Socialism is defined historically and by most definitions I’ve seen, as the ownership of the means of production. There are various forms of socialism, but all operate within this framework. Now, the term ‘common ownership’ has attracted all sorts of misconceptions, but let me clear up the first. Common ownership of a field doesn’t mean you have to get the yes from everyone in the world in order to use it. If they wanted it, they’d have done something about it. There isn’t a natural scarcity of land, the only scarcity is one artificially created in the rise of capitalism. So in other words, the managers of a piece of land or capital are the users of that particular land or capital. This fits in well with the ownership theory of personal possessions, so it may be said that socialists advocate a use-based ownership theory. This could theoretically be individual (as is usually advocated by American individualist anarchists like Benjamin Tucker) or people could band together in co-operatives and produce collectively, and receive the entire product of their labour, as viewed by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon, and later anarchists, also viewed that these co-operatives would form federations, communes, collectives, etc, and that these would become the basis of society in whatever form the individuals and their co-operatives desired.

One misconception that must be straightened out is the issue of ‘public’ ownership, i.e. state ownership. State ownership is not common, whatever the state owns is just owned and controlled by the state elite. This elite aren’t the users of these things, they just control them through force. There is only ‘public’ access to them because the state elite permits it. That’s much closer to private than use-based ownership.

This leads on to another issue. The right tends to regard any economic state intervention as ‘socialist’. It’s hard to see where they’re coming from. When does any intervention the state makes ever promote worker self-management, democratic workplaces, or common ownership? It was the state which prevented all of these things in the first place and still does today. In fact, it was argued by Adam Smith that the state, by it’s own admission, was instituted for the advantage of the property owning class;

“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is, in reality, instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have property against those who have none at all.”

— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776

That’s not to say that all state intervention as a blanket statement is necessarily anti-socialist. It was the state which originally acted in the interests of the property owners to put capital into the hands of the minority in what Marx called ‘primitive accumulation’. Some classical liberals, including Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill advocated various taxes and social security policies that would help restore this pre-capitalist society, and Proudhon advocated the state should set up worker-managed public works. However, most socialists have since given up that this would in itself create a socialist society, and have turned to the ideas of revolution propounded by the two foremost post-Proudhon socialists; Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin.

But to sum up, state intervention in itself isn’t socialist. And that includes the welfare state. But that doesn’t make it all anti-socialist.

So, I think that’s everything. If I’ve missed anything, please let me know.

Thanks for reading.

- Laszlo Zapacik