like with most things....
-a little of it is fine
-a moderate amount can be fine or it can be not so fine, depends on what you want and how much you're willing to sacrifice to get it
-a lot of it is bad
you may now return to hacking at each other
You may be right. I guess a little socialism couldn't hurt. I just worry that becoming a socialist country could set the stage for us becoming outright communist.
What's your idea of a "socialist country"? What do you mean with that? Is there any difference between a "socialist country" and a "communist country"? Do you think the USA will become a "socialist country" anytime soon?
no it is very bad. collectivism is a plague
What is "collectivism"?
collectivism is when people think you should do stuff for them just because they exist even when they haven't done anything for you.
it's all a big scam so that the "community" grows so strong it will sacrifice you for a greater good that doesn't even exist.
Marxism is neither "collectivistic" (as its libertarian critics have it), nor radically individualistic (as its conservative critics condemn it for). It rather understands this dualistic opposition as the product of
bourgeois society, predicated as it is rhetorically on individualism while producing 'collectivistic' forms of organizations (corporations, nations, races, classes) to preserve this 'individuality', and all the contradictions arising therefrom ("nation of individualists" etc.). It understands that contemporary 'individualism' is a marketing scheme, as with Hot Topic shirts produced for mass sale; it understands that contemporary 'collectivism' serves to defend its opposite, as with the institutions of the Church and their obsequience to capitalism.
Communism is quite incomprehensible to our saint (Max Stirner - ed.) because the communists do not oppose egoism to selflessness or selflessness to egoism, nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its high-flown ideological form; they rather demonstrate its material source, with which it disappears of itself. The communists do not preach morality at all, as Stirner does so extensively. They do not put to people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are very well aware that egoism, just as much as selflessness, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals.
Hence, the communists by no means want.... to do away with the “private individual” for the sake of the “general”, selfless man. That is a figment of the imagination concerning which both of them could already have found the necessary explanation in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Communist theoreticians, the only communists who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have discovered that throughout history the “general interest” is created by individuals who are defined as “private persons”. They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, what is called the “general interest”, is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and in relation to the latter it is by no means an independent force with an independent history — so that this contradiction is in practice constantly destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian “negative unity” of two sides of a contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction together with its unity also disappears.
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The German Ideology, Chapter III, "The New Testament: Ego"
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