Comments by "Regis" (@Timbo5000) on "Nationalism DOESN’T explain WHY Austria-Hungary collapsed" video.

@kenmar4009 Look up the Catalonian anarchists then and how their community functioned. You also forget that throughout most of human history, we have functioned on almost completely free trade and authorities were never powerful enough to really exert meaningful power everywhere. The government used to be a very weak entity, not capable of enforcing rules like they can today. Kings had no meaningful power in remote rural areas of "their" kingdom during most of history. These societies ruled themselves for the most part, with almost completely free trade
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@iustinianconstantinescu5498 Socialism is the working class seizing the means of production. Not "gubberment does stuff, the more stuff they do the socialismer it is". And I know this will blow your mind but what if I told you that free market socialism exists? It's a system in which workers control the company they work at, but those worker-controlled companies still compete with eachother on a free market. Yes, that is socialism too. Or how about anarcho-communism, which literally doesn't have a government and has as its only principle to abolish all oppressive relations (like upper class vs lower class)? They all have one thing in common: the workers seize the means of production. This has nothing to do with private vs public. If I work for myself, I as a worker have control over the means of production in my own company. Technically I'm then conforming to socialist principles since I own my own labour. If we have capitalism and change literally nothing except that workers must have control over their companies (by for example voting on subjects where normally the CEO would make a unilateral decision), that is already socialism despite there still being a free market. The government/public sector CAN take a role in socialism (you see this with authoritarian socialism like the USSR), but doesn't have to. Public means that society collectively owns something, which is not the same as the working class owning something. For example, if the government (representing society as a whole) takes control of something that is public. But if a company decides that its workers (not society as a whole, JUST the workers in said company) collectively own the company and control it themselves, that is still PRIVATE OWNERSHIP. The workers then own their company privately (like how shareholders can own a company privately in capitalism. That it's a group of shareholders owning a company does not make it public), yet at the same time that is in fact socialism because the workers own the means of production. The only principle of socialism is that everyone should own their own labour. This can be achieved through both public and private means. Socialism can be achieved by centralised public control of everything (USSR), but it can also be achieved by having all companies privately owned by those that work there (in this case, everyone owns their own labour and thus, it is socialism).
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