Simple, really

Genuine question. How would a transition to socialism work in practice?

Eating the billionaires and "nationalizing" publicly traded companies is the easy part. Saying "you can still possess your car" is also easy. The hard, and ultimately unpopular, part is everything else in between. Summer cottage? Family farm? What happens to pensions/retirement savings, land ownership, inheritance, small businesses, the apartment your are renting out to pay for your own rent...

Yeah, I know, these things tend to be out of reach for younger folks these days, precisely because of hyper wealth concentration. So with billionaires and mega corps out of the picture, the question still stands.

“But what if one day I get generational wealth? I better vote against anything that might reduce poverty and wealth inequality!” - republican voters

Downvoted because of Lenin-like person in the pic. Lenin was a genocidal dictator. If you want to promote a just socialism, remove authoritarian shit like this.

This is really just a very specific type of socialism, as indicated by Lenin being here; an authoritarian who killed other socialists. This is about ML.

The first and last panels are right, but, for example, according to this post Anarcho-Communists don't exist. They don't believe in "evolving to a point" as the third panel says, they believe in jumping straight to that point. Also, Libertarian Socialists wouldn't really be fond of "elected committees" controlling things, as the second panel talks about; maybe electing people into leadership positions inside of a company/cooperative, or maybe even having unions make those decisions, but nothing above that.

Lenin wasn't a socialist. He was a transparently dishonest fraud who built a cult of personality. The best thing you can say is that he failed because if the results were a success, Lenin was a monster.

The 1% cry about it way less than the 40+% of absolute troglodytes in this country who think of themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires and love their tacky prophet Donnie the douche

This cartoon makes some bad assumptions.

"the workers (aka the proletariat) own their own workplace" That's one way to do it, or you could have that happen indirectly where the workplace is owned by the government and the workers "own" it indirectly. Most firefighters don't work for a for-profit company, but it's also not a firefighter-owned company that goes and sells firefighting services to businesses that don't want to burn down. A worker-owned company might make sense in certain situations, say a clothing store. You wouldn't necessarily want a central government owning all garment manufacturing and sales. A worker-owned collective is probably a better match. You might have a worker-owned sports store that focuses on selling sports gear, and a worker-owned wedding gown store that focuses on that market. Most people are more familiar with the government-owned model, and that's also socialism.

"production is then planned by elected committees"... why? That's the communist way, but that's not necessarily how a socialist system has to operate. And, in many cases, an "elected committee" is absolutely the wrong way. In countries with state-provided healthcare, there's a government minister who is in charge of health, and their ministry hires the experts needed to run the healthcare system. I definitely don't think that system would be improved if an elected committee were in charge of running things. You might still have worker-representation in those setups. For example, the nurses could belong to a union, and a union rep would be part of decision making. But, an elected committee is a weird fit in many situations.

"increases in productivity continuously reduce the work week"... that's just not likely. People who have high paying jobs could sometimes demand a shorter work week, and occasionally they do. But, often they want a more luxurious life in their time off rather than a less luxurious life and lots of time off. I'm not talking about CEOs and other people who are workaholics and own multiple mansions. I'm talking about dentists and engineers who are willing to keep working a standard 40 hour week so that they can take trips around the world, or buy a nice cottage near a lake, or treat their kids to nice presents.

This way of presenting socialism is going to give people the wrong idea.

Market socialism also exists, just to remind everyone.

If you Google "define socialism", you'll get a sentence saying socialism is when tve means of production are owned OR regulated by the people.

So you can still have what we have right now, no need for any sort of fundamental change, except proper regulation, meaning actually good labour laws and proper taxation for the wealthy.

Finland and other Nordics are arguably market socialist.

And yes, I know how many will disagree. Here in Finland, less so.

Question. How can we be sure to trust that the elected committees do not turn society into an authoritarian regime? Would it work like standard western democracy, i.e. electing a party / parties to form a "government" (in this case committee; semantics)?

Edit: I truly appreciate everybody who takes the time to write elaborate answers pertaining to my question. I will read and respond once I have the opportunity and in that case, I hope eventual followup questions are welcomed. :)

This is a good writeup https://www.history.com/news/socialism-communism-differences

And socialism in pure form sounds like utopia.

Social democracy is currently the best of all the -isms in my mind.

And I believe any one party state will eventually become corrupted and some form of dictatorship.

I wonder if some common pitfalls like too much party control over committees, lying about quotas for financial gain, and the vulnerabilities of a society in revolt could be squeezed in, or perhaps covered in a second image.

Orthodox Marxism isn't always enough, and is not beyond revision and improvements (hence the many neo-marxists). Critical Theorists have addressed Marxism as well as Capitalism after all.

That said, the post is good and educational as is, and has my up vote.

See you at the first plenary session comarades!

After reading this, i now understand less about socialism.

I would love to see a policy where there is a variable tax rate on companies based on employees satisfaction.

If a company has a largely unhappy workforce they would be taxed most of their profits.

If a company has a extremely happy workforce then it can reduce the taxation rate below the standard rate. And employees can still vote on this 2 years after termination.

