When socialists say they want to collectivize private property, they use a meaning of private property which equates to "means of production", or "capital". The goal is that there won't be owners of capital earning money simply by employing other people to work the capital and stealing a part of what they produce (surplus value).

In your example, summer cottages and family farms aren't means of production, so there's no reason to redistribute them. Pensions and retirement were guaranteed to everyone even in the USSR, where women retired at 55 and men at 60, so I can guarantee socialists want you to have a pension. Small businesses that employ other employees would have to be collectivized eventually, which could mean that the owner simply becomes one normal worker in the business, working alongside the previous employees instead of above them. Regarding the apartment, you don't need to rent out an apartment if the rent of your apartment costs 3-5% of your income (as was the case in the Soviet Union). Land ownership and inheritance are a bit grey. Obviously nobody wants to collectivize your nana's wedding dress, or your dad's funko pop collection. Obviously we would want to collectivize if you inherit a big factory, or 20 flats that your mom rented out. For things in the middle, it becomes a bit more grey, so there's no easy answer. I bet everyone would agree that uprooting people isn't generally a good thing.

By the nine divines... Why does it take libs 80 years extra to reach the conclusions that Marxists have already described in detail in the last century...

That's a policy issue, not one of engineering or physical constraints.

Copyright was never about defending the creators, its origin is the industrial revolution and it was a tool of companies to protect "their" inventions (the ones of their workers actually). It was NEVER about defending the small person who actually creates things.

the communist still considered the SPD to be the bigger threat and refused to march with them

...which was confirmed when they agreed with the Nazis... And when they collaborated with the Freikorps to crush, torture, and murder the communists.

And the SPD of the 1930 were by no means "liberals". They were further to the left than any democrat has ever been.

Go ask Rosa Luxembourg, leader of communists in Germany and murdered at 47 at the order of SPD, how progressive and left the SPD was. "Left is when you agree to murder and torture communists". Fucking revisionists man

Oh golly, I sure wish we had a word to refer to antisemitic anti-LGTBQ+ people...

I'm not a socialist

All firms are mandated to be worker coops

Pretty sure that qualifies as socialism for most people. Welcome onboard, my friend!

The Tankie actually said something on the lines of, "If you would JUST READ MARX you would know that earning capital is a fundamental cornerstone of communism!"

I'm a communist who doesn't want to call China a communist country, so I don't really agree with the person that you were talking to, but your second paragraph does show you haven't researched communism or its history. The debate of whether societies need to undergo capitalist capital accumulation first to enter communism is about as old as communism, and the history of communism is full of examples of this. It's the ideological reason why the Russian Socialist Democratic Labor Party split into two wings: the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, the former believing that the Russian Empire had to undergo capitalism first in other to become communist, and the latter wanting to implement socialism to the primitive almost feudalist Russian empire. Some similar split happened more discreetly inside the Communist Party of China, with Mao implementing socialism directly to the extremely underdeveloped Chinese society, and later Deng Xiaoping opting for the more market-socialism (known now to many as "socialism with Chinese characteristics).

So you may or may not agree whether china is communist, but from your comment it's clear that you're very oblivious to the historical and ideological reasons for the argument as to whether china is or isn't a socialist country and whether they're on the path to it. It's good to discuss things and to have opinions, but please get informed before dismissing other people's opinions on topics they've probably dedicated more time than you to studying.

Who thinks Chinese economy is bad now??

I'm all for the Nordic model

The sad thing about the Nordic model is that it relies on wealth and labour extraction from poorer countries as much as the rest of capitalist countries do. Being on the upper side of unequal exchange (I beg you to read on unequal exchange, even if only the Wikipedia article), makes it very nice for some lucky few in Europe / North America, and very hard for the rest who aren't on the upper side.

The fact that anyone, let alone LGBTQ+ people, can go to the streets holding a "Lockheed Martin" sign and not get shamed into dropping it, shows we're failing as a society

The key is in one of the words you've said:

ELECTED committee

You don't have to trust that they won't turn authoritarian. If you see authoritarian tendencies and you don't like them, you vote them out.

Would it work like standard western democracy, i.e. electing a party / parties to form a "government"

That depends on who you ask. An anarchist will tell you no, a communist will tell you a different answer, etc. I'm a Marxist-Leninist so I'll answer to that as a Marxist-Leninist.

In a Marxist-Leninist state, there is only one party. In the same way that your country only have one justice system, your country only has one socialized system of healthcare (if at all), etc, there would be need only for one party: the party that represents the interests of the workers. This party would have a vanguard of communist intellectuals (liable to being removed from their position by popular vote), who would be in a constant back-and-forth democratic dialogue with the workers and their representation in worker-councils. The needs and demands of the workers would be translated to Marxist ideology, which is flexible depending on the circumstances, the culture, and the society it's applied to, and policy would be drafted, approved and adopted.

