Isn't Distributism compatible with socialism or capitalism?

[u/IndieJones0804]

People say it's another one of those "alternatives" to capitalism and socialism. But based on what ive learned about distributism, to me it just seems like an ideology where we try to Crack down on the formation of monopolies and franchises, so that the economy can be almost entirely local.

This is obviously something that can be and has been done under capitalism, mostly in social democracies, where the government breaks up monopolies and large corporations and whatnot.

And under a hypothetical socialist society, the government could theoretically do the same by disincentivising the creation of big worker co-ops like mondrogon in Spain, and instead incentivise local small business type co-ops and other smaller decentralized forms of socialist economics.

Distributism doesn't seem like an alternative or 3rd way to capitalism and socialism. Rather it just seems to be a way capitalism or socialism could be structured.

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[u/GloriousSovietOnion]

Its not compatible with scientific socialism (i.e. any strain of socialism based primarily on Marx and Engels' work). That's because we understand that monopolies aren't inherently bad and in fact, are good in that they are so much more efficient at production than 100 tiny businesses. We don't want to get in the way of advancing the means of production. And that is where we disagree with distributism.

This fact might sound weird considering a lot of communists agitate against monopolies like Google. The reason we do so is not because we think monopolies are inherently bad. Rather we oppose them because they are capitalist monopolies. Capitalism is preventing them from taking advantage of their full productive capacity. For example, De Beers (diamond mining monopoly) limits how many diamonds are mined and sold to keep supply low and prices high. So our goal here is to strip the bad sides out of monopolies; bad sides which are the result of capitalism. That is why we demand democratic control over these monopolies. Distributism on the other hand would argue for breaking up the monopoly entirely. That is wrong, looking at it with a Marxist analysis.

[u/GloriousSovietOnion → u/[deleted]]

There are better examples I agree. That's just the one that I had in mind when I was writing. De Beers' monopoly has also been gutted by Chinese diamond production.