this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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Explain Like I'm Five
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Socialism is great as a concept, basically means putting people before capital. Capitalism is the reverse. Even the staunchest capitalist countries practice socialism to some degree. Raw capitalism would be hell.
It’s the same with communism, where the workers were supposed to own the means of production, which means money wouldn’t gravitate around a few ones. Even the staunchest communist countries didn’t practice real communism, deforming it into feudalism.
TL;DR: Socialism is a great concept, just consider that everything we hear about it comes from a culture ruled by capitalists.
The EU has a lot of socialism. Just look at them for how to do it.
None of that is socialism.
"we need socialism like Nordic countries!"
"Nordic countries are Capitalist they just have robust social welfare programs!"
" Then let's implement those programs!"
"No! That's socialism!"
That would be capitalism's arguments, yes.
Socialism has several different lineages. All of which used different strategies for accomplishing socialism (workers own the means of production) and maybe eventually communism (stateless, moneyless, classless society). (I often use "socialism" interchangeably as both the movement for and the desired end state, which I think Marx used to do, too, iirc).
The Marxist-Leninist/Maoist version is what most folks are familiar with - create a "vanguard party", leverage that political power to take over the government in a workers' revolution, and then use the power of the state to accomplish socialism and eventually transition to communism. That strategy was how we got the USSR and Communist China, loosely speaking. How much that strategy actually fulfilled the promises of socialism/communism is up for debate.
But there were other socialist movements in other areas of the world. The European version tends to be either democratic socialism (use standard political power to ease a transition to socialism, sans revolution) or social democracy (use government to implement the desired economic egalitarianism without the precise goal of the workers owning the means of production). (I hope I got those right, I often get them mixed up.)
I would agree with you that no European state has reached the end state of socialism or communism, as they're still pretty dang capitalist, but a good number of EU states are a lot closer to the promises of socialism than the rest of the world, as far as I understand things.
That's not even slightly true, but human nature makes it end up being that way. We're real good at coming up with isms incompatible with our nature, so they never work as planned, often with irony too.
Ah yes, the biblical "human nature is flawed so we can't ever make the world better" argument.
Ignoring the 1000's of years of humans making the world better.
We used to have child sacrifice and we don't anymore. We used to have chattel slavery and we don't anymore.
Our economies can get better and if someone tells you otherwise they are lying to preserve their own power.