I’m fan of Jesse Spafford.
His views aren’t mine, exactly, but there’s lots of overlap, and he’s extraordinarily sharp thinker. One small example of Spafford-at-his-best is his response to arguments like those made by libertarian philosopher Michael Huemer (and discussed here). Huemer thinks a government taxing your income to finance a welfare state is like a mugger who plans to spend the money in your wallet on charity. In both cases, maybe the theft can be justified if the purpose is morally urgent enough, but both are theft, and are therefore morally guilty until proven innocent. The fact that the particular gang of muggers that finances the welfare state is a particularly large and powerful one that calls itself a “government” and has considerable public support is neither here nor there. People are just people, and if it’s wrong for random people to use force in particular way, it’s equally wrong for a “government” to do so.
Spafford points out in response that an argument of the same type and with the same intuitive weight as Huemer’s Charity Mugger argument could be constructed about the use of force by property-owners. He imagines a case where a cruise ship docks on an uninhabited and hitherto undiscovered island.
The passengers are excited to spend the day exploring the island, but, before they have a chance to disembark, one passenger runs to the end of the gangplank and declares, “Sorry, but I have decided that this island is for my personal use only! I forbid any of you from setting foot on it — unless, of course, you pay me $50 and take off your shoes before getting off the boat.”
When the first passenger in line ignores this edict and walks onto the island, the declaration-issuer’s friends rush over and seize the “trespasser” and begin binding her wrists and ankles. She struggles a bit, but after they spray sunscreen in her eyes, she stops resisting and is carried back onto the ship and locked in one of the cabins until she agrees to stay off the island.
All the points Huemer makes about the Charity Mugger and the tax collector seem to apply to the passenger who decides the island is his and a “legitimate” property-owner. If we wouldn’t accept the passenger’s behavior, why should we accept the behavior of a “legitimate” property-owner asserting the same rights over particular bits of the world?
Perhaps taxation and property-ownership (even the individual ownership of toothbrushes!) are both illegitimate across the board and we should just live in what Roderick Long calls the “Grab What You Can World,” where no one ever gets to stop anyone from using anything. That sounds like an awfully chaotic world that certainly wouldn’t have be able to sustain a functional enough economy to keep several billion human beings fed and housed, but perhaps the collective misery of that world is what Justice requires.
Alternately, we could conclude that, since no sane person wants Grab What You Can World and hence “No Coercion” is not really an option on the table in these debates, the question is always which distribution of resources we want to be enforced by monopolistic institutions of some sort (whether “governments” or just “property-owners who recognize one another’s claims”). In order to answer that question, we need to think through substantive questions about fairness—in other words, about what share of society’s resources each of us deserves.
Both Spafford and I are start from a commitment to egalitarianism (the claim that, in some important sense, we all have equal claim). More specifically, while the devil’s in the details, we’re both sympathetic to a smaller family of views called luck-egalitarianism, which holds that the thing we should be trying to equalize is what the Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen called “equality of access to advantage.” Roughly, inequalities are unjust to the extent that they trace to factors outside of the control of whoever ends up with the short end of the stick.
This is one of the most important reasons that I’m a socialist.
By "socialism,” I have in mind an economic system where democracy has been extended from politics to economics through collective ownership of the means of production. Whether the Soviet economy, for example, counts as a deeply flawed form of socialism or a pseudo-socialism depends on how you understand “collective ownership.” In theory, Soviet state enterprises were collectively owned by the public as a whole, but you could argue that this was a legal fiction and really they were the property of the ruling bureaucracy of the one-party state.1
Eighteen years before the Russian Revolution, the Irish republican socialist James Connolly wrote an article arguing that whether state ownership counted as socialist depended on who owned the state:
Socialism properly implies above all things the co-operative control by the workers of the machinery of production; without this co-operative control the public ownership by the State is not Socialism…2
I think that’s a respectable position. I’ve never been too hot and bothered, though, about the semantic dispute about how strictly we should define the word. If you want to parse “collective” ownership loosely enough that the Soviet economy would count, I’m happy enough to just accept that and express my position by saying that I advocate a very different form of socialism. That’s the rhetorical position that my co-authors and I take in our forthcoming book The Blueprint: How Socialism Could Work in the Real World, where we lay out what we think an economically viable and politically desirable form of socialism might look like in the twenty-first century.
