Hive is socialist... but what does that even mean? Today I will be going into what differentiates socialism from capitalism and what that means for Hive.
There are many people out there who are misinformed when it comes to different economic systems, so lets go over a few things.
Before we begin, lets get some clear definitions in order to prevent any misunderstandings or strawmanning.
- Private Property: Property that is owned by an individual or group and is used to make profits off others. This includes things such as offices, factories, apartments, et cetera.
- Personal Property: Property that is owned by an individual or group that is used directly by its owner(s). This includes things such as smartphones, houses, computers, food, toothbrushes, et cetera.
- Public Property: Property that is held in common by all who use it, this commonly includes things such as parks, forests, roads, et cetera.
- Market Economy: An economy in which goods and distribution follows supply and demand.
- Planned Economy: An economy in which goods and distribution is allocated ahead of time by some form of government.
- Polity: An identifiable political entity, organised institutionally, that can mobilise resources.
- Government: The system or group that governs over a community.
- State: A form of government in which a polity maintains a monopoly on legitimate violence.
- State Ownership: Ownership by a state.
- Employee Ownership: Ownership of a business by its employees.
- Worker Cooperative: A form of employee ownership in which decisions are made democratically, either by direct democracy or by electing management.
- Social Ownership: Various forms of ownership in which a community at large owns the thing in question.
- Feudalism: A combined economic, social, military, and legal system characterised by aristocratic control of almost all aspects of a civilisation.
- Capitalism: A variety of economic systems characterised by the heavy usage of private property to accumulate capital.
- Socialism: A variety of economic systems in which private property has been replaced with either social ownership or public property.
- State Capitalism: A system in which a state owns most business and management decisions are made by unelected officials.
- State Socialism: A system in which a state owns most business and management decisions are made by officials democratically elected by the sector in question.
Now that we're through with that mess, lets dive into this.
Now, what is capitalism and where did it begin?
Capitalism, as defined above, is an economic system that relies heavily on private property. Its biggest differentiation from feudalism is its incorporation of markets, rather than all control being inherited in lines of nobility it is distributed using market forces.
Under capitalism, the vast majority of businesses and resources are privately owned. These private owners have a primary goal of achieving the most profits possible. This leads to exponential growth, something which is unsustainable in the long run.
The roots of capitalism can be traced back to the enclosure movement, which happened between the 13th and 19th centuries and peaking in the 18th century. During this time, public land which was held in common by a village or town was enclosed and deeded off to private ownership. This combined with a rise in the number of merchants were are major contributor to the development of capitalism.
This enclosure movement, combined with the rise of merchants in the 16th and 17 the centuries, started the development of modern day capitalism.
I'll consider posting something more detailed about capitalism in the future if people are interested, this is enough for the current topic.
Alright then, what is socialism?
While there are dozens of socialist systems out there, I'll be going over the one closest to our current socioeconomic system today for simplicity. That would be market socialism.
Under market socialism, many of today's societies would change very little, especially in day to day activities outside of work.
What would change, however, is the workplace environment.
Rather than workplace management decisions being made top down by a CEO and board, they would be made bottom up in a democratic manner. Every employee would have ownership in the place they work and would get a vote in how things are run.
We can see this system working extremely well in some companies today, such as the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, or Ocean Spray in the USA.
You might be wondering: If this model is so much better, why hasn't it taken over everything? While a fair question, its framing is wrong and comes from the mindset of endless growth.
These businesses haven't taken over everything because that's not their goal. Their goal is to provide sustainable, reliable, and safe work for their workers, and to provide a good service. Expansion comes after providing a good service, and as such, may not happen if they're already providing a good service and their workers are well off.
This doesn't mean innovation won't happen, in fact, this environment fosters innovation more so than overworked and constantly busy ones. Some of humanity's greatest innovations were ones that came to mind while relaxed and stressfree.
If there's interest, I'll write about other forms of socialism, including those that failed or were doomed from the start, in the future. Many forms of socialism have been tried over the centuries, some were highly successful and others were a disaster.
How does this apply to Hive?
For those aware of Hive's governance system, you'll know that Hive is effectively a democracy which follows a set of agreed upon rules on how to distribute voting power.
Hive is not owned by any one group, its ownership is distributed to all of its users in a stake based model. That means that anyone who uses Hive effectively owns part of the network.
This also applies to many of Hive's token based communities, such as LeoFinance.
By building a decentralised platform that utilises democracy, you also build one that follows a socialist form of governance.
Decentralisation and socialism go hand in hand, and capitalism is in opposition to decentralisation.
