What is socialism?

[X3M]

Ok, agreed. I will not read anymore. I get the impression you are only here for, ragebaiting.
It will also always be meaningless. It will always not make any sense. And you will also assume a lot more. 
I am not going to respond, since you will assume the most negative things about me or anyone else.

PS. Do you know what ideology I am in right now? What is your assumption? Because I didn't mention it, now did I?

[DoMoNiC_HuNtEr]

Look I didn't mean any offense, and I now realize English is not your first language; I now think you actually could have read my entire post, but since you don't command the language as well as others, you don't fully comprehend what I am explaining. 

Let me be as clear as possible: I am not giving opinions, I am stating facts: Socialism is a tool of control, always has been, always will be. It is a dangerous ideology responsible for many, many, many deaths. There is no argument.

But for some reason, you still tried to argue, as if challenging an opinion, even though this is not an opinion.

You're trying to argue with me by saying "ideologies don't matter." This is factually incorrect and a very naive thing to say. This is something someone who doesn't understand the point would say. Again, no offense.

Edited April 20 by DoMoNiC_HuNtEr

[Edric O]

Ho-hummm.... Who disturbs my slumber...?

For untold eons, this thread lay at rest. The world turned and ages passed. Presidents rose and fell. Old wars ended, new ones started, the plague came and went, the reign of an ancient queen came to an end. Eventually, sightings of Edric O became rarer and rarer, until one day they stopped entirely. For six long years now, no one has seen him. Some say he was merely a myth. Some say he is busy with life. Others say he sleeps beneath the forum still, awaiting the fateful day when someone is wrong on the internet.

Now that day has finally come. The silence covering the ancient thread has been broken. It is time to rise. The sleeper must awaken!

[Edric O]

So. Hello there, DoMoNiC_HuNtEr. I see that you've resurrected my old thread. And you have made a lot of extremely false claims, which I intend to address.

First of all, I see you couldn't resist repeating the old "communism killed a gazillion people" trope. This falls apart the moment you try to apply the same standards to capitalism, or democracy, or monarchy, or any other form of government, economic system, or ideology. Because it quickly becomes obvious that they are ALL "responsible for many, many, many deaths" by those same standards. To name just one example, you listed people killed in civil wars started by socialists as being people "killed by socialism". Do you realize how many people died in other civil wars started by... pretty much every other ideology?

If ideologies are responsible for deaths caused by people fighting in their name, then ALL ideologies have killed millions, and the argument devolves into debating who killed more (as if killing less makes you better... hey, the Taliban technically killed fewer people than U.S. wars did, so the Taliban have the better system of government! Right? Right?).

Next, the idea that socialism (or anything else) was invented as a tool of control by people who were already in control of society at the time is just the height of absurdity. You think aristocrats and bankers invented socialism... in the 1700s... in order to... control people? In the 1700s and 1800s? What about the divine right of kings? They already had an ideology to control people, and it was the polar opposite of socialism! Not only that, but socialism ultimately traces its origins to certain currents within the French Revolution. You think the French Revolution was an aristocratic conspiracy too? I've heard about losing your head in your plans but this is ridiculous...

Look, I am familiar with every conspiracy theory out there. I know where they each came from. Now, in your posts, you have repeated most of the tropes of the "Judeo-Masonic global conspiracy" theory (you claim that Marx was a Freemason, you make a big deal about the obscure early socialist Moses Hess whose only prominent feature is that he has a very Jewish name, etc). The only thing is, this particular conspiracy theory is intended to be PRO-aristocratic. The idea behind it was that the French revolutionaries, the liberals, the socialists, and the left in general are a bunch of Jews, Freemasons and possibly lizardmen who ruined the glorious golden age of aristocratic feudal utopia that existed before 1789, when all of Europe lived in rural bliss overseen by the benevolent aristocracy and the divinely appointed kings.

In other words, it goes against the internal logic of your own conspiracy theory to claim that socialism is somehow connected with the aristocracy or the elites. This conspiracy theory about Jews and Freemasons was invented to argue that the aristocracy and the elites were GOOD and the socialists were evil for overthrowing them.

You also make a ton of verifiably false claims, like saying that all of Marx's children died before he did (in fact, he had some kids who died in infancy as was common in the 19th century, but all the ones who reached adulthood outlived him), or repeating the trope that he didn't know factories or factory workers (in fact he was one of the leaders of the International Workingmen's Association from 1866), and so on.

But the biggest reason why you are wrong is because you're just arguing about the wrong things. Did you notice that you never once listed a single thing that socialists believe, a single principle or idea or proposal? You never said "socialists argue X, but X is false and I'll explain why". Instead, you just accused the founders of socialism of being part of a conspiracy. And the problem with that is that even if it were true, it would not invalidate socialism.

Individual people can be members of a conspiracy, sure. But an ideology cannot be a conspiracy - ever! - because an ideology is a set of ideas. If you read socialist books and decide that you agree with the ideas in them, does a representative of The Conspiracy® ring your doorbell to invite you to join? In fact, how are you even supposed to know that a conspiracy existed, if you never met the people in that conspiracy and you just happen to agree with the ideas they promoted in public? Even if the founders of an ideology promoted their ideas for malicious secret reasons centuries ago, those founders are dead and their conspiracy is dead along with them. The ulterior motive is gone, and all that's left are the public ideas themselves.

A conspiracy is when you have a group of people who claim to believe X but actually support Y. So then, X is the ideology that is public and known by everyone, and Y is the hidden agenda of the conspiracy. This sort of thing can happen, sure, but the conspiracy cannot be spread by the public ideology of X alone. You need someone who knows and supports the hidden agenda, to actually continue the conspiracy. If a group of people start supporting ideology X without being in contact with anyone who knows the hidden agenda Y, then that group is NOT part of the conspiracy. And if everyone who knows (or cares) about Y dies of old age, then the hidden agenda is gone and the "surface ideology" of X is all that is left.

Let's use an analogy. Suppose that the game of football was invented as a front for a money laundering operation by the mafia. Does that mean that genuine football fans and football players don't exist, and everyone involved with the game is part of the mafia conspiracy? Not at all. The game can - and will - acquire a life of its own. If the game becomes popular and successful, then it will keep going even after the mafia conspiracy ends. So even if it was originally invented by some bad people for deceptive reasons, other people can just take it and run with it and do it "for real", not as a front for something else. The game, like a political ideology, is a set of ideas - game rules in this case - and people who adopt those ideas don't need to have the same motivation as the original founders.

In fact, don't we all sometimes copy political ideas from our enemies? I do! Who cares where the idea came from? If I think it's a good idea, I'll take it. I can literally hate the person who came up with the idea, and still support the idea by itself.

This is why conspiracy theories are the lowest tier of political thinking. They fail to distinguish between ideas and people, they fail to understand that a bad person can come up with a good idea, or vice versa (good people can have terrible ideas). Conspiracy theories are nothing more than complicated ad hominem fallacies, where an idea is attacked for having a bad author. As it happens, your personal accusations against Karl Marx and Moses Hess are lies, but even if they were true it wouldn't matter, because those people died 150 years ago. What's left are the ideas and principles of communism. If you want to argue against them, you have to know what they are and explain why they are wrong. It does not matter who came up with those ideas originally, or why. The author is irrelevant, the ideology stands or falls on its own merits.

And I strongly suspect that you do not know what socialist or communist principles actually are.