Garion Chat: Capitalism and Socialism

12/19, 10:24am
Garion Evans
So I've been having trouble coming up with sufficient definitions of capitalism and socialism.  I've been using "private ownership of the means of production" for capitalism, since I think a lot of people would agree with that definition, but it's pretty vague.
I've been using "social ownership of the means of production" for socialism, since I think it's fair that a group of people could give a resource collective ownership whether with government or without.  But these terms get tangled when you consider how things like corporations fit into this as they are both socially owned and private to a certain extent.

12/20, 7:11pm
Reginald Livingston
Corporations are the least of your worries honestly. Corporations are privately owned, they are just privately owned by alot of people at the same time (joint ownership).
Public ownership means that no one owns it, in the traditional sense. Governments try to say that they publically own things but it really is either private ownership or no ownership. Historically, public ownership literally means that the society in general will enforce 'no one can control this resource, and no one is responsible for it', which seems strange but that's how it turns out usually. The consequence is the resource being overused, naturally.
If you want to go with an ownership basis for detecting capitalism and socialism (objectively) you'll need to define ownership objectively. Typically libertarians will classify ownership by contract to satisfy this but they never explain what that contract means, cause its not like humanity is bound by contracts, people break them all the time. If you look behind the contract explanation, it's really about expectations between parties. If you have two parties who -want- to leave each other's possessions alone and will respect/defend each other's possessions as properly belonging to said parties, then you already have the incentive structure for ownership without needing contracts. The contracts only spell out in writing what two parties should expect out of each other in a particular arrangement/circumstance, and should the contract be broken then some pre-agreed upon consequence will be -sought- but that doesn't mean that it -definitely- will happen, its just something that should be expected.
Personally, I've never been a fan of either term, capitalism or socialism. When I use the terms, I use them completely differently.
Capitalism is a stage of civilized development, where the political authority has decided to respect the private property of it's citizens (to some extent), leading to all the benefits that follow (stability, security in capital investments, accumulation of wealth, free trade, global division of labor, etc). I use capitalism along with terms like tribalism, the classical slave societies, and feudalism.
Socialism is the attempt by a society to institute public property, as I described earlier. It doesn't require a government, as many communes, monasteries, colonies, etc have tried to establish public property with disastrous results.
Let me know if you have any further questions.

12/20, 11:01pm
Garion Evans
Thanks for spending so much time on it.
That's given me a much more clear idea of those meanings.  I agree with your usage.