The Two Forms of Socialism - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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As either the transitional stage to communism or legitimate socio-economic ends in its own right.
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By Doug64
#15100218
I stumbled across this interesting description of the two forms Socialism can be imposed, from Ludwig von Mises Human Action:

    There are two patterns for the realization of socialism.

    The first pattern (we may call it the Lenin or the Russian pattern) is purely bureaucratic. All plants, shops, and farms are formally nationalized (verstaatlicht); they are departments of the government operated by civil servants. Every unit of the apparatus of production stands in the same relation to the superior central organization as does a local post office to the office of the postmaster general.

    The second pattern (we may call it the Hindenburg or German pattern) nominally and seemingly preserves private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary markets, prices, wages, and interest rates. There are, however, no longer entrepreneurs, but only shop managers (Betriebsführer in the terminology of the Nazi legislation). These shop managers are seemingly instrumental in the conduct of the enterprises entrusted to them; they buy and sell, hire and discharge workers and remunerate their services, contract debts and pay interest and amortization. But in all their activities they are bound to obey unconditionally the orders issued by the government's supreme office of production management. This office (The Reichswirtschaftsministerium in Nazi Germany) tells the shop managers what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. It assigns every worker to his job and fixes his wages. It decrees to whom and on what terms the capitalists must entrust their funds. Market exchange is merely a sham. All the wages, prices, and interest rates are fixed by the government; they are wages, prices, and interest rates in appearance only; in fact they are merely quantitative terms in the government's orders determining each citizen's job, income, consumption, and standard of living. The government directs all production activities. The shop managers are subject to the government, not the consumers' demand and the market's price structure. This is socialism under the outward guise of the terminology of capitalism. Some labels of the capitalistic market economy are retained, but they signify something entirely different from what they mean in the market economy.

That pretty well sums it up, though von Mises was being discreet. Personally, I'd label them the Communist model or the Fascist model. It should be pointed out that these days the Left tends to follow the Fascist model more than the Communist model (Obamacare being a good example) though von Mises is careful to point out that both models involve a total takeover by the government and the practical elimination of the market economy, which isn't a fair description of any of the West's current interventionist systems:

    It is necessary to point out this fact in order to prevent a confusion of socialism and interventionism. The system of interventionism or of the hampered market economy differs from the German pattern of socialism by the very fact that it is still a market economy. The authority interferes with the operation of the market economy, but does not want to eliminate the market altogether. It wants production and consumption to develop along lines different from those prescribed by an unhampered market, and it wants to achieve its aim by injecting into the working of the market orders, commands, and prohibitions for whose enforcement the police power and its apparatus of violent compulsion and coercion stand ready. But these are isolated acts of intervention. It is not the aim of the government to combine them into an integrated system which determines all prices, wages and interest rates and thus places full control of production and consumption into the hands of the authorities.
#15100232
Pants-of-dog wrote:I guess Mises does not know what socialism is.

The standard definition of Socialism is "a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole." Von Mises' single change is eliminating "ownership" from the definition, at least de jure ownership. After all, if the government essentially runs your business along the Fascist model, they are the de facto owners regardless of whose name is on the deed. He also recognizes that as a practical matter, "the community as a whole" actually means the State.
#15102247
Pants-of-dog wrote:Yes, he literally changed the defintion in order to make this stupid and ahistorical point. Like I said, he has no clue what he is talking about.

Nope, Mises didn’t change the definition in a practical sense, he just ignored the rhetoric to look at how Socialism actually works in practice—which makes it fully historical. Or can you point to any example of Socialism above the level of the local commune where “vesting of the ownership and control ... in the community as a whole” didn’t mean the government making all the economic decisions? And in every case that had any staying power that meant a dictatorship because where the people retained the right to vote rather than just the facade, they would quickly grow tired of it and vote the Socialists out of power. Post-WWII Great Britain is a good example.
#15102271
Doug64 wrote:Nope, Mises didn’t change the definition in a practical sense, he just ignored the rhetoric to look at how Socialism actually works in practice—which makes it fully historical. Or can you point to any example of Socialism above the level of the local commune where “vesting of the ownership and control ... in the community as a whole” didn’t mean the government making all the economic decisions? And in every case that had any staying power that meant a dictatorship because where the people retained the right to vote rather than just the facade, they would quickly grow tired of it and vote the Socialists out of power. Post-WWII Great Britain is a good example.


