitalism." But capitalism is something else, a different category of thing. Capitalism is an apology for political economies that create or preserve vast social inequalities, on the grounds that the lower classes benefit, at least somewhat, along with the upper.
The reason China is now called 'capitalist,' despite its clearly and explicitly Communist politics, is that it has recently produced social stratification wherein upper social classes vastly better off than lower social classes. And that inequality needs an excuse.
"it has recently produced social stratification wherein upper social classes vastly better off than lower social classes"
Yes, instead of everyone being poor (Marxism), they now have rich people AND (wait for it) 700 million newly minted middle class people created in just the last 30 years. The greatest rise in wealth and prosperity ever witnessed in human history.
Turns out trying to create "equality" only creates misery.
@31 My only complaint with the word "capitalism" is that most people don't understand where it comes from, and have never given much thought as to why it's simultaneously so hugely contentious and so poorly defined.
"The Theory of Moral Sentiments" is Adam Smith's most important work; "The Wealth of Nations" is just an extended apologia rooted in that theory. It was Marx who made the error of conceptualizing capitalism as an abstract clockwork model, like a theory of physics, and everyone since has been suffering from that fundamental conceptual error, be they pro-Marx or anti-.
This is why you can't figure out how to define capitalism in our debate here-- you want it to be some particular aspect or set of features of a system, but every time you try to articulate that aspect, you can't quite get your thumb on it.
Most anti-Marxists naturally reject capitalism as described by Marx. I go a step further, and suggest that capitalism isn't even in the same category as what Marx describes. This does not mean I think the term is meaningless or useless.
Capitalism is an apologia. Sometimes it's applied to political economies where the lower classes are in fact benefiting, sometimes not, but there is always a large systemic inequality that the apology is meant to justify. You have to understand this before you can start to ask why some political economies exacerbate inequality and some seemingly quite similar ones mitigate it, or why some elevate the lower classes while similar others suppress an underclass.
"Lassaiz-faire" is a useful term for underregulation, and at this point in history, at least, connotes the consequences.
"Economic liberalization" is meaningless, it's applied to too many very different sets of rule-changes in political economies. Terms that at least describe a constrained set of broadly-described rule changes, like "Washington consensus" are a little better.
Some seemingly small rule changes (e.g. changing top marginal tax rate by 4%) can have much bigger effects than seemingly large rule changes (e.g. nationalizing or privatizing certain resources or enterprises-- some matter, some don't). If we want to analyze a political economy today, we need to look at the particulars of the rules and the context in which they apply, and the outcomes observed when these play out over time, or when they change. Ricardo, Malthus, Mill, and other early philosophers of political economy were all working in this vein, until Marx came along and penned his enormous red herring.
@32 Just go back to bed, Feebs. You're still digging at that old empty hole of yours.
"Orthodox economists say that value is determined by the desirability of a commodity; Marx says it is determined by the labor that went into it, and how that labor was compensated. Which of these theories is close to reality?"
From a descriptive perspective, orthodox economists are right and Marx (and Engels) are wrong.
As to what Frum is going on about? I think, he's referring to Trump viewing global trade (here between two countries) as a zero sum game that must create one winner and one loser. That's not an orthodox capitalist position, because the capitalist would believe that trade creates two winners and no losers. If one side was losing they would stop trading.
That doesn't really make Trump a "Marxist," but I doubt Frum cares about the accuracy of the phrase. He's just pointing out that what Trump believes about trade is outside of the capitalist mainstream. It's hostile to the concept of mutually beneficial exchange being the norm.
Calling him a Marxist is maybe at best a hammy analogy. Obviously an orthodox capitalist's view of mutually beneficial exchange also applies when one person exchanges hours of their labor for someone else's money. Like we do when we have jobs. Marx wasn't a big believer in the "two winners" theory in that case. So you can kind of see where he's going with it.
No, socialism is when the government controls the means of production. Regulating how capitalism functions or providing social programs is not “socialism,” and it isn’t helpful to conflate these buffers against capitalism with actual socialism.
