No joke, the first time I actually had socialism explained to me was in my college history class. Before that I had only heard of it in the negative contexts that you hear conservatives use it in. When the professor was done explaining it, I raised my hand and when called on, I said "Wait! That's socialism? What's wrong with that?!?". The professor chuckled and then we spent the rest of the class time discussing socialist theory vs socialist implementation throughout history. He was an outstanding professor, who permanently changed my political outlook.
Just stick "American" in front of it, and conservatives (in the US of A) will always agree, ig.
bUt ThE nAZiS wErE sOcIaLiStS
I can call a dog turd delicious but that doesn't mean it is.
Had me dying, that's such a good one
Tell them the proletariat should rise and eat the bourgeoisie
Kill all the elites, fuck em
Not knowing a lot about this, my question is, who has to pay for the overhead? If we all own a part of the company we work at, does that make me responsible for paying the cost of running the business?
Its the same as any business. The business earns money by selling something and that goes to pay for the activities involved in running the business. The difference is that the workers get to share in the profits and success instead of just a small group at the top.
How pay is distributed is also up to the workers (owners). Nothing says it has to be equal. All this means is that the people doing the actual work get to make the decisions. Not some investor who only cares about profit.
Overhead is the same (maybe less if management is smaller and cheaper) but dividends go to workers instead of shareholders.
Downside is that raising capital to grow the business is much harder and it's much harder to take risks because the effects are not diversified.
But there are other ways to handle it. I wouldn't vote for dividends to be distributed fully, I'd want my bonus, but to put the rest into investing in the company, raising wages, etc. Workers co-ops generally do pretty well once they're off the ground. The only problem they really face is that privately owned businesses are more able to cut labor costs and thus can undercut on prices until the cooperative competition fails
Yes... kind of....
One potential structure would be that various leadership roles (like the C-suite roles we see in any regular company) would be elected positions selected from someone within the company. Their leadership roles would day to day function like the C-Suite does, but instead of being beholden to a board of directors made up of the top investors, they would be beholden to the workers.
So for financials, there would be an equivalent to a Chief Financial Officer for this theoretical socialist company where the position is elected from the workers who handles where all the money flows to and from, making sure resources are being allocated correctly, everyone's needs are met. And since it's elected from the workers, there's incentive to do right by them, and they have already worked alongside them.
So you, Upperhand, might not be directly responsible, having ownership along with every other worker means you have an impact, even if it's indirect, by voting for good leaders, and doing better work would benefit everyone at the socialist company.
That’s not really socialism, it can describe a number of different systems within a broader capitalist economy like mutualism, distributism, and worker cooperatives, among others.
“Socialism” just means “the ‘social ownership’ of the means of production”.
And “social ownership of the means of production” really just refers to any situation where a business is owned and operated by stakeholders (workers, consumers, the broader community, or some combination of these) whose ownership rights stem directly from their social relationship to the business (as an employee, as a customer, or as somebody who is affected by externalities generated by the business).
And a business which implements such a structure can reasonably be described as a socialist business in a very neutral economic sense.
And an economy primarily composed of socialist businesses can reasonably described as a socialist economy in a similar manner.
And a socialist is simply a person that thinks that some sort of socialist economy would be superior to a capitalist one by whatever metrics they deem to be most important (and to be very clear: it can even be possible for a socialist to think that certain implementations of socialism could actually be worse than capitalism. It’s not like a universal thing.).
This is all to say that socialism is not a very well defined idea and it covers everything from nationalizing industries (at least within the context of a republic) to forming workers or consumer cooperatives without even a care for the philosophy of it all. Many people throughout history who have called themselves socialists have advocated for certain socialist ideas while being quite critical of others that would still be reasonably considered socialist.
I also want to mention one more thing since you mentioned distributism. Distributism is simply the idea that “things are better” when wealth and power are widely distributed throughout society. It does not advocate for any particular economic system, but prescribes a goal that distributists believe any economic system should strive to achieve.
All of those are socialist systems
~~While I like the metaphor itself, the part with the "economic elite" might be a very antisemitic trope: https://www.ajc.org/translatehate/cosmopolitan-elite~~
I mixed it up with globalist elite, thanks for pointing it out.
No, it's used in academia too. Our rich elite 1% oligarch capitalists are mostly not Jewish, and the working class shouldn't be expected to use a deliberately cumbersome new name for them.
Thanks for the well written answer, I learned something from it. It is much appreciated. To the people who just downvote without trying to teach people who ask questions, you're the reason people just label entire ideas or movements as stupid, nonsense, or that the people who believe in it as crazy fundamentalists with no real understand of it themselves.