I wanted to go into further detail with several things here, but I can't spend forever perfecting things as then I'd never get anything out. There's always time to go further in depth in more specific write-ups in the future.
If you've got any questions, feel free to comment.
While I understand the generalized and simplified exercise you are engaging in, simplifying and generalizing at the same time can make it even more difficult, if not impossible, to reach a meaningful understanding. There is actually a lot of gray space between the black and white extremes. Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and their profit (which is distributed to the owners) and can be compared to feudalism or colonialism, but I wouldn’t compare it to communism or socialism, or democracy for that matter. Democracy is a form of government where the people choose their governing authorities. Communism and socialism are philosophical ideas. You can compare democratic extremes though, such as laissez faire capitalistic democratic systems versus socialistic democratic systems. The Scandinavian countries are excellent examples of the second, while pre-antitrust America (and arguably 21st century America as well) is a good example of the first. The Scandinavian example illustrates a very successful ‘blending’ of communism and laissez faire capitalism where a ‘happy medium’ is found: simplifying (again, very dangerous) the private is kept private whereas the public is a shared entity. Socialized medicine is a great example: health and medicine are arguably public goods, not private, but even in that sector there is a mix of private and public practices, and professionals who participate in both. The command economy (and I will end with this) can be either fascist, where control is centralized but the profits are privatized, or communist, where control is also centralized but the profits (if and when they exist) are public and distributed with no rational criteria relating to input.
I disagree with your conclusion that “decentralisation and socialism go hand in hand, and capitalism is in opposition to decentralisation”. If you had said laissez faire capitalism, I might be more inclined to agree, but even then, what if it is laissez faire capitalism within a socialistic regime, i.e. fascism? The decentralization half of your conclusion goes to hell in a hand basket. The main problem here is that apples are difficult to compare to oranges to begin with.
Decentralization = democracy IMVHO. Now, how we organize the economic system within that is another topic, but I will say that the American democracy never did better than when there were antitrust laws, i.e. laws that furthered decentralization of the mean of production and punished the opposing idea of centralized monopolistic behavior.
Whew! A lot said in record time, and extremely deficient as a result, I'm sure – I almost didn’t say anything, but, what the hell, that’s why we’re here and it’s what I hope others will do with what I post, so I decided to make my simplified, generalized attempt too. 😃
Hive is not privately owned, but rather socially owned. Even joining requires someone who already has stake in the network to burn part of their stake to create your account, that burnt amount permanently becomes part of your account. While ownership is not evenly distributed, that need not be the case for something to be socialist.
You would be able to see this amount for any account on hiveblocks.com, but it's having post-HF24 issues and is down.
Any form of capitalism is in opposition to democracy. People spend between a third and half of their waking lives working, and to say that the form of governance within the workplace doesn't matter is delusional. Not to mention that the logical conclusion of capitalism is one entity having complete control over everything, as it would be in the best interest of any corporation to either buy out the state or create its own state to increase its power.
Workers fought hard and died for many of the liberties people take for granted these days, weekends, a 40 hour work week, a minimum wage. These were all movements against capital, in opposition of capitalism.
The Scandinavian system is not socialism, what they have in place is a welfare state. Workers do not have democratic control of the means of production, therefore it cannot be categorised as any form of socialism. They have social programmes, not socialism.
Under communism, there is no money, class, or state. There has never been a communist society*. While there have been people who called themselves communist, and even places run by people with communist ideals, again, there has been no communist society.
Fascism can exist regardless of the form of economy, it's characterised by ultranationalism and strict adherence to hierarchy. Fascism is an inherently self destructive ideology.
Capitalism cannot exist within a socialist regime. What you're thinking of is an authoritarian regime, which has nothing to do with the economy.
Any system that favours democratisation will inherently create socialism, as any form of democratically, bottom up, run businesses is socialism.
A planned economy is not necessarily socialist, as market socialism is socialism but has a market based economy.
Market socialism could drop in and replace our existing economic system, the day to day lives of people would not change that much. Most people would see significant increases in pay, and would now have occasional work meetings to vote on business decisions or vote on new management, other than that however there would be very little change. Over time, workplaces would improve as workers will make decisions that make working safer and easier, and productivity would go up.
*Just to cover this point, it may be possible to argue that some prehistoric human civilisations were communist, however that's impossible to prove or disprove. I'm specifically referring to modern human civilisations.
One thing I forgot to mention before is that Europe, for example, while being made up a wide mix of regulated capitalistic economic systems (thanks to the varied socialized natures of each government), is democratic.