"The Jewish nigger Lassalle….It is now completely clear to me, that, as proven by the shape of his head and the growth of his hair, he stems from the Negroes who joined the march of Moses out of Egypt (if his mother or grandmother on his father’s side did not mate with a nigger). Now this combination of Jewry and Germanism with the negroid basic substance must bring forth a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like.
Letter to Friedrich Engels, July 30, 1862
God damn, Marx was woke AF!
I'd go to bat for you, Charles, and engage the feeble, knee-jerk reactions in 1-4, but I'm too stunned by your reference to enjoying The Doors.
Marx's conception of Capitalism as a mechanistic system was not only his life's work, it was also his greatest error.
Capitalism is not a mathematical structure, an abstract system, a platonic form, a physical model "but with people, too." To think of capitalism in such terms is an error of kind, a category error. Capitalism is not system, capitalism is an apologia, a defense of a political economy.
Adam Smith was the first to articulate this defense at length. He defended the vastly inegalitarian political economy of his day (from which he benefited tremendously) using the principles he had laid out previously in his most important work, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments." The defense said that as long as everyone behaved correctly, the people at the bottom of the deeply inegalitarian political economy would benefit along with those at its top.
That's all Capitalism is-- an excuse.
Once you have shaken off the burden of Marx's fundamentally incorrect framing, it becomes suddenly clear why capitalism doesn't seem to die, why it comes right back again time after time, through war and stock market crash and every other sort of capitalism.
No matter what we do, we continue to build and maintain societies with vastly inegalitarian political economies. And as long as we keep doing that, we will keep excusing them. It does not matter how different these political economies might be, we seem to find it very easy to adapt Smith's apologia to each of them.
This says nothing about Socialism, but Marx rather famously never said anything about Socialism, either-- he left it to Lenin (and others) to figure out what sort of political economy should be used after his imaginary structure underwent the imaginary collapse he imageined for it.
What it does, do, however, is free us from the burden of struggling to shoehorn political economies as wildly different as those of, say, Singapore, Sweden, and Somalia into this would-be universal framework called "Capitalism." Free of the burden of Marx, we can see that there is no such framework, and that these are all distinct political economies. We can now start to re-analyze them, using the fundamental questions we have left alone for too long:
"What are the rules of the game in this particular political economy? Who gets what, and how?" "What happens when someone breaks the rules in this system?" "What are the consequences of these rules, if they play out undisturbed for a while?" "Who can change the rules, when necessary?"
But seriously - it would be interesting to know the origin of the phrase "state ownership of the means of production": the standard definition of socialism in internet discourse (except in the "that's why they nazis were leftists" shtick) . Is is actually a quote from Marx?
@2 Mudede is saying that the core prediction made by Marx was that Capitalism as he understood it in the 19th century was unstable. And would therefore have to change to a more stable state. And he called that transformed state socialism. So Mudede's saying that if you broaden the definition of "socialism" from that doctrinaire definition, Marx was in some way right. Its sounds a bit trivial stripped down that far, but Charles isn't submitting it as a phd dissertation.
Marx was wrong in his framing of the whole question, though. The Modernist folly (of which Marx is a prime example) was the notion that there were steady states in history.
@6 "...stock market crash and every other sort of cataclysm," not "...every other sort of capitalism"
@6 Maybe capitalism keeps coming back because it’s the natural order.
@9 Yes, that's a very useful and thus common component of the excuse.
Fighting your nature never ends well. See also: deaths by collectivism in the 20th century.
@11 Yes, Feebles, "it's useless to fight the political economy I am excusing" is also a very useful and common piece of the excuse.
Look, there are shelves upon shelves of book-length variations of the apologia available. It would probably save you a lot of effort to just link to one or two on Amazon, rather than try to repeat the whole exercise yourself, one anonymous SLOG comment at a time.
@12 That's just the problem, though, isn't it?
The idea that "Capitalism" is any sort of abstractable system at all is the core of Marxism, not the core of Capitalism.
Banks and corporations and other economic entities are defined by the political system. They can't exist without it. There is no "market" without a politically determined definition of property and rules that distinguish legal trade from theft or fraud. Each political economy has its own rules, and small differences in rules can have large differences in outcomes. it makes no sense at all to attempt to analyze widely diverse political economies as if they were all instantiations of a single framework.