In that book, we argue that our kind of socialism, in which the “commanding heights” of the economy would be directly publicly owned and the remaining market sector would be composed of internally democratic, worker-owned firms partnering with nationalized banks, would be desirable (among other reasons) because it would more closely realize egalitarian ideals than even the gentlest and most social-democratic versions of capitalism.3 (Note: It wouldn’t perfectly realize those ideals. It would better realize them.) In other words, we follow socialist tradition in thinking of socialism as a way for society to organize production, and thinking that one of the reasons it would be better to organize production that way is that it would lead to a better distribution of consumption.
Spafford argues in a new essay that this way of mapping the conceptual terrain doesn’t work. He writes:
With a slate of socialists having recently won numerous Democratic primaries across New York City, there has been a renewed surge of public interest in socialism. However, there is quite a bit of confusion and disagreement about what, exactly, socialism is. For some, the term “socialism” denotes systems of authoritarian control like what existed in the USSR under Stalin or China under Mao. For others, “socialism” refers to the present-day Nordic countries with their expansive welfare states. In this post, I aim to clear things up a bit by, first, explaining what socialism is not—controversially suggesting that a large portion of self-described socialists are actually wrong about the nature of socialism. I will then briefly offer a positive alternative account of socialism.
He then quickly covers the the same points we just went over in his own way:
Most generally, socialism is aptly described as an economic system that predominately involves social—as opposed to private—ownership of the means of production (i.e., the land, factories, and tools that are used to make all the things we consume). However, there are different ways of understanding social ownership, which, in turn, give rise to different conceptions of socialism.
On one interpretation, to own the means of production is to have control rights over them. Thus, the defining feature of capitalism is that private individuals—i.e., capitalists—get to decide how all the land, factories, and tools are used and, by extension, what gets produced. By contrast, a socialist society would wrest this control from the capitalist class and hand it over to the public, giving all members of society democratic control over what gets produced and how. Exactly how this would work is an open question; perhaps voters would elect an economic planning board or perhaps they might vote on certain production decisions directly. However, at the end of the day, what is produced must be a function of society’s democratic will. Call this the democratic conception of socialism.
My general impression is that most self-described socialists endorse this democratic conception. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve seen any other view defended in popular discourse.
He himself, though, doesn’t buy it for two reasons.
First, there is the tyranny of the majority problem. Suppose that the majority decides to direct production in a way that is to their benefit but impoverishes or otherwise harms the minority. Or perhaps the minority fares reasonably well in absolute terms, but the majority directs the bulk of the social product to themselves, thereby producing significant inequality. According to the democratic conception, such a society would still be a socialist one. However, this outcome would be anathema to most socialists.
Granted, this objection is not decisive, as a proponent of the democratic conception might maintain that “socialism” is strictly a descriptive term that is not intended to have any normative implications. Thus, socialism might be either good or evil depending on how the majority exercises its democratic will. However, I suspect that few self-described socialists would want the goodness of socialism to be contingent in this way.
All I can say on this last point is that I don’t share his suspicion. I think most socialists think, and have good reasons to think, that strict-definition socialism will lead to good results, not that “socialism leading to bad results” would somehow be definitionally incoherent. (Probably many also think, as I do, that democracy is valuable in itself and not just because it leads to good results.) At any rate, whichever of us is right about what most socialists think, speaking for myself I’m certainly not committed to the incoherence claim. In fact, the idea that it’s definitionally incoherent—that socialism is good by definition, so any “socialism” that led to bad stuff must really not be socialism after all—sounds pretty silly to me.
I said above that the USSR under the reign of Joseph Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria, and their associates—a regime that committed any number of genuinely horrifying atrocities—could be counted at “socialist” under a loose but not entirely crazy definition. (Again, if we want to talk that way, I’d just say it’s a very different form of socialism than the one I advocate.) But I also think it’s reasonable to define our terms in a stricter way that would exclude it.
Anti-socialists typically roll their eyes at the stricter definition because they suspect socialists who offer it of playing “No True Scotsman” games to save socialism from evaluation through inconvenient historical evidence. I don’t think that’s fair, which is why I brought up the James Connolly passage. (Connolly is chronologically safe from any suspicion of trying to No True Scotsman his way out of the verdict of history.) But if we start saying that the goodness of socialism shouldn’t be “contingent,” the anti-socialists’s point starts to look pretty reasonable.
