User blog comment:Centrist16/SOMETHING EVERYONE MUST KNOW/@comment-3398633-20150809140026/@comment-3398633-20150811192928

Point 1: How is the money being forcibly taken from the worker? The company tells them what they'd be making if they work for them before they agree to join the business. Your arguement on the the whole way the system should work is the reason socialist economies will never work. By that reasoning, any worker could earn the same amount of money as a doctor simply because the wares they've produced are sold at a higher cost. Why should a doctor have to spend 12+ years learning medical practice and interning before operating on a human, just to make the same as some thug with a basic education working at Wendy's? This is why socialist economics is toxic to actual business.

Point 2: A worker typically works from 9-5 and doesn't have to deal with their job until the next day. A manager almost never stops working, with work coming home with them and into their daily lives and recreation. Also, what is "labor"? How do you measure "labor" for each worker? If a man has to lift heavy boxes for five or six hours, does he make more than his manager who shuffles through paper day-in and day-out for nine or ten hours a day, and receives phone-calls even when at home? Do you pay doctors less because they only work for three hours a day doing physicals to help individuals live longer, and pay hamburger-flippers more because they work longer? This may look like an extension of the last point, but it fits into both.

Point 3: Marx wasn't an economist. He never majored in economics, and learnt economics from reading books, not actually learning about them from people who knew how economies worked. The books he read could have come from the late-18th century, not representative of how economics worked in the mid-1800s. All other Marxists just their economic inspiration from Marx, the self-taught wannabe economist. Going to a kinda-sorta doctor who taught himself a surgeon isn't going to be a good doctor let alone a qualified surgeon. Same applies to Marx. Sorta being an economist doesn't make you an economist. And Mondragon exists because it was established in a capitalist state where social and economic stability allowed for it to grow. But in countries which were socialist, such cooperatives didn't succeed because the economies were too unstable.

Point 4: Social anarchism is considered a branch of anarchism, not socialism, though it shares some similarities to some of socialism's ideals. But according to your own words, following some and not all of socialism's ideals doesn't make its a socialist ideology. As for the second part, it is absolutely an excuse not to adopt socialism. Capitalism has a long record of working very well, whereas socialism in all of its forms, has failed each and every time in human history. And in the few cases it had some success, it was either because, as in the case of Mondragon, they took place under capitalism systems, or in the case of China, adopted capitalist ideals.

Point 5: Like you said TM, there are different models of socialism. State socialism is still variant of socialist, and advocated for state ownership of all means of production. Just because it wasn't your form of socialism, doesn't mean it still wasn't socialism. As for Venezuela, social democracy is a variant of socialism. It's still socialism.

Point 5: Accordng to state socialism, you have a non-democratic form of socialism, and still be socialist. That's why economists still classified the Soviet Union and China, especially under Stalin and Mao, as socialist states. You see, this isn't like Christianity, where the Bible has a very clear position where there are no "in-betweens". Either you are a Christian, or you aren't. With socialism, there are many variants of the ideology, and adhering to any one of those ridiculous models and variants means you're a socialist, even if the other socialists don't agree with you. They are all considered socialist whether you like it or not. So your last sentence is comparing apples to oranges.