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Comment by krysp | Hacker News Reader

Seems like you and everyone in the replies to your comment may have misconstrued what the parent meant; if he's from Europe, socialist isn't a dirty word like the US. In most of Europe it's quite a positive thing to say your government is more socialist, or has more socialist policies

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It should be mentioned that Denmark, which has often been pointed to as an example of a successful socialist country is not socialist. The country's politicians vociferously protest against this label and going by Engels' own definition, the country is not at all socialist.

It is extremely capitalist with classical hierarchies of business ownership. High tax, free healthcare and free schooling does not make a country even remotely socialist.

So what does make a country even remotely socialist, in your opinion?

Workers owning the means of production.

That sounds a lot more socialist than just "remotely". According to Wikipedia, it's the defining characteristic of socialism.

If it doesn't meet this definition, I wouldn't call it socialist. Otherwise, the word socialism would lose its meaning. California having high taxes does not make it socialist. Austria having free education does not make it socialist.

The socialst dream is the class-less, egalitarian, solidary society.

The whole point of reformist socialism is that you should not try to get there in a single giant leap, but step by step, with the fully socialist society more of a Platonic ideal: There'll likely always be a next thing to fix.

Austria having free education does not make it socialist - but it makes it more socialist.

I think we have to be careful here because none of these countries which we have thus far mentioned have any ambitions of attaining the socialist crown you speak of. They like it the way it is: capitalist with strong protections for and investments (education, healthcare) in their capital producing peoples.

Indeed. Hence, not every Social Democrat can be considered a socialist - only progressive ones that still dream of a better world instead of having made peace with the status quo.

Purple is more red than blue is red. This doesn't make the word "red" lose its meaning. In my opinion, it gives the word more meaning by defining it as a spectrum of quality. Thus we can plot colors on a spectrum of red-ness, which can be useful for certain applications.

Similarily for capitalism-socialism. It is a spectrum. The United States represents one extreme, where something like, I don't know, North Korea maybe represents the other. And Finland is somewhere in-between.

That is not a good comparison. Blue and red are well defined as high frequency and low frequency electromagnetic radiation. Capitalism and socialism, on the other hand, are very vague terms, and I think the many discussions here prove that.

Take, for example, a country where the majority of things are privately run but are heavily taxed by the government. Is that more capitalist or socialist than a country where most of the economy is run by the government, but the remaining private businesses pay little to no taxes?

Or a country where one party owns everything but pretends to act on behalf of the workers, as opposed to a country where everyone is a business owner? Or a country that has little labor regulation but a strong social safety net, versus a country with weak social welfare but strict labor regulation?

A textbook reformist democratic socialist policy would be giving employees a seat on the board of directors, or allocating some company shares of publicly traded companies to them.

If Bernie Sanders had his way[1] and this was implemented in the US, the country would become more socialist.

[1] https://berniesanders.com/issues/corporate-accountability-an...

Sanders here mentions similar policy in Germany, but forgot to mention differences between US and german corporate governance models (one board vs two boards). In Germany (and many other EU countries), companies have executive board and supervisory board, the later is mainly to provide monitoring role and that is the board where empolyees have seat on.

Not having some of the largest wealth inequality in the world (look it up).

No, you are even more wrong. Social democracy is not socialism. The state doing stuff is not socialism. A functional health care system is not socialism. The bare minimum of being socialist is to want to transition away from a capitalist system which no country in Europe has any ambitions.

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