Lower Nubia wrote:Duvniask wrote:And I am a 400 foot tall purple platypus-bear with pink horns and silver wings.
Despite what some might say, in the final analysis social democracy preserves capitalism in return for a compromise where the working class gets universalized benefits. The only way you can really call it "socialism" is if you subscribe to the obnoxious idea that socialism is "when the government does things".
Ahh the old fashioned:
"Social democracy isn't my flavour of hardline socialism, therefore it ain't socialism."
Spare me the bullshit.
Go read actual theory instead of spouting your surface-level layman nonsense. Social democracy has never meaningfully challenged capitalism.
Lower Nubia wrote:Aureumterra wrote:Social democracy literally isn’t socialism. And this is coming from a passionate anti-socialist. Sweden and Finland are both social democracies and both reject the label of socialism
"Types of socialism include a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production and organizational self-management of enterprises as well as the political theories and movements associated with socialism. Social ownership may refer to forms of public, collective or cooperative ownership, or to citizen ownership of equity in which surplus value goes to the working class and hence society as a whole. There are many varieties of socialism and no single definition encapsulates all of them, but social ownership is the common element shared by its various forms.
As a term, socialism refers to a broad range of theoretical and historical socioeconomic systems and has also been used by many political movements throughout history to describe themselves and their goals, generating numerous types of socialism. Socialist economic systems can be further divided into market and non-market forms. The first type of socialism utilize markets for allocating inputs and capital goods among economic units. In the second type of socialism, planning is utilized and include a system of accounting based on calculation-in-kind to value resources and goods wherein production is carried out directly for use."
It being written on Wikipedia does not mean it is correct terminology. This is the terminology of certain academics who maintain a very surface level view of what "socialism" means.
Socialism, properly understood, is a system distinct from capitalism, and you will find no better analysis of what constitutes capitalism and its mode of production than in the Marxian framework, which keeps its terms much more well-defined than common parlance. Defining socialism as just being "social ownership" or "economic democracy" leads you to a distinction without a difference, where the entirety of the capitalist framework is preserved, but under obfuscatory legal expressions. You still have a ruling class that towers over the working class and controls the state apparatus behind the scenes, albeit less so than in comepletely managed democracies like the US. You still have the universality of commodity production which implies the concomitant market exchange, alienated and exploited wage labor by said ruling class, externalities and the race to the bottom in the pursuit of profit.