r/Socialism_101

As a Vietnamese, our most common view is that Soviet was the big brother helping and protecting smaller socialist nations while China was a back-stabber.

However, it seemed that most western socialists denouned Soviet for destalinization and China was in the right

Do they really consider Khruschev's actions to be more reprehensibe than China cozying up to USA, supporting Pol Pot and invading Vietnam?

I'm something of a closeted socialist. My parents, and most people who surround me for that matter, are deeply confused about the inner--and outer--workings of the world. For this reason, when conversations involving politics arise, on pain of exposing myself as some sort of alien deviant and subjecting my peers to a wild culture shock, I kind of shrink and avoid involving myself as much as possible, even if I might have something quite enlightening to say. The reasons for this tendency of mine are felt by all of us I'm sure. Not only is it nearly impossible to use political terms correctly because of years of deliberate obfuscation, explaining your position with any degree of depth seems like a complete waste of time when your foundational assumptions are different from everyone else's. You are forced to stay within the extremely restrictive bounds of acceptable popular notions; literally everything that might be useful is unthinkable and deemed conspiratorial. What a great testament to the power and diligence of ruling class ideological forces that the term "socialism" is taken to mean the exact opposite of its historical meaning. Our whole political vocabulary is a carefully conditioned psychological entrenchment which incontestably elicits certain emotional reactions depending on the preferences of the rulers: "communism" bad, "democracy" good. These terms are subject to no critical consideration nor serious investigation. Unlike the rest of the English language, they are not ever-changing definitions with varying connotations, but definite and irreproachable truisms independent of historical influence. They have a single meaning and a single acceptable attitude to be adopted toward them. I may sound cynical, but popular attitudes are so expressly sheepish and embarrassingly uncritical that not complaining about it seems to me an act of complacency for the existing order.

For these reasons, I wanted to know how fellow socialists express their positions to people who, having been systematically fooled by the masters, may not be familiar with the elementary facts of political-economic life. It seems to me that describing your political position with a single word like "socialist" or "communist" is entirely impossible due to reasons detailed above. So what do you say when people ask you what your political beliefs are? How do you work around the indoctrination, the deeply ingrained misconceptions, the unavoidable sheep mentality? How do you support your position with theory and evidence without sounding pretentious and high-minded?

So I’ve read the communist manifesto, the whole premise of the 1st chapter is that the rapid development of productive forces leading to the inevitable overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariats.

Yet this has not happened a single time to my knowledge and the only countries where marxists took power were were some the least developed countries on Earth with very underdeveloped productive capacities. Russia, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, North Korea, Angola, Cuba, Zimbabwe, etc.

Westerns instead seem to be some of the mostly learn towards reactionary politics that completely ignore or further empower the bourgeoisie.

I'm from a third world country. In our here leftists and liberals are widely thought to be same. I knew there were differences. But even in leftist and liberal societies often work together here. Yes, there are criticism in our leftist circle too about the liberals but these aren't nearly as much as i see on Reddit. I have some questions regarding this scenario -

1. In Which side liberals are situated politically ? Left or right?

2. As many ideas of liberalism match (obviously not economical ideas) with marxism like secularism, gender equality, internationalism, lgbt rights, anti racism, equality in justice; why leftists dislike them so much?

My opinion on consumer activism has always been something like “it’s good to do but it won’t organize the masses nor will it materially change anything. Its benefits to the workers is short lived at best”

In the aftermath of both Trump presidencies and other, localized uprisings or organized efforts, it always seems like there’s a period of fervor, which includes consumer activist efforts… eg, boycotts. I know they’re effective for short term efforts and for building solidarity but, a few of my friends over the weekend said something that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. Their basic sentiment was that they felt demoralized after the consumer boycotts of GenAi, Starbucks, Amazon, Facebook/Meta…. Etc., made them feel disheartened since it didn’t bring about material change.

I can find some sporadic, random comments and posts echoing similar sentiments, and now I’m question if consumer activism is ever a viable tactic. I don’t recall reading anything on consumer activism in any of the theory I’ve perused, so here I am posing the question to others online.

My question; is consumer-activism worth it as part of a broader revolutionary strategy? It’s something I am going to continue to do for the time being because it’s low-effort, but I’m reluctant to encourage it if others outside more coordinated and organized efforts

Hi, I come from a liberal family that primarily focuses on the environment and how to stop climate change (they are also members of “The Greens” in Germany, where I live). I frequently try to convince them of the idea of socialism ever since I came to believe it is a much more effective approach to achieving long-lasting change.

One argument I often hear from them is: “We don’t have the time to advocate for socialism; we need to focus on climate change first because we only have about 20 years left.”

I try to make it clear to them how the economic system is connected to climate change, but I also understand their argument. Do any of you have counterarguments I could use to further the discussion?

