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The Guardian reports that "socialism" was the most looked-up word on Merriam-Webster's site this year, a change the American dictionary publisher attributes to US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who has positioned of himself as a "democratic socialist".
As a socialist (or communist) myself, I personally think it's great that especially people from the United States try to figure out the meaning of the word beyond McCarthyism. I'm glad that people show interest in politics and finding out about positions of candidates.
Past years winners are available on Wikipedia.
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'Socialism' the Most Looked-Up Word of 2015 on Merriam-Webster
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @09:23PM
If your system traded 1 set of overlords for another set of overlords, you still have Capitalism.
In this case, that would be called State Capitalism. [wikipedia.org]
The defining element of Socialism, once again, is collective ownership of the means of production.
Ownership means that you get to make the decisions about that stuff you own.
In Socialism, those decisions are made by The Workers via a Democratic vote--1 worker, 1 vote (with every worker's vote equal to any other worker's vote).
If you arrive at your workplace and leave Democracy outside the door, you don't have Socialism.
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Sunday December 20 2015, @03:09AM
Unless you're starting from a clean slate, where no one owns anything -- for this vote by the workers to have power, the means of production must first be taken away from someone else (namely, whoever owns it). How is this different from ordinary totalitarianism?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2015, @07:31AM
You've never seen a **new** business start up?
You've never seen a e.g. lawn care business spring from nothing except what folks already have?
You've never heard of Uber or Lyft?
The workers own the means of production.
Those *could* have been set up as a worker-owned cooperative and we'd have a fine example of how it works.
Notice how the owners of the central computers have instead fallen into the greedy, deceitful model so familiar with Capitalists.
I have previously posted an item about how home healthcare workers formed a cooperative.
Minimal stuff needs to be supplied by the workers there; they supply labor and mostly use the clients' stuff.
I mentioned in another thread the other day that Finland had an idea to use a small portion of tax money to fund new collectives.
If you had followed my links about Italy, you would have seen that they have had a startup funding scheme since the 1980s.
The fixation of you and your ilk on top-down paradigms shows narrow^W no thinking.
Your limited life experiences and lack of imagination are depressing.
-- gewg_