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[–] FuckTheVirileAether 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
Eh, they were probably laughing at the irony of Trump dissing socialism when the United States itself is one of the strongest examples of socialism in the world. First of all, you have to understand that the average American is wildly disinformed. Remember the quote from CIA director Casey:
If you actually read Marx's Communist Manifesto, especially chapter 2, then you'll understand that every policy he recommends to transform a capitalist society to a communist society has been implemented in America for 100 years. These include federalized public education, progressive income taxes, public utility companies, etc. etc. The only difference is that instead of abolishing private property and rights of inheritance, we implemented property taxes and estate taxes. The path to communism includes increasing the productive forces as rapidly as possible, and it was discovered after Marx that people produce more when they feel like they have a sense of ownership and can leave something to their kids. So social production actually increases more via taxation than it does through strict abolition. If you only tax a portion of their estate, you get more than if you had taken all of it, because they work harder to leave something to their kids.
One of fundamental concepts of communism is that only the elite are supposed to know what's really going on, everyone else, all the workers and middle-management are only told what they need to keep them producing as much as possible. Americans like to think that THEY know the truth, that their leaders and their media WOULD NEVER lie to them! That it is always the people in other countries who are brainwashed! Yet these same Americans just believe whatever the MSM tells them, they never read the original source material, the people who claim to be the strongest anti-Marxists have barely read a word he ever wrote, and if they did they didn't understand it. Because the American education system doesn't teach people the historical knowledge they need to understand anything other than how to solve equations and follow the rules, not to formulate those equations in the first place, not to understand the principles behind and purpose of the rules. Even students with bachelor's degrees can barely do anything more than memorize and solve equations - they are technicians at best, and have no idea how to observe a physical system and formulate an equation that symbolically captures that system. Americans can do it, but they do not know it.
Socialism is simply an economic system whereby the production of one class is redistributed to another class. Production is owned by society, and society chooses how things should be distributed. The political system by which this decision is made can differ. There might be socialism in a democracy, where people vote directly on how to distribute things. Or socialism might exist in a Republic, where people only vote for representatives who then decide on the distribution. Or it might be in a dictatorship where one leader with nearly absolute power makes all these decisions irrespective of how the voters might choose.
As soon as America allowed people to vote who didn't own property, America started down the road of socialism. Because then people who didn't own property could vote to have the value from that property redistributed to themselves or whoever they thought needed it more, i.e. socialism.
[–] matt ago
Well said.