A good example of this in action is detailed in a book called "how the workers' parliaments saved the Cuban Revolution", by Pedro Ross. It details the immense level of popular participation in the drafting, approval, implementation and execution of policy in Cuba during the 1990s "periodo especial", a huge economic crisis precipitated by the dissolution of their biggest trading partner, the USSR. Literal millions of people, through their unions and through worker councils, participated democratically in deciding which sectors of the economy they wanted to preserve most, which ones least, which workers are redundant and which aren't, which goods and services should be prioritised in the planned economy, how to organize local organic farms everywhere (including workplaces) in order to minimize food imports... All of this happened in a back-and-forth, multi-year exercise, between the top representatives of the government, the specialists (e.g. economists, hospital directors, transit company directors, etc.), and the direct representatives of the people through the worker's councils. It's truly one of the most explicit and overwhelming examples of democracy that I've ever encountered.

The most voted party in the wide front coalition is LFI, earning more votes than Macron's party. Macron is refusing so far to name a president from the LFI, for the first time in the history of the 5th republic of France.

Dang, I wish there were a term for that...

That already happens. People who research normally do it under a wage and the invention goes to the company paying the wage. If not, a small inventor doesn't have the financial means and the lawyers to fight a big company copying their idea. The small person is never defended.

Bold of you to assume that there's no cause-effect relation between what Lockheed-Martin execs deem profitable, and whatever policy the US takes. Lobbying is a thing, and the same investors that put money in military conglomerates, put money into lobbying and into media. If you can't see how the existence of powerful capitalist companies that make weapons is detrimental to a democracy, I don't know what to tell you.

What's this bullshit? Now we can't criticise the military conglomerates because "they're just companies doing company things"? Nah fuck that and fuck Lockheed Martin, selling weapons to an imperialist government makes you as bad as the imperialist government.

I know right? The very idea of copyright is so fucking abstract, absurd and far-fetched. For the most part, it amounts to:

"NOOOOO YOU CAN'T PLACE THE ATOMS IN THIS ORDER BECAUSE ANOTHER PERSON DID IT BEFORE YOU!!!11!1!1!" (When it comes to scientific or engineering parents)

"NOOOO YOU CAN'T MAKE A SURFACE REFLECT THE PHOTONS LIKE THAT, OR EMIT THEM IN THAT PATTERN. THE RIGHT TO DO THAT BELONGS TO SOMEONE ELSE!!!1!!1!" (When it comes to pictoric arts)

"NOOO YOU CAN'T MAKE THE AIR VIBRATE AT THOSE FREQUENCIES IN THAT PATTERN, SOMEONE DID IT BEFORE YOU AND THEY'RE PAYING ME SO YOU CAN'T DO IT TOO!!!" (Music)

"NOOO YOU CAN'T PUT LETTERS IN THAT ORDER!! THAT'S ILLEGAL, ANOTHER PERSON DID IT BEFORE!!" (Text and code)

So yeah, fuck that shit

Be fucking accurate

They approximately are, you just can't read. They claimed there's an Oct 7th per WEEK, not per day. If you divide your final number by 7, you get approximately 40k, which is very close to the 35k+ VIOLENTLY murdered by Israel since Oct 7th (not counting all the thousands that have died since as a consequence of hunger and preventable diseases).

Where are the mods when you need them to erase some comments...

Going back to the cold-war era where the USSR had to manufacture and provide mostly every single consumer good for its own citizens due to economic sanctions and isolation. You can't compare luxury goods made all over the entire world for a wealthy minority, designed by experts from all other industrialized countries, against soviet-made mass-produced items which were meant to be able to be produced in as many units as possible using the least amount of resources possible. It's just different manufacturing paradigms.

The USSR was what is called a "shortage economy" as opposed to western capitalism's "surplus economy". In capitalism, an abundance of competing companies in the same field leads to overproduction of most goods in a way that some products from some brands end up on the shelves of stores and storage houses collecting dust, and companies who manufacture a lot of these non-desired products, disappear. This leads to an inefficient waste of resources and labour, since it leads to unused goods and services.

The USSR, on the other hand, had a state-planned economy in which, using predictions of the planned output of raw materials, decided what to produce with these materials. Producing 10 more drills, meant that you had to produce 10 fewer units of something else. Hence, the economy was optimized so that only as many as strictly necessary of most goods would be manufactured. Additionally, the products were design to require the least amount of labour and resources necessary to be manufactured, taking into account mostly long-life and easy repairability to prevent inefficiencies. It was the only way that the USSR could, as a less industrialized state than for example Germany or the US or Britain (which had started industrialising around one century before the USSR did), could provide goods for everyone, and for the most part it did. The quality of products may not have been as high as high-quality consumer goods in the west, but that's simply a combination of design choice to be available to cover more goods with similar amounts of raw materials and labour, of fewer experts in design and manufacturing than worldwide due to the size of the soviet block and their economical embargos.

