What is the diffrence between state capitalism and socialism?

I don't understand, I want a leftist to tell me.

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capital

Wage labor doesn't exist in one.

What difference would capital make. In "state capitalism" capital, aka one of means of production would be owned by the state.

In socialism, capital would be owned by the state.

Control over the means of production. If the workers control the means of production, it's socialism. If they don't, it's not. That simple.

Look at the Soviet Union. The means of production we're brought under a central planning authority. If the workers had been able to vote on who controls the planning authority, that would be socialism. But they couldn't, so it wasn't.

Now look at Yugoslavia. The means of production we're largely arranged in a market system, but they were owned by the workers. So there was no central planning authority (well, there was but it didn't plan everything) but it was still socialism.

read fucking capital you idiot

Read Marx you dolt.

State property is still private property. The dichotomy between 'state owns the MoP' and 'individuals owns the MoP' is completely retarded. All developed capitalist nations have a huge public sector, that does not make them less capitalist.

Depends on who you ask.

Leninists and ML's draw a clear distinction between the two. Socialism in their eyes is the phase where people start "building up" communism, or rather the material conditions for communism. Communism is then the highest phase of socialism, at which point the state has withered away.

Leftcoms and other more traditional marxist tendencies don't conciser this distinction valid, in fact Marx frequently used both words to refer to the same thing. That's the reason they call the USSR "State Capitalst" and not "Socialist". Main features are for-use production, no wage labour, etc. The usual stuff.

Liberals, Conservatives, etc. call socialism a system where the government does some things, and the state does other. Communism is when the government does everything. As you see, this is the pinnacle of human political science.

Not sure how anarchists talk about it.

Oh yes, and Market socialists actually believe stuff like this

They ignore all the other features of capitalism, and just concentrate on the ostensible fact that the MoP are privately owned, ignoring the fact that co-ops can and still do perpetuate capital.

To clarify: Co-ops can be a good first step, but that isn't the goal.

State capitalism is a meme. Look to modern China if you want to see an example of "state" capitalism. Market economy with state owned enterprises. Really, it's just capitalism. Concerning the USSR, attempts were made to eliminate markets via agricultural collectivization and a planned (centralized in this case) industrial economy, which was intended to be a step towards socialism. The most important step – the abolition of wage labor – was never achieved for a variety of reasons, mainly to do with the circumstances of the revolution itself, the second world war, and Stalin's purges, which eliminated the old Bolsheviks and thus ceded the Soviet government by default to careerists who would inevitably become revisionists.

State Capitalism is system where most of
the key industries are nationalized while maintaining capitalist market forces with a welfare state/strong unions. An example for State Capitalism would be the USSR during the NEP period, after that it transformed into socialism. A modern day example would be China after the Dengist forms.

Socialism is when the means of production are owned the public, with no private property or market existing so value isn't produced for the sake of producing value, e.g. the USSR under Stalin, Cuba until recently, GDR, etc. Basically you make the state so encompassing that the population becomes the state.

bookzz.org/book/862537/add33c

Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism if you want a broader picture of what socialism is all about.

How about aquiring atleast wikipedia-tier knowledge about a subject before posting shitty questions.

I knew this was going to be a great thread before entering it and it's absolutely delivered.

you left your shitposting flag on

In state capitalism, the state owns the products of the workers' labor and in return pays those workers wages. Thus the state itself functions in precisely the same manner as the bourgeois class does in a liberal capitalist society. The state is society's capitalist, hence the term "state capitalism."

Socialism is an economic system in which the means of production are collectively held, and those who produce own what they produce. It eliminates entirely the function of the capitalist–private ownership of the means of production and absentee ownership of the products produced by other people. Lacking the function of the capitalist class and of capital itself, socialism is not capitalism.

low energy leftcoms recently

...

I'm ancom and I follow the marxist/leftcom definition of capitalism and communism.

Leftcoms need to stop peddling their low energy "critique" of a dead country. The USA, for example, functioned in that way to a significant degree during the Second World War – yet only the USSR earns the "state" capitalist label. And despite the USSR becoming more and more like an economy with competing firms, albeit state-owned, their nominal independence is ignored and the state treated as "totalitarian". Both the liberals and leftcoms have no fucking clue.

Centrism with a system which leads to the growth of a para-bourgeois social relation is deadly. 'Making everyone a bureaucrat' cannot be nearly as gradual as the MLs want it to be if it is to happen at all; read Towards a New Socialism.

tumblr tier

I am not a leftcom, and that is how Lenin himself described the NEP.


Wait, do you actually want the Soviet Union to be classified the same way as the New Deal United States?

But in socialism, isn't the state ran by the public, and is therefore public property.


How would laborers even have the motivation to work without a wage?


Interesting, I will have to read that later. But wouldn't China be more of Command Capitalism with heavy socialistic influence because of the way the use subsidies to bring the poor into the middle class and to promote various business practices.