Democracy is decentralization.
The social economic arrangements are another thing. They are defined and controlled by the governing system, not the opposite.
Here on HIVE, I own my HIVE. It is no one else's, and I don't share it with anyone.
Just like we all own our own home (sooner or later).
But I get the sense that what we're really talking about is whether the local baker gets to call the shots in his bakery or not. As long as he/she puts up the money, I'm inclined to say they deserve to be the boss. On the other hand, when a group of people open a cooperative bakery, I have no problem with that either. That's pure business.
Democracy is another thing. It's the form of governance we choose to regulate and control not just our economic arrangements, but all other social arrangements appropriate for each level of governance, from flat owners who share the cost of roof repairs, to ordinary private citizens who vote for a national health service, both because it is the economically rational thing to do. (The tough part is convincing them. 😂 )
ohhh...this makes me feel bad. VERY BAD.
More than half of my life been ruined by socialism. Not hard to guess my feelings about it....
😃
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
Same here.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
I totally agree with the premise of your thesis here.
An interesting debate for me. I wouldn’t get too involved but we who have lived in socialist countries (and there are quite a few of us here) can tell you that Hive is something completely different. Socialism has always degenerated into some shit (but that doesn't mean the same won't happen to Hive), but it's true that you still have quite a few people who think that's it ...
When most people think of socialism, they think about the various forms of authoritarian socialism. In these scenarios, the system tends to devolve from state socialism into state capitalism before falling apart, as what happened to the USSR.
There have been a handful of highly successful regions that used libertarian socialism, though they often met their end via invasions. One such example of this is Revolutionary Catalonia, a fairly large region that sprung up during the Spanish Civil War. During their existence they saw massive improvements to quality of life and literacy rates, however they were destroyed around the start of World War 2 by fascists.
An example of market socialism would be Yugoslavia, and while it was destroyed by an increase in nationalism leading to wars, they were doing better off than other similar regions during the same time period prior to that.
A modern day example of libertarian socialism would be the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. Despite being under constant threat of Turkish invasion, they've managed to do quite well for the region. They also played a crucial role in the defeat of ISIS.
A lot of the stuff people hear about socialism these days is propaganda from those in power, as any major successful socialist countries would threaten to topple their power. It's why the USA's CIA has repeatedly overthrown democratically elected leaders in smaller countries. They don't want people to contemplate possible alternatives to the current system.
Every system has its downsides, that's why it's important to compare it to other systems in similar countries. You can find plenty of bad things that have happened in any country regardless of its social and economic systems. I see lots of people point to one bad thing in a country and use it to dismiss the entire system.
Also, a common tactic of authoritarians, including fascists, is to call themselves socialist even when they are anything but. The classic example of this is Hitler's National Socialist party, who killed the actual socialists in the party during the Night of the Long Knives. If calling yourself something was enough to actually be that, than North Korea would be democratic and China would be a people's republic.
Authoritarians call themselves something that's popular in order to garner public support, try not to fall for it.
I don't know, I wouldn't take Catalonia for a successful cause ... Spain still takes them for its own, all leaders have been severely punished ... hey, in Europe, people are imprisoned for political crimes because they think differently or want something independence ...
Yugoslavia ... but I'm from exYU, I wouldn't agree that nationalism was the cause of the catastrophe that happened later, Yu was totally credited and the catastrophe happened when the loans had to be repaid ... and then everyone else was to blame ...
Syria? Um ... with the dictator from before, because everything went well until the drought and the endangered Syrian tribes moved to the area controlled by this dictator and the solution was that they later went to Europe, and next to them they had millions of more Pakistanis, Afghanis, Bangladesh and I don't know who else ... they caused total global chaos ... ... you didn't exactly convince me 😎
In a libertarian socialist society, there are no leaders as it functions as either a direct democracy or a liquid democracy. Like I said, they were destroyed by fascists around the start of WW2 (1939) and after that they became part of Spain again.
Also, Yugoslavia was not a libertarian socialist system, that may not have been clear in my post. It was a federal republic, not unlike the USA, Nepal, or Germany. That puts it as being more authoritarian than libertarian, though nowhere close to the degree of the USSR.
While the rise of nationalism in Yugoslavia was in part driven by the economic crisis, things could've gone a different way had there not been a rise in nationalism. A good chunk of the Yugoslav Wars was driven by nationalism.
In 1989, Yugoslavia had an external debt of USD$17B, or about 19.2% of its GNP.
