"Socialism means the government owns everything!"
Anglican Brat
Shipmate
in Purgatory
Does any socialist actually believe this? I think the most I heard is that Jeremy Corbyn once said that some industries should be nationalized, rather than left up to the private sector, but as far as I know, few socialists if any believe that everything should be run according to a command economy.
Comments
Whether any, many or more socialists would actually like it to be true (as opposed to believing it is) is a moot point
From some of what I read, some socialists would like most industries to be publicly owned, but in itself that doesn't mean it should be run by a central government. It may mean that most industries are owned by the workers directly.
Marxism is something else.
To be efficient some of the owner/workers would need to be cleverer than the majority. They would demand to be paid more or have more shares. Some workers would be happy to cash their shares. Others would be happy to buy the shares. After a few years the firm is more or less privately owned
If the firm is owned by the state, there are no shares and all the state has to do is pay workers what they are worth to the firm
And here, most railways were owned and operated by the colonial governments almost from the beginning - the costs involved for the necessary distances and such a small population were beyond private ownership.
Lots of people who aren't socialists probably think this is what socialists believe, mainly because socialism was and remains completely and deliberately misrepresented in almost all sections of the press, print and broadcast. (The Morning Star is the exception).
True: I remember reading that Tony Benn promoted cooperatives, when Secretary of State for Industry in either the Wilson or Callaghan government. From memory, a division of BL in Birmingham was bought out by its workers and made a cooperative. It failed, but that was probably a reflection of the viability of the business rather than the viability of cooperatives in general.
If Benn had had his way, that co-op would not have operated in a marketplace that would look familiar now.
Well, sure - if local governments want there to be local bus transportation, they're going to have to subsidize unpopular routes if they want them to exist. And that seems reasonable enough - being able to get around seems like a public good to me, and perfectly within the remit of government to provide, through one means or another.
Buses, like roads, trains, gas mains, and so on, seem to me to be things where running them as a monopoly makes sense. It doesn't make sense to have competing local bus companies running buses on the same routes, or rival companies running gas mains down the same street. So we want one of them, which necessitates some kind of public control over the monopoly.
If there are purchasable shares, it's capitalism and not socialism.
Suma seems to run pretty well without shares and with everyone getting the same wage.
The nature of Normal Distributions means that some will be
I've never seen a pay scale that takes intelligence into account.
But not all industries, by any means. In broad terms, infrastructure should be provided by the state. On top of that, there is plenty of room to provide services.
I would also consider that the purpose of providing a service should be to satisfy the needs of the end users, not to make money. If they do that, they should make money (and pay tax on that to provide the infrastructure that they are using). But the service provision is the thing.
Currently in the UK, we seem to have a society that is more monetarist than even capitalist - that the only value anything seems to have is how much money it can make. THat is a deeply broken and dysfunctional society.
Ownership means control, and more specifically exclusive control. The government has control, therefore the government has ownership. Nobody else has control, therefore nobody else has ownership.
"Everybody owns it" is just another way of saying nobody does.
If you can't sell your share then you don't truly own it.
I agree that socialism means some important services should be in the hands of the people. Look at how train services have failed under private hands.
The route I take to work normally is subsided by government at lest part of the way. There would be no train service otherwise
Defining control by the ability to sell something for money is a pretty narrow definition. Consider a croft. Crofters have security of tenure, they can build a home on their croft, they can put up agricultural buildings. They can buy their croft if they want to, but all sales and transfers are controlled by the Crofting Commission. Each croft usually also includes a share in the common grazing of the township. That share can't be sold separately from the croft. The legal owner of the land, round here the Duke of Argyll, can't do very much with the land without the permission of the crofters. Who actually owns the land in your view?
In this sense, for the government to own the NHS means it is fully responsible for it. This implies they have to have sufficient powers of control over the NHS for this task to be doable.
Covid notwithstanding, train services in 2020s UK are massively better than they were in 1990s UK. That's a strange form of failure.
The whole point of owning something is that nobody else can tell you what you should or shouldn't do with it. It's yours to do with as you wish, with as much interest or involvement as you choose.
From how you put it here, it sounds like nobody does.
So the answer to the original question is: no, unless you're an American right-winger who has redefined the word to meet your ideological agenda.
This.
And this.
I do like the much more helpful definition of Socialism which is "Do unto others as you would have done unto you." As Benn noted, in the UK certainly, socialism owes far more to Methodism than it does to Marx.
Conversely there is a deeper discussion to be had about property and ownership - especially with respect to the 'means of production'
AFZ
So, in fact, nobody owns anything, because there are always limits on what you can and can't do with things you "own". Everything from planning permission to insider trading rules to rules against littering mean, in your view, that you don't own the item in question.
And yet, there have pretty well always been laws against hurling your owned object through someone else's owned window.
