What is socialism?

❌ Social Welfare Programs

❌ State-Run Enterprises (UPS, Fire Department, etc.)

❌ Full State Ownership Of The Economy

❌ Full State Control of The Economy

❌ When The Government Does Stuff

✔️ State Owned Economy With Workplace Democracy by The Working Class and General Public Under The Dictatorship of The Proletariat

✔️ Social Ownership of The Means of Production With Democratic Control over The Means of Production

✔️ Industrial Democracy W/ some form of Common Ownership of Enterprise

✔️ “From each according to their ability, to each according to their work”

✔️ A system where no one who is able bodied (especially capitalists) can live off of, or make a fortune off of the labor of another.

What is Communism?

❌ A one-party state

❌ Authoritarianism

❌ Dictatorship

❌ Totalitarianism, Some Orwellian Dystopia

❌ Any Form of State

❌A society where no one owns personal possessions (Laptops, houses, cars, etc.)

✔️ A society which abolishes private property (Private ownership of enterprise, in a word, the abolition of the entitlement to what one does not produce)

✔️ A society that deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.

✔️ A stateless, classless, moneyless society embodying the principle of “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”

✔️ A society where there is no exploitation by economic means, nor oppression by a state

✔️ The doctrine for the liberation of the proletariat

✔️ Inevitable

What did Karl Marx study and write most about?

❌ Communism

❌ Socialism

❌ The State

❌ Poetry

✔️ Capitalist Economics

✔️ Human Society and History (including, mind you, human nature)

*If you search all 50 volumes of Marx’s works, you will find less than 7 pages describing what a communist society would look like, when asked, he would always say, “I don’t have a crystal ball” The overwhelming majority of his works are a detailed study and critique of how capitalism works.*

When and where did Karl Marx believe the first successful socialist revolutions would take place?

❌ The most backward countries on earth (Russia, China, Albania, Cuba, etc.)

❌ At the beginning of capitalist development and at the end of feudalism (Russia, China, etc.)

✔️ In the most advanced capitalist countries in the world

✔️ At the end of capitalist development, building off of capitalism as capitalism built off of feudalism (the modern era, not 1917)

Why then, was Marx wrong?

❌ He did not understand the inner contradictions of the capitalist system

✔️ He lived before the time of imperialism, whose conditions brought the first socialist revolution in the world to Russia, and subsequent revolutions

(Now from a Trotskyist perspective)

What, then, was the USSR?

❌ An ideal example of socialism

❌ A socialist economy in the proper sense

❌ A purely state-capitalist economy (technically in some ways, but not really)

❌ A failure of socialism, or communism

✔️ A failure of Stalinism

✔️ A degenerated workers state where democratic control of the economy was replaced by that of a small bureaucratic elite (Stalinism)

✔️ A betrayal of the original democratic ideals and gains of the October Revolution

Why was this?

❌ Human Nature

✔️ An almost inevitability due to 1.) The backwardness of Russia 2.) The fact that international revolution (which Lenin and Trotsky both believed to be the sole hope of the RSFSR) 3.) The failure of ‘Socialism in one Country’ (Stalinism).

Why has every socialist revolution not attained favorable results?

❌ Human Nature

❌ The superiority of Capitalism

✔️ Every single socialist revolution since October has been based, not on the early October revolution or the Paris Commune, but on the Stalinist example of a one-party state, and the theory of ‘socialism in one country’. We live in a global, integrated economy. Revolution must be international in scope, or at least in several advanced countries. The completion of the socialist revolution in one country alone is unthinkable.

✔️ Revolution in an advanced capitalist country has yet to take place, we are only just recently finding ourselves in the conditions Marx wrote about in which the internal contradictions of capitalism bring us to proletarian revolution in said countries. Without aid from an advanced country, revolution in a poor country will be mercilessly crushed by U.S. imperialism, even given its already dim prospects

✔️ Every single socialist revolution has happened in the most backward countries in the world, (and not the most advanced as Marx and Engels believed necessary) attaining remarkable yet still not desired results

✔️ We are only now entering the era of late stage capitalism, of the end of capitalism

Feel free to comment and share, I am tired of having to explain this to liberals.