Worldbuilding 202: Socialism
Greetings and supercilious! Okay, I am not THAT bad! But I am that good! In today's post, I will be going through socialism! Now to all 🇺🇸s, BOOOO!!!! 👻 Muahaha!
What is socialism?
As I discussed in my post on economics, economics is about answering the question on how to distribute finite resources to infinite wants. And yes, I will be focusing on the economic aspect and not the social aspect of it. And here it focuses on the question of who owns and decides means of production. Capitalism is when the means of production–machines and tools–are owned by private individuals, so socialism is:
An economic system where the means of production (tools, machines, etc.) are publically owned by the people.
Yes, that is all there is to it and the restriction of it.
Capitosocialism scale
Okay, capitosocialism is not a word, but I’m making it up because it fits here! Socialism and capitalism are not a binary choice but a whole spectrum!
Of course red is for socialism and leftist ideas, and blue is right and conservative, only crazies would say otherwise! On the leftmost extreme you have pure socialism where every industry and everything is publicly owned by some method and on the right you have the other extreme where everything, no matter what industry, is always privately owned and the public owns nothing.
I bring this up because it is important to understand that nations and societies can exist anywhere in this spectrum through various means. You can have publicly owned parts within an industry or have part of the economy coexist with privately owned ones. You can also divide industries up such that some industries are publicly owned but others are privately owned. You can mix these two different methods and have a country, or society, be anywhere on the scale.
Market vs planned socialism
A common misconception with socialism is that it necessitates a planned economy. What is that? A planned economy means there is some central agency that decides what is produced and, generally, also what prices will be, if they still use currency. Albeit in the most extreme form, there would be no point to a currency, as what is produced is given to all who contribute. On the other hand, market economy necessitates a currency to be used for anything but very local transactions. This is because in market economies, it is the market and will and desires of the people that dictate what is produced by the producers. This can also be put on a fancy continuum.
Similarly to before, it can be in different amounts in different segments of the economy. Communism is the most famous example of planned economies and is socialism, too. Nazism, at least the one in Germany back in the day, is the most famous planned capitalist economy, well, mostly planned. But remember, communism is not socialism, and socialism does not require planned economies!
Demoautocratic principles
I made this word up, and I am sure you can guess what it refers to. Due to communism and the Soviet Union, the term socialism is often associated with autocracy. That is, one person rules supreme! With caveats I won’t go into here. But… you guessed it!
It’s on a scale, too! You have autocracies at one extreme and absolute free democracy at the other! No one is 100% full of democracy because it is insane. Why should 5-year-olds be allowed to vote on things they cannot understand? Everyone limits the number of people who can vote, and how much you limit decides where on this spectrum you land. Oligarchies land in the middle often; I think the scale is logarithmic… Oh well. A fun fact is that if a voting system has two very reasonable and fair principles applied to it, it is in fact a dictatorship! It is called Arrow’s theorem if you want to look into it.
As Anne is a bit of an orange cat and you may be too, I will explain the gist of it. You vote by ranking people, or parties or whatever, A > B > C > D >... etc. Now, for the first property, we want the property of unanimity, where if everyone votes the same, then that is the outcome we get; super fair! The other property is that if everyone votes Vivian > Anne, then a third contestant that can be placed anywhere in the ranking shouldn’t change that Vivian wins over Anne, that is, the ratio of Bob > Vivian > Anne, Vivian > Bob > Anne, or Vivian > Anne > Bob, should not change that the final tally is that Vivian is voted better than Anne. This is called Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives. Seems super reasonable, right?
With these two properties, there is only one person whose vote counts, and the rest are discarded! Anne, do we have on the list for voting systems? (Anne: I’m waiting for the vote results to see if we should add it… Say, have you voted yet, Vivian? I’m thinking you’re the only one that matters…) Of course I voted, and this is a very fair and just voting system! And the result is… Add it to the list!
Many systems can be built to land all over this scale, and you can even have democracies within autocracies, and I’m not talking about where it is a fake election with predetermined results, but where the people vote, but the number of possible outcomes is restrained.
