Hello everybody and welcome back to ideology explained, today we are talking about socialism.
And much like with anarchism this is a very broad topic so I will only go over the basics.
All of the ideologies I mention here eventually deserve their own videos so please don’t
be angry with me for not mentioning every single one in detail.
Very basically socialism can be summed up as a system in which the means of production
are owned by the community or by the workers.
That meets practically all definitions I am aware of.
There are two main parts to socialism, that being the economic and the political part.
We’ll start with the economics.
Basically, socialism requires the workers to own the means of production.
You may now be asking: “what is a means of production?”.
And I would tell you: Good question.
The means of production are the things you need to use, to be able to do your job.
That can be a camera if you are a photographer, industrial machinery if you work in the heavy
industry or a computer that can run editing software if you’re a youtuber.
In most cases nowadays people don’t own their own means of production themselves and
instead use the means of production of an employer.
The idea behind socialism is that those means of production dictate much about your life
so you should have a say in how they are run and not just have to listen to someone else
who happens to own them for now.
For example I 100% control the means I used to create this video.
But when I worked in the heavy industry I had no control what so ever about how the
company would be run despite the fact that I very much had a stake in that because how
well the boss managed the factory dictated how much I and my colleagues had to work overtime
to keep the company afloat.
So under socialism everyone is supposed to have a say in how their workplace is run.
That’s all socialism means.
People having a say in how their means of production are managed.
This can be achieved in many different ways.
There are worker co-operatives which democratically decide what to do, these are most commonly
supported nowadays, there are union run workplaces which is more of a syndicalist thing and the
classical one which most nowadays see as antiquated is state control over the means of production.
That system is then called state socialism.
The logic behind that is that the state, which ideally is democratic represents the working
class and therefore the state owning the means of production equals the workers owning the
means of production.
Many modern socialists oppose this because it doesn’t change much in the life of the
average worker.
And some even go as far as to say that’s why the soviet union failed.
Nowadays you’ll tend to see people support worker co-ops instead.
This, by definition, is all that socialism is.
And because of that we can also learn what isn’t socialism.
For example, fascism, aka national socialism, as they called it rather deceptively, it is
not socialism because it does not and did not give the workers the means of production,
the nazis actually privatized like crazy.
I am not sure who or why started this myth that the nazis were socialists but it’s
wrong in every way.
And furthermore, someone giving you free healthcare is not socialism either, because it does not
change who owns the means of production.
No, sanders is not a socialist.
Not if you use the word correctly and in the way socialists themselves use it.
So far I’ve left out the distinction between a system of production and a system of distribution
so let’s make that distinction now.
A system of production is a part of an economic system that dictates how things are produced,
for example in capitalism things are produced by privately owned businesses while in socialism
it’s worker controlled businesses.
But the conditions in which things are produced have no influence on how they are distributed,
that’s the job of the system of distribution.
When speaking about capitalism we usually mean free market capitalism.
That is capitalism for production and a free market for distribution.
There are other systems of distribution like a centrally planned economy, a decentrally
planned economy or an AI planned economy, all of which I’ve made videos about already.
And crucially, because socialism is not a system of distribution but of production,
you can pair it with any system of distribution.
You can have centrally planned socialism, you can have decentrally planned socialism
and you can have market socialism.
All of those are possible and supported by different people.
Historically only centrally planned socialism has seen any wide-scale use, despite the fact
that most modern socialists don’t like it.
So please be aware that when someone calls themselves socialists they aren’t usually
talking about the historic socialism of the soviet union and such.
Because the soviet union had state ownership over the means of production as well as a
centrally planned economy which most socialists nowadays disagree with.
I said I would talk about socialism as a political system as well.
And that is a tough question because what a socialist government is, is even harder
to pin point than what a socialist economy is.
I can tell you what isn’t.
Voting for a self proclaimed socialist in a capitalist democracy does not turn the government
into a socialist one.
According to Marx socialism was the stepping stone towards communism, and would be a so
called dictatorship of the proletariat which is very badly named because it’s not about
a literal dictatorship.
It’s about exclusive rule of the proletariat.
And if you want to know what that means, watch my video on Marxism.
There are of course different ways this can be achieved, for example excluding the bourgeoisie
aka the capitalists from democracy could be one way this could be achieved.
But you could also abolish states all together and create socialist communes.
From democracy to actual dictatorships, everything could be considered some form of socialism
depending on what definition you want to listen to.
Really socialism as a political system is not a thing that is defined.
It’s so broad as to be close to meaningless, socialism is primarily an economic system,
not a political one so anyone can interpret anything into that and it’s usually not
helpful to think about a government as a socialist one since that can mean anything.
You can call the soviet government socialist, you can call the Norwegian one socialist,
you can call the English government socialist and you can call the American government socialist.
The problem is that nobody really knows what that would mean anyways much like if you called
them capitalist governments.
My advice is, don’t use the word socialist to describe a government, use it to describe
an economy, because that’s what it’s there for.
So, now you hopefully have a better understanding of what people mean when they say they are
socialists.
Thanks for watching C YA Thanks to my patrons for giving me money and
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