Technically you are correct. But, as I understand history, socialism in practice followed Marxism and is an aspect of Marxism. Yes, you can consider post-revolutionary France to be the first socialist society of any practical merit, but that would be damned awkward now wouldn't it, considering the violence inherent in such systems being so quickly manifested. In any event, I don't consider the post-rev French state to be the same as the modern socialist state.

My usage of Socialism should be interpreted as existential socialism, i.e. Socialism as it has existed. You see, socialistic societies were spawned by Marx and Engels, not the other way around. And thus, Socialism is an aspect of Marxism.

And thus we have the problem of playing with a syllogism without having a reliable understanding of the problem. Good try though.

Hmm, allow me to help you out here. There were concepts prior to Marx that looked like Socialism. There were concepts after Marx that looked like Socialism. The impact of Marx on the second set was so great as to render it a subset of Marxist philosophy. Marx got a bad name in there somewhere. The first set were in fact Socialists, since, if memory serves me correct, the term was coined a few decades before Marx. The second set chose to be called Socialists. As Orwell has so brilliantly demonstrated to us, Socialists (modern flavor) like to switch terms around, they like to hide behind onomastical gymnastics. Since no one likes Marxism because when allowed the Socialists killed masses of humanity several orders of magnitude beyond anything the world had yet seen. The modern 'Socialist' prefers to keep the killing in the womb, but is looking at the elderly with a bit of drool in the corner of his mouth.

Anyway, Marxism out, Socialism killed by Marx, Socialism reclaimed by the followers of Marx.

Now, this may not make much sense to you, if you are a Socialist that is. The problem is that Socialist theory, or better, the Socialist mind-set is such that inherent in such a system is the belief of an evolutionary order to the universe. This style of thought demands that things occur in order, like dominos falling. Though this is a simplistic assumption, with a minimal range of application, it remains a primary assumption. And that being the case, any given Socialist is going to naturally assume that since someone used the term 'Socialist' before anyone used the term 'Marxist', Marxists therefore follow Socialists.

More about economics...

The illegal aliens that have flooded the country have been depressing wages. They have been displacing workers, in some places unemployment rates have been huge for those who did the work the illegals underbid. This caused what one could term an isolated recession or perhaps a sectional recession.

These illegals depressed the social services of those areas that sought political and economic advantage by using them, meaning, the politicos, Right and Left, robbed the middle class by using the money they took from the MC to bribe illegals into moving there and to artificially elevate the incomes of the illegals by providing free services to them. You cannot take money from a system and have it magically re-appear.

Also, the illegals are, get this, illegal. This means that not only do they not have to pay child support or have to endure the full wrath of the law (sanctuary cities are notorious for lowering the status of the crimes illegals perpetrate in order to keep them under the radar), they do not have to respect lending laws. A huge chunk of the crash of the housing market was a consequence of illegals not paying their house payments.

More on economics later,

Have fun all,

Joel.


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