Moninfinite payers
This term comes from mono, for one, and infinite, you know that one! This is about how many pay for a certain service or good in a society, and can you guess what it is? That is right, another scale of things!
I am seriously running out of colours for these! But yes, in one extreme, there is a single payer for something; the other logical extreme is infinitely many people paying for the service, which is impossible, so “All people individually pay” is close enough.
Some might say this coincides with the market/planned spectrum, and they do affect each other, but they are still separate. Sure, a planned economy fits quite well as a single payer system for everything, but it doesn’t have to! Like the Soviet Union, which had individuals pay for things at state set prices, so it was individuals paying for goods and services while having a centralised planning economy.
What is important in this discussion is that socialism does not in any way entail one side or the other. So having something like a single payer system is not socialism. An example of a capitalist system with a single payer is most of the modern world when it comes to healthcare. Companies are allowed to own and fight for market share, but it is the single payer that decides who they buy from and what they buy. The United States is an example of where a few, namely the insurance companies, pay for it. Which leads to the next part nicely.
No position on any scale fits everywhere
Some might believe the delusion that one's country is one of these many scales uniformly, and the answer is, no they’re not. Every sector of the economy is differently fit for each scale just out of pure economics, others because of social opinions. So every country lies at different places in different sectors, and that is fine.
Now what are good positions for all sectors? I cannot tell as that is heavily determined by society, what is available, and values, but a few trends are these.
Infrastructure is generally better single payer and planned economy
Healthcare is better single payer and market economy
Consumer goods are better infinite payer and market economy
Life necessities are better as a mixed payer and mixed economy
Notice here, however, that I do not say socialism or capitalism because in a lot of these, it really doesn’t matter as long as the stuff is being made. Most issues that have been seen with socialist systems are a product of all these other scales where they pick one extreme and over apply it. As we say in 🇸🇪: Lagom is best.
Public ownership styles
As I have hinted, there are many ways that public ownership and thus socialism can be made, and here are a few of them.
The state is the public
This is the one that communism used, essentially. In this model, the state is considered representative of the public, and its job is for the public. It can be elected or simply just be. But in this model, the means of production and all that is owned by the state; after all, it is the public! Surely it can make all the planning perfect!
Workers own their job
This is where the workers of a place are the principal owners of the means of production of the workplace. This is in some way how Syndicalism was going about it, and the point was to unite all within a sector of the economy in one big union, and that unions together would make the socialist dream come true.
Community owns all
This can be on any scale but often works more locally where production and all its means are owned by the local community. The idea is that the community as a whole owns things that are locally relevant, but on a nation scale, other systems might apply.
Collective assimilation
A bit broader, but it means that the means of production belongs to everyone of a specific group. It can be everyone of a profession, everyone of a place, everyone of a lot of various groups that aren’t covered by those categories before.
Socialism as a product
Socialism as it was initially conceived by Karl Marx is a product of the time and era he lived in just like everything else in all of history. As I said in my economics blogpost, a lot of economic models are products of the time and the capabilities society possesses at the time. Before a certain point in time, there was no possibility to even have capitalism in a meaningful way, as no one had that much money. You could argue it was a form of socialism back then, then but I would argue it is not because it was individuals owning tools and such, not really socialism in any meaningful manner.
So what do I mean exactly? Well, the industrial revolution was sparked by the rise of capitalism, which in turn came from mercantilism because with free trade, money was starting to be made by individuals. Capitalism has this nasty habit when left uncontrolled to accumulate more money for the capitalists, and money is power. So socialism was a reaction to this in a time where factories and industries were becoming more and more the norm and would become the end all be all.
Well so they thought; today, a lot of machines already replace a lot of people and continue to do so. Which is, in my humble opinion, one reason why socialism as it was practised was doomed to fail, though as I say, it is mostly because of bad choices that the various groups who have tried it wove the many scales into socialism. Maybe with enough automation, the scale of socialism and capitalism might become entirely obsolete.
