Communism in the United States

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You mean welfare? Pretty much all nations have that and socialism isn't needed.

Welfare is a form of state intervention which is not driven by market forces.

It is "socialistic," especially if a welfare recipient has not contributed any of his/her tax money. They are making money off the state, purely.

Welfare is a Social Program and has nothing to do with Socialism except for the first two syllables.

I think welfare is always needed in a limited capacity but socialism is basically a pure welfare state with zero repercussions from not working. The whole point of socialism is the notion of letting everyone else contribute except everyone has the same idea and nothing gets done.

That's what I noticed from people who advocate for it anyway.

All right. I'll give you that.....but the funds allocated to the welfare recipient are derived from "the community as a whole." So there are elements of "socialism" in this form of interaction.

I would guess this might be said to be "socialism" in a loose sense, rather than in the pure sense.

It's very socialist in that limited capacity and everyone knows the hot potato that welfare is in the entire developed world.

Making it considerably larger will cause chaos.

I don't advocate "making it larger."

But this thread is largely a hypothetical on the subject.

To understand Communism, you really need to understand collectivism first. Collectivism is a broad, general term that covers any situation in which power, property, and rights are concentrated in the hands of a few for the benefits of all. The citizen doesn't exist to serve himself; the citizens exists to serve the state. Those aren't YOUR clothes you're wearing; they're clothes the state ALLOWS you to wear. You do not have rights; you have duties and obligations. Fairness and justice are relative terms. And that means pretty much all systems of government and economics are inherently collectivist by nature. Monarchy is collectivist (the state exists at the pleasure of the monarch), though not as obviously as slavery. Slavery is more obviously collectivist--the slave receives according to his basic need, the master enjoys the product of someone else's labor. Racism embodies collectivism--preferential treatment based on skin color, which includes both ideologies of the Klan AND affirmative action. Collectivism often, though not always, creates victim classes who struggle against oppression. Under National Socialism, the German people struggled against Jews (and also against any "other" person not of Arian descent). In Soviet Russia, workers and peasants struggled against the wealthy and the aristocratic ruling class. In Feminism, women struggle against the patriarchy. In CRT, all members of victim classes struggle against white men, and victimhood is intersectional.

What's important to note is the claims of victims to their oppressed status need not be rooted in fact. Critical Race Theory is not about facts, despite insistence otherwise. It's about narrative. You can't support CRT through evidence because white society isn't concerned with collecting data on oppressed minorities. You have to rely on the collective experience of black people. Some claims by oppressed groups HAPPEN to be factual--racial slavery was a thing, for instance. Feminism is backed by the real-world disenfranchisement of women in the west, and the fact that men have a tendency towards competition, have greater potential for muscle mass, and have historically dominated entire industries. Do black people ACTUALLY have less opportunity in America? No. Are women ACTUALLY forced to remain barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen their entire lives? No. And in both cases you can always point to minorities and women being highly successful and unrestricted.

Communism is institutionalized collectivism, no different than how racial slavery was institutionalized in America, with the stated goal of universal equality for all people. To maintain a communist state, a country requires a permanent underclass and a common enemy. To maintain equality, the communist state must enforce equality. That means a centralized government dominated by a single party and ideology with a select pseudo-intellectual elite making decisions about who gets what. If you overproduce in either/both quantity or quality, you display superiority and inherent inequality with your comrades--so equal pay removes the incentive to innovate. But since you have access to all basic essentials (food, water, housing, medicine), you have no need to work at all. And as you pointed out, OP, when everyone regardless of initiative or output is on a level playing field and of equal worth, that also means they are all also equally worthless.

Feminism is sexual collectivism. It's an application of Marxist-infused critical theory to gender and gender roles. In Feminism, you have a more pronounced effect of victimhood. Communism in theory seeks to level the playing field. In practice, not everyone benefits equally from communism. But in Feminism, the theory is that women should have a level playing field with men. In actual practice, women are considered "more equal" than men, and some women are even "more equal" than other women. And yes, that's a concept stolen from "Animal Farm," which is NOT a warning against socialism but rather a clarification of what can possibly go wrong. What Orwell describes as a sort of exception to the rule, though, ends up being the rule rather than the exception to it (Orwell was a democratic socialist and highly critical of Stalin, btw). And this is exactly the case when it comes to feminism: Feminists who somehow manage to break the glass ceiling and climb the corporate ladder and end up abusing their female subordinates are examples of this apparent hypocrisy. They "slept their way to the top." They "collude with men." They are more likely traitors or sellouts. There's little regard for attainment based on actual merit. And it's really obvious when you see them in politics: Hilary Clinton's bid for the presidency, both times. The first time the election was "stolen" by a "man" who just came out of nowhere in her own party. The second time she had a perfectly clear path, but the election was "stolen" by a billionaire madman. But when people point out her husband's sins while he was in office, suddenly there's nothing wrong with a sitting president mistreating women. What about Kamala Harris? This is where the intersectionality of race and gender come into play--Kamala Harris is a woman, she is black, and she's Asian. It's hard to get any more victimized than that! And it's this intersectionality that optimally positions her as a political winner rather than accomplishment or merit.

And all of this obscures genuine needs of women in the west--to the point I couldn't even tell you what women actually need. That might be a good sign if it means that women actually have access to everything they need. But if, say, abortion is 100% banned, then you end up with a situation in which women are extreme risk of death when an abortion would be a life-saving procedure. I think it's admirable to want to supply someone's essential needs when they can't afford it themselves, but the problem of providing everything free is you destroy the value of everything. When things have no value, there is no rational point to having anything, not even essentials (food, shelter, water, etc.). For that reason, i.e. individual women have no reasonable right to life as individuals, you can be called upon to sacrifice everything, even your own life, for someone else's cause. Feminists WANT women to die, basically, because women who are abused and even killed reinforces the idea that men are oppressive. Now, sure, men could just stop being jerks, right? But if men stop being jerks, where does that leave feminism? So every single thing, no matter what, is seen as oppressive to women. If you're a "nice guy," it's only because you want to get in her pants. Or a woman can physically assault a guy to make a point, and that's ok, but a guy who bruises her in self-defense is a psychopath.

The commonalities of communism and feminism are related to their shared collectivism. Everything is offensive. Everything is an outrage. Anything that deviates from the narrative is a myth or never existed. They are both radical and revolutionary by design. Speaking of radicalism, I was debating a feminist on here once who basically argued that all feminists are decent, good-natured, nice women who just want parity with men and there's nothing at all destructive or hateful about feminists. So I cited some things by Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin. The feminist tried to play it off like those women didn't exist. She'd been a "lifelong feminist" and there was no evidence of any feminist who hated men or had radically negative views towards men, and I found two well-known feminists within the community who had some extreme views. So, yes, there's this idea of reeducation, rewriting history, and gaslighting that goes on that sustains collectivist ideals within victim movements. Everything is a "critical theory." Feminism is not fundamentally different from communism, only more focused. Where feminism and communism are fundamentally OPPOSED is that communism is an ideology and philosophy by white men for white men. Feminine empowerment is merely an afterthought. However, in America, feminists amount to "useful idiots" who help further collectivist causes, hence the weird relationship between western communism and feminism. One could easily dispense with the other if it ever proved convenient to do so.