Troy Camplin
1 min readJan 9, 2020

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Government and the state aren’t identical. Democracy, for example, isn’t identical to the state, and is fundamentally anarchic in structure. “Governance” takes place absent a state, or within a state. There is governance within one’s household or within a corporation or within an anarchic commune or within a state. Governance means politics, and all forms of socialism, including each and every one you mention, place politics/governance in charge of economic decisions.

I will also note that if “socialism” means anything anyone wants it to mean, it means nothing whatsoever. It’s a sound incapable of communicating anything between people. This article is precisely an attempt to make a move against that tendency. Socialism isn’t welfare. I don’t care if people make the mistake of thinking it is.

Now, this isn’t to say that all the things you listed aren’t versions of socialism. They are (as are several you left out, including, conveniently, national socialism). But they all involve government/governance/political control over the economy. I will admit to having failed to fully define the political economy in this piece such that it was clear that even in an anarchy there are forms of governance, and those forms of governance necessarily take over the economic social order, but I fully stand behind my statement that socialism is the dominance of the economy by the social order of government/governance/politics. You cannot find a single example of “socialism,” in the real world or theorized, that isn’t fundamentally defined as this.

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Troy Camplin
Troy Camplin

Written by Troy Camplin

I am the author of “Diaphysics” and the novel “Hear the Screams of the Butterfly.” I am a consultant, poet, playwright, novelist, and interdisciplinary scholar.

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