The GameStop malarkey
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Maybe it’s just me but it’s not immediately clear who’s actually saying this.
I think it is just you as it obviously the Robinhood site that is saying this. Why I drew attention to their definition of socialism was that it got parts right but others wrong, perhaps suggesting that they were trying to be fair or had even come across a definition similar to ours.
The first part of the passage you quote — about nobody owning the means of production and everybody benefitting from what’s produced — is more or less ok. On the other hand, the bit you put in bold (and the reference to socialism as defined in the first part having existed in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) is not.
I hope nobody here is going to suggest that this is part of the struggle against corporate capitalism and that workers should show sympathy for the small investors in their class struggle against the corporates!
Definitely not, Adam, but it is interesting that market libertarians and anarchocapitalists should jump on this example of GameStop as a way to mount an assault on corporate capitalism. As if. The notion that you can have capitalism without the large corporations that dominate the economic landscape today is pure pie in the sky – as is the suggestion among some of them (the Ancaps rather than the Minarchists) that you can get rid of the capitalist state under capitalism
Alan, you make the point that ” there is a benefit in distinguishing structural varieties of capitalism from superficial appearances. Corporate capitalism versus crony capitalism.” I agree but I have always thought that corporate capitalism is what the market libertarian crowd mean by crony capitalism . In other words, the incestuous “you-scratch-my-back-and-i-will-scratch-yours” relation between corporations and the state
“I think it is just you as it obviously the Robinhood site that is saying this. Why I drew attention to their definition of socialism was that it got parts right but others wrong, perhaps suggesting that they were trying to be fair or had even come across a definition similar to ours.
The first part of the passage you quote — about nobody owning the means of production and everybody benefitting from what’s produced — is more or less ok. On the other hand, the bit you put in bold (and the reference to socialism as defined in the first part having existed in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) is not.”
Had you placed the relevant passage in your original post (https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/topic/the-gamestop-malarkey/#post-213264) in italics and/or within quotation marks it would have been immediately obvious, not only to little me but to anyone else similarly confused. 🙂
Actually, it was within quotation marks but anyway it’s clear now. Another possible source of some people’s confusion may be that the first part of the Robinhood definition reads very like how we might put it. After all, we could endorse this (except pehaps the word “business”):
Warning: this is from Robinhood site not me.
“The primary component of a socialist system is collective ownership. In a socialist system, nobody owns the land, natural resources, or business interests within the country. Instead, the entire population theoretically benefits from any wealth that is created.“
With the greatest respect confusion arose due to inconsistent use of quotation marks, still evident in your original post and again demonstrated by their absence at the close of the second paragraph of your most recent post.
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