(05-13-2020, 09:01 PM)mikesez Wrote: Marx used socialism and communism interchangeably, he didn't really bother to define them. Remember, in his time, a "commune" was a political unit, usually a city, sometimes a village, that had its own walls and its own rules but often got overruled by an absolutist central government. Paris was a commune.  Most dots on the map in Germany were communes.  The urban workers Marx hoped to organize were all in these communes.  In a sense, Marx was trying to say that in the future, cities with factories would be the seats of power, not rural palaces, when he talked about the future being "communist".
People who came after Marx have mostly agreed that communism is something more extreme and more pure, that has never been attained. So debating about communism is kind of like debating about if x wings can defeat b wings, or other stuff from fantasy and science fiction.  Socialism, on the other hand, people have experienced that in many different places and times by now, and that is worth discussing.
I think homebiscuit gets closest to the right answer.  Everyone agrees that the government should step into an economic crisis from time to time.  One way to define socialist is, someone who wants that government intervention to be a permanent, all the time, arrangement.
But we're all sort of socialist now! All of us want an unemployment system that automatically pays out when you qualify. All of us want food stamps that automatically pay out when your income gets low. We want these programs to be permanent and automatic. Sometimes that's totally rational and scientific, but sometimes it's not.

your minor premise is thus disproven and as such, your syllogism fell apart.  As a budding libertarian (still strange to say) I don't want or need your nanny state.

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(05-13-2020, 09:01 PM)mikesez Wrote: Marx used socialism and communism interchangeably, he didn't really bother to define them. Remember, in his time, a "commune" was a political unit, usually a city, sometimes a village, that had its own walls and its own rules but often got overruled by an absolutist central government. Paris was a commune.  Most dots on the map in Germany were communes.  The urban workers Marx hoped to organize were all in these communes.  In a sense, Marx was trying to say that in the future, cities with factories would be the seats of power, not rural palaces, when he talked about the future being "communist".
People who came after Marx have mostly agreed that communism is something more extreme and more pure, that has never been attained. So debating about communism is kind of like debating about if x wings can defeat b wings, or other stuff from fantasy and science fiction.  Socialism, on the other hand, people have experienced that in many different places and times by now, and that is worth discussing.
I think homebiscuit gets closest to the right answer.  Everyone agrees that the government should step into an economic crisis from time to time.  One way to define socialist is, someone who wants that government intervention to be a permanent, all the time, arrangement.
But we're all sort of socialist now! All of us want an unemployment system that automatically pays out when you qualify. All of us want food stamps that automatically pay out when your income gets low. We want these programs to be permanent and automatic. Sometimes that's totally rational and scientific, but sometimes it's not.

your minor premise is thus disproven and as such, your syllogism fell apart.  As a budding libertarian (still strange to say) I don't want or need your nanny state.

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