Stop couping yourself.
Stop couping yourself.
Stop couping yourself.
this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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Communism
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Anyone who says they don't like socialism I just tell to stop using public roads moving forward.
socialism is when the government pays for things, and the more things it pays for, the more socialister it gets
socialism is where the government socialisms for things, the more they socialism for, the more socialismier it is.
- Cunk on socialism
Then a dictatorship spending 80% of GDP to prepare for war would be a socialist country.
Even if all the money is spend on social issues, only utopian socialism equals this. It's what got Karl Marx so fussy about because he knew the capitalists/monarchs/oligarchs will never allow it to happen for as long as they live. So a next social revolution à la the French revolution he predicted.
Since Marx, socialism is when the means of production is in the hands of the workers and one's income is comparable to one's contribution.
And since Marx didn't have a good idea as to how a socialist government would function as his version did not get off the ground, we now have standard vanguard (SU) and capilliary vanguard (PRC '78) democracies as examples of socialist societies.
A few corrections:
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For Marx, worker ownership is not Socialist. Cooperatives are petite bourgeois structures, the form of ownership must be public ownership, ie equal ownership across all of society, not just the working unit. Countries like Cuba, the PRC, and former USSR all have public ownership as the principle basis of society.
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Marx had a decent idea of how Socialism would function, you can read a bit about it in Critique of the Gotha Programme. Lenin and other Marxists took the basis created by Marx and implemented the first major steps towards Communism in real life.
Just to clarify, the post you reponded to is definitely paraphrasing famous prof. Wolff joke about exact same topic.
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Publicly funded infrastructure and utilities within a Capitalist system isn't an example of Socialism. Socialism is an organization of society where public ownership is principle, ie at least over the large firms and key industries. The US Army is not "socialist," it's an arm of the state within a Capitalist system. Same with roads.
I get what you're trying to say, but I think this line of thinking backfires more often than it helps. Anti-socialists can easily point out that it's the broader system that needs to be viewed, not the discrete element.
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My younger brother moved from the bay area to a suburb of Nashville. He hates it because (per him, I haven't verified this) there are no public parks or trails that he can run or bike at within like 40 miles of his place. Plenty of private parks, but nothing public. At least it seems that way to him since every city he's lived in California had/has at least 15 miles of bike trail and usable public parks in every neighborhood.
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Technically lemmy and the fediverse implement socialiam principles
Open source is inherently socialist
The amount of Americans who were trained to misunderstand and hate socialism based on reaganomics but yet want to be Russian is heavily astounding. Americans are the weirdest bullies of the world.
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accurate.
We do our best to ignore the countries that do have good social policy, or manufacture reasons that social policy doesn't work while ignoring the exact same problems mirrored in our capitalist system exacerbated by disparity.
The US definitely doesn't ignore countries like the PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, etc that are more rapidly and equitably developing than their peers, it wages active economic warfare if these countries don't play ball. The US Empire needs subjects, after all, so if countries don't bend the knee the US either saber rattles or sanctions them to oblivion.
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