What is the economic model in fascism?

As soon as you have the answer, we will compare it to socialism and see if they are similar.
#15102288
Pants-of-dog wrote:What is the economic model in fascism?

As soon as you have the answer, we will compare it to socialism and see if they are similar.

I provided the Fascist version of Socialism in my first post:

    The second pattern (we may call it the Hindenburg or German pattern) nominally and seemingly preserves private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary markets, prices, wages, and interest rates. There are, however, no longer entrepreneurs, but only shop managers (Betriebsführer in the terminology of the Nazi legislation). These shop managers are seemingly instrumental in the conduct of the enterprises entrusted to them; they buy and sell, hire and discharge workers and remunerate their services, contract debts and pay interest and amortization. But in all their activities they are bound to obey unconditionally the orders issued by the government's supreme office of production management. This office (The Reichswirtschaftsministerium in Nazi Germany) tells the shop managers what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. It assigns every worker to his job and fixes his wages. It decrees to whom and on what terms the capitalists must entrust their funds. Market exchange is merely a sham. All the wages, prices, and interest rates are fixed by the government; they are wages, prices, and interest rates in appearance only; in fact they are merely quantitative terms in the government's orders determining each citizen's job, income, consumption, and standard of living. The government directs all production activities. The shop managers are subject to the government, not the consumers' demand and the market's price structure. This is socialism under the outward guise of the terminology of capitalism. Some labels of the capitalistic market economy are retained, but they signify something entirely different from what they mean in the market economy.
Essentially, the Fascists followed the Augustus method of ruling—keep all the old labels, but change the content. Just as Augustus could claim that his military dictatorship was actually a republic because he still had all the forms, the Fascists could claim that their socialist system was actually capitalist.
#15102368
@Pants-of-dog Let me know when you learn how to read.
#15102376
Pants-of-dog wrote:
I guess Mises does not know what socialism is.



Agreed -- this is capitalist propaganda by *omission*, ignoring the origin of *scientific socialism*, that being Marx & Engels, and _The Communist Manifesto_, or *workers-of-the-world* socialism.

What anti-communists *also* gloss-over is that any *nationally*-constrained economics -- whether fascist (as described at this thread), or Stalinist -- is going to run into trouble, because that country still has to deal with the larger *world* market, meaning that fictitious capital (bad debt) *internally* / domestically just isn't going to play at the international level, under scrutiny for possible trade pacts. National GDP-to-debt ratios are a *real* thing internationally and *can't* be kicked under the carpet.
#15102393
Doug64 wrote:@Pants-of-dog Let me know when you learn how to read.


I was unclear.

I was not asking you to repeat what the pundit told you.

I am asking about which particular economic model fascists strive to create.

You see, socialism is an economic model more than a political one. It is radically political because it radically changes the economic foundations of politics, but it is still fundamentally about economics.

So if we want to argue that socialism and fascism are the same thing, we have to see if fascism also has the same economic model.

Now, you and Mises want to dumb it down to “state ownership” and stop,the analysis there. Most people (including Marxists, economists, political scientists, and historians) want to look at things in finer detail.

So I wanted to know if you knew that the economic model of fascism is basically class warfare. The government protects the wealthy business owners, forcing the workers to stay in line, and in return, the business owner is forced to suborn their own interests and do what the government tells them to do.

The evil socialists, if we want to assume the worst, take the wealthy business owners, the government, the police, and the priests, and we line them up against the proverbial wall.

One government supports the existing business class as a way of maintaining power, while the other kills it.

