Also depends on how you define capitalism, and whether you consider Socialism with Chinese Characteristics to be capitalist.

The context of this discussion is Brazil and the intentions of the socialist Brazilian government. Are you claiming that the socialist party in Brazil intends to dismantle capitalism? In case you are unaware, countries can have capitalist economic systems and still have significant socialist traits like: large public sectors, state enterprises for natural monopolies and important industries, subsidized education and healthcare, etc.

Uhh, China...

You can’t have it both ways though. The policies enacted in Northern Europe would definitely be agreed on as communist/socialist by the majority of mainstream American politicians, Democrats included.

For some people, even the government interventions by those specific rich market-capitalist European countries are "too socialist" and get the exact same "didn't you realise Stalin killed millions?" kinds of responses.

PRC is way more capitalist than Norway or some other European countries. Approximately, one is capitalist dictatorship and the other socialist democracy.

Yes PRC government was originally propped by USSR but that's it. If you look at labor protection laws, social security, etc it's nowhere near.

The German Social Democratic Party is the literal actual identical party of Marx and Engels.

That we assign to the Bolsheviks the mantle of one or another 19th c epithet is a kind of secret pact between the two sides of the Cold War. It is itself doctrinal Leninism even if the State Department spreads it. Its func

But this is to privilege 100+ year old origins of these terms over their actual application and development in most of Western Europe. It’s anachronistic and misleading.

That's entirely orthogonal to the fact that Americans thend to label literally anything and everything they don't like as communist. Especially any sort of social(ist) policy good for the people and bad for the 1%.

Social democracy is a class-collaboration system where both the owning class and the working class compromise on their own interests (minimizing vs maximizing real wages) for the sake of stability or national interest. Class-collaboration systems -- however desirable they might be --are inherently unstable because the conflict between the owning class and working class is built into the basic structure of the economy. It's also the case that the state, which administers the conditions of this collaboration, is not a neutral party, but a tool of the owning class. Since the 70s, and especially since the 90s, that's resulted in the rollback of social democratic measures put in place after the Great Depression when the bulk of the owning class recognized them as necessary for stability. State oil revenues are a material factor that has slowed that rollback in e.g. the Nordic countries relative to the Anglosphere, but the underlying dialectic isn't any different.

I would call them market economies instead of socialist governments

> disregard for property rights and freedom of contract

Are you complaining about taxation and regulation? Both are cornerstones of every successful state in human history.

Any form of centralized power is bad for the vast majority of civilization. always has been

That doesn't answer my question.

> Aren't you a venture capitalist?

Pretty much.

> A left wing one?

Wouldn't say that. I like wealth redistribution and taxation as a tool of both economic empowerment and political equalisation.

I do have friends whom I'd consider left wing. I agree with them on many issues, from unionising bars to raising the minimum wage. I disagree with them on others, e.g. regulating everything for the sake of it.