Is what you describe really socialism though? Western leftists would probably call these policies social democracy. And yes, they make the life of people in that country better! Relatively high minimum wages, limits on prices (or price increases) for certain things (especially housing), mandatory paid sick leave, mandatory unemployment insurance, and so on are all things that some European countries have in some form or another. And yes, that makes most of our lives (I’m German) relatively great.

However, most of the housing, factories and land are still owned by capitalists. They still exploit their workers and tenants, the policies only soften the blows. In recent decades, the concentration of capital in a few families’ hands has also skyrocketed here, which gives them political power (sometimes openly, sometimes covertly) and led to the erosion of many of these social democratic benefits. Also, a lot of the high social security in the west in the past century was only possible thanks to exploitation of people and nature in the global south.

That’s why many leftists, at least in the west, don’t think that social democracy is enough in the long term. Many even see social democrats as stabilizing the fundamentally corrupt capitalist system by covering up that corruption. For most of us, socialism would mean that, at the very least, big corporations are owned and lead by the workers themselves. That could be cooperatives in markets (market socialism) or that could be some kind of planned economy (not only state central planning, there’s also proposals for somewhat or even totally distributed/decentralized schemes). The point here is that there are no more owners of productive forces, who don’t participate themselves in production, i.e. capitalists. The existence of a separate capitalist class with a lot of power and opposed to the workers is a common denominator for unneccessary misery in this world. Eliminating that class (that doesn’t mean eliminating the people, only expropriating them) would not magically solve all problems in the world, but it would make us freer to seek effective measures.

Maybe you should read that post before commenting. It’s anti-AnCap at its heart.

I’m neither. You’re the misinformed one here, and the people who downvoted me as well. Go to the link you provided.

• click the link to the article for Ahmed Al-Sharaa
• click the link to the article for Al-Nusra Front
• see “part of” section in the overview: Al-Qaeda

Yes, they split several years ago. Insofar I have exaggerated. Are they substantially better in terms of authorianism and religious fundamentalism? I seriously doubt it.

Correct, it’s the other big islamist group, al-Qaeda.

If they really carry out war operations from civilian hotels and office buildings, that is a huge war crime. It’s telling that the NYT doesn’t mention this and I have heard nothing of it in European media.