Comment on This is why Americans hate Socialism.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 4 days agoI think we’re actually closer to agreement than you seem to realize, but you’re making one important logical leap that I don’t think your argument establishes.
I agree that there’s a distinction between something being proven beyond a reasonable doubt and something being sufficiently supported by evidence to conclude that it is likely true. I’ve never argued otherwise. In fact, that’s precisely why I keep appealing to historical evidence and academic definitions rather than pretending every conclusion requires courtroom-level proof.
Where I disagree is your claim that protecting workers is a necessary condition of socialism. Worker ownership of the means of production is central to the definition of socialism. But you’ve moved from that definition to an asserted purpose: that worker ownership is fundamentally driven by the desire to protect workers. Those aren’t the same proposition.
Socialism seeks to alter the ownership and control of the means of production and, consequently, the distribution of economic power. That can absolutely benefit workers and historically has often been justified in terms of improving workers’ material conditions. But “worker protection” is not what makes an economic system socialist. A system could theoretically have worker ownership while providing extremely poor working conditions, and it would still be socialist in the relevant economic sense. Conversely, a capitalist economy can provide extraordinarily strong worker protections without becoming socialist.
That’s the distinction I’m making: worker protection can be a motivation, objective, or consequence associated with socialism without being a necessary defining condition of socialism itself.
And regarding your final point, saying that your arguments demonstrate that my position is wrong is not itself an argument. You still have to establish the premises and show that the conclusion follows from them. That’s exactly what I’m challenging.
If your position is that socialism necessarily entails worker protection, then demonstrate that from the definition or from the academic literature. If your position is instead that socialist movements have historically pursued worker protection as one of their objectives, I have no substantial disagreement with that. Those are two very different claims.
Objection@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
I’ve already explained this but I’ll spell it out very neatly and plainly for you:
Premise A: Socialism means worker control of the means of production (MoP).
Premise B: A class that has control of the MoP will use that power to advance their own interests.
Premise C: Worker protections are in the interests of the working class.
Conclusion 1: Therefore, in a socialist system, worker protections will be implemented.
Conclusion 2: Therefore, if a system does not have worker protections, workers are not in control of the MoP, and it is not a socialist system.
Conclusion 3: Therefore, worker protections are a necessary condition of socialism.
This could only be true if either B or C are false. If one of those premises is wrong, then it’s you that needs to provide an argument or justification about why it is false.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I understand the syllogism. The problem is that your conclusion does not actually follow from your premises, and you still haven’t addressed the distinction I’ve been making.
Premise A is broadly consistent with the economic definition of socialism: workers collectively control or own the means of production.
Premise C is also uncontroversial: worker protections can be in the interests of the working class.
The problem is Premise B. You are assuming that a class possessing control over the means of production will necessarily use that control to advance all of its perceived interests, and then treating that assumption as sufficient to establish a necessary institutional feature of socialism. That does not follow.
Even if workers collectively control the means of production, they still have competing interests and preferences. Collective ownership does not magically produce unanimous preferences about wages, hours, workplace safety, benefits, working conditions, or how resources should be allocated. Workers can collectively choose policies that benefit them in some respects while sacrificing other interests.
More importantly, you’re confusing an expected consequence or political objective with a necessary definitional condition.
Your argument could establish something like:
“If workers control the means of production, they have the ability and potentially the incentive to implement worker protections.”
It does not establish:
“Any system in which workers control the means of production must necessarily have worker protections, and therefore worker protections are a defining condition of socialism.”
That’s the gap I’ve been pointing out.
And the fact that you can construct a syllogism doesn’t make the conclusion established. You have to demonstrate that the premises are sufficiently strong to entail the conclusion you’re drawing from them. Premise B is doing almost all of the work here, and it contains the exact assumption under dispute.
You also keep saying that I’m claiming socialism inherently doesn’t protect workers. That’s not my position either. Obviously socialist movements have historically advocated worker protections, and obviously worker ownership can be used to pursue them. I’m saying something much narrower: worker protection is not what defines socialism, and the absence of a particular set of worker protections does not logically establish the absence of worker ownership of the means of production.