It incentivises companies to invest more in the employees wellbeing, and punishes companies that take practice in unsustainable hiring and mass layoffs later.

If it is unavoidable that a company needs to downsize, they would be incentivised to help employees find new employment.

I'm sure there is a large issue I'm not seeing with this but I'm pretty fond of the idea.

It surprises me so that any functioning democracy isn't automatically socialist.

i thought the crying guy was Hatsune Miku at first LOL

So it's all nice in theory, but I have questions...

the workers own their workplace

Based on previous discussions, I understand the commonly proposed model here would be a workers' collective of some sort. People involved in the collective's production share the proceeds - we made N number of tractors and took them to market and received X value units; we spent Y value units in the production process, so we can distribute (X - Y) value units among the members of the collective. The workers own the equipment and infrastructure used by the collective and share responsibility for production. If a worker moves from workplace A to workplace B for whatever reason, they cease to share in the proceeds and responsibility of workplace A's collective and take on the responsibilities of workplace B's collective and share in its proceeds.

(Aside: What if X is smaller than Y? Should members then add back the difference for the next production cycle, so production materials can be procured?)

Let's look at the (X - Y) part a bit more closely. This defines the benefit that members of the collective derive from the enterprise, so they are collectively incentivised to make the difference as big as possible - to benefit themselves rather than a capital owner. Let's assume that all collectives can procure production materials equally with no supply and demand market forces (unlikely). Let's further assume that the market value for the goods produced is fixed (questionable, but OK). So anyone involved in producing tractors pay the same number of value units for raw materials and components and can only ever sell tractors for the same number of value units as everyone else. This means that an individual collective is heavily incentivised to reduce the raw materials needed per tractor (production efficiency), make better tractors than other collectives (market attractiveness), or increase the number of tractors they take to market in a given time period (increased production). Each collective, and ultimately its members, thus stand to benefit from having the most skilled tractor builders, innovative tractor designers, and an all-round hardworking membership. A more successful collective would draw more workers with such beneficial traits and become even more successful in the process. It would also be in the interest of the collective to either push out members that do not contribute according to their full ability, or reduce their share of the proceeds. The former would result in some workers not being accepted into any collective after a while and thus not contributing to any production, the latter in performance-based remuneration that creates societal inequality.

Congratulations! You just created market forces in the labour market that will have winners and losers.

a.k.a the means of production

Can someone explain to me what this means in today's world, beyond factories making physical goods (such as tractors) using physical machines and manual human labour?

production is then planned by elected committees

There are some details missing here. Who elects these committees - workers, or society in general? What are the requirements for being electable for such a role? How are these committees held accountable for failures? Do they plan production at a society-wide level, each in a specific industry, or down to regions or specific production facilities? Do they serve only a planning role, or are they also responsible for execution?

What checks would be in place to prevent professional popularity contest participants (those we call politicians at the moment) from adopting a facade of ideological purity and getting elected on popularity rather than merit? How would they be insulated from outside influence by those affected by their decision making? Do we really need more tractors, or do they still have friends in Worker's Collective 631 that makes tractors?

Congratulations! You just created a managerial class (at best) or just the usual corrupt cabal that run things to their own benefit.

increases productivity as workers are more happy and committed

That's a big assumption. Anyone have any data from wide sampling across multiple industries to support this as a long-term sustained effect?

work to better ourselves and humanity

If you replace "humanity" with "our close community" this might be realistic. I don't think the "and humanity" has ever happened at a macro level.

Is that Lenin or Louis CK in the second panel?

I can haz Star Trek fyu cha?

Is a planned economy an inherent part of socialism? That seems like the biggest red flag (lol) in this comic. All sorts of incentive mismatches there.

"Democracy at work, too" is like the biggest pitch for socialism, "government deciding what businesses can exist" is the biggest pitch against. A tightrope to walk, for sure.

Nice idea but it's very telling that there is no mention at all of how to make this come about. The more I learn about Marx, the more he seems like Jacque Fresco and his Venus Project, just a "wouldn't it be nice if" pie-in-the-sky idea.

Socialism

A system of government where the country's wealth is concentrated into a small, ruling class of billionaires, who use the media they own to keep the lower classes fighting with each other while they . . . the rich . . . run off with all the farking money.

Oh wait. that's capitalism. I don't know how I got those two systems confused.

Kewl story bro

Well, people, including political leaders are corrupt, so this would never be practically possible, since people would just abuse the system and hoard resources, as always.

Trusting pure socialism to not accidentally starve its people through inept and lazy government decisions is like buying a PC with Windows 11 and hoping you won't see ads because you trust the closed source code.

Yes, you can do this... I guess?

Everything socialism wants can be accomplished with market capitalism, AI, and UBI. We just need to get rid of the idiot religious folks voting against their interest ("oh no! trans people make baby jesus cry!") and get rid of the liberals who want make government bigger and bigger and bigger ("Let's put a tax on filling out the form! And make a new waiting period for something!"), and then we'd finally have a functioning society.

Moneyless society is such BS. Have fun writing an IOU for 30 avacados

Missing the panel where millions of people die from starvation