Setting aside the notion that state ownership renders “production defined by wage labour” “minimal or non-existent” (which will come as news to anyone who’s ever worked in a publicly-owned industry), are we really still doing “socialism is when the state owns things” in 2021?
https://twitter.com/irateben/status/1419037825400459265
But in a way, the worst bit is the throwaway “bad things still happened” remark. Presumably that refers to… industrialised state terror, mass repression, hyper-militarism, deep social conservatism on nationality, gender, sexuality… etc. etc?
If you can look at all that and say “sure, there are bad things, but it’s still good and socialist because the state owns means of production”, then you reduce “socialism” to a (misapplied) mechanical label for a property relation, rather than a project for human emancipation.
Socialism has to mean freedom, or it’s meaningless. Freedom from the wage relation is fundamental (NB: replacing a private capitalist boss with a state bureaucrat boss is not freedom from the wage relation), but the whole point of emancipating ourselves from the wage relation >
< is to *emancipate ourselves*, to be free, including from the whole gamut of other oppressions linked to and fuelled by the division of society into classes and the exploitation of labour by a ruling class.
If that’s not your horizon, then, as @IrateBen rightly says in the QT… maybe you’re a wannabe statist technocrat rather than a revolutionary.
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