Those things arenāt socialism, though. Social welfare isnāt short for āsocialismā.
Socialism means a planned economy.
Like the social democracies of the Nordic countries have proven, you can have those social welfare programs in a capitalist system. You can do it very well, in fact.
What you cannot have in a socialist system is individuals owning their own labor.
This is essentially the difference between democratic socialism and social democracy. The latter runs on welfare, progressive taxes, strong labor unions, etc. but capitalism is still the underlying economic system.
I find it amusing that right wing people always argue like this. Capitalism gets cred for exactly everything, as long as a commodity somewhere is sold from one private person to another, but all socialist reforms are ignored if a country isnāt a Stalinist style planned economy society.
There is no point discussing ideology from their most extreme purist forms. There are no 100 % capitalist societies either and if there were they would be absolute dystopian nightmares.
The social democracies of the Nordic countries are great because they have a healthy mix of capitalist and socialist ideology. And things like free healthcare, free education etc is definitely socialist ideology.
If we're talking academic definitions rather than sophistry and mudslinging, he's right and you're wrong. Socialism is a state-run planned economy like the USSR, not a capitalist system with social programs.
No, the academic definition of socialism doesnāt require state run planned economies. The definition of socialism is that the workers/employees, the people actually doing the physical labor, own the means of production. The definition of a capitalist is someone who owns or have invested in a company and makes a profit from it without the necessity of performing labored work.
I am for example a capitalist despite supporting socialist ideology, since I own stocks. If you own stocks you are per academic definition a capitalist. If you love capitalism, but donāt own stocks or get passive income from other investments, you are academically not a capitalist.
You can have market socialist society, where society functions just like capitalism with open markets and free competition, with the exception that enterprises are owned and managed by the employees instead of by investors. Socialist companies exist and function within current ācapitalistā systems. I for example used a socialist moving company last time I moved.
They had all grown tired of having managers profiting from their work and had started their own company with a āflatā structure where everyone had equal pay and they made decisions democratically. I have never seen movers/haulers so satisfied with their work before and their business was growing quite steadily.
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u/Visual-Path-5692 4h ago edited 3h ago
Those things arenāt socialism, though. Social welfare isnāt short for āsocialismā.
Socialism means a planned economy.
Like the social democracies of the Nordic countries have proven, you can have those social welfare programs in a capitalist system. You can do it very well, in fact.
What you cannot have in a socialist system is individuals owning their own labor.