{"id":29187,"date":"2017-12-27T13:25:39","date_gmt":"2017-12-27T18:25:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29187"},"modified":"2017-12-27T13:25:39","modified_gmt":"2017-12-27T18:25:39","slug":"systems-that-suck-less","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=29187","title":{"rendered":"Systems That Suck Less"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecosophia.net\/systems-suck-less\/\">Systems That Suck Less<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>Last week\u2019s post on political economy attracted plenty of disagreement. Now of course this came as no surprise, and it was also not exactly surprising that most of the disagreement took the shape of strident claims that I\u2019d used the wrong definition of socialism. That\u2019s actually worth addressing here, because it will help clear the ground for this week\u2019s discussion.<\/p>\n<p>The definition I used, for those who weren\u2019t here last week, is that socialism is the system of political economy in which the means of production are owned by the national government. Is that the only possible definition of socialism, or the only definition that\u2019s ever been used? Of course not. The meanings of words are not handed down from on high by God or somebody; the meanings of words are always contested among competing points of view, and when a word has become as loaded with raw emotions as the word \u201csocialism\u201d has, you can bet that every one of the definitions you\u2019ll be offered is slanted in one direction or another.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s just as true of the definition I\u2019ve offered, of course, as it is of any other. I want to talk about who owns the means of production in society, since this is arguably the most important issue in political economy, and it so happens that socialism, capitalism, and many other systems can be defined quite neatly in this way. A century ago, when it was still acceptable to talk about systems of political economy other than capitalism and socialism, the definition I\u2019ve proposed was one of the most common. You don\u2019t hear it very often now, and there\u2019s a reason for that.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Systems That Suck Less Last week\u2019s post on political economy attracted plenty of disagreement. Now of course this came as no surprise, and it was also not exactly surprising that most of the disagreement took the shape of strident claims that I\u2019d used the wrong definition of socialism. That\u2019s actually worth addressing here, because it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[111,15417,1758,5131,2799],"class_list":["post-29187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-capitalism","tag-ecosophia","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-political-economy","tag-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29187"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29188,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29187\/revisions\/29188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}