this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Socialism is about the government playing a central role in the economy to ensure wealth and resources are distributed more fairly, rather than being concentrated in the hands of corporations or individuals. Socialism can still allow for private businesses and a market economy, but key industries and services are often publicly controlled to prevent excessive inequality.
"More fairly" means "more in a way that the said government sees fit"
Socialism is not about the government's size. Socialists, particularly Marxists, emphasize using the state and nationalization after proletarian revolution to reflect the working class' interests and build socialism, but the size of the state itself is not what makes something socialist, both because (1) socialists seek to eventually end the state itself once productive forces and consciousness are sufficiently advanced and (2) capitalist states can also have large governments, generally to serve the interests of the ruling class, albeit sometimes in a roundabout way.
That's state socialism, a specific kind of socialism that wants to keep the state apparatus, not realizing that it will always (re)create a ruling class. Different from Libertarian Socialism which unironically want a stateless society, not as a never to reach end goal.
This isn't true, unless you have a different conception of what "class" is from Marx and Marxists. The State is the only path to a stateless society, in that the state disappears once all property is publicly owned and planned, and thus the "state" whithers away, leaving government behind.
For Marx, the State is chiefly the instruments of government that reinforce class society, like Private Property Rights, not the entire government.
This is demonstrably false as first there were stateless societies and then states appeared. If anything, stateless society is a path to the State.
So the bolshevik state bureaucracy wasn't a new ruling class giving themselves privileges others didn't have?
In the Marxist notion of "class," no, they did not form a class. The State is an extension of the class in power, not a class in and of itself. In the Soviet Union, that class was the Proletariat.
Party members and Soviet officials did have privledges like higher pay, but in the Soviet Union this difference was only about 10 times between the richest and the poorest, unlike the 100s to 1000s or more in Tsarist Russia or the modern Russian Federation.
Soviet Union bureaucracy was not the proletariat, they didn't use the mop to produce commodities, so they didn't have proletarian class consciousness. Whatever interests they had, it was not working class interests. Lenin, Trotsky and Sverdlov were one nobleman and two petty bourgeoisie.
How would society handle critical functions such as water sanitation for millions of people without a state to enforce equitable share of the cost?
With a world wide net of councils, all connected but not centralized
“These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves.
This retains class, though. If your councils only have ownership of their own jurisdictions, then the members of each council are Petite Bourgeoisie. Marx specifically advocated for full centralization because chiefly it becomes a necessity anyways with increasingly complex production, but also because it gives more democratic control over the whole of the economy, not just individual bits.
So we have a factory council open to all workers in the factory to make decisions and send revocable delegates to the city council where they talk to the delegates of farmer councils, consumer councils, .... If the factory council makes unfair decisions (and I assume you mean all the workers in the factory belong to the petite bourgeois since they all can attend the council), the consumer council can take collective action to counter it.
So who is the ruling class? Certainly not the bureaucracy as in liberal and bolshevik states since it doesn't exist here. Or is it the city council? They are revocable, not elected for a given period. Like the soviets before the Bolsheviks ruined everything.
First off, bureaucracy is not a "class," the Socialist states like the USSR were controlled by the Proletariat. The formation is described in Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan, or you can check this infographic if you prefer:
Anyways, back to your question. In the instance of single-unit factory councils, it isn't so much as a "ruling class" as it is that these workers have control only within their immediate domain, and no real control outside of it. The Soviet model is different, it laddered upwards and extended equal ownership over all within it.
The Marxist critique of the cooperative model is that trade between these cooperatives will result in the resurgance of Capitalism, not the elimination of class society, as time goes on and some cooperatives swell in power and others fall under their control, without equal ownership between them. Engels elaborates on this in Anti-Dühring. Cooperatives don't scale without administration, either, which means at that point you may as well extend ownership equally across the whole economy so that it may be democratically controlled by all, even if those more local to an issue have more of a voice.
Now, that doesn't mean cooperatives are bad, it's just that they only really serve to play a role of "filling in the cracks" large industry leaves behind, as said large industry should be publicly owned. Cooperatives being small can remain as such, and only make themselves able to be properly folded into the public sector when they grow to include large networks of administration, at which point they have outscaled their original cooperative nature anyways.