To be fair, when Spafford talks about “goodness,” he seems to mean less all-around goodness than the specific goodness of fulfilling egalitarian ideals. So, let’s talk about that. Remember, these were his examples:
Suppose that the majority decides to direct production in a way that is to their benefit but impoverishes or otherwise harms the minority. Or perhaps the minority fares reasonably well in absolute terms, but the majority directs the bulk of the social product to themselves, thereby producing significant inequality.
So, we could imagine a really advanced socialist society—something way beyond the socialism of The Blueprint, maybe an economy that had moved beyond markets or even money, where some sort of participatory, decentralized, democratic planning bodies decided both what would be produced and how it would be allocated to individual consumers. Now, imagine that a really grotesque, virulent form of racism takes hold, and the planning bodies decide that all black and Jewish citizens are only allowed to pick up half as many groceries as Aryan citizens at the decommodified state distribution centers. If there are still collectively-owned restaurants of some kind in this society, we imagine that they all put “Whites Only” signs in their windows.
Would this severe violation of egalitarian ideals within the context of a democratically collectivized economy (indeed, in our version of Spafford’s case, a democratically collectivized economy that had transcended the commodity form, so it would meet the strictest definition of socialism I know of) be a form of *non-*socialism? I have to say that sounds like an absurd result to me.
I certainly don’t think this scenario would play out under socialism, but that’s an empirical prediction grounded in an analysis of why Jim Crow, Naziism, etc., happened in the real world and what sorts of material conditions I think would or wouldn’t be likely to lead to similar things happening in the future. If I’m trying to make the case for socialism to someone whose primary political concern is racial equality, the least interesting or reassuring answer I could possibly give them about why I don’t think this scenario would come to pass under socialism would be “because then it would no longer count as socialism.”
Here’s Spafford’s second reason for resisting the idea that socialism means collective ownership and democratic control of the means of production:
Even if proponents of the democratic conception were willing to bite this bullet and allow for minority-impoverishing socialisms4, they face an even bigger problem, namely, that the democratic conception implies that all existing democratic states are socialist in character—a result that would render socialist demands trivial.
How’s that?
To see why this is the case, consider how production decisions might be made in a socialist society. Presumably, there is no way for the mass public to make every production decision, e.g., how many pencils should be made relative to coat hangers, shoe soles, and brushes for electric motors. Rather, some degree of delegation will have to happen such that there is a class of planners tasked with making production and allocation decisions—but where those planners can be recalled if the voting public disapproves of their choices. Most plausibly, this public control would take the form of elected representatives pledging to either preserve the status quo by leaving the current slate of planners unmolested or bring about reform by either replacing the planners or modifying their decisions directly. While there might be other ways of achieving democratic control of the means of production, the just-described arrangement seemingly has to qualify as an instance of such control, i.e., of socialism.
So far, so good. It’s very different from the version of socialism Sunkara and Beggs and I advocate, but I’m happy to grant that what he’s describing—basically, appointed state planning bodies overseen by an elected government—would be one of the many forms that collective democratic control of the means of production might take.
However, the just-described system is also the one that already governs every existing (representative) democracy.
This is a confusing claim! I’m writing my response to Spafford, for example, on a MacBook that I seem to recall purchasing from a wildly profitable private company that manufactured it on its own initiative, rather than from a state-owned enterprise carrying out the directives of a planning office run by appointees of the elected government. When I finish the essay, I’m going to schedule it to post Sunday morning on the privately-owned Substack platform, and then I’m going to drive into town to sit at a privately-owned coffee shop and drink some coffee while reading a book published by a privatized, for-profit publisher.
So, what does Spafford mean?
He writes:
In any such democracy, there will be a group of people who are legally tasked with making production and allocation decisions. Granted we call these people “capitalists” rather than “planners,” but they serve an identical function, namely, deciding what to produce with society’s resources as well as how to carry out that production and how to distribute the resultant product. And, while they also don’t collaborate in the way that we might imagine a socialist planning board collaborating (as each capitalist has been delegated their own slice of the means of production to manage), one can imagine the paradigmatic socialist planning board dividing up labor in just the same way across a similarly large group of planners. In fact, such a division of management is plausibly unavoidable, as the alternative of collective, deliberation-based management seems infeasible given a suitably large economy. Thus, strictly speaking, the current day-to-day management of any capitalist economy is compatible with the democratic conception of socialism.