No, you just don't understand that "means of production" doesn't exclusively apply to industrial production, it talks about all capital, including financial. Lenin talks about this extensively as far back as the early 1900s, and it applies extremely well.

Communism is when you perpetuate the class relations of your country in an authoritarian manner. Oh wait, or was it backwards...

Medical and psychological consensus says we shouldn't allow children to marry or drink alcohol or do drugs. Where's the medical consensus that we shouldn't allow GRT?

I'm not myself trying to make the assertion that china is communism or that it will achieve communism, I'm saying that what you consider "ludicrous", has been a hotly debated topic for the past 100 years with many proponents on both sides, many of them with much more knowledge of socialism and revolutions than you or I possess.

I hope solar eventually beats ICE engines for efficiency

I'm not sure your comment makes a lot of sense. The problem with solar isn't that it's not as efficient as internal combustion engines, it's that you can't generate electricity on-demand. But it's already a cheaper form of energy than burning fossil fuels in many countries.

You know that Switzerland, a country in the literal Alps, has one of the best train infrastructures on Earth?

As the other comment said, of course there are fringe cases. There shouldn't even be a city in Dubai, let alone trains getting there, but fortunately, most cities on earth are in accessible places because, well, otherwise why would thousands upon thousands of people go there.

Wait, you're telling me that a preindustrial society, the successor state to an empire that had 10 famines a century, had one last famine during some failed policy of land collectivisation and then ended hunger for 300 million people? How does that make the USSR look bad?

there’s already a term for socialists who tolerate capitalism, it’s social democrats

Social Democrats don't want a transition to communism, not even ideologically. Dengists and Mensheviks do, at least ideologically. Whether you believe that or not is a different debate, but equating socialdemocrats with mensheviks is dumb, not a dunk.

why did they implement, and I quote Lenin, state capitalism

Look, I'm not here to argue for Marxism-Leninism against you because you're obviously trying to be smug, not trying to have a civilized discussion. If you actually want some good (in my opinion) analysis of actually-existing socialism, there are plenty of Michael Parenti videos online, or you can pick up his book "Blackshirts and Reds". But I suspect you're just here to punch to those communists that are further left than you are. If you do want to have this discussion let me know.

Millennials discover surplus value (1850s concept)

The very concept of money has changed a lot for the past 200 years. In Marx's time, the dominating view of money was that of a trading good like any other. Economists wrongly believed that money had appeared through barter, that primitive economies were barter economies, and that money, originally as fragments of precious metals, appeared from its convenience of being small and relatively weightless, easy to divide, long-lasting and impervious to rotting, etc. properties. Nowadays we understand that money appeared as a quantifier of debt, in centralized economies where one central authority would request goods and services to be provided by the subjects of that authority. These debt-notes would eventually turn into money.

Many modern economists understand money not as yet another commodity, but as a debt-measuring utility. Money would be, in short, a quantification of the right to request something from society. "Moneyless" society was understood at a time where money was poorly understood. For example, if you fix the prices of most goods and services, or even provide them at no cost, then what's the point of money? Many people argue that the Rouble in the late USSR (70s onward) wasn't really a currency at all. If money stops being a good indicator of the amount of goods and services that you can obtain, is it really money anymore?

This just goes to say that Marxism is open to discussion, and that everything should be analyzed with the most current and applicable knowledge, and be subjected to the harshest scrutiny. You're very welcome to discuss the implications of a moneyless society, I just suggest that you do it in a more well-versed and less authoritative way than you did in your last comment.

That link is basically responsible for solidifying my beliefs that leftists are correct about labour regulations and the economy when I was a young adult. I showed it to a friend some time later, and he quite literally told me "millennials discover Marxian surplus value extraction from the working class". Truer words have never been spoken

Efficiency doesn't care how big your country is, sprawl would be as inefficient in Cyprus as in Russia, you spread your services and infrastructure over an unnecessarily large area, to huge economic and environmental cost, and forcing people to rely on a car to move around

Lenin was a genocidal dictator

Whom did he genocide according to you? And I guess you're against the worker-councils that made an incredible amount of the decisions in the RSFSR and the early USSR?

Our side you mean the side of imperialism and neocolonialism, of the invasion of Iraq, of the bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Korea, and the interventionism in Chile, Libya, Iran (Mosaddegh era), and the support of the banana republics? Fuck that, that's not my side.