READ CAPITAL HOLY FUCK YOU IMBECILE

kek, so socialist unemployment is a thing?
it was higher in your beloved Yugo than in capitalist west

No you retard, Lenin described Imperial Germany as state capitalist. The NEP was to be a stepping stone towards that state capitalism and thus socialism. Lenin said repeatedly that "state capitalism" would be their salvation. Leftcoms and anarchists repeatedly ignore this historical context and turned state capitalism into a descriptive term exclusive to the USSR.

Consistency is beyond the likes of you, I know.

Yes. Private property means you extort surplus from it to your own enrichment. So unless you have a kleptocracy state property isn't private property.

Working people would still get paid according to their labor. Wage labor means the specific relation of employer and employee in capitalism, where the workplace is privately owned and the worker has no say in what he produces, what happens to the fruit of his labor and what happens to the firm. Instead he gets paid a wage as compensation.

I don't think you should be naming China anything if you don't even know about the USSR.

I take it that you want Platonic quasi-fascism with a human face rather than an anti-imperialist revolution like you say you do.

akarlin.com/2012/06/ayn-stalin/

State Capitalism has means of production owned by the state. Take it to comparison with Syndicalism where means of production are owned by individual self-managed workplaces.

Private ownership over the means of production

Workers owning the means of productions

State owns the means of production

You will hear that argument from stalinists and maoists. Of course, the problem with that is that their states are run by bureaucrats rather than by direct democracy. Property is only public when the public is actually able to determine what is done with it.


Wages do not reflect the value of what a laborer produces. They are thus not a motivation to produce. Instead, a laborer in a capitalist system is motivated to work by the threat of a loss of his livelihood.

More to the point, laborers in socialism are motivated to work by the plain fact that they own what they produce. The more a laborer makes, the more stuff he has. Of course, he does not just want the specific items that he produces himself. He has to socialise the products of his labor. That is to say that he (likely along with everyone else in his workplace) brings the products of his labor to the group and receives an equal value of other goods in return. The mechanism by which this occurs varies according to different ideologies. Certain socialists, like titoists, even advocate a market system.


t. Holla Forums

Jesus, make up your mind.


Why in the hell would you want to equate the Great Depression-era Soviet Union with its explosive industrialization and sudden prosperity with the New Deal United States that was impoverished and teetering on the edge of collapse? That is an argument that someone wishing to discredit the Soviet Union would make. They were not even the same systems. Industry in the United States was entirely privately owned.

Read Lenin.

I take it you've never heard of the War Production Board. Did you not know that during WWII the President could effectively fire CEOs and take over production? Obviously.

Have you ever read a history book about the Soviet Union? Even Kruschev and Brezhnev came from the proletariat and Lenins and Stalins active policy was to bring more proletarian blood into the institutions. If you want to complain about petit bourgeois elements in management and science, well, this was because proletarians in Russia during the 20s couldn't fucking read.

Fascism is class collaboration. Bureaucrats are not a class, not by any Marxist definition. But good job using liberal buzzwords.

Something you may learn in university is that randomly posting articles or sources doesn't make your thesis any better. Just an advice for when you actually are doing something academically and not LARP as an Italian intellectual on an imageboard.

That being said, wealth inequality isn't the defining feature of capitalism, exploitation is. The fact that you clinge to that now merely shows your intellectual inconsistency, as you'd be the first one complain about muh SocDem reformism when a state merely redistributes wealth.

ww2 united states are not New Deal united states, you retard
it was basically planned economy with directives from the center

it is no wonder that Bolsheviks were inspired by ww1 experience in wartime economic management

And? That doesn't dismiss my point about the happenings at the top of the hierarchy. I hear that even Mao was based for a while with the Chinese communes.

Call for centralism if you wish but don't come complaining if angered proles come knocking due to your exit into a Stalinist fantasy.

>quasi-fascism

I know that fascism class collaborationism and that the USSR was proletarian; you're just too autistic to understand my complaint and comparison.


No, I'm even sympathetic to Leninists who wish to implement anti-imperialism and short or progressively-reducing transitory stages of social democracy to ensure that revolutionary preconditions are met. The problem with MLs is that they believe that the state bureaucracy will magically wither away because everyone's proletarian and happy!


I'm just showing one effect of having a centralised system in which the bureaucrats develop slightly-different social relations to other proles because of their control. Yes, I've skimmed over Grover Furr's logs of Stalin's attempts to outline his democratic reforms to the Soviet system, but he still failed to implement these; you must now admit that the Soviet system was dismantled despite the general populace wanting it.

NEP was State Capitalism, you fucking idiot.

Kill yourself.

Not exactly true. Bolsheviks were inspired by economic theories that got used during WW1. Not by WW1 directly.

Ballod (who was one of those who organized German economy) had written his Der Zukunftstaat. Produktion und Konsum im Sozialstaat in 1898 and Russian translation happened some time in ~1905 (Ballod was born in Russian Empire).

t. Lenin
dipshit Stalinist fucking filtered

jesus christ you people are dumb

And what should this prove, you fucking retard?

