Socialism today is no less misunderstood than it was in the 1980s—often deliberately so. What its modern advocates describe as “socialism” is typically little more than cosmetic reform of capitalism, re-branded to appear humane while preserving centralised power. Yet history shows that whenever socialism moves beyond rhetoric into practice, it does not dismantle oppression—it merely changes who enforces it.
Poverty, conflict, and inequality persist not because markets exist, but because power is repeatedly concentrated in the hands of the state. Under socialism, ownership of the means of production does not disappear; it is transferred from private individuals to political authorities. The result is not freedom, but a new ruling class—bureaucratic, unaccountable, and entrenched—extracting value from the labor of the many while controlling access to resources.
While socialists claim that all wealth is created by the working class, they ignore the indispensable role of entrepreneurship, innovation, risk, and voluntary exchange. To label those who organise capital and production as “parasitic” is to misunderstand how wealth is actually generated and sustained. Prosperity does not arise from coercion or uniformity, but from freedom, incentive, and choice.
Socialism, in its classical revolutionary form, promises a total transformation of society—abolishing markets, money, private ownership, and profit. In practice, this vision requires total control. Production “for use” rather than sale demands that someone decide what is produced, in what quantities, and for whom. That “someone” is inevitably the state. Free access becomes rationing. Common ownership becomes state ownership. Administration over resources becomes government over people.
This is where socialism’s resemblance to Nazism becomes impossible to ignore. Though differing in rhetoric, both ideologies reject individual economic freedom, subordinate the individual to a collective ideal, and rely on centralised authority to enforce compliance. Like the Nazi system, socialism places control of industry, labor, and distribution in the hands of the state, eliminates the right to profit, and treats economic outcomes as a matter of political entitlement rather than personal effort.
Modern socialism expands this framework further, insisting it must encompass all peoples, all cultures, all beliefs—except the belief in free enterprise. It demands ideological conformity while claiming moral superiority. Rights are no longer derived from individual liberty or personal responsibility, but from birth and group identity. Effort, innovation, and merit are subordinated to enforced equality of outcome.
Socialists argue that their system would eliminate elites through “instantly recallable delegation” and permanent democracy. History suggests the opposite. Centralised systems inevitably produce elites—technocratic, bureaucratic, or ideological—who are far more insulated from accountability than any market actor. The promise of rule by “the people” collapses into rule by planners.
To recap:
Socialism is not an advanced or liberating post-capitalist society, but a Changing Faces of Soccentralised economic order that replaces voluntary exchange with compulsion. It is market-free, money-free, profit-free and therefore freedom-free. It abolishes choice in favour of control, effort in favour of entitlement, and individual rights in favour of collective mandates.
It has never existed as imagined because it cannot exist without coercion.
It is not a path to equality, but a repeat of authoritarian experiments that concentrate power, suppress dissent, and impoverish societies.
Like Nazism, it subordinates the individual to the state, demands obedience in the name of a higher cause, and treats economic freedom as a threat rather than a right.
The organising principle is no longer “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs,” but rather: from each according to what the state demands, to each according to what the state allows.
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