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Path: utzoo!watmath!watarts!sizma
From: sizma@watarts.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: What is Socialism
Message-ID: <2008@watarts.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 23-Sep-83 17:45:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: watarts.2008
Posted: Fri Sep 23 17:45:11 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Sep-83 04:04:59 EDT
References: utcsstat.1087
Lines: 65

As far as I've been following this debate (submissions up to
Sun 18 Sep) I've not seen a very clear definition of capitalism.
This is probably largely due to the fact that when one is immersed
in a system, it is hard to see it as something distinct -- its details
only become clear when they are contrasted to the details of another
system. That's why people usually have to get out of a country before
they really understand the limitations of what's going on in it.
	Capitalism -- something that all of us have grown up in
and which for a large part of our life has been synonomous with
"reality" -- can only be defined in terms of "capital" or money. It is
a system whose continuation depends on the exchange of goods for
private profit. The notion of private property is crucial to
capitalism. It means that people who produce do not control their
products unless they "own" their labour by legal means or by 
physical force. What difference does it make if the owners of
other people's labour are private corporations or government
bureaucracies? In both cases surplus value (capital, profit, cash,
call it what you will) is gained by one person or a small group
of people at the expense of the energies and freedom of a much
larger group.
	This is admittedly a cursory definition, but I think its
a start towards applying the generally accepted and classical
characteristics of capitalism to our everyday experience instead
of arguing about "them vs. us" or "what they claim to be vs. what
we claim to be".
	Such a description obviously applies to virtually every
society on earth today, and some people might say it makes any
discussion of socialism vs. capitalism a very idealist pastime.
On the other hand, it goes a long way to explain many of the
similarities between East and West:
	-- labour strife takes very similar forms all over the world
	-- most societies seem to be heading in the same direction in
respect to consumption of commodities, technology, and, unfortunately,
militarism;
	-- corporations from the west usually have little difficulty
in making deals with governments of the East.
	The main similarity of course, is that the language of money
is now universal.
	Yet things were not always this way, of course. Money, as a
universal phenomenon, or, more accurately, as the phenomenon on which
a society's relations are based, is relatively new. I don't
expect that many people on the net have an unprejudiced view of
pre-capitalist societies, even the native Indian society of North
America, but these now-demolished societies provide an important
contrast to capitalism as we know it. So-called "primitive" societies
usually held property in common, worked only as long as was necessary
to provide their common needs, rarely had institutions of authority,
and had remarkably egalitarian relations (including between male and
female). There is a considerable amount of research and literature
backing up these points, but, needless to say, controversy still rages.
	The point of this is that while pre-capitalist society is gone
forever, observing capitalism in this light helps throw into sharp
relief many of its problems which we assume to be inevitable
"inadequacies" of life. If private property is just another
arbitrary quirk of history, why do we work for others? Why do we
have so little influence on the major decisions of our lives?
What's so great about institutionalized authority if for hundreds of
thousands of years (and probably longer) people were able to constitute
themselves into autonomous communities with collective decision-making
and virtually no large-scale aggression? (Ask any anthropologist --
organized warfare is at most 10,000 years old.)
	The difference between capitalism and socialism thus begs
the question of just how large a system capitalism really is.
As far as I'm concerned, it includes everything people have so far
referred to as socialism.