This is 1918, Lenin argues for NEP, he compares private Capitalism to State Capitalism there. Soviets didn't even nationalize the shit out of Capitalist factories yet.

What exactly happened at the top of the hierarchy which triggers you so much? Stalin was elected by the party. How do you implement a planned economy without a centralized hierarchy?

I'm just too autistic to comprehend your dumb liberal comparison? Yeah right.

Not exactly. The bureaucracy withers away by encompassing everything, when everyone is a bureaucrat nobody is. Everyone will be part of the collective decision making process and thus the state and the population as a dichotomy vanishes.

People with influence and a high rank are dealing with other people with influence and higher rank? Well duh. Even fucking Star Trek has a fucking captains quarter.

See what people mean when they say that Leftcoms setting some ridiculous standards nobody can achieve and call it day?

Where have I been saying that this is a good thing? And also where on earth is it written that bureaucracy and Soviets are mutually exclusive and not more often one and the same thing?

t. brainlet

I have. Your turn.


Did the War Production Board own the means of production? No. The company shareholders, the bourgeoisie, still maintained ownership. You would do better to compare it to Gorbechev than Stalin.

And private ownership of the means of production. How can you not see that as significant difference?

Nothing.

...

Okay, so they still get paid, it just not called a wage.


Couldn't he just become an entrepreneur and just produce what ever he wants?


Never heard of it.


I know what the USSR is, they are much more socialist than China is today. Hell China is making the smart move of transitioning to capitalism, but the retarded CCP still wants to hold on to power.


Why is it a big deal if the laborer doesn't get paid what the product he is making is worth? Isn't the laborer offering his services to make anything regardless of the value of what he is making?

Top kek. Entrepreneurship is a hilarious scam. Unless the wannabe piglet is a profeasional baseball player or something, he can only ever hope to take out massive loans (if he is one of the lucky few who qualifies for them) to cover the costs of "his" business which make the bank his boss. Even in the exceedingly rare cases where an entrepreneur's business does last long enough to repay his loans, he still endures all of the financial risks associated with his business (apart from the obvious risks of unemployment and poverty faced by his workers), which means that he either has to keep working hard at his business or sell it to some financeer who will in turn rent it to some other poor sucker who wants to be a piglet.


Because the rest of the value of his work is going to people who have material interests directly opposed to his own. On top of that, it deincentivizes labor. When labor does not benefit the laborer then he can only be made to work by threatening his well-being.


The laborer is obligated by necessity to take whatever he is given. The supposed choice between bosses is little more than superficial, since wages are subject to market forces. He is not the author of a voluntary contract. He is a man who is forced into his economic situation.

Steve Jobs, Sam Walton, John D. Rockefeller, Hiroyuki Nishimura, Momofuku Ando, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk are all entrepreneurs who are not exclusive to sports.

Part of the reason why there are not more entrepreneurs is because of risks, not everyone is willing to take them, or be able to plan out something that will actually work.


Wages benefit the labor, and there is nothing forcing people to work in a particular job or anyone for that matter. Hell in every communist society the well being of the proletariat has to get threatened for them to work to meet there quota.


And you think the has to get stuck on who will pay him the lowest rate. If his wages suck, he can become specialized and enter a different job market with higher scarcity and higher wages. And of course he can become an entrepreneur, and assuming he doesn't fuck up, pay back the bank and not have a boss.

I don't see why state capitalism is such a bad thing as a progressive step towards communism. If the USSR truly was state capitalist, even under Lenin and Stalin, then so what? Engels talked about the state managing economic relations positively. It was by far the best state for workers in the world at the time.

They were also bourgeois from birth. You could have at least picked one of the few actual rags-to-ritches guys like Andrew Carnegie or Hernan Cortéz who made their fortunes off the explotation of the New World in the wake of the genocide.


Only fools and madmen would take those odds, and the potential returns are far from worth it. Your response does not address the point either. Only a few can get the loans. Only a few of the few will ever pay back the loans. Only a few of a few of a few will make a career out of it. It's a fucking lottery, not some mythical capitalist meritocracy. On top of all that, even if it actually did elevate the best–which it clearly does not–it can only elevate so few as to be useless to the vast majority of individuals in society regardless of their merits.


Receiving greater return for their labor benefits workers. The precise opposite benefits the workers' bosses. Wages thus constitute the basis for the inherent antagonism between the two economic classss. It is an antagonism in which workers are always at a relative disadvantage owing to the fact that they must rely on wages to survive.

So, no, wages do not benefit workers. Wages define workers and their inferior economic position.


I know that what you mean by "communist society" is one of the Stalinist or Maoist 20th Century countries, but that is not what "communist society" means.


That was certainly true during Stalin's first two five-year plans and Mao's "cultural revolution." It was not, however consistently so, either in those two countries or elsewhere.


It does not matter who is working the worst jobs for the lowest pay. What matters is that those jobs dominate capitalist society.


Where do you get this absurd fantasy from? How many of those positions are unfilled? How many workers can they support? That is not any kind of solution.