Definition of Socialism

Part of This Series of Posts:

When defining something it is important that the definition includes all instances of the use of the word (that have real material basis) at hand. It is also necessary to note that characteristics of a word do not equal a definition as if a word was to meet a checklist criteria to be defined as something then nothing would be definable. In the case of socialism we would get the 'not real socialism' meme from leftcoms and other ultra-leftists, and in the case of capitalism we would get the 'not real capitalism' in the case of some libertarians towards all capitalism currently existing or in a more general sense towards earlier instances of capitalism such as mercantile capitalism that were not as developed as the capitalism of the industrial era today. The point is that everything is in motion and developing and to reduce everything down to a dogmatic definition, a string of words that is universal, is an incorrect line of thinking and one which gives precedence to established institutions. As Marx and Engels said:

"The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity" - Karl Marx

"The thing to be done at any definite given moment of the future, the thing immediately to be done, depends of course entirely on the given historical conditions in which one has to act. But this question is in the clouds and therefore is really the statement of a phantom problem to which the answer can be - the criticism of the question itself" - Karl Marx

"[V]ery anticipation of yet to be proven results seem disrupting to me, and the reader who wants to follow me at all must resolve to ascend from the particular to the general" - Karl Marx

"[Hegel] develops his thinking not out of the object, rather he develops the object in accordance with ready-made thinking put together in the abstract sphere of logic" - Karl Marx

"But had any eighteenth-century Frenchman in the faintest idea, a priori, of the way in which the demands of the French bourgeoisie would be acomplished? The doctrinaire and necessarily fantastic anticipations of the programme of action for a revolution of the future only divert us from the struggle of the present" - Karl Marx

"[Communists] develop new principles for the world out of the world's own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to. I am therefore not in favour of our hoisting a dogmatic banner. Quite the reverse. We must try to help the dogmatists clarify their ideas" - Karl Marx

"To try to give a definition of property as of an independent relation, a category apart, an abstract and eternal idea, can be nothing but an illusion of metaphysics or jurisprudence" - Karl Marx

"Mr. Bray does not see that this egalitarian reflection, this corrective ideal that he would like to apply to the world, is itself nothing but the reflection of the actual world, and therefore it is totally impossible to reconstitute society on a basis which is nothing but an embellished shadow of it. In proportion as the shadow becomes embodied again, we perceive that this body, far from being the dreamt transfiguration, is the actual body of existing society" - Karl Marx

"Mr. Proudhon does not directly assert that bourgeois life is an eternal truth for him. He says it indirectly, in that he divinises the categories which express the bourgeois relations under the form of thought" - Karl Marx

"The principles are not the starting-point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them, it is not nature and the realm of man which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history" - Friedrich Engels

"Our ideologist may turn and twist as he likes, but the historical reality which he cast out at the door comes in again at the window, and while he thinks he is framing a doctrine of morals and law for all times and for all worlds, he is in fact only fashioning an image of the conservative or revolutionary tendencies of his day. An image which is distorted because it has been torn from its real basis and, like a reflection in a concave mirror, is standing on its head" - Friedrich Engels

"[We should not expect to find] fixed, cut-to-measure, once and for all applicable definitions in Marx's works. It is self-evident that where things and their interrelations are conceived, not as fixed, but as changing, their mental images, the ideas, are likewise subject to change and transformation and they are not encapsulated in rigid definitions, but are developed in their historical or logical process of formation" - Friedrich Engels

"Our definition of life is naturally very inadequate... All definitions are of little value. In order to gain an exhaustive knowledge of what life is, we should have to go through all the forms in which it appears, from the lowest to the highest; To science definitions are worthless because (they are) always inadequate. The only real definition is the development of the thing itself, but this is no longer a definition" - Friedrich Engels

To define socialism we first have to define capitalism. Capitalism is defined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as a system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated to make profits for those who own them. Marx described capitalism as "the anarchy of production". Engels explained:

"For in capitalistic society, the means of production can only function when they have undergone a preliminary transformation into capital" - Friedrich Engels

Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, said that:

“[Capitalism is a system of] profits in command” - Mao Zedong

Simply put capitalism is a system where profits are in command, society produces for the sake of profits. Hence from the negation of the negation: Socialism is a rational system where social ends are the primary motivator/determinant of society.

This is the end of the definition anglo box -1 -2 -3.

My way of looking at it is that capitalism being when profits are in command fits every instance of capitalism and socialism being when social ends are dominant fits every instance of socialism to have existed in material reality.

Now I know that some people will point out that Stalin described a socialist society:

“Yes, you are right, we have not yet built Communist society. It is not so easy to build such a society. You are probably aware of the difference between socialist society and Communist society. In socialist society certain inequalities in property still exist. But in socialist society there is no longer unemployment, no exploitation, no oppression of nationalities. In socialist society everyone is obliged to work, although he does not, in return for his labour receive according to his requirements, but according to the quantity and quality of the work he has performed. That is why wages, and, moreover, unequal, differentiated wages, still exist. Only when we have succeeded in creating a system under which, in return for their labour, people will receive from society, not according to the quantity and quality of the labour they perform, but according to their requirements, will it be possible to say that we have built Communist society" - J.V. Stalin

However, here he is giving a description, and it is not the only description he gave of socialism. The point is that you are not supposed to take the characteristics he describes and see this as the essence of socialism, or ahistorical criteria that define socialism. A description of characteristics is not itself a definition. To summarise the descriptors of socialism he provides, it is each according to his needs to each according to his work, abolition of unemployment, exploitation/the extraction of surplus value/wage labour and oppression of nationalities. These are of course characteristics of a socialist society. However they are not the definition of socialism itself. The definition I have outlined of socialism is a "system where social ends are the primary motivator/determinant of society” is hence correct.