That's one of the troubles with owning things. They have a nasty tendency to interact with other things you don't own.
My point was that shares you can't sell still give you control (or, a share in control) over the business. Whereas trading in shares doesn't necessarily lead to that (share in) control if you're only interested in the dividend and resale value and thus don't take any interest in the running of the business.
Employees have a share in control of the business, even if they're not given a bit of paper that says that they own a share of the business. It's in the interest of employees that a business succeeds, it's also in their interest that that success is not at their expense. Ownership is more than who has possession of bits of paper that says they're the legal owner - it's about investment (which is primarily the time of the workers rather than a lump of cash someone spends), decision making about business development, responsibility to get things done ... and that's shared far too widely to be able to say a particular individual (or even collection of share holders) owns it all.
The Socialist ideal is that all workers are invested in what they do - that they're not replaceable automatons clocking in, doing what they're told, and clocking off - that they're integral to the success of the business and that they share in that success. Workers should have pride in what they do, should be rewarded for that, should have a say in how things operate. That ideal is violated in Capitalism where a few based solely on their ability to sink money into a project get to dictate what's done and reward the workers with as little as they can get away with. It's also violated in totalitarian Communism where politically appointed managers take the same dictatorial attitude.
Not around London they are not, nor around the North West. More delays, not enough trains and high prices, packed carriages.
Again the company I work at pretty much functions as you describe socialist ideals but is not Socialist. As well as that no one has shares but we own the company between us. We would usually get a profit bonus but due to austerity and Covid not this year.
Isn’t it interesting how definitions are bendy.
Indeed, most regular train users would not agree. Where trains have improved is in rolling stock. For the most part this is a function of technological advance. Direct-flush/drop-shoot toilets have been phased out. Most (though not all) have automatic doors, air conditioning etc. These started in the 90s. And then we now have (unreliable and often overpriced) WiFi and power sockets.
There's no doubt that rolling stock improvement has been a good thing.
Now, most people don't understand how our railways work (it is stupidly complicated system). The train operating companies are just that: train operators. They don't actually own the trains. They lease them from the rolling stock companies. They are, of course very highly regulated- it's a closed market) but they make very big profits on very small risk. Rolling stock is directed by the DoT. So even these improvements can't really be attributed to the lease companies. They are mostly down to technological advance. But the service and cost gets worse and worse
We don't really have a privatised rail service. What we have is a fragmented national system with lots of systems for profit-extraction. Subsidies are now higher than when it was a public service. Why? Because the market can't really run a modern railway.
AFZ
Opponents of re-nationalisation always point to the BR of the 1970s. "Is that what you want?" they say.
No. Of course not. I want a rail system like the nationalised ones they have on the continent now.
It's all a matter of the points of comparison you choose.
Exactly
Let me introduce you to the idea of The Commons. You appear not to have heard of it, despite the fact it's been around for thousands of years.
Well, the whole reason littering isn't allowed is because I don't own the street, not because I don't have ownership of, and thus the right to dispose of, the piece of litter itself.
If I owned the street as well then I could drop as many pieces of litter on it as I liked.
Actually it's not that simple. I own my house and the land it stands on but I cannot fill the garden with broken furniture nor build a six foot brick wall at the front of it because of covenants over my ownership.
It's not an absolute.
What mechanism do you have for keeping your litter on your street, and not blowing on to my street? What mechanism do you have for keeping the vermin that live in your litter on your street, and not in my street? What mechanism do you have for preventing contaminants from leaching out of your street and in to mine?
A tiny fraction of control is no control at all. You could just as well say we all have a share in ownership of the NHS, but you can't even park your car in one of "your own" car parks without having to pay through the nose.
John Lewis is famously "owned" by its workers, but I bet most of them aren't even able to decide which shelves to put which bits of stock on, never mind broader company policy. Other than the dividend (i.e. annual bonus) what benefit or control over their work does their "ownership" give them?
Let me google that for you.
Eta: no, unsurprisingly, you're wrong, because you didn't bother checking what the situation actually was before you posted.
Old people often are given no choice but to sell their homes in order to fund their care by their local authorities. Guess they never really owned them.
So if you owned a piece of land with a river running through it you'd be perfectly justified in dumping your industrial sludge in the part of the river that you own and whoever's downstream just has to put up with that?
That makes no sense. Selling a property in order to use the income to purchase something else from someone else is only possible if you own the property in the first place. How desperately you want or need the thing being purchased is neither here nor there.
Quite. But they still do not have the freedom not to sell it. Not if they want to carry on living anyway.
But it's your definition of ownership which seems to be having complete and unrestricted control of the things one owns.
Courts can order seizure of property to pay debts - by your reckoning does that mean they weren't really owned?
This is a quirky understanding of antipollution laws. In America there are privately owned roads and streets. Still can’t litter on them.