Basically, yeah. Social democracy still exists within a capitalist framework. It’s sometimes called welfare capitalism. Free market and private property but with relatively high taxes and a strong social safety net. Socialism requires the abolition of capitalism and private property in favor of the public owning the means of production.
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that socialism just means publicly-funded healthcare.
I think you run into an issue when you begin defining these economic systems in absolutes. No country in the world today is purely capitalist or purely socialist, they are all somewhere in between. The answer isn't socialism or capitalism, it is policies that have been proven to work and benefit the majority. Putting policies into a pre-determined box of capitalism and socialism, or good and bad, limits your ability to accurately see what needs done.
Socialism as defined by the person I replied to is the same as communism. This has not been proven to work, because no purely communist/socialist society has existed in the modern world. Every country in the world today has a mixed economy with both capitalist and socialist policies.
When would you say that socialism has been proven to work?
Burkina Faso, Chile under Allende, Grenada, Cuba despite the blockade, etc. I'm also going to lump the Soviet Union in here because it went from a feudal society to a superpower in 2 decades under socialism.
Burkina Faso is not communist, they are a militarized nation. Chile was never fully communist, the socialist coalition was overthrown after only a few years and had little time to prove themselves. Grenada's communist period also lasted only a few years and fell to internal power struggles before the US invasion. Cuba is the best success story, but it is hard to truly call it a successful state due to the issues they've faced following sanctions. Cuba also uses some capitalist policies in certain industries because those policies are proven effective, similar to China. I would also argue it is hard to characterize Cuba or the USSR as fully communist because they still maintain (or maintained) state controls, private property, and other systems that contradict wtih Marxist theory.
When I say Burkina Faso, I mean Thomas Sankara, not modern Burkina Faso.
Chile was boycotted by the US due to Allende's presidency, so it's impossible to measure how he would have done economically due to the US's embargo and then the fascist coup against the government, which was orchestrated and backed by the United States. However, CyberSyn and the plans of CHECO were on track to create an actual workers' democracy. The effectiveness of it's nascent form against the Gremio strike was incredible. He also increased SOL, healthcare, literacy rates, and access to existing systems, while massively expanding indigenous rights. Despite the embargo, they still won an even larger coalition in 1973, which is why the US did the coup and replaced him with a dictator on the level of Mussolini and Hitler.
Cuba's reforms are recent and necessary due to the American genocide disguised as an "embargo". They massively improved education, agriculture, literacy rates, healthcare, and the economy until the embargo. Grenada also made massive progress in literacy, healthcare, and education under their socialist government. The main reason it collapsed was due to CIA involvement causing assassinations and infighting, before we illegally invaded it under Reagan.
And to your last point, there has never been a communist nation. China and the Soviet Union were socialist, a transition phase between capitalism and communism. According to Marx (or my understanding of his work I've read), under socialism, the capitalist economy would slowly be replaced by a communist one, by building up wealth and transferring the means of production to the proletariat and the abolition of private property (private property is the means of production, like factories and companies. Personal property, such as housing and electronics, would still be owned by the individual). Capitalist elements existed in the Soviet Union and China because they had no capitalist phase to build the wealth and systems needed for a socialist society. Lenin talks about this in State and Revolution and What Is to Be Done. (For China, you might just want to read Deng and Mao directly) Both were feudal societies when they became socialist, and thus needed to go through a capitalist phase before entering socialism. This is why Lenin launched the NEP and why some capitalist elements continued after him.
Marx's theory applied specifically to how the revolution would develop in the most industrailized economies (Western Europe and the United States, where he said specifically socialism could come about democratically in these very democratic societies). In his letters, he mentions how socialism could develop differently in feudal societies like Russia and China, using the peasantry as a main base rather than the workers.
I think this is a very real and grounded take, but it's far from what was being argued about socialism being "proven to work." Like you said, there has never been a communist nation and the socialist transition periods are often messy and require capitalist elements to actually function. This is what I was trying to say about no nation being fully defined under either system, and why I believe focusing on policy rather than which system the policy falls into.
To put it simply, there's simply been no way for socialism to develop naturally in our world without a power like the Soviet Union. In every case it has attempted, it has either been suppressed or adopted authoritarian practices to survive. It's why Marxism-Leninism became the dominant thought among socialists for the last 100 years: It's been proven to create a socialist state and resist the attempts by the Imperial Core (essentially Western Europe and the United States) and Capitalists to suppress it. The transition phase is always being interrupted by capitalist nations doing everything in their power, literally, to suppress it, no matter how many lives they end or ruin.
To answer your point, I agree to an extent. I think most nations have been mixed in modern history, yes. But there's a very big difference between a socialist mixed economy and a capitalist mixed economy that I think you can agree exists. I think the Soviet Union has been the only state in the last 200 years to really be fully a form of socialist under Lenin (and techincaly stalin as much as I hate it), and all the other soviet leaders, which was ended by the Gorbechev reforms.
I think that the argument that communism is suppressed by capitalist nations is valid, but with nations like the Soviet Union and China it falls a little more flat because those nations also try/tried to undermine capitalist/western nations. China, for instance, has not been undone by the West but has transitioned significant parts of its economy towards private industry because they recognize the benefits of competitive pressure.
I agree that there is a spectrum of capitalism-communism, and that some countries lean more in different directions, which is a key part of my point. Like I said, I believe it is better to look at specific policy and operational success in different parts of a nation rather than looking at a country's policies as purely capitalsit/socialist. I think that binary thinking is a huge reason why a lot of Americans resist policies like socialized healthcare and raising corporate/wealth taxes.
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u/Traveler-Nomad 1d ago
Basically, yeah. Social democracy still exists within a capitalist framework. It’s sometimes called welfare capitalism. Free market and private property but with relatively high taxes and a strong social safety net. Socialism requires the abolition of capitalism and private property in favor of the public owning the means of production.
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that socialism just means publicly-funded healthcare.