I’m afraid that if I can’t even convince my liberal family, I won’t be able to convince anyone else down the line.

Hello! My FYP have been full of these, and honestly, my uneducated ahh, is struggling to understand the meaning of these, can you guys please help me understand what they are? Thank u smmm

Hello everyone,
I have some points in favor of the question in the title, but I still have some doubts which I ask you to answer please.

1. the lower the hours, the more motivation and productivity. I believe that you can get more work and higher quality work done when working less as you have more free time and you do not feel like youre suffocating in your job.
2. the reasons why working hours are so long is because companies want to create more and more profit, thus relying on workers working more than they're paid.
3. producing enough entertainment for everyone, food for everyone, clothes for everyone, food for everyone, building infrastructure and so on doesn't actually require that much (in comparing). However, there are many useless jobs that are only existent to create profit and/or exclusive to a capitalist society. Think of all the jobs related to money (which would not exist in a communist economy) and so on

now to my skeptical thoughts:
wouldn't certain jobs that require long working hours that are not producing anything or accumulating profit, like teachers working 30+ hours a week, police, fire brigade, nurses,… still have these highly time consuming tasks?
How would it exactly work?
Please feel free to give me more insight on this topic as I would like to discuss this topic with my dad.

Have a great day!

1. Value, Price and Profit

2. The critique of political economy

3. Germen Ideology (M + E)

4. Origin of family, private property and state (E)

5. Anti Duhring (E)

6. Socialism: Utopian and scientific (E)

7. Economic and political manuscripts 1844

8. On the Jewish question

9. Gotha programme

10. Thesis on Feuerbach

11. 18th brumaire of Louise Bonaparte

12. Poverty of Philosophy

13. Contribution Critique of Hegel's philosophy of the right

14. Das Kapita

15. Grundrisse

I have read manifesto, principals, wage labour and capital. As this list is too long that I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to finish it, is there any titles here which can be avoided or have almost same contents? Or something which i should add to the list?

I hear people calling China revisionist. Or saying that The PRC has become a state capitalist state and abandoned socialism. From what I have read on the topic, I'm torn. Came here to get more perspectives and reasoning on both sides.

So, is China socialist? Why/why not?

any ways to help?

I mean obviously I'd think it would be some absurd symbol of bourgeoisie self indulgence and exploitation of labor turning low cost goods in overpriced commodity, but I was wondering if there was any other insightful thoughts? I found the example of Chopt, if anyone is confused on what I was talking about.

I am looking for Socialist publications (newspapers, blogs, magazines, etc). I am specifically looking for analysis of current world politics. Any suggestions?

Products and services like WhatsApp and other SM draw their value from how many user their platform has. Does this not produce problems for the LTV?

A clone of the same product with the same code is worth almost nothing regardless of how much SNLT was used to produce it. And it should still have qualitative use value, should it not? Or is the value in a marxian sense zero and this is just a deviation of price and value? Are services benefiting from network effects just extracting Monopoly Rent?

I want a book that’s relatively simple to understand, entry level socialism, from which I can hopefully build on. I would love recommendation, thank you in advance!

For Context

I am a leftist social democrat. I am anti-capitalist, but I am not totally convinced by socialism. I do think it is superior to capitalism, though. I was born in a royal muslim family in India; my grandparents were Gandhian socialists, freedom fighters for India. Today, all of our family is full of social democrats. Recently, I have been reading about mutualism, anarchism, and workplace democracy.

I know that people are gonna say you can't be a leftist and socdem. You can see my other posts to understand my ideology.

My Question:

So recently, I was talking to my "apolitical" (social liberal) friend about the evils of capitalism, and she seems to have a lot of potential to become a leftist. We got into talking about life and socialism.

She said that she just wants 3 things and votes on the basis of these:

1. Social Progressivism - LGBTQ+ rights, Feminism, green politics, etc.

2. Honest and Reliable institutions - Corruption-free public institutions (courts, etc) and relatively cheap healthcare, housing, and education.

3. Ability to retire at 30-35, get financial freedom, and work for fun or not work at all, focus on enjoying life and raising a family.

The third is the issue that she holds most dear because she's from a upper middle class household, and her sister has achieved "financial freedom" and now spends her days making art, travelling, and having fun.

Because of this, she feels attracted to many austerity measures like lower taxes, rebates, etc. Since she had this sort of understanding about the world, I weavered away from democratic socialism and started talking more about market socialism, where one can still buy houses and have passive income, but in the workplace democracy is mandated, thus making it a combo of a social democracy and market socialism. She seemed pretty stoked.

Then she went home and googled more about socialism, and guess what she found. Yep, she got spooked. No private property? No Passive income? No Retiring Early? I tried to tell her that MLs and anarchists aren't all of socialism, but my words fell on deaf ears. Now, she's spooked.

What do different types of anti-capitalists think of early retirements?