There is, I think, a logical leap here. If, under System 1, X performs “an identical function” that Y performs under System 2, that doesn’t mean that System 1 just is System 2, especially when that judgment of the function being “identical” is happening at this level of abstraction. Under feudalism, local lords might act as judges in disputes between their peasants and generals when it was time to mobilize for war. But the existence of judges and generals to fulfill the same functions in capitalist nation-states doesn’t make modern liberal capitalism a form of feudalism. It seems to matter a lot, when trying to figure out what’s the same and what’s different about the two systems, that the feudal lord assumes these functions merely by virtue of his hereditary relationship to the land, whereas judges and generals in liberal capitalist democracies are appointed to these positions by a separate state power. Similarly, what seems most relevant when comparing the form of democratic socialism Spafford described above to what happens under capitalism is that the capitalists derive their ability to decide what’s produced and how it’s distributed not from being appointed by and responsible to a democratic government but just by virtue of having enough money to buy the means of production. That’s not a small distinction!
Spafford continues:
But what about the element of democratic control that socialism requires? This element, too, is present in most existing democratic countries. As noted above, in a socialist economy large enough to require the delegated management of production, i.e., planners, democratic control will take the form of the public being able to vote to recall those planners and have them replaced (most plausibly by electing representatives to implement the recall). But note that this form of control already exists in practically every democracy! After all, if the voting public is unhappy with how the means of production are being managed, there is nothing preventing them from electing a slate of representatives who will oust the current managers of the economy and replace them with individuals who will change what is produced or how production is carried out.
This could take the form of anything from a democratic transition to socialism to a democratic decision to take away the means of production from the existing private owners and gift them to new private owners.
Starting with the second option, let’s ask a simple followup question:
Would this be a one-time shakeup, analogous to a new feudal king who, having taken power in a particularly bloody war, executes every single local lord and creates an all-new nobility (so the descendants of the new lords he creates will then have hereditary rights to the land and the serfs working there)? Or is the idea that each new owner will be chosen by the state?
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Jesse Spafford’s Substack
What Socialism Is (and Is Not)
With a slate of socialists having recently won numerous Democratic primaries across New York City, there has been a renewed surge of public interest in socialism. However, there is quite a bit of confusion and disagreement about what, exactly, socialism is. For some, the term “socialism” denotes systems of authoritarian control like what existed in the …
Read more
13 days ago · 4 likes · 4 comments · Jesse Spafford](https://jessespafford.substack.com/p/what-socialism-is-and-is-not)
If the latter, so we have a new system where private individuals are chosen to run the means of production on their own accord (rather than carrying out the directives of a planning agency) and they extract private profits in the usual way, but rather than getting to sell it to new owners or pass it on to heirs, each next owner is decided by the state, that sounds like a substantively new and interesting economic arrangement that we could all have fun arguing about how to classify. (Would it be a radically mutated form of capitalism? Or would it be something new, neither capitalist nor socialist?)
On the other hand, if we assume that the state-selected owners will now have full ownership rights and were able to dispose of their property as they saw fit, and the next owners got their ownership rights from standard market mechanisms, then I would agree with Spafford that what we’re imagining would still be the system we’re living under, not because there’s any sense in which we’re already living under a system of democratic control of the means of production, but because we’re living under plain old standard-issue capitalism now and we’ll continue to do so in this scenario.
On the other hand, if what we’re talking about is not democratically reassigning the means of production to different capitalists but a democratic transition to socialism, then two points seem relevant.
First, whether representative political institutions existing suffices to give voters the ability to transition to socialism is a vastly bigger and more complicated question than Spafford’s discussion suggests. (In the U.S. context, for example, any attempt to sweepingly nationalize the means of production would surely be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. And even if it weren’t, the current owners of the means of production would surely turn to extra-constitutional attempts to keep their economic power rather than meekly accepting their expropriation. That doesn’t necessarily mean that that the transition to socialism would be violent (plenty of coups around the world have been defeated peacefully through overwhelming mass noncompliance, for example), but it does mean that it’s hard to imagine getting all the way to socialism without some sort of constitutional crisis.
Putting all that aside, though, even if the public does have the capacity to use existing political institutions to seize control of the means of production, that doesn’t actually mean that it already has control of the means of production. To adapt another Michael Huemer thought experiment about property rights, if I find a hermit living by himself whose only weapon is a spear he fashioned himself, and I have a gun, then I have the capacity to seize control of the spear. That doesn’t mean that I control the spear already.
Spafford writes:
One can now see how the two objections to the democratic conception of socialism come together. The first objection worried that the conception allows for societies to be declared socialist even when the voting majority opts for production decisions that are anathema to self-described socialists.
