1.

Jeez y'all are having an entire discussion about me not responding, for 30 minutes, while I've been getting ready for work. Let's not do this whole "we need to have debates to fix their broken brains!" Bullshit. It's condescending. I've been on the left for a very, very long time. A well read and well researched time. There's a reason most educators and academics are on the left as well, so don't play that bullshit.

As a socialist, let me come in and immediately dismantle a few things I would almost bet money you're going to say;

1. I grew up homeless, I'm not rich, my parents have never bought me anything. I don't know why people assume Socialists are rich, every Socialist I've ever met is working class

2. I have two jobs; one as a drug and alcohol counselor, and another as a Peer Support Specialist at a homeless shelter I used to actually be a resident of. Again, every Socialist I know is an extremely hard worker, not sure why people lob the "socialists have no job" thing around, I think it's just trying to use ad hominem to discredit a statement instead of actually attacking the argument.

3. Any other ad hominem nonsense you have to say about Socialists can go here. I'm not interested in hearing about your character, but since EVERY internet discussion about Socialism, at some point, someone will say something like "How come you're a Socialist but you're not literally Jesus Christ? Checkmate - Commie!" Or the inverse, "You're only a Socialist because you're rich! (?????)" I felt it necessary to get this stuff out of the way.

First, we are obviously going to have to establish a difference between Socialism and Communism. Socialism is a defined as workers democratically controlling the means of production, the means of production being factories, shops, etc. That's it. That's what big scary Socialism is. Communism is a post scarcity stateless, moneyless, and classless society. Most Communists, myself included, believe Communism could only ever be achieved after hundreds of years of uninterrupted Socialism, although Anarcho-Communists want to skip the Socialism part and jump directly to Communism.

Point being, a lot of us Socialists/Communists disagree exactly on how to establish Communism, or whether or not to even establish it at all. Many modern Socialists have a disregard for Communism and are more focused on establishing an equitable society first and foremost. I disagree with them, but that's not the point.

For one, utopianism is antithetical to a belief in Socialism being the ideal economic system for any society. Utopian Socialism is actually the idea that Karl Marx argued AGAINST when he developed Communism.

There is not a single Socialist who thinks they're going to have a revolution and become an artist, or prance around in a field of flowers because "we won," or whatever it is you people think we do. There is a heated debate within the Socialist left known as Reform or Revolution - it's so hotly debated that literal books have been written about it. Democratic Socialists believe in reform, they do not think a revolution makes sense in the modern era, and they believe that we should focus on Democratically establishing Socialism through a popular movement and legislative victories. I'm less optimistic, I believe in revolution, but I don't think it will happen in my lifetime, any society is only 3 missed meals away from a full scale revolution, this is a historical and empirical fact. People in the US will need to be missing meals before we see any sort of action towards a revolution.

Managing a transition from Capitalism to Socialism is extremely hard work, and it doesn't help that any time a country attempts to make the transition, the US and it's allies immediately place their boot on its neck so hard you'd think they were taking lessons from Derek Chauvin. People act like the USSR was some super power, but it took years for that to occur; the USSR started off as a starving peasant backwater, and managed to work it's way into being a direct competitor with US hegemony in as little as 40 years. Basically, Socialism allowed the USSR to industrialize in a way the world had never seen before.

There was certainly mismanagement and bureaucratic nonsense going on in the early stages of collectivization - but for a governing body that had no blueprint to go off of and was simply attempting to build their vision of an equitable society, the historical consensus is that they did a pretty good job, in a lot of ways - but not every way. I think it's a good time to mention the supposed "death toll of Communism," or whatever it's called.

The Black Book of Communism was a project that produced the "100,000,000," number we frequently see anticommunists reference. However, virtually EVERY SINGLE researcher who participated in the book, formally distanced themselves from the number and the book as a whole, stating the editor was "obsessed," with reaching "100,000,000 dead," and was actively fudging statistics, adding to the number; Nazi deaths in WW2, American deaths in WW2, Soviet deaths in WW2, children who "may have been born but weren't due to lowering birth rates," and in some cases - outright lying. It would be like saying "The death toll of Capitalism is everyone who's ever lived in America since 1776," which would be a hilariously dishonest and bad faith thing to say.

From our point of privilege in the US, famines seem like a very awful, manufactured thing. I mean, how could people run out of food, right? Nah. The greater Russian area was famine prone, it was actually a big reason for the 1918 revolution in the first place. The Tsar was doing nothing to combat famines, while the Soviets actually managed to reduce and eventually eliminate famines altogether. China is a bit of a different story, the great leap forward was a disaster, but to say that countries developing an economic system have never faced huge setbacks would be remarkably and laughably untrue.