But you can't begin to think clearly about any of that until you've rid yourself of the core Marxist conceit: the false conception of capitalism as an abstract clockwork system.
@13 Closet case I see.
@7, I feel like there’s a deficiency of language here. The “socialism” that is being described here then needs a new word, to be more precise and for political reasons. The US has absolutely softened the edge of capitalism over the years. People love their Medicare, but they can be convinced to give it up if properly framed as the anti-capitalism.
@15 Black markets are defined by legal structures. The legal structure is what decides the market is "black" or not. Black markets can not be described without reference to politics.
There are no political economies in which political and economic power are separated. Economic power (even if we define it narrowly to simply mean "accumulated wealth") can not exist outside the political rules that define property and legitimate exchange. This is true in every political economy, regardless of whether its critics or apologists describe it as "capitalist," "socialist," or anything else. This is why the field of inquiry was originally named "political economy," not "economics."
All you are saying is that you prefer political economies in which there is some meaningful (if slight) distinction between the wealthy and the holders of political office (which is distinct from political power, let's not forget-- an officeholder or the office itself can be politically weak, and a person with no political office can be politically powerful). This has nothing to do with whether a political economy's critics or apologists describe it as "capitalist."
@18 Discovers harder working, more competent cavemen get warmer, dryer caves, better mates and healthier offspring.
Instead of improving their competency though ("Get skillz, yo!"), envious caveman goes to Hempfest and blames "capitalism", "patriarchy", "cisheteropatriarchy" etc etc.
@16 If that's how you want to describe a person who knows how to use a library, I'll take it.
@20 Free marketers use Amazon. Armchair socialists use the library.
@19 You're flagging, Feebles. You keep digging in the same spot over and over again, and don't understand why you aren't finding any nuts. Go get some rest, and start over from the top after your nap.
@23 That's a pretty banal distinction, though, isn't it? Pretty much every political economy has some resources controlled directly by the state, and other resources controlled indirectly by the state via definitions, rules of legitimate exchange, taxation, etc etc.
Different political economies are all over the place in the different ways they handle various resources. It has nothing to do with whether their critics or apologists describe them as "capitalist."
It seems to me like you very much want "capitalism" to describe some particular set of features in a political economy, but are having trouble figuring out why you can't seem to enumerate them.
The reason is simple: capitalism isn't a set of system features, that conception of capitalism is the central Marxist fallacy. Capitalism is an apologia applied to many political economies with all sorts of different characteristics.
You know who has caused the most death and destruction in the world in the past 100 years?
Intellectuals. It’s why calling someone “French educated” is an epithet. Particularly those who studied and attempted to deploy Marxist theory. Capitalists are why you live so well today compared to 1800.
Robotslave & Ken Mehlman,
This is an excellent discussion. Nice to read Sloggers engaged in spirited, civil and informed debate.
Keep up the good work.
@23 " I think state control of wealth versus control by non-state actors is an important distinction."
It isn't a distinction if oligarchs and corporations control the state, fuckwit.
@29 So prior to Deng, it wouldn't have occurred to you to describe China's political economy as "capitalist," but now you insist on it.
And what has changed is that the rules of China's political economy have been altered to create (or perhaps re-legitimize, if we look back into Chinese history before Mao) upper classes vastly better off than the rest of the participants in that political economy.
The difference is that there is now a vastly inegalitarian stratification that needs to be excused. There was no need to excuse China's political economy as "capitalist" prior to Deng, because social systemic inequality was not so great as to need an apology (there was political inequality, as you note, but this is true in every political economy except anarchism, which is systemically unstable even in the short term).
China's political structure is still strictly and explicitly Marxist/Leninist, i.e., Communist. Marx is still the central text of the CPC, and their single-party rule remains secure. The party still has direct control over much of the economy; executives from the top to four levels down in most large "private" companies (including all banks) are hand picked by the party, not the board of directors or the executive suite.
And yet many critics and apologists now feel a deep need to describe China's political economy as "capitalist."