This is a huge difference.
#15102535
@Pants-of-dog

You can’t say that Fascism is Socialism, because, much like Communism, Fascism is more than just an economic theory. What you can say is that both are socialistic. But you are making the standard distortion that the Left has latched onto, that Fascism “supports” the business class, when what it actually does is enslaves them—they are no more free to make their own decisions than their workers. And so the workers are no better off than under Communism, which is no more willing to allow independent decision-making. In Poland, Solidarity wasn’t exactly welcomed by their Communist overlords with open arms. Now it is true that under Fascism some of the wealthy owners might be subsumed into the new ruling class, and as such continue their lavish lifestyles ... which again, makes them no different than the new ruling class under Communism, as the USSR amply demonstrated.
#15102538
Doug64 wrote: But you are making the standard distortion that the Left has latched onto, that Fascism “supports” the business class, when what it actually does is enslaves them—they are no more free to make their own decisions than their workers.


:lol:

It was two large German companies, Krupp and I.G. Farben, that bailed out the Nazi Party when it went broke in 1932.
#15102549
Doug64 wrote:
@Pants-of-dog

You can’t say that Fascism is Socialism,



*No one* here is saying that fascism is socialism, except for *you*:


Doug64 wrote:
What you can say is that both are socialistic.



---


Doug64 wrote:
because, much like Communism, Fascism is more than just an economic theory. What you can say is that both are socialistic. But you are making the standard distortion that the Left has latched onto, that Fascism “supports” the business class, when what it actually does is enslaves them—they are no more free to make their own decisions than their workers. And so the workers are no better off than under Communism, which is no more willing to allow independent decision-making. In Poland, Solidarity wasn’t exactly welcomed by their Communist overlords with open arms. Now it is true that under Fascism some of the wealthy owners might be subsumed into the new ruling class, and as such continue their lavish lifestyles ... which again, makes them no different than the new ruling class under Communism, as the USSR amply demonstrated.



Yes, so both Stalinism and fascism are *elitist*, and so is capitalism, for that matter, because of the *class divide* in all instances.

The Solidarity movement was just a more pro-Western, U.S.-backed 'color revolution'-type of sea change in the politics of the Poland state.



Subsequently, it was the first independent union in a Warsaw Pact country to be recognised by the state.[4] The union's membership peaked at 10 million in September 1981,[2][3] representing one-third of the country's working-age population.[5]



Operating underground, with significant financial support from the Vatican and the United States, estimated to be as much as US$50 million,[7] the union survived and by the latter 1980s had entered into negotiations with the government.



Following Poland's transition to liberal capitalism in the 1990s and the extensive privatization of state assets, Solidarity's membership and influence declined significantly; by 2010, 30 years after being founded, the union had lost more than 90% of its original membership.



CIA covert support

See also: Poland–United States relations

In the year leading up to martial law, Reagan Administration policies supported the Solidarity movement, waging a public relations campaign to deter what the Carter administration had seen as "an imminent move by large Soviet military forces into Poland."[16] Michael Reisman from Yale Law School named operations in Poland as one of the covert regime change actions of the CIA during the Cold War.[17] Colonel Ryszard Kukliński, a senior officer on the Polish General Staff, was secretly sending reports to CIA officer David Forden.[18] The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) transferred around $2 million yearly in cash to Solidarity, for a total of $10 million over five years. There were no direct links between the CIA and Solidarnosc, and all money was channeled through third parties.[19] CIA officers were barred from meeting Solidarity leaders, and the CIA's contacts with Solidarnosc activists were weaker than those of the AFL-CIO, which raised $300,000 from its members, which were used to provide material and cash directly to Solidarity, with no control of Solidarity's use of it. The U.S. Congress authorized the National Endowment for Democracy to promote democracy, and the NED allocated $10 million to Solidarity.[20]

The Polish government enacted martial law in December 1981, however, Solidarity was not alerted. Potential explanations for this vary; some believe that the CIA was caught off guard, while others suggest that American policy-makers viewed an internal crackdown as preferable to an "inevitable Soviet intervention."[21] CIA support for Solidarity included money, equipment and training, which was coordinated by Special Operations.[22] Henry Hyde, U.S. House intelligence committee member, stated that the USA provided "supplies and technical assistance in terms of clandestine newspapers, broadcasting, propaganda, money, organizational help and advice".[23] Initial funds for covert actions by CIA were $2 million, but soon after authorization were increased and by 1985 CIA successfully infiltrated Poland.[24]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarit ... rade_union)
#15102560
@Doug64

If you look at actual history and see what fascists actually did, you would see that they did support the business class and ruthlessly targeted the working class.

