Red Deathy says:: Socialism: A society where production is organised socially and democratically to meet human needs- where the full productive forces artificially constrained by capitalism can be harnessed to produce an abundance of wealth for all, and where we can live without war, or the repressive features of the class state. Where the condition for the development of one is the development of all (This is not to say that we hold people down, but that one person cannot rise above the others on the back of their Labour, as happens now)
My response: Yes please. Let's assume the word "socialism" to stand for the utopian vision mentioned by Karl Marx in the "Critique of the Gotha Programme" essay, and "communism" the movement leading to it. Then we can bypass the trivial debate about whether Sovietism was a good thing (it wasn't), with its corresponding anti-Communist witch-hunt, and move on to the debate about whether socialism is a real possibility, and if it is, how would we go about building such a thing. There's convincing evidence that people aren't smart enough or empowered enough or MOTIVATED enough to be able to construct such a society as Marx envisioned in "socialism," either today or any time soon.
