Here's a tip. Don't let Lenin, Mao, Reagan or Jordan Peterson define socialism for you. It'll be less confusing. Any government aid to the people that is purely without reciprocal demands IS socialism. Any policy intended to lead to equality, IS socialism. Socialism isn't a dirty word. Marx was right about a lot of things. Which is why Marxism changed the world, and every modern country today is to a large extent socialist.
It was defined in the 19'th century. So the bar for what is socialism is set incredibly low.
Lol. name one thing Marx was right about that has anything to do with 'government aid to the people without reciprocal demands'
Materialist reading of history. Or as we say today... history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism
He introduced the Smithian idea that people respond to incentives, to other things than just the economy. Ie, the idea that if something has power over us we will adapt our behaviour to accommodate it. The concept that absolute power corrupts absolutely is a Marxist idea. While not his quote, it stems from a Marxist world view.
Smithian as in... Adam Smith, who predates Marx? You're off to a rocky start here, but please correct me if you meant someone else. Marx had very little to say about power or corruption as a political issue. He also placed the economy at the base of society, with everything else forming a superstructure around it... kind of the point of his historical materialism. Anarchism was the parallel tradition whose focus was power, but Marx saw the meat of social relationships at the level of production in the economy.
The idea with welfare is that desperate people do desperate things. So we try to avoid making people desperate. Before Marx we saw poor people being criminal as an evidence of their moral failings. Today we think that poverty makes people more inclined to commit crimes.
Okay... but Marx wrote about production and class struggle, not crime. He wasn't a sociologist. The ideas you're attributing to him are just plain old classical liberalism, which he was born into and informed his ideas to a substantial extent for sure, but they aren't really Marxism.
Before Marx we saw rich and/or powerful people as qualitatively different. They were rich not because of circumstance, but because they were better people. We don't think like that today. While personal qualities can impact your success in life, the context you find yourself in is more important.
We often forget how Marxist thought has impacted the world because we have forgotten how people thought before Marx.
If nothing else, Marx was pretty specific about his analysis of the situation in 19th century industrial capitalism, and one of the things he emphasized repeatedly is that the important distinctions in society are not to be found at the level of rich versus poor, or powerful versus powerless--that was the tradition that preceded him, after the French Revolution, literally
how people thought before Marx. He saw things through the lens of workers who produce more than they consume, and non-workers who live off the surplus produced by the workers, with some variations in between.
The pre-Marxist political dichotomies are pretty telling. Before Marx we had liberals and conservatives. Conservatives were into government control, censorship and any measures to control the "riff-raff". Liberals wanted to deregulate in order for market forces allow for the best of us to reach the top. Conservatives see the liberals as dangerous dreamers. After Marxism emerges conservatives and liberals blend into a single ideology... conservatives... which makes no sense, because these are actually each others opposite. And socialists started calling themselves "liberals"... which is frankly bizarre, because they're everything but liberal.
Bottom line, we have forgotten all the things Marx was right about because we take it for granted as truth today. As if we always believed it. But we didn't. It also hasn't helped that the Marxist academics in USSR and China have creatively reinterpreted Marx in order to better support their various dictatorships. That's why we today make a distinction between socialism and communism. Even though initially they were interchangeable. Socialism is the western Marxist tradition, while communism is the Soviet Marxist tradition.
Kind of a bizarre take that ignores most of what socialists have said about themselves and their positions. Classical Marxism had very little to say about socialism or communism, and what came out of Russian "Marxism-Leninism" was a statist interpretation that was rejected by those calling themselves left communists, council communists, anarcho-communists, and so on. As I say in the OP, even Lenin was hesitant to call the Soviet system anything more than a highly organized form of capitalism on its way to becoming socialist... certainly not a model of communism. The terms are fluid and ill-defined to this day, so I don't accept the simplistic way you're using them here.
I should also point out that the idea that socialism always leads to dictatorship is dumb, since in several countries in Europe it was socialist reformers who pushed the countries into becoming democracies (from monarchies).
Again, those people were called liberals. They overturned monarchic feudalism and replaced it with capitalism, and then Marx basically said "you didn't actually deliver on your promise of freedom, equality, and fraternity, and here is why". There may have been early inklings of socialism in some of those revolutions, but what emerged from them was the kind of society Marx wanted to REPLACE with some form of socialism.
edit: My personal opinion. Marx was a genius at analysing the social trends of his day. He also accurately predicted social developments from 1850 and 1880, which is pretty good going for any sociologist/philosopher. After that his ideas broke apart. He also failed to see that those in power might actually bend to Marxist ideas and accept them. Which is what happened. He thought that those in power would stubbornly stick to their guns and all get swept away by the inevitable revolution. He couldn't imagine how any peaceful socialist revolution could be successful. Which is a pretty big failing on his part. He also made pretty grave arithmetic blunders in his Das Kapital. When counting the value of a product he only counts production of it as contributing to the value. Completely ignoring the cost of R&D, distribution and advertising. This is a pretty glaring mistake. It was based on pre-industrial methods of calculating value of products.
Marx doesn't ignore those things (namely distribution, which he writes quite a bit about), he just calls them 'enabling conditions' of capitalist production. As I said, he was very specific in his terminology, and reserved the word 'value' for (a) whatever usefulness a commodity has for the person who consumes it, or (b) its ability to be exchanged for something else by someone who doesn't want to consume it. The commodity itself has these properties solely because instead of being a pile of raw materials in the vicinity of some machinery and a few people standing around doing nothing, it has been transformed by labor into a receptacle for value in this sense. Advertising does not add to the value of a commodity, though it may affect its desirability and therefore its
price, which is treated as something separate from value by Marx.
The worst part of this post is that it treats Marx's central thesis, the fulcrum of his entire economic contribution, namely that workers produce more value than they receive in wages and employers pocket the difference, as a kind of footnote or blunder on Marx's part, reframing him as some sort of social philosopher who wanted people to have state-funded welfare services. This was not his message. Marx can be boiled down to these basic ideas:
1. Social progress is dictated to a large extent by the material conditions of production, namely who produces a surplus through their work and who doesn't work but lives off the surplus.
2. Capitalism replaced feudalism, but did not remove the exploitation; both involve workers making surplus value for non-workers and having no say in its distribution.
3. When workers are alienated from the product of their surplus work and have no control over its distribution, they tend to revolt and exert control over production.
That's basically his whole story. It was consistently focused on worker power through struggle, autonomy of the producer class against capitalist domination, and the possibility of social transformation by changing the relationship between surplus value production and its appropriation/distribution. And all of it was derived from his observation that workers are who make a commodity usable or exchangeable in ways that the raw materials were not, and thus should be entitled to some manner of democratic control over the material abundance afforded by their sweat and toil. While pressuring the state to provide allowances to people based on their income might have the effect of improving the conditions of workers, who are generally poorer than their employers, this was not the main thrust of Marx's theory in my view.