Again, that it’s logically possible that a socialist society could do things that would be anathema to the values that make socialists prefer socialism to capitalism doesn’t strike me as any sort of reason to think we should adopt a definition that would rule this out a priori. Rather, socialists need to give substantive arguments that socialism wouldn’t play out this way. If they’re unable to do so, that should lower our confidence that socialism would be as good as socialists say.
And the second objection reveals that this isn’t just a fanciful hypothetical, but, in fact, is exactly what is happening now: voters already have democratic control over the means of production, and what they have chosen to do with them is nothing more or less than our current processes of production and the associated allocation of the social product. If voters wanted to do organize production and distribution differently, they could. Given that they have so far declined to take advantage of this opportunity, it seems hard to deny that this is because the status quo mode of production is how the majority likes to do things. But, surely, we are not now living under socialism. So, the democratic conception of socialism surely can’t be correct.
In other words, we already live under a regime of democratic control of the means of production, and this has in fact led to grotesque inequality—because it’s led to the perpetuation of capitalism! At the end of Spafford’s chain of reasoning, we’ve arrived at the conclusion that capitalism and collective democratic control of the means of production are fully compatible after all.
Pretty clearly, something somewhere has gone wrong. What?
First, it doesn’t follow from the fact that ordinary citizens of liberal capitalist democracies enjoy some degree of political power (severely limited by the disproportionate political power of capitalists!) that if we’re still living under capitalism, the majority must love capitalism. Many people vaguely assume capitalism is the only way things could be, of course (or know of no alternative but twentieth-century Stalinism), but even that’s not the biggest obstacle. Even assuming that there’s a peaceful democratic road that goes all the way from where we are to socialism using nothing but standard peaceful democratic left-wing tools like labor organizing, building mass socialist political parties out of the social base of that organized working class, and so on, every step along that road involves tremendous risks and pitfalls. As Vivek Chibber argues in effect in his excellent book The Class Matrix (which I discussed here), the most important stumbling block to this happening is not the enthusiasm of the masses, who love the share of society’s resources they have now and have no wish for more, but a variant of the same collective action problems that are also the most important obstacle of citizens of authoritarian dictatorships using their collective power to achieve political democracy. In theory, as a confident, militant, organized working class demanded more and more within the system, pushed up against its limits, etc., it should be easy to imagine support building for trying to find a way to make a leap beyond it. But as the entire history of capitalism shows us, the formation of a confident, militant, organized working class is the far bigger challenge.
Second, even if it were the easiest thing in the world to collectively organize people around maximally ambitious goals about how to improve their situation, the spear example above reminds us of the large distinction between having the power to take possession of something and actually having possession of it.
Let’s think about two versions of that case:
- Spear 1: I stumble on the hermit, who lives nowhere near civilization. I have a gun and the hermit only has a spear. If I took the spear away from him, there’s no one he could appeal to for help getting it back. Nevertheless, I choose not to take it.
- Spear 2: Let’s make the hermit a bit less of a hermit. He lives close enough to civilization to hike to the home of someone he pays to take care of the spear for him, with strict instructions on where to keep it and how to handle it until he comes back for it.
In Spear 1, I have a capacity to get my hands on the spear any time I want (by seizing control of it with my gun), just like in Spear 2, the hermit has the capacity to get his hands back on the spear any time he wants (by hiking back to retrieve it from his employee). That much we have in common. But in Spear 2, the hermit controls the spear. He exercises the control indirectly, through someone he’s entrusted to keep it safe for him, but he still exercises control. In Spear 1, there is simply no normal sense of “control” under which I am currently in control of the hermit’s spear.5
Spafford’s own alternative to the “democratic conception of socialism” is what he calls the “egalitarian conception of socialism”:
The obvious solution to this problem, then, is to define socialism in terms of outcomes rather than process. On this proposal, social ownership of the means of production is understood in terms of the public having a right to the social product rather than control rights over the means of production. Specifically, under socialism, each person has a right to an equal share of what has been produced. Thus, socialism is realized when and to the extent that there is an egalitarian distribution of resources.
Even if I’m right that Spafford’s case against the “democratic conception” fails, I should say something about why I find it more plausible than his “egalitarian conception.” There are, basically, three reasons.
First, terms like “feudalism,” “capitalism,” and “socialism” are normally (and, I think, appropriately) understood as the names of economic systems that either have existed already or might come into existence in the future. Socialism is the name of a system that (if all goes really well!) might one day replace capitalism. But the demanding form of egalitarianism that Spafford and I both subscribe to versions of is one it’s very unlikely that any economic system we could implement any time soon could fully realize.
