Socialism Sorites

making sense of the fuzzy boundaries between capitalism and socialism, or capitalism and social democracy, or whatever you want to call it

Whenever I encounter the perennial capitalism vs socialism debate, I run into questions like ‘is X country socialist?’ and 'is X worldview socialist?’. Inevitably neither side can agree on these questions. The capitalist is left feeling duped when they’re told ‘The Soviet Union wasn’t actually socialist’ or ‘Norway is a socialist country’ and the socialist ends up defending their own political self-identification instead of talking about anything interesting.

It’s About Capital Ownership

The main difference between capitalism and socialism, as I see it, concerns capital ownership or what Marxists call ownership of the means of production. A capitalist economy is characterised by widespread private ownership of capital and a socialist economy is characterised by widespread social ownership of capital. Social ownership of capital includes things like state-owned enterprises, workers’ co-operatives and firms where the state (or some other body representing the public) is the majority shareholder.

For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to put aside more specific questions about the mode of production, the state and civil society etc. Forget about whether socialism requires economic planning without markets or a ‘genuine’ workers’ democracy and so on. Let’s just focus on treating the capitalism/socialism distinction as a matter of the ratio of private to social ownership.

This is preferable to using a national government’s self-identification for obvious reasons. People and institutions can call themselves whatever they want, regardless of what they actually believe or practice. The fact that North Korea is officially called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea sure as hell doesn’t prove that it’s a democratic nation. It’s a lot easier to look at how much of a country’s wealth is in private and socialised firms.

Finding the Boundary

It’s all well and good to look at the private-social ownership ratio, but where do we draw the line? At what point do we say an economy is capitalist or socialist? Is a country with 80% social ownership a socialist country, or is it still capitalist? What about 50%?

It seems common to insist that socialism requires a very high proportion of firms be socialised whereas capitalism can still persist in an economy with lots of social ownership. Marxian socialists are happy to agree with capitalists on the question of whether ‘social democratic’ mixed economies are still fundamentally capitalist. 20ᵗʰ Century state socialist economies had very little in the way of private firms while modern mixed economies have a sizable public and private sector.

I think this sort of position is a historically contingent artefact. I could imagine a nearby possible world with widespread social ownership and a small private sector, where various flavours of socialism are popular and the idea of capitalism most salient to people is some kind of libertarian anarcho-capitalism. In such a world we might think that a socialist economy is one with any significant level of social ownership but capitalism, true capitalism, requires the total destruction of the socialist state and the abolition of social ownership. Anything less would merely be partially deregulated socialism.

Even if we insist on socialism requiring a uniquely high ratio of social-private ownership, it’s still hard to find the boundary between capitalism and socialism. You might want to say that a socialist economy is one with no privately owned capital at all. Okay, fine, but that means every country in the world today is capitalist. Even North Korea. Even the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, the archetypal state socialist nation, would not count as socialist because it had a small amount of private ownership through the (highly unfree, state-directed) kolkhozes.¹ If you’re an anarchist or a certain kind of Trotskyist then these conclusions might not bother you, but they will if you’re the kind of person that likes to point to the Soviet Union as a negative example of socialism or if you want your definition of socialism. It’s also just a bit strange to insist that, for example, a country with 100% social ownership would suddenly become capitalist the moment someone starts working as a freelance musician or starts selling their homemade jewellery online.

Enter the Sorites

Lane Kenworthy, in his book Would Democratic Socialism Be Better?, stipulates that an economy becomes socialist once two-thirds (66.667%) of employment and GDP is in socialised firms. He admits that it’s an arbitrary cut-off but it’s better than nothing. The private sector would decidedly play a subsidiary role in such an economy and social ownership would be the norm. For the purposes of his book it works, but I’m left thinking that it’d be odd to insist that an economy that dips 1% above or below his cut-off would automatically become socialist or capitalist.

Fuzzy boundaries are a common linguistic phenomenon. It’s not entirely clear where to draw the line between capitalism and socialism, much like it’s not entirely clear where to draw the line between a tall person and a person of normal height. These cases generate what philosophers call the Sorites argument or Sorites paradox. Applied to the capitalism/socialism distinction, it looks something like this:

1. An economy with 1% of firms under social ownership is not socialist

2. If (1), then an economy with 2% of firms under social ownership is not socialist

3. If (2), then an economy with 3% of firms under social ownership is not socialist

   …

4. If an economy with 99% of firms under social ownership is not socialist, then an economy with 100% of firms under social ownership is not socialist.