You are just refusing to thunk farther than “state control”.

Also, socialistic is not a word that is actually used to describe anything.
#15102571
Speaking of socialism, I was just reading about the *Hungarian* Revolution, and it looks *very* inspiring:



Workers’ councils organize resistance

That the Hungarian Revolution was anything but a counterrevolutionary rebellion for the restoration of the capitalist order is shown, above all, in the role played by the workers’ councils. The Kadar government had a hard time pushing through the policies decided by Moscow. The workers’ councils, which were the backbone of the armed resistance, still largely controlled political and economic life throughout the country.

The first workers’ council was elected as early as October 24 in the Eggesult Izzo lamp factory, one of the biggest factories in Budapest, with 10,000 workers. This decision was taken as Soviet tanks rolled into the city for the first time.

The workers’ council demanded the dismissal of the factory directors appointed by the bureaucracy and their replacement by workers’ committees at all levels of production. “Let us demonstrate that we can settle matters better than our blind, tyrannical bosses,” read the council’s 10-point declaration.

In the days that followed, workers’ councils were set up in the steel mills, the shipyards of the Danube, the mines and many factories all over Hungary. They tried to enforce their political demands, which coincided to a great extent with those of the students, with a general strike. A meeting of the delegates of the workers’ councils from the biggest factories in Budapest agreed upon a program, which began with the statement: “The factories belong to the workers.”

When Soviet troops and tanks invaded on November 4, the Nagy government collapsed and all of the Hungarian party’s “reformers” capitulated to the Kremlin bureaucracy. This demonstrated that the working class and its councils were the real driving force of the Hungarian Revolution.



https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2006/10/hung-o26.html
#15104320
Also:



The initial resources for capitalist development in England, its birthplace, came not from entrepreneurial individuals saving their money and then applying it to production, but from looting and plunder internationally, inherited fortunes, and the stripping of the mass of the population of access to the means of production and their transformation into a propertyless class with nothing to sell but their labour power.

And the course of capitalist development soon swept aside the independent entrepreneur. This took place through two processes: first, the inexorable logic of competition, which is not to perpetuate competitive struggle, but rather to compel each producer to drive out his rivals, with the aim of becoming a monopoly; and second, the expanded scale of production, which meant it could no longer be organised by individual entrepreneurs, but required the mobilisation of capital by corporations resting on a vast credit structure.



https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/0 ... f-j30.html
#15104356

[Adam Smith] has been continually utilised to provide the ideological justifications for the present order.

These are based on claims such as:

• Market society provides opportunity for initiative; profit, whether in the sphere of production or finance, is the reward for risk.

• Social inequality is the result not of the inexorable logic of the system itself but flows from an inherent failure of individuals to avail themselves of the opportunities that this best of all possible worlds provides.

• Capitalism is the only possible form of socio-economic organisation.


Over the past period, especially since the financial crisis of 2008, these nostrums have been shattered as the agencies of the capitalist state—governments and the central banks—have provided trillions of dollars to the banks, hedge funds and corporations, a process that has now reached new heights.

This transformation of capitalism into what he calls “statism” worries Kaufman because it reveals too clearly the real nature of social and economic relations and represents a “great departure from the vision of the founding fathers.”

While Kaufman’s focus is directed to ideological questions, the increasing drive to statism does have an objective economic significance as well. Both the health crisis produced by the pandemic and the resulting economic crisis have revealed the utter bankruptcy of the market system and the objective necessity for state control and organisation in order to ensure the very functioning of modern society.



https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/0 ... f-j30.html
#15104706
Doug64 wrote:I stumbled across this interesting description of the two forms Socialism can be imposed, from Ludwig von Mises Human Action:

    There are two patterns for the realization of socialism.

