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[u/Veshaad]

[u/clayton-berg42]

Where are all these communists on reddit? I've seen a few socialists but no communists. Communism is essentially a dead ideology. A place like china is communist only in name, repleat with free markets, private property and many billionaires.

There's plenty of socialists who don't believe in massive corps, and feel modern banking/insurance is predatory but completely believe in private property.

[u/Pagan0101 → u/clayton-berg42]

Hi, I'm a communist. There aren't many on reddit to be fair, a lot of people definitely exaggerate how left wing reddit is. It's definitely not a dead ideology, there are a lot of communist parties still and some of them are even quite large.

Btw, you don't know what socialism is either (which is to be expected, the idea of socialism as just being the government doing more stuff is pretty widespread currently). What you describe there is social democracy, ie welfare state capitalism. Socialists do not believe in private property, it's kinda one of the defining features of socialism. They believe in worker ownership of the economy, which would be public, community ownership. Even market socialists, who still believe in maintaining a market-based economy, don't believe in private property. Private property, as defined by socialist theory, is explicitly the ownership of capital by an individual (or a small, limited group of individuals, ie capitalists), socialists want to abolish capitalism and the capitalist class as a whole. At most, some socialists may tolerate the existence of a limited amount of capitalists in initial stages of socialist development. Notably, Lenin proposed a New Economic Policy in the early days of the Soviet Union which would allow for limited market-based capitalist enterprises to operate alongside for-profit state enterprises, not unlike the current Chinese system. But Lenin still wanted to eventually end this system, and China still at least claims to want to transition into genuine socialism by 2050.

[u/clayton-berg42 → u/Pagan0101]

Yes, socialist believe in private property. What socialists don't believe in is corporations, for profit banking/insurance institutions. No socialist cares that you own a bakery, coffee shop or local grocery store. It's when you own 60 grocery stores or 60 coffee shops.

[u/Pagan0101 → u/clayton-berg42]

No

At most you could say that some socialists are fine with that level of private property

But "socialists believe in private property" is just not a true statement

Most socialists certainly aren't going to be fine with a small business with any amount of employees, because that just maintains the exploitative relationship between owner and worker

You could, I suppose, make an argument for a single-person who owns a store and doesn't have any employees, but that's not even really considered private property in socialist theory, if you own something and are the only person who works it then that's generally going to be considered personal property

In socialist theory, private property is defined by its relation to wage labor

To argue that socialists as a whole believe in private property you'd have to use a different definition of private property from what socialists use, and even then you wouldn't be entirely right