terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"
terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"
Posted May 31, 2025 13:03 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)In reply to: terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce" by smitty_one_each
Parent article: Cory Doctorow on how we lost the internet
To nitpick - that's closer to communism. But the Americans seem unable to distinguish between socialism and communism - there is a VERY big difference (and probably both bear little resemblance to marxism - these words have had their meanings mangled, messed up, and generally screwed over by people with vested interests).
I'd liken socialism to Not-Only-SQL - free-format within a structured framework (or a structured framework over a free format). Ownership for the employees by the employees - not the state or the rich entrepreneur.
Most of Western Europe has been pretty died-in-the-wool socialist since the century before last. Unfortunately a lot of that structure has been trashed since Reagan, and we're all the worse off for it.
Cheers,
Wol
Posted May 31, 2025 13:32 UTC (Sat)
by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989)
[Link]
To your point, from a certain American view, the difference between, say, National Socialism and Communism was the overt racism of the former. Lenin was basically arguing an authoritarian midwife in the form of a "revolutionary vanguard" to help birth the Marxist worker's paradise, only that midwife morphed into Communism. I say this to sketch a certain point of view, not to pretend that a century of development an nuance can be crammed into a sentence.
A refinement on my point would be to posit an architectural spectrum. Real individuals/places/history acquire all sorts of architectural cruft en route to (at least two) overarching tasks:
- stability
- resolving the tension between the individual and the group
My RDBMS/no-SQL analogy may be considered the ends of that spectrum.
Cheers,
terminology: "capitalism" versus "commerce"
Chris