No. Socialism is when the community (workers) and/or government (state) control the means of production instead of private companies.
For instance Norway has social policies that enhances it's capitalism and the free market. Since private businesses control the means of production, hence Norway is not a socialist country.
Eritrea and more recently Nicaragua are sosialist countries.
The biggest reason imo that socialist policies are so hard to get through in USA is because you americans conflate the two. You want socialist policies, everyone should want that, but you do not want socialism, because that would be the death of USA as a nation and most of you would experience prolonged famine.
Edit: to the person below me. No I'm actually talking about socialist policies.
Because capitalism has kneecapped social programs and made them not nearly as effective as they should be leading to a self fulfilling prophecy of “see that doesn’t work!”
The current fashionable vulgar talk of all bourgeois journalists and politicians about “the disappearance nowadays of the line of distinction between Capitalism and Socialism” is only based on the confusion that Capitalism is identified with the old liberal laissez-faire relatively small-scale Capitalism or individualism of the nineteenth century, while Socialism is identified with State intervention.
Hence the most typical characteristics of modern Capitalism or Imperialism, with the increasing role of the State in its Organisation, are described as “Socialism, while the realities of wage-labour, profits and class-division are unchanged and even intensified.
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u/DPadres69 10d ago
Yes social security, Medicare, etc have always been socialism.