Let me begin by pointing out that all Socialists are afflicted with a priestly personalty. No priest is ever satisfied with battling the Devil; every one of them wants to tell decent-people how to live. Clarification: My use of decent-people as a compound word should not be taken as a moral judgement. It is simply a way to identify individuals who do not want to control anyone’s life and resources except their own. Priests in Supreme Deity religions have the better part of the bargain because bad people, evil, etc., are always with us; so the frocked priest will always have a ready-made enemy to rail against; whereas, the Socialist priesthood needs wealth to denounce before they can climb the pulpit with any semblance of credibility. America is basically a religious society, yet most Americans distrust ——and even dislike —— the priestly personalty; more so when priests of any stripe usurp political power. Americans always have and always will reject any political philosophy that ultimately ends in totalitarianism. The toughest job non-Socialists face is identifying and separating necessary civil servants from public trough leeches. Socialists in government gained respectability by association; so identifying them to the public through a Socialist-controlled media is not easy. That is changing, but it is changing very slowly. Just to be clear. A Socialist is anyone who believes in their God-given Right to lifetime tenure at the public trough whether or not they belong there. A dedicated civil servant working for the country as a whole is not a Socialist. Socialists in government only work to protect their spot at the public trough while they advance Socialism. Elected Socialists posing as Democrats never openly admit to being Socialists. They are easy to spot because they must continually restock the feed tub with more and more tax revenues; at the same time they must build more feed tubs in order to accommodate political opportunists who elbow their way in next to the Socialists. Unfortunately for rest of us the feed bill has to be paid at some point in time. Individual liberty is always the coin that is used to pay the tab in every form of totalitarian government. Creating wealth Socialists must confiscate the wealth others create in order for them to preach their gospel. The only thing that Socialists can claim they create in any country is a dependant class of tax dollar millionaires/billionaires. Even the Soviet Union had a number of wealthy individuals. To no one’s surprise they were all Communists in government positions, or loyal party members beholden to the party bosses. Sound familiar? When private sector wealth is not available to demonize, Socialist priests fallback on moralizing about the inequalities in every walk of life. Without wealth created by others under their control, Socialists denounce all government as the most evil institution man ever invented. Once the government is under their control it becomes mankind’s only hope of salvation. There is one caveat: Limited government remains evil government. Furthermore, when Socialists have the nation’s wealth under their control they take credit for creating it just as they take credit for the economic and social improvements that non-Socialist, private sector, Americans worked so hard to bring about before Socialism gained a foothold in America. Those generations of Americans certainly never intended private sector citizens to lose any freedoms in order to make Socialism a viable proposition. NOTE: Every religion has it formal prayers recited by the faithful. Few non-Socialists ever think about Socialism’s prayer book because it is too short to be published and sold in bookstores: “God bless fools and the tax code.” Socialist priests are guided by one economic principle: Unlimited tax dollar funded capitalism for us and socialism for everybody else. Obviously, that principle makes Socialism a pyramid scheme because that is the only way a Socialist government can function economically. Like all pyramid schemes Socialism requires an ever-increasing influx of money coming in if the pyramid is to remain standing. Unlike the Wall Street pyramid scheme where investors invest by choice Socialism requires force. (To be more accurate investors bet their money on Wall Street by choice before bailouts forced everyone to invest. But that’s another topic.) Socialism’s pyramid scheme requires unlimited tax dollars coming in lest it collapse. Socialists cannot allow that to happen because a collapse is no different than a bust cycle —— as in capitalism’s boom and bust cycles. Bailouts, stimulus packages, raising the debt ceiling, and so on, were all designed to keep the pyramid from collapsing. The taxpayer cannot opt out. It all amounts to being told “Once a ? always a ?. You fill in the faithful from the religion of your choice. Apostasy makes me partial to naming Muslims, but I leave it to you. Proselytizing Socialists/Communists succeeded in turning the educated middle class away from a love of individual liberty for everyone by turning them into an ever-increasing herd of ravenous swine oinking for more and more tax dollars. I refer specifically to teachers, the press —— TV in particular (tax deductible