The part where the workers own the means of production.

The concept of helping people.

It provides a safety net by pooling the resources of the community to support the less fortunate. This prevents people from having to sacrifice their long term goals because their short term needs may not be otherwise met.

Also in contrast to capitalism that treats society as a zero sum game (“I can’t get ahead unless I take something from someone else”) socialism is a benefit multiplier (“I’m part of the community. By making the life of everyone in the community better I’m also improving my own life”).

Used to dismiss it out of hand because all the ‘socialist countries’ are complete authoritarian hellholes. But in hindsight this is a kind of thought-terminating cliche. I never really knew what the idea was apart from some vague notion about sharing or something that’s well intentioned but never works out in practice. I think most people share this belief.

Turns out the idea is pretty simple: Worker ownership and control. Places like the USSR and China fail this definition because they don’t have any of that. Therefore they are not socialist. Those countries replicate the worker/owner dynamic of Capitalism, so it is ‘State Capitalism’. And they both have the same problem: A small group of people have all the power and they fuck over everyone else.

I had to get sold on the specific idea of ‘market socialism’ / ’ workplace democracy ’ before I learned and realised this. The general idea is that if you can run a country like a democracy, you can run a business like one too. In fact, many are. So lets do that as much as possible in order to wrestle power away from the owner class who spend all of their money bribing politicians and ruining everything.

I like that the government is financially able to provide social services above and beyond anything Americans are used to. Those services are a reliable way to help out neighbors.

There’s no reason for any American to be unhoused, hungry, uneducated, or in need of healthcare. If wealth taxes were implemented, 95% of Americans wouldn’t have any more money taken from them than they already do and it would do so much for millions and millions of Americans.

A socialistic society lifts up the people that need it most and doesn’t hurt anyone in a way that they can’t cope with. And moreover, some studies estimate that helping out those poorest Americans allows them to add value to society in ways that makes up for the wealthy people and corporations getting taxed heavier.

Few movements self-identify as “Socialist”, at best it’s a taxonomical label. Attempting to talk about the finer points of socialism is akin to debating the pros/cons of “Animals” – it’s an overly broad topic and doomed to spiral into bike-shedding over semantics as soon as the conversation starts to look interesting.

With that being said, let’s talk about some more concrete terms – apologies in advance for wielding only slightly less clumsy terminology in my bullets:

• Socialized Medicine: Healthcare is a human right. I am pro human rights.
• Unions: Mostly positive. Nothing’s perfect, but come on… you’d have to be blind not to see and feel for how exploited lower-class workers are without them
• Democratic Socialists of America: I’m a member – that means I like them. I think their platform represents the ideal incrementalist approach to improving the current status quo
• European Welfare States (e.g.: Denmark): Too fuzzy to have a solid opinion on, but certainly a battle-tested template. I like most of their ideas most of the time
• Marxism: A genius body of economic philosophy, but increasingly out of place as time marches onward. I’d be for a by-the-book implementation (insofar as that’s possible) in 1923, but not 2023
• Maoism/Leninism: Not exactly success stories. It’s easier to appreciate their noble ideas & intentions with the distance lent by history, but that’s altogether different from “liking”
• Communism: As a whole? I think the template holds promise and can be made to work in a modern context, but viability =/= realizability. The world would have to get turned upside-down first and it’s questionable exactly how many of us would live through that… but never say never.

I like democracy

I like the idea of a deliberate and rational society. Unfortunately we need to be cautious with this kind of thing and pay attention to where others have failed in the past.

What I like is that when there is progress, the progress is actually experienced by everybody and not just by a wider or narrower elite.

For instance, I love robotics but I can’t stand that adding robots to society results in unemployment. You can’t just let the owners scoop up all the capital gain.

It’s one of the better -isms currently available.

Workers owning the means of production is the way it should be. Until we can mature further.

I like working and feeling like I’m helping others or working towards a larger goal without the constant ever present exploitation of myself and others.

It addresses the crudeness of the hand that deals some people, rather than assume equal opportunism is automatic.

That it’s anticorporatist.

reduction in suffering and increase in dignity of our whole race.

that it holds that social practices are created from social practice and not inherited from immutable law, enabling criticism of the underlying machinations of society without being hindered by the argument that such machinations are an inherited and instinctual product of nature and thus unalterable.