Converation thread

Oh, you haven't seen anything yet. Look at the hundreds of millions murdered by Stalin in the USSR.

The man was a dictator, but on the scale of things, not really much of a socialist.

For your information, socialism and communism are not the same thing. Communism is a form of anarchism – have you ever read the Communist Manifesto as I have? – it believes in classless and stateless utopia where everyone contributes to the "common stock" and takes only what they need from it. Socialism, they believe, is the path to get to these anarchist utopia – they must have an incredibly large government that socialises healthcare, nationalises industries, breaks up monopolies, sets wages and prices, spies on its citizens, and taxes the rich to hell, and redistributes wealth. You're wrong – Joseph Stalin was a textbook socialist!

It is BECAUSE I understand the difference that I don’t consider him as such. Stalin violated a thousand strong tenets of socialism, such as a free press and democratic government. He even said himself, “Freedom of the press, too, is a kind of beauty which one must have loved to be able to defend. It is something which I love truly, whose existence I feel to be essential, to be necessary to me so that without it I cannot live at peace, or live a full life”. Marx did not approve of or support most anything Stalin did. Everyone regretted him once he died, everyone feared and despised him. He’s not a part of that, and if he’s a socialist, he’s not really a good one, gotta admit.

Yet again with the historical ignorance. Marx was both a socialist and a communist, as stated in his manifesto, he views socialism as a better improvement to move to, the transitory stage in fact. You can be both, since going directly to communism doesn’t exactly work great. Marx supported socialism, but didn’t think it was the same place we’d stay, just as many in the past viewed capitalism as a temporary semi-good to help humanity progress from one systems to the next. Biden isn’t a socialist, the guy’s openly capitalist, he shows no signs of actually wanting…  Read more to change systems, he’s a traditional liberal with relatively low standards for corporate regulation. That’s just a center/mid-left democrat, most of his social positions weren’t even around before people like Bernie negotiated them into his administration campaign directly. Bernie himself, on the American stage, seems somewhat radical. Is he? Not too much, let’s be honest, radical is Karina and Claudia in the party for Socialism and Liberation. This guy is a free healthcare buff that wants to regulate capitalism. That’s not exactly radical on the world stage considering most every developed country does have that kind of social policy. Social policy does NOT equal socialism. Socialism is the representative democratization of the workplace and ownership by the community or workers as a whole. Biden and Sanders aren’t crying in the streets for it, they’re trying to make poor people capable of living in this revolting economic system.