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The problem with socialism
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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I've only heard anti socialists say that as a way of smearing socialism. This is the kind of shit you hear in a PragerU video or something.
That's the problem.
It is pretty easy to smear any *-ism or honestly any buzzword.
See what's happening with the word AI.
Some scientists use a very specialised model to make an actual +ive impact and everyone says "AI is great!" and use that to drive funding for destabilising the technology industry/market.
Those who like to irresponsibly control people, will use buzzwords to attract people into groups and then use them to further an unrelated agenda by slowly drifting away from everything the word once stood for.
This is essentially the history we know of: under the names of gods of religions, of languages, and then ideologies and regimes.
In the end, all of them go to help those who will control people without caring about how they use them.
What's your proposed solution then?
I don't have a solution for others.
Only one that I decided for myself and then applied it.
You gotta find your own balance point for how much you care about correctness and how much you are fine being led astray by "leaders" in turn for likeability and easy conversations.
I personally don't subscribe to the idea of leaders who can't justify their position. Maybe your problem is that you see socialism as a system to be implemented rather than a thing that you do? Like, socialism is, and should be a constant revolutionary project, not just a static position.
If you try to put it that way, that then again opens it for others to add/remove as they feel like.
While I understand that socialism is not some hard program that can exactly apply to every scenario, there has to be some tenets of it that are defended well, to prevent a malicious actor from uprooting its base.
My personal solution is simply that I don't subscribe to any *-ism and don't group myself with anything even if it tends to provide similar solutions in the current scenario, simply because in some other one, the group's solution might end up greatly differing from what I would consider acceptable.
There's is. It's really simple: "From each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need." Anything else on top of that is philosophical.
This is a similar tact that I took when I was about 16-17, but I find that to be a very naive point of view. Regardless of whether or not you want to apply any label to yourself (which is perfectly valid) the material conditions of the system we live in will come down on you too. So you either end up in the "We are stronger together" camp, or you end up in the "Me and mine are what needs to be protected. Other people be damned" camp. And if you find yourself in the former, you most likely align with people who call themselves socialist, and if you find yourself in the latter, well then you're probably a bootlicker
Considering how I have seen people claiming to be from the former camp expecting bootlickers, I'd say that assumption doesn't work out well in real life.
Those who try preaching "We are stronger together" and "according to their ability" are most of the times the same who would damn everyone when they find the perfect time, while also using the same words to make others give them a hierarchical position.
And in the end, you still have the players get power while the workers get exploited and their voices shut down.
Opportunism is a real problem in every system, but you can stop it if you're well organized. Ultimately I reject your framing because if we were all power hungry we'd be licking fascist boots, not talking to the powerless.
Problem is, you are not my colleague or my boss or similar people. You are someone I might not even end up interacting IRL.
Most people will just ignore the people slowly amassing power because they tend to be discreet enough to not raise too many alarms and the same thing might look like just incompetence unless one is looking closely enough.
Then there will be people who just find it easier to de-escalate situations, no matter what the outcome, that end up helping the malicious ones get out unscathed. Cover-ups follow.
And the power-hungry will mostly be found in places of power. Whether you interact with them directly, depends upon where you end up working.
The most hard working and benevolent people I have seen, are coincidentally also those who tell you to care about yourself.
They won't preach teamwork or communality, but that comes naturally to them. They won't ask you to help others, but will help with what they are good at and not treat it as a favour. They don't bid you to be helpful, but enable you to get to a place where you can be helpful. Also, they won't act like they overtly care about you.
I feel like you've interacted with too many socialists online. That is not my irl experience at all. In fact, your last paragraph there does describe most irl socialists.
Except that they neither identify as socialists, nor do they care about the other's *-ism.
So you see, one neither needs to be any *-ist nor requires to accept all terms of any group, to be able to have +ive interactions with them. The only time that is required, is when it is an extremist group.
I think you're way too hung up on labels. Why do you give a shit what somebody else calls themselves? Maybe you've just been meeting socialists that know you have a weird anti"-ism" thing, so they just don't use that word and instead describe ideas to you (which is a fairly common tactic to take around somebody that is slightly unhinged). Nobody said everybody needs to be any kind of anything. There are lots of helpful people to socialist causes who don't consider themselves to be socialists. That's called critical support is is highly valued.
No. I have been meeting people who don't even know about the word.
You sound like:
"All good guys are ours."
"All bad guy claiming to be with us, are not really ours."
When the label is your agenda and you are calling me "hung up".
"Its 2026 and in my third week here on North Sentinel Island, I've discovered that, despite a century of a world super power using the word 'socialist' in the name of their country, somehow these people have never heard the word, 'socialism'".
That's how you sound.
Once again, I don't give a shit what people call themselves, so if they are good guys, they are on the same side as me, because that's the side I've chosen? People claiming to be socialists but they're not actually socialists, then they're not socialists. That's not a bad guy/good guy thing, that's just how words work.
Again, there are incredible people who have been vital to the socialist causes who would never call themselves socialist, and there are no problems with that.
My problem is with you specifically. The label isn't my agenda beyond just trying to get you to stop caring about what someone.calls themselves and start caring about what they do.
Well, some people just never learnt English
Guess what? I always ever really cared about what people do. And someone calling themselves something is part of what they do, for whatever reasons they do.
I don't have a problem with this part. My problem is the direction you take after this conclusion. Words will always mean something to people and when someone calls themselves a part of some groups or when someone calls others a part of their group, politics takes over from that point. That affects the masses and masses have power.
So even if I actively try to stay out of said "masses", doesn't mean it won't affect me.
That word only exists in English? That's weird, I wonder then how so many people from non-Engliah speaking countries learned about it then?
Yeah I was being facetious.
But a better way to say that is - Not everyone has the time to subscribe to all such things, no matter how widespread it is. And I am saying this as one that literally has "Socialist" in the constitution of my country.
Then, I don't know what to say to you. Having conversations with low information people with yield low information results. That is in no way relevant to what we're talking about. You might as well have said "Yeah, but lots of people I know have never even heard the word 'fission' before" while in a thread talking about nuclear science.
Exactly my point.
People can have low information about your domain and still be helpful people.
Please go back and read the several different times I say exactly that in my previous comments. We don't disagree about that. We just seem to disagree that people who do use "-ism" labels can also be helpful people.
I don't disagree about that either.
What I am saying is that (now again having to reiterate what I said before) if you use a *-ism extensively without properly defining it, you end up giving power to a phenomenon you don't get to control. And someone with the ability to control it, can come in and use it for nefarious purposes, as stated in previous comments.