Yes. It certainly can be. It is also a social system. It helps to try to not get too married to one particular definition of pretty much anything. Like many things, socialism exists as a range of things.
Socialism as a social system is not incompatible with capitalism because social ownership of equity is simply not required. Progress can take place without flipping the game board over and starting from scratch. It can be enough to enact social programs and the state and federal level without throwing the baby out with the bathwater and attempting to replace our economic system with social ownership of private interest.
Take the government of the good ol’ U.S.A. for example. This is a government by for and of the people. In other words, it’s a socialistic government. If we understand that, we can move forward and the people can decide that the government can be a tool for progressive and positive social change without any changes to our economic system.
I would disagree but I don’t have the time to go digging though texts to back up my argument (I am hopefully going to an anarchist bookfair tomorrow, and while this debate is somewhat on topic for that I need to conserve my energy for coping with crowds of people.)
Speaking in broad terms, obviously- Nothing personal. I was class of '92, so I grew up hearing cold war propaganda and became an adult when the Russians were suddenly our weird but generally friendly neighbors.
My dream is a second Great Experiment. The way our founding fathers combined a monarchy, a Roman senate, a tribal council, and a charter colony into an executive, legislative, and judicial branch bound by the Constitution; I believe we can combine capitalism, socialism, a gift economy, mercantilism, and a reputation economy into a unified system greater than the sum of its parts.
Good. We need people who are willing to stand up and push forward economic policies like these.
Because even one elected representative can get things on the agenda that shift the Overton window, and may win wider public support.
there are a number of instances that I can think of, where smaller parties campaigned for issues that seemed outside the mainstream, but then won support and were signed into law without the small parties ever getting into government.
We need a push back against the politics of unbridled capitalism, and here is the perfect place to start.
It boils down to an argument of definition which is a pointless waste of time no matter how you look at it. You’ll argue that socialism is X which makes it incompatible with Y and I’ll argue that dictionaries are not arbiters of language and socialism in a non-economic sense is a common enough usage that attempting to define the word with a single definition is ultimately fruitless as no single definition will encompass the spectrum of use.
Have fun at the book fair.
