@Monster Zoro's Tesla Supplier the thing about socialism and capitalism is though
You have 3 modes of production so to say, each with their own social relations
Feudalism has feudal social relations, capitalism has capital centered social relations, and socialism has socially centered social relations
In feudalism, there's lords that own a piece of land, and do no work on it
And there's peasants that work that piece of land and produce things with it and with their tools, and their work produces value, the peasants get to keep some of that value, and the rest of the value they pay to the lord who owns that land, as tribute
In capitalism, there's capitalists, as in stock holders for example, who own a company, but do no work on it
And there's workers that work at that company and produce the products, decide where things should go, decide who to hire and fire, decide budgets, etc, workers do all the work, and their work produces value, and they get to keep some of that value, as wages, but the rest of the value is taken by the capitalists, as profit, because they own the company, the means of production, as in the means by which that profit was produced
In both feudalism and capitalism, lords and capitalists get money not by working, but owning the thing that the peasants and workers work on to produce value and to generate that money
In socialism, there is no feudal lord and no capitalist, the workers themselves own the land and they become the share holders, and they decide things together and run it democratically
But there are 2 main schools of socialist thought:
Authoritarian socialism, Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Deng Xiaoping, Xi Jinping
Libertarian socialism, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Bookchin
Social democrats were originally socialists too and I'll talk about that too, but they aren't socialists anymore
The difference between these 2 schools of thoughts is that they have two different approaches to how they think socialism should be built
The authoritarian socialist approach is, you win elections or do revolutions, and use the power of the state to make socialist reforms of the economy, and the idea is that the workers are empowered by those reforms, and eventually because the workers get so empowered, the role of the state stops having a role, the state withers away, and you end up with a stateless society run by the workers' organisations
The libertarian socialist approach is, you built workers organisations today, that on their own, through strong unions and such, get more powerful, because people would be less and less reliant on the state or on trying to get capitalists to raise wages through voting on policies, but instead rely on their own organisational power, and that bit by bit, that's how you end up with a society where workers run their own workplaces
Libertarian socialists criticise authoritarians' approach, saying that the means and ends to achieve a method are inter-connected, so that if you empower the state more and more, like authoritarians do, it is impossible to end up at a stateless worker-run society, because the means the authoritarians take do not lead to that end, and they also say that the authoritarians just replace the role of the shareholder
In the USSR, a group of capitalists didn't own the company you worked for, Stalin and his government owned the company you worked for
Same thing practically, workers don't own the means of production, someone else does, and they produce the value that those owners extract a part of, just for owning it
And social democrats originally were socialists that said the way to get to socialism is to win elections and reform capitalism with good pro-worker laws, and that that way you end up at socialism
Libertarian socialists also criticise authoritarian socialists, and say that authoritarians are just edgy social democrats
Which imo is true cause both social democrats and authoritarian socialists end up with the same things in practice, capitalist economy with some pro-worker laws
But social democrats eventually distanced themselves and now they just want pro-worker laws and a capitalist economy
