>>67087
>Lol, you obviously don't know what materialism means in the socialist sense.
Good thing I didn't use it in the socialist sense. I was talking about it in much the same way as most laypeople do. Socialists are materialists because they value tangible, material goods more than anything else, to the point where they're fixated on them.
>Christian socialists exist unironically.
I didn't deny that. Do I really have to exclude them explicitly? No one asked about them, and it's quite obvious that my post isn't meant to apply to them.
>It's not that strange, especially if you consider "the left" doesn't exist. Plenty of infighting and hate.
It does exist, just not as a coherent movement. Is that really so controversial? You can even trace most leftist ideas back to the French Revolution. It's like a Big Bang that spawned edgy teenagers who want to fight "the system".
>Escaping inequality is not the only reason many socialists are what they are.
It's one of their most common topoi. I think almost every socialist I ever read or talked to absolutely loved equality. The protosocialists didn't, but they're not all that relevant anymore. And they had a very strong identitarian drive, too. Fourrier didn't want a totally equal society, but in his vision, people were not so much individual personalities as representatives of their particular caste.
>They want a society that is not dominated by competition, to the extent that you're not a proper citizen if you don't dream to be succesful.
>This competition drives out the human aspect of society. By pressure of the wish to be succesful, by pressure of the boss or by pressure of simply struggling to get by, it causes people to relinquish their spare time.
>Wealth, women and worldy titles become the prize of this perpetual competition. Not wishing to participate, trying to live life with a focus on spirituality, means no food, unless there's a welfare state.
>Not that I advocate a welfare state, because even with one, the problems of competition and private ownership of socially necessary property still exist under one.
What pressure does competition create, exactly? That you have to work if you want to eat is a law of nature. The market ensures that each successive generation has to work less and less to feed itself, in spite of the Malthusian Law. You're starving if you don't work at all, yes, but because the costs of food are trivial nowadays, you would only have to work a few hours a week for housing and some food to sustain yourself, if it wasn't for the state fucking with the economy in all kinds of ways.
>inb4 standard of living
Yes, I was talking about working a few hours for basic housing, potatoes every day and one serving of bacon once a week. Actually, your standard of living is higher working nothing and being on private charity, but for the sake of argument, we can ignore that. That's how we'd live if there was no market at all. You cannot complain that the market exists and simultaneously that you don't have the kind of lifestyle only the market can afford you. No, collectivizing socially necessary property and disallowing competition, however the hell that's supposed to work, is not an alternative. You either have a market of some sort or you have no standard of living at all.
>>67148
You talking about what conception of marriage, exactly?