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Comment by aeoleonn | Hacker News Reader

It's so funny...

Once a person clings to Marxism / Socialism, it's like that expression "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." They begin to see Marxist-related thought patterns everywhere, such as "Competency? that must be due to [class based] privilege!" rather than a person actually investing their time, studying/experimenting/researching/inventing/creating, despite hardships.

Recently, during the winter storm, I cooked breakfast for a neighbor (a college student studying Journalism). His response to me giving him some free food: "You know what this is, right? It's socialism."

Me: "Uh... it's just sharing some food one time." while quietly thinking: "Gee, I hope he doesn't call every aspect of sharing "socialism" because that would be annoying and cringey."

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You're using a rather glossed over small to dismiss the large.

You are right - it's somebody with some food sharing one time. That's what it is, in the small.

But in the large, what do you call it? You want to describe a society where such acts are common place, and perhaps compare it to a society in which it is not. Or you want to discuss the relative frequency of these acts. At this point, you need more than "just a little thing a person did once that doesn't mean anything" to work with these concepts.

Then you get politics thrown into the mix, propaganda every which way, and next thing you know you've got somebody complaining about others "clinging to Marxism" on the internet.

> You want to describe a society where such acts are common place, and perhaps compare it to a society in which it is not

Whether a society shares resources freely doesn't indicate socialism. Socialism is when the government enforces said sharing. Its about free agency.

Social services are not socialism. Socialism is about the workers owning the means of production. Social services are something that goes back to basically the dawn of human society (Roman bread and circuses are a classic example).

>You want to describe a society where such acts are common place, and perhaps compare it to a society in which it is not.

Is it Utopia?

I don't know, but as someone who grew up in the alps surely know that the european nations with more social and solidaric laws are certainly happier than e.g. former balkan states where rugged individualism and corrupt feudalism disguises itself as democracy at times while distracting the commoners with nationalism.

> But in the large, what do you call it? You want to describe a society where such acts are common place, and perhaps compare it to a society in which it is not. Or you want to discuss the relative frequency of these acts. At this point, you need more than "just a little thing a person did once that doesn't mean anything" to work with these concepts.

You can invent a new term for it, but it's still not socialism. In fact, it still will not be socialism if half of the society willingly donate some of their food to the other half.

Because even in an extreme libertarian society, people still can willingly give away things for free. In fact, in any form of society where ownership is to be respected, the act of charity is necessarily allowed to exist.

The core of socialism is social ownership, not just "sharing". Coming back to the scenario: the parent commenter would literally never own that food, and therefore be compelled to share, to imply that the act is in any way related to socialism.

This is hardly the first, nor will it be the last, time a term has shifted and taken on multiple related meanings. I don't have deep enough knowledge to say for sure, but on an initial glance it kind of looks to me like the socialism you are describing is not particularly close to the ideas espoused by the guy the term was originally coined for. [0][1]

You are free to make up some new terms yourself, but if you want to be able to actually communicate with others you need to be willing to look past these kinds of issues and understand what is actually meant.

[0]https://www.etymonline.com/word/socialist [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_de_Saint-Simon

I do agree that words take on different meanings. But on the other hand, not every misuse of a word is such an instance (otherwise talking will be difficult).

In this case, a person (or many people) gave away their own belongings for free.

To use the word "socialism" on such a phenomenon unironically would mean that socialism no longer describes a kind of society, as it now refers to individual choices. The meaning is fundamentally different. In that case, it should also lose all the negative connotations that come with its more formal meaning.

In that conversation, it didn't; the neighbor named it socialism, as a snarky attack, which means he was still referring to the definition that describes a society.

> you need to be willing to look past these kinds of issues and understand what is actually meant.

I don't really know what the neighbor really meant when he said that it was socialism. What the commenter did was not related to any "-ism" as far as I can think of. Maybe the neighbor did it on purpose because he didn't like being on the other end of charity. Maybe he really didn't know what socialism means, never looked it up, and used it as he guessed from whatever he was reading.

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