Socialism isn’t a binary yes/no thing. It’s an economic ideology that can be realized in many different ways
Comment on Was it a good thing that SNW explicitly said the Federation is socialist?
trolololol@lemmy.world 5 months agoYou’re right.
There’s a bad habit of calling socialists the countries that should be called something like"capitalist but a bit to the left"
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
MudMan@fedia.io 5 months ago
Hi.
That's called "socialdemocracy" and it's been around for centuries. It's actually older than the marxist concept of socialism, if you're gonna get pedantic about it.
I get that Americans have completely sandblasted off any remaining meaning in the word "socialism", first by having conservatives use it as an insult and then by having weird US lefties get all purity test about it, but most of the world has a pretty clear picture of socialdemocracy, it's not that ambiguous. Most socialdemocrat parties across the planet are called some version of "Socialist Party", "Labour Party" or "Worker's Party". It's a thing.
So no, it's not a bad habit. It's just... what that's called. It does get easy to mix up with the Marxist concept of socialism, which is likely why most marxist parties advocating for a socialist society are called "Communist Party" instead. The bad habit is to not challenge the fundamentally conservative, deliberate confusion between the two that any range of neoliberals and protofascists continue to use to pretend milquetoast socialdemocratic policy is some form of revolutionary action.
Man, US politics are so weird.
halm@leminal.space 5 months ago
Also countries that probably started out socialist but took a sharp turn into authoritarianism and under-the-hood oligarchy… You know who you are.
jimhensonslostpuppet@startrek.website 5 months ago
Well I’m not a Marxist Leninists or a anything like that, and neither is Star Trek ever promoting anything like that