For comparison, today, the USA has an external debt of USD$21.3T, or about 98.8% of its 2019 GNP (roughly ~140% of its 2020 GNP due to the pandemic). Debt isn't the only factor, else the USA would be a wasteland right now.
Syria and the NES are different governances entirely, given the region's ongoing civil war that should've been more clear. The NES has a population of around 2 million and is currently not recognised by any major government. They currently have 23 represented political parties and operate under a federated semi-direct democracy, with a goal of moving as close to direct democracy as possible over time.
Hive has a voting system but the weight of that vote equals to the stake you have in it, therefore if is a democracy is a very imperfect one, still...
There are few users with most of the stake. However is true that Hive has a lot of potential in a world with a socialist model, but we aren't in that world right now, lets not confuse our hopes with the reality.
While it is true that Hive's stake is not distributed evenly, that plays no part on whether or not it would classify as socialist or not. Hive's system is malleable and agreed upon by its users, and if necessary, can change in the future to adapt to society's own changes. Witnesses are elected and witnesses control the rules.
Hive's very existence stems from a defiance of power, people didn't want their network essentially controlled by a single person.
As long as everybody who takes part in that adventure Hive, does that completely voluntarily, I have no problem with the term socialism.
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STOPI'm not entirely sure Hive is really that socialist in how it operates. I'm not convinced it is run for the common good. And there are some pretty powerful stake holders who control a lot of the power here, so I'm not entirely convinced it is democratic either. But it is early days, so we'll see what happens as it grows
Good point, one can argue it doesn't follow the spirit of socialism, even though it follows the letter of socialism.
I expect the distribution of stake to spread somewhat out over time, it's a necessary requirement for the health of Hive's economy.
Something that could be beneficial is having some form of standardised promotion system where a large majority of the amount spent on promotion is burnt, with the bit not burnt being distributed to DApp operators that participate in the system. That would mean advertisers would essentially be providing money to hive authors in exchange for advertising.
I want to see Hive grow, and as soon as HF24's rough patches are worked out I'm going to look into onboarding people. LeoFinance is also doing great work onboarding new users but we need to use as many fronts as possible to onboard.
HIVE is not a democracy. HIVE is a plutocracy. At best you could call it a representative plutocracy.
There is nothing socialist about HIVE. Even if you look at the evolution of HIVE you see its purely capitalist.
Youre wrong.
I would tend to agree with you if it weren't for the fact that Hive only exists because someone with even more wealth showed up and tried to buy out the network. Now the network is specifically moving in a direction to prevent that from being possible.
That doesnt really have anything to do with democracy or socialism. Im not seeing your point.
Justin did buy the network and someone else made HIVE. Then free market kicked in and gave HIVE a market cap.
Theres really nothing socialist or democratic about hive. If you view "upvotes" as someone getting free stuff and you somehow equate that to socialism, thats actually not how upvotes work.
Id like to see more democracy in HIVE but i dont see that being possible.
Yes and No.
I'll take the silly response. Take it with a grain of salt of truth. And I am not directing my words at anyone in particular, but more fictionally speaking.
Everything I love about Hive: free speech (mostly), (practically) infinite posting and image hosting, shared work (although disproportionately) to develop value in our jointly invested assets, and a representative governing body that can be easily replaced by popular support to enforce the will of the electors (although stacked to favor the wealthiest). Sounds like a free market democracy with certain constitutional rights that cannot be broken by anyone.
Hive does not rule every part of our lives, and only controls as much as we choose to invest into it. That does not sound like socialism to me. In full blast socialism, I would not be allowed full ownership of any of my own property, because it would be shared by everyone. If everyone believed I didn't deserve dime to my name due to a past crime allegation, they could choose to agree I do not deserve to earn a living or own property, and I might die of hunger. More likely a body of the government might penalize me with unjust consequences, the situation would be censored to protect the people (the government), nobody would know about the injustice, and nobody would bother to stop it.
However, some other things I have experienced in Hive: downvotes used to censor my words, downvotes used to censor my shared images, downvotes used to prevent me from earning my fair portion of rewards/income, fraudulent information posts used to rally opponents against honest/hardworking artists/authors, permanent spam attacks against authors intended scare curating from rewarding legitimate authors, permanent blacklists operated by anonymous cults who impose draconian sets of rules in order to be removed or provide no options whatsoever, witnesses who can jointly tax the populace at whatever rate they deem is fair for themselves, and witnesses who are capable of acting against according the will of their wealthiest stakeholders to impose self-benefiting irreversible measures.
Yes, this part reminds of socialism quite a bit. And this sums up all the parts of Hive abuse potential I really dislike the most.