You can run this argument in the opposite direction too with the premise ‘An economy with 100% of firms under social ownership is socialist’, concluding with ‘An economy with 0% of firms under social ownership is socialist’. Either way, we’re left with a problem where the vagueness of terms like capitalism and socialism has led us to incoherence.

The Sorites argument has to go wrong somewhere – it just looks wrong and the conclusion is obviously absurd. Yet it’s not so easy to figure out where exactly it goes wrong. The argument uses the form of modus ponens, which is a valid form of argument under almost every system of formal logic (including classical logic). If the problem can’t be with the structure of the argument, then maybe one of the premises is false. Good luck trying to explain which one and why.

We can’t avoid the problem by going back and insisting that it was wrong to say the capitalism/socialism distinction is about the ratio of social-private ownership. You’re going to run into the Sorites regardless of how you define socialism. We could go with the anarchist or Marxist approach and say that the line is between laissez-faire capitalism and state capitalism, or social democratic capitalism, or whatever you want to call it. We’d just be using different things and running into the same problem.

Evading the Sorites

Socialist policy analyst Matt Bruenig seems to have picked up on this problem, although he describes it a bit differently. He gets around the issue by deciding not to classify countries or economies as capitalist or socialist. Instead, he recommends treating capitalism and socialism as a spectrum rather than a binary. Economies can be more or less capitalistic and more or less socialistic, but trying to identify them as capitalist or socialist is a fool’s game.

You can respond in a similar way to the Sorites more generally, but it’d be a radical move. You’d have to say that words like ‘tall’, ‘bald’, ‘green’ and ‘blue’ are hopelessly vague. But they don’t seem to be hopelessly vague, at least not all the time. A 7’0”ft tall man is unambiguously tall, hex #00FF00 is definitely green and Mike Tyson is obviously bald. Likewise there are paradigmatic cases of capitalist and socialist economies that don’t need to thrown out with the bathwater. We can do better.

Resolving the Sorites

I can’t do all the responses to the Sorites justice. But broadly speaking, there are two ways of trying to resolve the Sorites: an epistemicist approach and a semanticist approach.

Epistemicism is the view that vague terms do have sharp boundaries but these boundaries are hidden from us. We know a little bit about the boundaries, like we know that an economy with 100% private ownership is capitalist and that an economy with 100% social ownership is socialist. We can go much further than that too. But once we start getting into borderline cases it becomes less likely that we’re classifying them correctly.

This approach resolves the Sorites argument because it entails that some of the premises are false. We just don’t know where the line is and therefore we don’t know where the first false premise begins.

Semanticist approaches typically treat borderline cases as having an indeterminate truth value – Sentences like “A country with 65% social ownership is socialist” are neither true nor false. The most popular semanticist view, called supervaluationism, works roughly like this: A sentence that is true on any admissible precisification of the predicate ‘socialist’, that is, one where every competent user of the term ‘socialist’ would agree that the term applies, is said to be super-true. Likewise, a sentence like “A country with 100% private ownership is socialist” is super-false. Essentially the way that supervaluationism works is we evaluate sentences globally with respect to a set of precisifications.² On this approach, one or more of the premises in the Sorites fail to be true (though they aren’t false either!).

Which approach ultimately works, if any, and which is preferable is a complicated question. Needless to say much turns on the philosophy of language and what kind of things you’re happy doing to your logic, metarules etc. But at the very least you can see how the problem arises and how you can get out of it without conceding that ‘socialism’/’capitalism’ are hopelessly vague terms.

1. Kolkhozes were a kind of pseudo-cooperative collectivised farm. Kolhoz members were entitled to a small private plot of land and some privately-owned livestock, though how much they were entitled to changed over time. Kolkhozes were officially voluntary cooperatives but in reality members were usually forced to join and they were managed by the state.

2. Arguments are a little more complicated. They get to be locally valid if and only if they are valid at each precisification and globally valid if and only if