    The first pattern (we may call it the Lenin or the Russian pattern) is purely bureaucratic. All plants, shops, and farms are formally nationalized (verstaatlicht); they are departments of the government operated by civil servants. Every unit of the apparatus of production stands in the same relation to the superior central organization as does a local post office to the office of the postmaster general.

    The second pattern (we may call it the Hindenburg or German pattern) nominally and seemingly preserves private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary markets, prices, wages, and interest rates. There are, however, no longer entrepreneurs, but only shop managers (Betriebsführer in the terminology of the Nazi legislation). These shop managers are seemingly instrumental in the conduct of the enterprises entrusted to them; they buy and sell, hire and discharge workers and remunerate their services, contract debts and pay interest and amortization. But in all their activities they are bound to obey unconditionally the orders issued by the government's supreme office of production management. This office (The Reichswirtschaftsministerium in Nazi Germany) tells the shop managers what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. It assigns every worker to his job and fixes his wages. It decrees to whom and on what terms the capitalists must entrust their funds. Market exchange is merely a sham. All the wages, prices, and interest rates are fixed by the government; they are wages, prices, and interest rates in appearance only; in fact they are merely quantitative terms in the government's orders determining each citizen's job, income, consumption, and standard of living. The government directs all production activities. The shop managers are subject to the government, not the consumers' demand and the market's price structure. This is socialism under the outward guise of the terminology of capitalism. Some labels of the capitalistic market economy are retained, but they signify something entirely different from what they mean in the market economy.

That pretty well sums it up, though von Mises was being discreet. Personally, I'd label them the Communist model or the Fascist model. It should be pointed out that these days the Left tends to follow the Fascist model more than the Communist model (Obamacare being a good example) though von Mises is careful to point out that both models involve a total takeover by the government and the practical elimination of the market economy, which isn't a fair description of any of the West's current interventionist systems:

    It is necessary to point out this fact in order to prevent a confusion of socialism and interventionism. The system of interventionism or of the hampered market economy differs from the German pattern of socialism by the very fact that it is still a market economy. The authority interferes with the operation of the market economy, but does not want to eliminate the market altogether. It wants production and consumption to develop along lines different from those prescribed by an unhampered market, and it wants to achieve its aim by injecting into the working of the market orders, commands, and prohibitions for whose enforcement the police power and its apparatus of violent compulsion and coercion stand ready. But these are isolated acts of intervention. It is not the aim of the government to combine them into an integrated system which determines all prices, wages and interest rates and thus places full control of production and consumption into the hands of the authorities.

In which of these dictonomous categories would you place liberal socialism ? And , it seems to me that the basic definition that free market classical liberal conservatives have of socialism is simply a combination of dirigisme with planisme . As you should be able to see , these are French rooted words ; so such concepts did not originate in Germany . Also there was a huge gap between Hitler , and the Strassers , as to what the National Socialist economy should entail . https://www.britannica.com/story/were-the-nazis-socialists , https://www.thoughtco.com/guns-or-butter-the-nazi-economy-1221065 , https://www.thoughtco.com/was-adolf-hitler-a-socialist-1221367 , https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany#Privatization_and_business_ties , https://arplan.org/category/people/gregor-strasser/ , https://arplan.org/category/people/otto-strasser/
#15105367
Deutschmania wrote: (what you said)

Well, in the first place I completely reject Ludwig von Mises and anything he says. I'm no genius but I can refute everything I've seen him say with a few facts.

Both his alternatives for "socialism" are references to state capitalism. Neither one is actually socialism, which is a socioeconomic system in which the working class owns and actively runs and controls the MoP. But in all the examples you listed in your post the state owns and dictates to workers. That is not liberation of workers!

At this point most of the opposition would turn to dictionary definitions of socialism. If that's what you want to do, please do.
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