The Soviet economy didn’t have entirely flat wage scales. Neither do actually existing worker cooperatives. It’s likely that any economically viable world of collective ownership and workplace democracy would, while distributing goods in a vastly more egalitarian way than capitalism, still violate luck-egalitarian principles to some extent. For example, people who would be particularly good at certain jobs might not be enticed to do them without a higher salary (or, if we’re imagining a marketless and moneyless form of socialism, “a greater consumption allotment”) than they’d get for many other jobs. To whatever extent this reflects unchosen differences in natural talents, their larger share violates luck-egalitarian principles.
Not only does it seem overwhelmingly likely that any post-capitalist system we could implement at this point in history would involve some degree of such violations, it’s at least an open empirical question whether we can ever completely bring economic practice into alignment with the ideal. This doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be our moral North Star, even if we never get all the way there. But it does mean that we have to choose between thinking a society is socialist “to the extent that” it fulfills the egalitarian ideal and thinking that socialism (and not just “some degree of socialism”) is actually achievable in material reality. The premise of my political life has been that it is, and I’m very reluctant to let that go without a very good reason.
Second, socialists have historically argued that one of the reasons socialist “processes” are desirable is because it would lead to more egalitarian “outcomes.” Karl Marx, for example, put it this way in his Critique of the Gotha Program:
Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of nonworkers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labor power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one.
I worry that we would lose the ability to express thoughts like this in their clearest, most natural, and most forceful way if we redefine socialism as the realization of distributive egalitarianism, rather than saying that one good reason to be a socialist is because a socialist system of production will lead to a comparatively more egalitarian distribution.
Finally, socialists have historically been motivated not just by egalitarianism but also, and often at least as much, by other values like freedom from domination. (Read Citizen Marx.) You could argue that they were wrong to care about those other values but I’m skeptical. It seems to me that more than one thing matters.
We could, I suppose, define socialism as whatever best realizes all the ideals that are relevant to evaluating social systems—freedom, equality, material sufficiency, optimal conditions for individual flourishing—but then we really would be in the position of defining socialism as goodness, such that “socialism would bring more good things than capitalism” would become totally vacuous, like “salt is saltier than anything other than salt.”
Let’s not do that. There’s an excellent substantive case to be made for socialism. Let’s make it, and not just define the challenge out of existence.
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Even Leon Trotsky, whose official position was that the USSR remained a post-capitalist “workers’ state,” however much it had bureaucratically “degenerated,” sometimes hinted at this sort of analysis. In a memorable passage in his book The Revolution Betrayed (1936), he seems to suggest that Soviet public property was in practice at least much more the property of certain parts of the public than others.
”The Soviet press relates with satisfaction how a little boy in the Moscow zoo, receiving to his question, ‘Whose is that elephant?’ the answer: ‘The state’s’, made the immediate inference: ‘That means it’s a little bit mine too. However, if the elephant were actually divided, the precious tusks would fall to the chosen, a few would regale themselves with elephantine hams, and the majority would get along with hooves and guts. The boys who are done out of their share hardly identify the state property with their own. The homeless consider ‘theirs’ only that which they steal from the state. The little ‘socialist’ in the zoological garden was probably the son of some eminent official accustomed to draw inferences from the formula: ‘L’etat—c’est moi.’” [“The state, it is I,” a comment supposedly made by King Louis XIV.]
He goes onto say that state ownership not meeting this condition would be mere “state capitalism.” I left that part in ellipses because it strikes me as a pretty big further claim. Two people who agreed that state ownership without democracy would be something other than socialism can still reasonably disagree about what it is.
We’d think this even if we thought, which we are not, that social-democratic reforms are long-term sustainable if the workers’ movement never gets around to changing the economic foundations of society.
Again, I really don’t understand why this supposed to be any sort of bullet. Advocates of liberal capitalist democracy aren’t biting any sort of bullet when they acknowledge not just the conceptual possibility but the all-too-tangible reality that liberal capitalist democracies often institute unjust laws and continue to say that political democracy is better than political authoritarianism both as a matter of principle and because democracy provides a more promising terrain of struggle for movements to correct these injustices.
I don’t have necessary and sufficient conditions for “in control of” in my back pocket. But I do think any plausible definition would have to get these two cases right.
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