This alone should tell you that "Marxism" and "Capitalism" aren't in opposition. And the reason they're not in opposition is that they're not the same kind of thing, that they're categorically different. Marxism is a critique of an idealized, abstract model of an imaginary economic system, with the conceit that this formalized fiction is "capitalism." But capitalism is something else, a different category of thing. Capitalism is an apology for political economies that create or preserve vast social inequalities, on the grounds that the lower classes benefit, at least somewhat, along with the upper.
The reason China is now called 'capitalist,' despite its clearly and explicitly Communist politics, is that it has recently produced social stratification wherein upper social classes vastly better off than lower social classes. And that inequality needs an excuse.
"it has recently produced social stratification wherein upper social classes vastly better off than lower social classes"
Yes, instead of everyone being poor (Marxism), they now have rich people AND (wait for it) 700 million newly minted middle class people created in just the last 30 years. The greatest rise in wealth and prosperity ever witnessed in human history.
Turns out trying to create "equality" only creates misery.
@31 My only complaint with the word "capitalism" is that most people don't understand where it comes from, and have never given much thought as to why it's simultaneously so hugely contentious and so poorly defined.
"The Theory of Moral Sentiments" is Adam Smith's most important work; "The Wealth of Nations" is just an extended apologia rooted in that theory. It was Marx who made the error of conceptualizing capitalism as an abstract clockwork model, like a theory of physics, and everyone since has been suffering from that fundamental conceptual error, be they pro-Marx or anti-.
This is why you can't figure out how to define capitalism in our debate here-- you want it to be some particular aspect or set of features of a system, but every time you try to articulate that aspect, you can't quite get your thumb on it.
Most anti-Marxists naturally reject capitalism as described by Marx. I go a step further, and suggest that capitalism isn't even in the same category as what Marx describes. This does not mean I think the term is meaningless or useless.
Capitalism is an apologia. Sometimes it's applied to political economies where the lower classes are in fact benefiting, sometimes not, but there is always a large systemic inequality that the apology is meant to justify. You have to understand this before you can start to ask why some political economies exacerbate inequality and some seemingly quite similar ones mitigate it, or why some elevate the lower classes while similar others suppress an underclass.
"Lassaiz-faire" is a useful term for underregulation, and at this point in history, at least, connotes the consequences.
"Economic liberalization" is meaningless, it's applied to too many very different sets of rule-changes in political economies. Terms that at least describe a constrained set of broadly-described rule changes, like "Washington consensus" are a little better.
Some seemingly small rule changes (e.g. changing top marginal tax rate by 4%) can have much bigger effects than seemingly large rule changes (e.g. nationalizing or privatizing certain resources or enterprises-- some matter, some don't). If we want to analyze a political economy today, we need to look at the particulars of the rules and the context in which they apply, and the outcomes observed when these play out over time, or when they change. Ricardo, Malthus, Mill, and other early philosophers of political economy were all working in this vein, until Marx came along and penned his enormous red herring.
@32 Just go back to bed, Feebs. You're still digging at that old empty hole of yours.
See, this is what Marxists and Engelists get wrong about Capitalism.
Capitalism itself describes Socialism. It's just called Mercantalism, or Welfare for Corporations and the Rich.
(sigh)
And China itself is a classic version of Mercantalism, or one party Monopoly.
"Orthodox economists say that value is determined by the desirability of a commodity; Marx says it is determined by the labor that went into it, and how that labor was compensated. Which of these theories is close to reality?"
From a descriptive perspective, orthodox economists are right and Marx (and Engels) are wrong.
As to what Frum is going on about? I think, he's referring to Trump viewing global trade (here between two countries) as a zero sum game that must create one winner and one loser. That's not an orthodox capitalist position, because the capitalist would believe that trade creates two winners and no losers. If one side was losing they would stop trading.
That doesn't really make Trump a "Marxist," but I doubt Frum cares about the accuracy of the phrase. He's just pointing out that what Trump believes about trade is outside of the capitalist mainstream. It's hostile to the concept of mutually beneficial exchange being the norm.
Calling him a Marxist is maybe at best a hammy analogy. Obviously an orthodox capitalist's view of mutually beneficial exchange also applies when one person exchanges hours of their labor for someone else's money. Like we do when we have jobs. Marx wasn't a big believer in the "two winners" theory in that case. So you can kind of see where he's going with it.