Your Conclusion 2 is particularly problematic. “Workers are not receiving protections, therefore workers do not control the means of production” is simply affirming what you are trying to prove. You would need an independent argument establishing that worker control necessarily produces those protections. You can’t use the conclusion as evidence for one of its own premises.
So no, I haven’t failed to address your argument. I’m addressing the precise point on which your argument depends: you have demonstrated that worker protection can be an interest of workers. You have not demonstrated that it is a necessary institutional consequence of worker ownership, nor that its absence logically proves that workers don’t control the means of production.
Those are three different claims, and you’re treating them as though they’re interchangeable.
Objection@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
You’re just nitpicking. You opened with “O my God. I cannot even begin to tell you how truly stupid this meme is!” Now it’s just that I haven’t sufficiently proven my premise. We’re back to the standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” where you’re rejecting the whole argument based on a sliver of a technicality. I’m not really interested in playing that game.
I’m established a clear and reasonable argument for why worker protections should be considered a necessary component of socialism. Your counterargument is that, just because workers have a clear means and motives to protect themselves, they might randomly decide not to. That’s hypothetically true, but only hypothetically. In practice, it’s pretty much always going to happen, and if it doesn’t happen, like I said, it’s a good reason to look very carefully about why it isn’t happening.
Also, for the record, the meme doesn’t even say that worker protections are a necessary component of socialism, only that socialism “protects the most vulnerable!” You literally said, multiple times including right here:
…that that’s correct! The only issue you have which it, that you’ve chosen to hyper-focus on, is that you’re claiming it’s not definitionally correct, but the meme never even claimed that it was part of the definition! Only that it was an ideology that did promote worker protections, which you just said is true! So on what basis was this reaction of “I cannot even begin to tell you how truly stupid this meme is!” at all called for?
mechoman444@lemmy.world 3 days ago
So, in your previous comment you said I wasn’t addressing your point. I did exactly that, in detail. Now you’re telling me I’m splitting hairs.
I explained why your syllogism doesn’t establish the conclusion you’re trying to draw from it, and rather than address that response, you’ve simply moved on to another objection. So I’ll restate my original argument one more time.
Socialism is an economic system. It does not inherently, nor was it specifically designed, to protect workers. Its fundamental purpose was to address the concentration of wealth and economic power associated with capitalism by changing the ownership and control of the means of production. It isn’t a magical philosophy for solving every social problem.
Socialism has also never historically produced the utopian outcomes people often attribute to it. In many cases, socialist systems produced enormous concentrations of political power and inflicted serious harm on the very people they were supposedly intended to liberate. You can’t simply look at the intended goal and pretend the historical outcomes don’t matter.
My argument has never been that worker protections are bad, nor that socialist movements have never advocated for them. I’ve said the exact opposite: if socialism results in better protections for workers, I’m perfectly fine with that. My argument is that the fact that workers can use collective control of the means of production to protect their own interests does not mean that socialism inherently will do so. There is nothing in the economic structure of socialism that magically guarantees that outcome.
You were making that guarantee. I was pointing out that it was an assertion based on what you believe socialism should accomplish, rather than something inherent to socialism itself.
And, frankly, I’ve never encountered this particular argument before. I’ve never had someone construct a syllogism specifically to argue that worker protection is a necessary consequence of socialism. It was actually an interesting argument to respond to, and I appreciate the different way of approaching the issue.
But ultimately, I still don’t think it establishes your conclusion.
There is no economic system that comes with a magical guarantee that its participants will use it in the way we think they should. And socialism certainly isn’t a universal philosophy for resolving every problem in society. It’s an economic model concerning ownership and control of the means of production.
I don’t understand why people keep treating socialism as though it is somehow inherently going to resolve inequality, protect every vulnerable group, empower workers, and solve all of society’s other problems. We have an enormous historical record to examine. At some point, you have to actually look at what these systems have done rather than what you believe they were supposed to do.