P.S. answering to your: “This is a terrible gotcha and shows that you didn’t even read the theory before you thought you could debunk it.” Let’s not fall so low as to the personal attacks ;) or conclusions about a person. You don’t know what I have red and what not, to judge. A question is a question – it can be anounced even by a parrot. If you are to philosophize and a question is of current topic, and you are not a parrot yourself, then it should not be a problem to discuss it with logic and arguments by both sides. You see ;) I can do it also, well of course unless you are a parrot :)))
It’s not really a personal attack, it’s a statement of fact, you’re clearly approaching this assuming it’s stupid even though you obviously haven’t read the material needed to argue against it, if you had you wouldn’t be making the arguments you are.
Your arguments aren’t logical, they’re being petty with definitions, you’re squabbling about things that don’t matter to the socialist argument and can be answered hundreds of ways by the different philosophers, and if you had read any of the material you would understand why your arguments are meaningless.
:) beeing not a young person, beeing born in one of the soviet block countries (forced in to that block by force), having to learn commies litterature almost from zero grade and during the whole education system, later having finished bussines and economy studies in capitalism, now having a small IT bussiness, even your nickname (as it sounds) for me is behind the borderline of my tolerance. ;) Yet, I’m not trying to call you someone or even atack your beliefs by presumptions. The questions were just the questions, simply out of interest of how would someone who presents himself (socialist or comunist) would answer them. P.S. your comment (before this one) where you replyed my question by question, was quite good as for a discusion, even if you fall time to time into some magic asumptions about person behind questions. Anyway, I thank you for you effort when you answered the questions and presented your point of view on the subject. :)))
The Soviet block countries were extremely anti-socialist. They were lying and pretending to be socialist to acquire power, they were actually authoritarian hellholes that never implemented even one socialist policy. I have no doubt that being raised there is why you aren’t familiar with the theory.
If you need evidence of this, look at how they treated Yugoslavia when they implemented workplace democracy, an actually socialist policy. Lenin himself even called it “state capitalism”