Got it bro, the actual Nazis aren't the Nazis, neither the ones who eliminated the most radical oppositors to Nazism, but actually the ones that died 26+mn of trying to fight them. God, you anti-communist revisionists are exhausting.

The Bolsheviks actively collaborated with Hitler and the Nazis, right up until Operation Barbarossa

Ugh, not this Nazi talking point again... The Soviet Union pursued for all the 30s a policy called "collective security", in which it desperately tried to achieve mutual-defense pacts with England, France and Poland because the soviets knew that their 15-year-old nation which had only just started industrializing since the end of the feudal and backwards Russian Empire, didn't have a chance alone against the Nazis with their 150 year long history of industry (as would be seen later with the USSR suffering 26+mn deaths during the war, in places like Belarus 1 in 4 people died). The USSR wanted these mutual defense agreements to the point of offering to send 1 million soldiers to France and England if they agreed to mutual defense... which France, England and Poland denied because they thought Nazis would attempt their declared goal of eliminating communisnm and massacring the "slavic untermenschen". After this was denied and it was obvious that the west would rather see the USSR invaded than reach a mutual defense agreement, they did the only possible course of action: delaying the war as much as possible to prepare for it and industrialize a bit more. That's where the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact takes place, not before a decade of exhausting every possible negotiation route with France and England in opposition to Nazism.

The fact that the USSR then proceeded to (rather bloodlessly, around 50k deaths overall, very comparable to the oppression within the USSR itself) invade Poland, has to do with the USSR not trusting the Polish government. Why? In 1917, the Bolshevik revolution drafted an unprecedentedly progressive constitution which granted the right to self-determination and lawful secession to all peoples of the former Russian Empire. That's how many countries such as Finland or Poland suddenly gained independence lawfully and peacefully in a never-before-seen act of respect of the right of self-determination. What did Poland immediately proceed to do? Become fully nationalist, ignore the right to self-determination of other peoples, and invade Ukraine (and later the USSR) in an attempt to gain territories they considered theirs by historical right. When they had conquered a good chunk of modern Ukraine and Belarus, the Polish Government decided it was a good idea to start a war against the USSR, since the USSR was plunged deep into a civil war and didn't have many resources or troops to defend itself, and some conquests and victories could grant them a positive peace agreement which granted the territories the Polish Nationalists considered theirs (while ignoring the right to self-determination that the Bolsheviks had granted them less than two years earlier). Poland was also happy to make peace and appeasement treaties with Nazi Germany as long as they could also get some territorial gains from Czechoslovak land.

Similarly, Finland in 1917 after gaining independence, was plunged into a civil war between communists and whites, which the latter won and proceeded to imprison communists in Finland who had supported the Reds, around 80k of which some 12k died (funny how nobody talks about that). The USSR had reasons to suspect of a possible alliance between the Finnish government and the Nazis, and proceeded to invade Finland. After the failure of the invasion, as you said, Finland joined the Nazis.

Blaming the USSR for entering a non-aggression treaty with the Nazis, when all western nations had done it, and after 10 years of the USSR trying to make mutual defense agreement with Poland, England and France, is at best ignorant, and at worst purposefully misinforming with an agenda. The USSR had reasons to suspect of Poland and Finland (especially given its history of constant betrayals by all European powers since the October Revolution, with 14 countries sending troops to aid the Tsarist loyalists against the Bolsheviks) and, while outright invasions may not be justified, it could all have been prevented if the western powers had actually agreed to fight nazism. It's absolutely nuts to blame the USSR and call them "collaborators with Nazis" given the historical background of the two decades before the war, especially the latter.

If you're not fucking ASHAMED of parading with a Lockheed Martin banner, you're a disgusting human being. Change my mind

And I'm saying that you have clearly not dedicated much time to thinking about or studying the issue. I'm a Marxist-Leninist, so I'm not very supportive of Dengism, but if you listen to Dengists and Mensheviks they will tell you that China still has a communist party in power (as does Vietnam and as does Laos) whereas the former USSR has a capitalist proto-fascist in government. Only time will tell who's really right, and whether china shifts to a less market-socialism society and more towards a democratic centrally planned economy in the hands of the workers and the state.

So we both agree that the Stalinist Sovietunion and the KPD, which allied themselves with them arent left?

One country ended up with Nazis. The other ended up defeating the Nazis. I'd say the Bolsheviks did a better job, didn't they? The fact that there was oppression against Mensheviks and SRs in the context of a civil war, doesn't mean they're anticommunists, they didn't quite literally enable the Nazis in order to murder the ones who were more communist than them, but defeat them instead.

Want to find the blame for Nazism in Germany? The fault is primarily of Nazis, and then of Nazi enablers, and then of anti-communist leftists.

China bad, what other source do you need?

Europe really shot itself in the foot privatising all its former public services