It’s important to consider the fact that an economy does not have to be entirely Capitalist, Socialist, or Communist.
Most countries already have Socialist and Capitalist components at this point.
What I’d personally like to see is Land be a communist system. Necessities be Socialist. Luxuries be Capitalist.
Ever citizen of a country should own and share in the land of the country equally. It should not be possible to privately own land. If land is leased or rented from this pool for individual or corporate use, that money should be given to everyone equally. Likely that would be handled by a government in reality, but it should be fairly hands off other than facilitating the transfer of value.
Necessities like Housing, Food, Transportation, Medical Care, Parks, Rec Centers, Schools, Police, Courts, etc. should be all handled with socialism. Where the government collects taxes from the land value and capitalist markets, and operates these systems itself for the benefit of everyone who needs them.
If you want more than necessities, capitalism should stick around to handle those desires. Want a bigger fancier house, some fancy oranges from another country, a suit made of silk, go ahead and buy it on a capitalist market either with the money you receive from your portion of land ownership value, or through participating in the capitalist market yourself.
OilyArena@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Why does this have so many upvotes? It’s completely wrong. Social welfare and shared infrastructure have nothing to do with Socialism. Socialism is an economic model where the means of production are owned by the workers, nothing more, nothing less.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 15 hours ago
You clearly don’t understand how many countries operate. Or you’re somehow misunderstanding what “means of production” or “workers” means.
My local electricity provider, and all of it’s power production equipment, transmission lines, meters, etc. are owned by the government. So is every hospital in the country. Almost every road is public.
Means of production is any sort of capital used to build value, so things like infrastructure, buildings, factories, machinery, tools, etc.
Workers does not mean the people that work in a particular building or factory, it means the class of people as a whole.
It’s pretty obvious that if the government owns something, under a democracy that thing is is owned by the citizens of the region. Even Marx mentions that socialism would use the state for collective ownership.
OilyArena@lemmy.ml 14 hours ago
Yes, they may be state-owned, but you still live in a bourgeois state with capitalist ownership structure, so the state doesn’t act in the workers interest, but to uphold the capitalist order.
By the way, would you mind telling me what country that is? Most EU countries with strong state-owned infrastructure that I’m aware of have been forced to liberalize, so for example in my country lots of former state enterprises are now private profit-bound businesses that are just 100% owned by the state.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 14 hours ago
Canada
You’re stretching the realities here with your assertions. The vast majority of what the government does is in the interest of workers. It could be better, absolutely, but it’s a far cry from some dystopian corpo-state. The government could move towards more positive worker benefits, but a lot of those workers won’t actually vote for them if they did because people aren’t entirely rational. So we’re essentially getting what we deserve right now.
Profit-bound but still owned by the state would still be socialist. There’s no requirement that the means of production not generate profit to qualify as being owned by the workers.