u/IrrationalRotations

Granted I'm assuming something in the title that may very well not be true. In that case, what are the main arguments for the feasibility of socialism?

My impression from a relatively cursory look at political philosophy is that socialism is very much considered a 'live' option. That is, there are many political philosophers who are openly socialist and make convincing arguments in favour of their position.

It also seems to me that most of these arguments center on questions of ethics and justice, and the inability of capitalist societies to meet the standards implied by the answers to those questions.

However,I would guess that for most people who are consciously not socialists, the reason they aren't socialists is not because they see proposed socialist societies as unjust, but rather because they don't think that they are feasible.

For my part, when hearing high level descriptions of hypothetical socialist societies, ones that focus on life in the hypothetical society, my main thought is not

"That sounds awful"

It's

"That sounds impossible".

This is also something that comes to my mind when reading criticisms of capitalism. It's all very well and good to point to some deleterious aspect of contemporary capitalist societies, but if we don't have a feasible alternative that can avoid those issues, it's not really a criticism of capitalism.

In particular, it often seems to me that descriptions of socialist societies often assume things like increased economic efficiency, or broad consensus on contentious social issues. But I see no way in which those things are supposed to be obtained. In fact, it's often kind of unclear to me what exactly a socialist society would actually be.

I know of some work on this direction. I've read "imagining real utopias" by Erik Olin Wright (albeit a long time ago). I kind of liked it, but found it to be very tentative. I also know a little bit about Parecon, but to be frank found it kind of absurd.

The general consensus view is that colonialism was bad. Good, I agree.

However, there seems to me to be a common idea that colonialism was an exploitative or parasitic relationship. That the colonizing nations became rich off of the backs of their colonies. It's not hard to see where the intuition for this comes from, Europe got rich at the same time it was going around sticking its flags where they didn't belong, and clearly colonialism was more popular among the European nations than the ones they were colonising.

But I also know that even during the colonial period (and before either reached its height) people criticized it. I believe Adam Smith was a critique of colonialism, not from a moral perspective, but from an economic one. Colonies are expensive and troublesome, it's not that crazy to ask whether they are actually worth the bother, right? Even if countries pursued colonialism with the intention of building wealth, that doesn't mean it worked. Sometimes people do things that are evil and stupid (look at Nazi Germany, for instance).

So, with the benefit of hindsight and 100 odd years of economic insights... Did colonialism even make sense from a purely self-interested perspective? Would the colonising nationals have been better off just not bothering? Or interacting with their global neighbours in a friendlier manner?

I'm trying to learn about classical value theories, which means I'm learning a bit about Marx.

One point impressed on me is that understanding the notion of commodity fetishism is important for understanding how Marx differs from the classical political economists.

My understanding of commodity fetishism is basically the following...

Commodity fetishism is a phenomenon in capitalist societies where relationships between people are mistaken for relationships between things. For instance, the value of a commodity is often spoken about as if it were a property of the commodity itself. But this is silly, because clearly the physical commodity has no value imbued in it, there is no 'value molecule'. Instead, value is a social relation between exchangers of commodities, which merely appears as a property of the commodity itself.

But, to be blunt, it's hard for me to believe that the classical economists were actually confused about this point. They seem to be well aware that value is a social relation between people. Smith's 'beaver and deer' example for instance doesn't couch the value of beavers or deer in terms of the properties of beavers and deer themselves, but rather in a negotiation between hunters.

So who is Marx criticising here, and are his criticisms accurate? On top of that, how does an understanding of commodity fetishism allow us to improve upon their theories?