I see this in various flavors of anarchism and I don't get how it would work in practice. Hierarchies form to simplify the logistics and social cohesion of a disorganized network of subunits.
As a basic example, how the hell do collectives even communicate with those on other continents? It took millenia for humans to develop reliable seafaring technology, only made possible through the direction of state actors. Sea cables cost millions to maintain; satellite communication is even harder to achieve.
Assuming that any of these could even be accomplished strictly via collectives ("Why the hell should I give you my Chilean copper so you can throw it in the ocean to talk to Europe?"), operating these essential services gives access to power and coercion.
Somebody has to launch the ships or run the heart of the telegraph network. Will you centralize the authority of multiple collectives to regulate and monitor it?...
And if you don't do anything to bridge the ocean, what's to prevent ideological drift for that continent; getting a little too centralized for more efficient resource use? Even if your accessible web remains strong and ideologically pure, you have to pray that completely separate webs will be just as strong.
Anarcho-primitivism is the only critique that seems to own the inherent anti-civilization logic, but even then there's nothing stopping a collective-of-collectives from making a bigger pile of sharp rocks to subjugate you.
How is that different from a state, aside from the decentralization of power?
What would prevent centralization of power?
That's the whole point. If your state concept is broad enough to entail any organization of a certain size, be my gast in a council republic
It's somewhere along the lines of "any organization that handles the administrative work and protection for a given territory".
And I don't think that's all that broad of a definition, and it includes your world wide net of councils as a state.
Importantly, you didn't answer the second question:
Would these councils be elected by the people they represent?
Would they sit in a parliament and form a legislature?
That just sounds like Canada.
Not exactly. The lowest level of councils is free for everyone to attend to. These neighborhood councils send delegates to the city level and so on. These delegates are revocable so when they don't do what the basis wants, they are gone. Also on each level, each group can opt out if they want. And decisions are made on the lowest level possible so much more voluntary and less central than Canada
Easy, we connect all humans together in a telepathic Borg-like mindlink.
Unfortunately I quite prefer my mind being the only one I can hear.
Don't knock schizophrenia till you try it. 9/10 voices in my head recommend it.
Shit that's all you had to say
Socialism is always about recreating a ruling class: it is to make the working class into the ruling class.
There is no practical alternative to this. Imagine trying the only way: to immediately end class relations. You've won the revolution. Your ideological brethren are in power and the Great Workers' Council is going forward with your plan. How are you going to force people to end class relations? Won't it require a state? Who is enforcing the end of relations? If someone buys up an extra-big plot of land and starts charging tenants rent, reinventing semi-feudal relations, who is going to stop them? And what are you going to do about the bourgeoisie who still exist, especially those overseas, and are working against you to reopen your country for exploitation?
All of these basic realities require a state. And you cannot simply end all class relations instantaneously, as the wider public will not all agree with you ideologically. Unless you plan extreme forms of oppression for the entire population, you will need to deal with the remnants of various class relations in various forms, engaging, ideally, in a process that will whittle them away. That entire process will be recreating a ruling class, i.e. the working class, to impose this process on the other classes.
An alternative would be to stop trying to overthrow some classes and touch grass
Organizing a socialist movement doesn't happen online.
“Gramsci shows that one of the main historical concerns of the Catholic Church has been to control the reading and the diffusion of Christianity, blocking the rise and spread of popular, autonomous and base level interpretations and thereby saving the purity of the historic doctrine. […] Many Marxists act the same way. Their biggest worry is the purity of the doctrine. Every time that historical facts challenge the doctrine or show the complexity of the practical operationality of elements of the theory, they deny that these elements are part of the story of Marxist theory and doctrine. This is, for example, what doctrines of betrayal are built on. Every movement that appears to stray a bit from these ‘pure’ models that were created a priori is explained through the concept of betrayal, or is explained as ‘state capitalism.’ Therefore, nothing is socialism and everything is state capitalism. Nothing is socialist transition and everything is state capitalism.” – Jones Manoel, Western Marxism, the fetish for defeat, and Christian culture
Great quote and book!
不， 你不明白。如果某件事有效，那它一定是坏事。^_^哈哈哈哈 《开玩笑啦》