What fits your world
One big thing about having socialism is, as I said just, it is a response to capitalism, which means for it to exist, capitalism must exist, or have existed, and for that, a lot of technological, or equivalently magical, development must have occurred so there is a class of people that has money to invest and buy machines, magic, and more in order to earn even more money.
After that, you are logically free to include it. It can be the remnant of the struggle where it succeeded by not taking the wrong extremes, or having died out because it made the wrong decisions in history, just like it happened on Earth. Or maybe it is co-existing happily with capitalist systems, and it is all a happy world! Or it is Anne’s world, where it all breaks down and we get World War: Socialism vs Capitalism, and everyone loses 😀
Of course, you can also do as I have said and have a mixed system where nations decide differently how to implement a scale, and all the scales I spoke of. You can also take the absolute worst choices and make them very deliberate and smart. Then you can do a better version of Anne’s desire for chaos and conflict! ...This makes it sound like I don’t create conflict for stories, which I do, I just like having a stable centre with chaos and conflict around 😅
Minipracticum: The United Federation of Workers’ Labour Unions
Phew! That is one helluva big name! But I made a small post on the people who founded this government, namely the Tsxobjezn. They are socialist and retain that economy far into the future. This is partially because my universe mimics the early 20th century, but in space! I try to make it a sensible mix of what was with what logically should and could be. Which of course means anyone can do it, and it is generally what I advise often: sometimes you want something nonsensical because it fits a theme or source, so mix it so it's as logical as it can!
They have an ideology that is called “Unionism” which is built on syndicalist ideas of sector-wide unions, but my own version of it where it is built as a bottom up system, with local unions first, then forming with others of the same industry locally, and forming larger geographic parts, and keeping on until they have the union that covers all people. This is how their democratic system is also structured. They are really in no extreme but heavily toward the socialism one. How did it come to be? Well, given Anne is a Tsxobjez, I’ll let her tell the tale.
(Anne:) Thanks, Vivian! The best way I can describe this is to refer to Kwxents, one of the architects of the Tsxobjezn People’s Revolution. In their life, they toiled away in a factory for capitalists who owned the means of production absolutely. Because the capitalists had all the power and treated the people who worked in the factories like disposable parts to be used without repair until they broke, Kwxents grew up viewing the means of production as a distant dream.
But as they listened to the stories of their auntle, they began to question whether the workers themselves should own what the factories produced. After all, it was the workers making it, was it not? The capitalists had almost no contact with the factories. They just sat in their mansions skimming profits off the virtual enslavement of the people who did the hard labour. Kwxents began to speak out about this, and though they were mocked at first, soon people began to listen. Dozens of arrests later, the People’s Revolution caught fire, and before long, the capitalists fell to the power of the people.
Today, we remember Kwxents for their struggle and sacrifice. Thanks to their tireless efforts, and those of their partner Aksxana and technological genius and friend Tthenla, workers across the Federation own their jobs and have a direct stake in the direction of the companies for whom they work and a direct share of the earnings, proportional to the work they gave.
Summa Summarum
What have we learned here? Well me, not much 😛 but I hope for you lot that you have learned that what is often thought of as things related to socialism, and even communism, are in fact spectra where you can lie at many places all at once in a given society, and that socialism, despite its complexity, has a simple component to it: the means of production belongs to the public, not individuals. The important thing to notice is that the other spectra make it a very wide array of options to pick from
This allows you, as a writer and worldbuilder, to create socialisms that fit your story, world, and personal needs. But remember that it is a product of its era and applying it to far flung tech or magic societies can ring weird. Like how Star Trek is called socialist despite their technology completely wrecking any notions of economy that relates to socialism…
But you can still use it if there is a theme or feel you are going for! Good luck worldbuilding, Comrades!
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Copyright ©️ 2024 Vivian Sayan. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as socialism, demoautocratic, and moninfinite are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, specific ideas such as the United Federation of Workers Labour Unions, the Tsxobjezn, Kwxents, and everything else in the minipracticum as well as all language or exact phrasing are individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
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