God that fuckin thread. Someone in there really straight-up pulled a "I honestly think the world is split into the greater and the lesser; and the latter exists to serve the former" and had the unmitigated settler gall to take offense when people compared him to a nazi/eugenicist.

lmao

.world

Is OP stupid or living under a rock? We already have socialism in America. Joe Biden is a card carrying CCP member. Obama is the most influential Marxist after Lenin and Marx himself.

California and New York are the staunchest communist states we have.

The Democratic Party has always been socialist, and the GOP is loyal to Putin.

The US is the only successful socialist country. Period.

no one ever seems to stop and think, "I don't actually know that much about socialism, or socialist countries, or socialist history."

OP in that thread has some real bangers in their comment history like "not going into debt is Marxist activism"

On the subject of Marxism, if people stopped getting into debt a lot less money would be flowing to the top. Banks would have fewer profits and their power would shrink. Therefore abstaining from debt could even be considered a kind of activism. The best kind of activism really, because it actually makes you wealthier.

Also they just straight up defend being a landlord insisting it's a ton of work lmao.

I don't think I can take much more of this. Everything is getting so watered down, even though there are fucking definitions and volumes of books written on everything.

Fucking EVERYTHING is up for grabs, words have no meaning, and you can twist literally anything to fit your agenda, and a bunch of braying jackasses will eat it up with a gigantic spoon.

it's so weird to me how these types of people have absolutely no idea what they're talking about yet still do it all the fucking time. Why don't they just go talk about video games or whatever else it is they like to do?

"define socialism"
has never read theory in their life

Socialism is the transitionary stage of society between capitalism and communism.

Socialism begins when the proletariat seize power away from the bourgeoisie, ending the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and installing the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the meaningful point at which the transition between capitalism and communism has begun, the point at which the capitalists are not in power, but instead the working class.

All states that achieve this status are socialist states in practice. The varying unique conditions each country finds themselves in will define what economic and transitional policies they undertake, which will look very different depending on the strategy they're pushed into by the varying conditions.

Socialism is when the goverment does stuff, the more it does the more socialist it is. If it does a whole lotta of stuff, its communism.

I'm not moving to Nazi

-Lemmy.world brain genius

Link it you absolute lib https://lemmy.world/post/6238022

Shouts out to @Dkarma@lemmy.world -27 "Just Google it u lazy little shit"

This per si is a very individualistic/liberal way to see the matter! I would love to live in Cuba, for example, since I understand Spanish pretty well, yet, if I am a true socialist, it means that I want mankind to live in socialism and after, communism. The best way to do it is to fight for revolution in my country.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Let's define what socialism is

Even asking this question amongst well read leftists will give you 500 different answers lol.

Hello yes, my brain works as a semi-sentient wikipedia article and that's why I'm always correct.

Would you like to learn about the non-nazi waffen ss? Just ask me, I'll tell you everything you'd possibly need to know.

most politically educated liberal

Where's the wikipedia stormfront emoji. dangit?

Aww. The baby brain liberals are struggling again.

Yet another meme became straight up reality with them, "socialism is when capitalism".

Bad month for Onion.

If by "socialism" you mean [Not Socialism], then no. If by "socialism" you mean [Also Not Socialism], then yes.

please read. Be better. Read and think first. Comment later.

Can this possibly be more condescending? Especially coming from someone who clearly has barely read about the thing they’re pontificating about. Jesus.

"We have Nazis at home"

The problem with language is that the only thing required for a definition to be "correct" is for that definition to be in common use. That's just how language works.

You can try to fight against that, and lead a never ending struggle to halt the conversation and say, "no no, the Real definition is this!" every time someone uses a definition that conflicts with the definition you use. But at some point fighting against semantic drift and taking a stubbornly prescriptivist stance on how words should be defined is a fruitless battle that doesn't actually help you communicate those ideas more clearly. Instead, you should adopt a different communication strategy that is less prone to misunderstandings.

There are so many different and contradictory understandings of what it means to be "progressive" "leftist" "liberal" "socialist" "communist" and so on that it's impossible to create a definition that everyone agrees on. Even if you correctly incorporate things like historical origin, first recorded use, and the context in which a world was popularized when evaluating how you define those terms, those things don't actually help communicate your thoughts more clearly. Which should ideally be the mechanical function that language facilitates.

Part of the issue is that those words are very broad and general, and encompass a wide variety of competing schools of thought who all nonetheless identify themselves using these umbrella terms. Of course some of the disagreement over definitions comes from bad actors deliberately mischaracterizing these things for propagandistic/rhetorical purposes, but even if that wasn't the case umbrella terms such as these are inherently more prone to semantic drift over time.

A better strategy for communicating political ideas is to use terms that are much more specific in context, such as Marxism. Of course, Marxism has the same problem of bad actors intentionally mischaracterizing what Marxism is, but because Marxism is a much more specific thing it is much easier to resolve disputes over contradictory definitions. This is because there is an authoritative source you can refer back to in order to resolve conflicts and disagreements over definitions. Because Marxism is defined by the collected body of work authored by Marx (as well as those who contributed to that body of work and expanded upon that work over the years), it is much easier to have a conversation with agreed upon definitions by referencing that body of work.

Edit: But to get back on topic and define socialism, "Socialism is when the government does stuff."

social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism

This is why lemmy.world is scared of hexbear. Its users might learn one or two things about socialism.

Personally, i would instate socialism where I am, whatever the cost.

Socialism is when the government does things