New rules:

[Svengoolie 3]

Yeah yeah i'm not Bill Mayer but xxxx it, let's have our own new rules.

New rule: Taking the G out of Angus burger to make it "anus burger",  or redoing an Angus 1/4 pounder to read "anus pounder",  may have been funny 10 years ago,  but not now. 

[indianasmith]

Anyone who calls George Soros a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer should be sentenced to ten years in a re-education camp where they can learn the difference between fascism and communism!

[Svengoolie 3]

People who say george soros in a communist should do a semester at college to learn that communism is not a synonym for socialism.

[ER]

Technically that's true, socialism and communism aren't the same, but people can be excused for blurring the line when Soviets to the end maintained they lived in a "socialist motherland" when of course it was straight-up communism.

Socialism is not necessarily evil, just stifling and inefficient, while Communism is living death.

I used to have long conversations with someone who grew up in Leningrad and something he said was a big point stressed all the time in his school years sticks out in my mind, that in the USSR it was considered theft to hire someone to work for you, since to employ someone was to to steal that person's labor.

Just throwing that out there because that always stuck out in my mind.

[Alex]

I'd argue it was neither, but just another military dictatorship with Marxist leanings.

[Svengoolie 3]

I'd argue it was neither, but just another military dictatorship with Marxist leanings.

And you are correct.

[ER]

You two don't consider the USSR Communist? I'd say it was a perversion of Marxism, perhaps, but I don't understand how it couldn't be Communist. The military-heavy dictatorship is certainly correct.

[Alex]

Because in the USSR people at the top of the party had more power and money than people at the bottom. The only redistribution of wealth that took place was taking it off the people who had it, and keeping it in the hands of other selected people. Under communism you end up with no requirement for a centralised government with everyone working for each others benefit. Everyone is treated the same. However in the Soviet Union high ranking party members had bigger houses, better holidays and so on and so on. Even if Lenin had lived I don't think it would have even been within touching distance of communism, certainly not as Marx wrote it. It was just another military dictatorship given some leftist imagery and titles and no real aspirations to the sort of perfect society that is supposed to be the final aim of that particular belief.

(Just as an aside I would say Communism, while a lovely dream (and much like Anarchy if you understand the precepts behind what that actually entails and not what the word has came to mean) is not possible. People just aren't built the way required for those systems to work).

I'd say at no point did the Communist Party pay more than lip service to this ideal. Under it, you have no oppression (yeah, when did the Soviet Union ever not oppress its citizens), no sexism, etc. You could put up an argument that the USSR was still in the first of the three stages of communism, but it was never going to move beyond that and even then I'd struggle to make that argument stick.

So yeah, for me the whole Soviet Union was a military dictatorship holding onto power by any means it could, except the one that it should have. The popular will of the people. It just gave itself a few of the trappings of Communism, but actions speak louder that words and imagery. I can take a potato and paint it red and green, but that doesn't make it an apple.

But then I find when you get to the extremes of politics in any direction, you end up with the same things going on. It just gets given different names.

[Alex]

Oh I'd also agree that socialism is inefficient and stifling. Without the promise of extra reward for additional labour you lose the incentive to work harder, and where there is a job for life there is less of a reason to work harder and make sure you do your job right. I know when I was working in the civilian world, if I worked a weekend as overtime, I want to be paid more for it and loyalty to the company be damned. A job is a transaction. People pay me for my time and skills, not out of the goodness of their hearts and unless they do something extra to earn it, they don't deserve my loyalty just for being part of that transaction.

[ER]

Sometimes the Israel kibbutzim are praised as pure communalism, a sort of parallel Marxist ideal, devoid actual input from Marx or lip service paid to him, and Gorbechev praised the Israeli kibbutzim as "surely what the founders of my nation had in mind" so I looked into that system thinking it must be something great, and.... was appalled.

There are kibbutz models that cover the spectrum and most today are not as extreme as early-on in the Zionist movement but the early kibbutzim strike me as something out of a dystopian nightmare, with children communally raised without parental input and everyone eating at tables in a cafeteria at the same time, sleeping in bunkhouses, no one owning much of anything, and jobs assigned via committee with the fruits of labor equally divided according to membership, not actual output, and the more I have read about life on a traditional kibbutz the more I find even the purest strain of communalism frightening and murderous to individuality.

And I am all about personal freedom, seeking above all else to be left alone.

[RCMerchant]

Hippies were most true to Marxist Communism.
I mean, dam! They lived in communes, they grew they're own food and shared it with each other-everybody was equal.

Of course you had folks who twist it-like Manson. He had a commune. And he exploited it. He was a Stalin.

I don't  think communism is at all f**king good. It won't work. People with talent deserve to make they're lives better.
Socialism-is -I don't know. Nazi's were the National Socialist Party.
I really don't know-and this is the honest truth-know wtf 'socialist' means. Because I have heard the word flung around like a dog with a dishrag.

EDIT! OH!
I figured it out!
During the 20's and 30's in Germany, the Nazi's and the Communists were fighting in the streets. The country was that divided.
Way before WW2.
 Hitler and Stalin were major political figures going waaay back before the war. And they f**king hated each other.
Kinda like Democrats and Republicans!

[ER]

The term does get thrown around, RC, you're right, and at its heart what it means is the government takes control of some but not all parts of the nation, usually industry, banking, medicine, education, social services, farming, but typically leaves other parts of the economic superstructure alone. Usually what's happened next is inflation skyrockets, bureaucracy and rules increase, productivity slows, taxes become stifling, and if they're lucky people vote themselves out from under it the way the French (and to an extent the British) did in the early 1980s.

Most societies have certain elements of socialism in them, in the US one obvious one is the public education system, a perfect example of the big-spending, wasteful, low results, spirit-crushing effects of letting the government manage something.

Socialism can in some cases provide a certain security blanket for some people but in getting those benefits people sacrifice a lot else.
 
Another problem with socialism is it tends to open the door to creating a totalitarian elite that exploits the majority as it gains greater and greater power over people's lives, though admittedly that's also the case in other forms of government, just more transparent under socialism. Again I don't think socialism is evil at heart, just not the best system under which to live, and history proves that. Eventually most socialist experiments run out of other people's money, to bring in a famous quote, and fail.

[ER]

Also don't let the word "Socialist" in National Socialist Party fool you. Nazism started out as a leftist party with socialist roots but it went far right into the zone of reactionary politics, just (and I do not know why) held onto the original name.  Ironically Nazis weren't socialists.

[RCMerchant]

I dunno...socialized health care, child care for the poor, and Social Security seems like good things to me.

I get Social Security. I also paid into it all my working life-and taxes.

I got news for you. No matter what governing idelogical belief you have- the guy at the bottom is gonna get f**ked.

[RCMerchant]

Also don't let the word "Socialist" in National Socialist Party fool you. Nazism started out as a leftist party with socialist roots but it went far right into the zone of reactionary politics, just (and I do not know why) held onto the original name.  Ironically Nazis weren't socialists.

Just like 'Democracy' turned into 'Monopoly', where whoever owns the most money and property wins.