advertising dollars), the Hollywood horde, and everyone else that derives their huge incomes from tax dollars even though they are not needed to keep a minimum of necessary government running. Socialist patriots Had U.S. troops been fighting alongside Communists in Vietnam as they did in World War II, Socialists would not have opposed the Vietnam War. Instead, they would have been demanding that American woman and children be sent off to fight and die in the jungles of SE Asia. Killing never bothers Socialists, it is who gets killed that concerns them the most. There was a time when I made the mistake of believing American Socialists/Communists were not betraying their country by encouraging trade with China even to the extent of giving China the edge. I should have known better than to trust a Communist. My excuse: I believed that as the lives of the Chinese people improved materially China’s Communist leaders would slowly move towards individual liberties for the Chinese people. I was wrong. China’s first priority is to build a bigger and stronger military. China had the largest standing army in the world before it began building nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, intercontinental nuclear missiles, etc. China’s motives should be clear along with the motives of those who make excuses for China. Those people will not rest until the United States becomes a Communist country. American Socialists made huckstering history when they convinced Americans that China was a trading partner rather than a military threat in our brave new world. The Madison Avenue slogan “You can sell dry horse manure as bubble bath if you package it properly.” was never more effective than when it was applied to Communist China. Finally, Socialists do the same thing with tax dollars that missionary societies did with voluntary contributions in China. Missionaries bought converts with rice.; hence, the phrase Rice Christian. The loyalty of the poor is still bought and paid for with “rice” in the welfare state, while the Socialist priesthood takes tax dollars by force to enrich themselves. No rice for the people at the top of the pyramid —— they demand steak and lobster; so it can be said with some degree of accuracy that they are Surf ‘n’ Turf Socialists.
Better terms are statists, progressives, market socialists, globalists, crony capitalists, etc.. The actual meaning of the word socialism is labor in control of the state, to which these people have no intentions of making happen. I wish you wouldn't have put this in the religion section so more would read it.
Yeah, because encouraging people to fight against oppression is "telling decent people how to live." Because worker self-management is really about dictating how a person lives their life... I think all of us would be happy to climb down off the soapbox if the issue of systemic inequity was every resolved. If you get wealthy by your own labor, I don't care. That's where your analysis fails. It's the difference between political activists and priests--priests are interested in job security, activists just want an issue addressed. Socialists may pick a more ambitious issue to address than local water conditions or something, but at our core, we just want society to offer a fair opportunity for everyone.
WTF are you talking about? Socialism is the bridge to communism. If you want to call socialism, communism, than don't (*)(*)(*)(*)(*) when those who are against it do the same. And newsflash, if labor could run a business, there would be no labor.
Even the communists didn't propose that. They proposed communism as a system whereby a dictatorship would be established to forcibly revert capital from the bourgeois to the proletariat, thereby bringing about socialism. That's straight up Marxist communism that I'm describing there. Even when he and Engels first proposed communism most socialists didn't support the proposal. The first International split over this very issue. Socialism is not some middle point between capitalism and an egalitarian state; it is the rejection of concentrated power entirely. Communists merely proposed a totalitarian state as a means to achieve that goal. The particular interpretation that you're posing is basically a bit of propaganda inserted into the burgeoning US public education system starting around World War I. Socialism (labor controlling itself, or self-management) as proposed by Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Rocker, and others was considered too subversive--meaning that people would find the concept appealing, and that would be a threat to the United States. They were labeled anarchists, and all sorts of mostly unfounded charges were leveled against "anarchists" trying to destroy the country. You can find more accurate descriptions of socialism and the goals of socialism in the popular press in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I continue to use the definition that the early "anarchists" did. They described socialism, and even the communists agreed on that as the end goal. The communists just proposed a nonsensical plan (a totalitarian dictatorship) to achieve it. Indeed, it would bring about the end of economic classes. That is the goal.
