Kasz216 said:
I'm curious why you would think this to be the case. People generally refer to the democracies of europe as socialist as well. Yet they don't follow what some consider the main socialist tenent. Aka ownership of the means of the production by the people. Using the textbook definition of socialism (and communism for that matter) there has never been a socialist or communist government in existance. Few people have issues with calling Stalin a Communist even though the government ran the means of production... when in reality such things were supposed to be run by the people with a near nonexistant government after a couple decades. Unless you want to argue there are no socialists you'd need to find a context of what you consider socialism different from the textbook definition. I'm interested to see what context you consider "socialism." |
I consider a bunch of the democracies in Europe to be social democracies with mixed economies.
I consider the USSR to be socialist - at least up until late in its life. It was a centrally planned economy with huge amounts of state ownership, it wasn't absolutley purely socialist but it was as far to that end of the spectrum as I know of in any significant country. Socialism requires public ownership - depending on how you view it this could be centrally controlled (ie by the state) or communually. USSR fits the first definition.
The Nazi's never implemented anything really resembly socialism, their economy was far closer to being Keynesian than socialist. However as I have said before their economic model was never really defined - Hitler often said that the economy was something of little importance as far as he was concerned.









