Clickbait title in response to this dunk tank thread from today
The comments contain snark due to the comm they are in, so I wanted a more serious post on what Hexbears think about the question.
While in specific contexts it may be useful to define socialism one way or another, or to identify empirically how the average person understands the word socialism, it is in general a waste of time, if not entirely misguided for leftists attempt a universal definition of socialism.
Most of us have heard the famous excerpt from German Ideology:
”Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
It is worth taking a moment, even if you have read it before, to reflect on what Marx says here. One may read it as mere emphasis, a shift in focus away from static definitions and toward progress.
But it is more than emphasis. The point is that communism — which Marx tended to use synonymously with socialism although Lenin later drew a harder line — does not need defining, because it is not an abstract thing but a concrete process.
Socialism is defined by what it negates (productively, as in Hegelian sublation). Socialism has no universal definition because a socialist movement does not negate capitalism in the abstract, but a real historical capitalist society, in a real time and place. It is a dialectical process in which the contradictions within a determined and concrete present state give rise to a new, as yet indeterminate state, whose determination depends on the historical events yet to unfold.
It is true that socialists generally fight for worker ownership of the means of production. Marxists, however, are not deluded into believing they can make this happen through force of will alone. It must happen through this dialectical process. Humans may be determined by their material conditions, but humans also possess the ability to change their material conditions, through revolution:
”The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”
If socialism were to have a universal definition, it would be the productive negation of a particular capitalist reality, peculiar to the time and place in which it occurs.
Avoid dogma, avoid definitions. It is what Marx would have wanted. He told me.
Could we say that socialism will have a concrete definition, after it has negated capitalist reality?
No, as that would only hold for the time and place of capitalism that it negated.
The materialist view places primacy on material reality, with concepts/ideas/abstractions existing only secondarily, as a subjective human categorization of the existing material things.
Socialism is an idea, it does not have reality or definition outside of a given conceptual framework. Whether someone decides a state like China or Cuba deserves the label socialist has no effect on the material reality of that state. There is not one "correct" definition which can be verified against some actually existing abstract object. You can only say a state is socialist per the mainstream usage of the word, which will differ from communists' usage, which will differ from fascists' usage. Definitions are not static or universal because concepts are not.
The folks on that lemmy.world thread want to impose an absolute, static definition of socialism regardless of how self-identifying socialists understand socialism, because the lemmy.worlders have their own political reasons to define socialism in a particular way. As for the self-identifying leftists who also try to do the same thing, all I can say is it's unfortunate because it implies they are still thinking in idealist terms, which means they most likely have a dogmatic approach to leftism in general, which hasn't been great historically e.g. ultraleftists and Trotskyists (not trying to be sectarian here, I think it's objectively true that those groups have not worked well with other leftist revolutionaries).
Great post, now you just gotta spread this to everybody that distils the definition of socialism down to just simply workers owning the means of production and communism is stateless classless moneyless society with 0 idea of the path to take to get there or how it would function