That is an awfully long sermon, Flanders: if you want to hold your congregation, save words and don't SHOUT!
You are the 1st person I have ever known to say socialism is the final step. I have now literally heard it all from the collectivist camp. From "socialism and communism are two completely different things. No correlation whatsoever.", to now "communism is the middle ground." You seriously need to read Marx, just got the two mixed up, or are being disingenuous. Either way, doesn't matter. Humans want a new way. Capitalism until it is found.
Then clearly you've not read much on the subject. Well, that's because you invent this very large tent of "collectivism" that throws extremely different groups like communists and anarchists together. It's not surprising you find them disagreeing with each other, because they don't rightly deserve to be considered related political movements. It's like inventing this term of "corporatist" that includes both social conservatives and radical right-libertarians--that they disagree on drug policy is not surprising. Communists have a very strange viewpoint on the matter, not reflective of the majority of groups on the left. They see totalitarian dictatorship as the path to freedom, they call a socialist society the "workers' state", they call state capitalist welfare states "socialism", and other nonsense. This is very, very different from how traditional socialists used the term. I think you're the one with the confusion here. You think that communism represents orthodox socialism, and buy into the communist redefinition of terms. Yeah, maybe it's time to give anarchism a shot.
I have read Marx. One can't know what they are unless they read a plethora of works. All I am saying is, I have talked to plenty of people who identify themselves as socialists, none of which have the same definition of socialism, what the application of said socialism truly is, who from history actually was a socialist, etc. The only constant, my socialism is real socialism, his was something different. It forever changes to win the current argument. Might as well call it Romneyism.
And he was pretty clear that there was no transitional stage; that a revolution would overthrow the capitalist states, and communist states would be established afterward to take control of capital from the capitalists, and to manage the transition to what he called a workers' state--which other socialists at the time simply referred to as "socialism." Marx and some other communists (and I stress the some), after the Manifesto, would later come to agree with the orthodox socialist position on the matter when they correctly realized that a welfare state (what they called a socialist state earlier) would do nothing but reduce class resentment and cut the legs out from under the socialist movement. Marx (and Engels) was not the be all end all comment on socialism. They were one of a number of socialist thinkers at the time, though Marx would later go on to cause a severe divide between the libertarian socialists and the communists int he first International. There's a lot of interesting political dynamic going on there, well beyond what is discussed in most history classes that touch on politics. There were socialists before Marx and many, many after Marx, and each of them had different takes on what socialism was to be. But all of them agree on the principle that labor ought to manage labor; they referred to this state differently (most called it "socialism", communists called it the "workers' state"). I agree. I think the core objection here stems from the aforementioned division among socialists int he 19th century. It really split along two paths; a libertarian socialist tradition, and the communist tradition. "Orthodox" socialism represented the majority, and fell more along the libertarian lines than communist lines. There's really a huge gulf between these philosophies; communism proposes a lot well outside the scope of traditional socialism. The socialism I'm talking about right now is the same socialism that was being discussed among the original libertarian socialist groups. Some things have changed, reflecting a better understanding of the world and the impact of economic policies--our options and issues have broadened substantially over the last century and a half--but the core definition and goal has not.
To Til the Last Drop: Every message I post can be put in two or more forums. Without considering the number of readers, I pick the one I think is the best fit. Thanks for the thought anyway. As to the meaning of Socialism. Usually, I write my messages knowing that Socialists will insist Socialism is an economic system within a form of government. Were that true they would have no trouble explaining what form of government existed in the former Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics, and does exist in Communist China, North Korea, Cuba, etc. They never say, but they do have an explanation when Communism fails. The excuse is: That was not Socialism. The same excuse is offered whenever anyone points out the horrors that always come with Communist government. First and foremost Socialism is a totalitarian form of government as close to a theocracy as one can get without using God. Pointing that out has been one of my pleasures in old age. In fact, for about two years I posted on a board that was restricted to one topic; discussions about Socialism and Capitalism. Lefties on that board went berserk every time I strayed from their religious doctrine which I did in every post.
