Clickbait title in response to this dunk tank thread from today

The comments contain snark due to the comm they are in, so I wanted a more serious post on what Hexbears think about the question.

While in specific contexts it may be useful to define socialism one way or another, or to identify empirically how the average person understands the word socialism, it is in general a waste of time, if not entirely misguided for leftists attempt a universal definition of socialism.

Most of us have heard the famous excerpt from German Ideology:

”Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”

It is worth taking a moment, even if you have read it before, to reflect on what Marx says here. One may read it as mere emphasis, a shift in focus away from static definitions and toward progress.

But it is more than emphasis. The point is that communism — which Marx tended to use synonymously with socialism although Lenin later drew a harder line — does not need defining, because it is not an abstract thing but a concrete process.

Socialism is defined by what it negates (productively, as in Hegelian sublation). Socialism has no universal definition because a socialist movement does not negate capitalism in the abstract, but a real historical capitalist society, in a real time and place. It is a dialectical process in which the contradictions within a determined and concrete present state give rise to a new, as yet indeterminate state, whose determination depends on the historical events yet to unfold.

It is true that socialists generally fight for worker ownership of the means of production. Marxists, however, are not deluded into believing they can make this happen through force of will alone. It must happen through this dialectical process. Humans may be determined by their material conditions, but humans also possess the ability to change their material conditions, through revolution:

”The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”

If socialism were to have a universal definition, it would be the productive negation of a particular capitalist reality, peculiar to the time and place in which it occurs.

Avoid dogma, avoid definitions. It is what Marx would have wanted. He told me.