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Protestation
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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Communism
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socialism is when the government pays for things, and the more things it pays for, the more socialister it gets
- 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.
Just to clarify, the post you reponded to is definitely paraphrasing famous prof. Wolff joke about exact same topic.
A few corrections:
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.
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.
Why do you need to redefine a world that ot's creator defined?
They are sarcastically pointing out that public roads aren't Socialist.