First post btw!
A bit of a backstory about myself...
I'm a socialist. I a am not an American and live in Europe. I believe that capitalism is a failed system of economy that is riddled with paradoxes and contradictions and that it's not a sustainable system of economy in the long run. I have educated myself about the failures of capitalism by studying the work of Marx and Engels and I agree with much of what they said.
Unfortunately, I'm extremely nihilistic and blackpilled about the future of socialism...
In the past, socialism use to be a (mostly) scientific ideology that focused on social class and materialism. It rejected for the most part romantic and unscientific concepts like religion, while also calling out corrupt systems like globalism and neo-liberalism. Then somewhere between 1990-2015 something terrible happened....
...millennial sjws grew up and infected the socialist movement
It's almost impossible to describe how much damage these brats have caused the socialist movement. Almost literally everything that socialism use to stand for has now been destroyed. But before you can understand why, it's important to first give a brief overview of what socialism actually is since lots of people have massive misconceptions about socialism.
Basically, the premise of socialism is that the concept of wage labor in a capitalist economy is a form of exploitation since the capitalist can make money of the labor of someone else. So if a capitalist pays a worker 10$ per hour to produce 20$ worth of value per hour and then pockets the remaining 10$ for himself, then that is a form of exploitation since the capitalist gets to profit of labor that he himself was not responsible for. And thus, from the point of view of socialism capitalism is basically theft and should be done away with in favor of a socialist society where workers reap the benefits of the means of production rather than the capitalist whom from the point of view of the exploited workers are merely a parasite class.
In addition to the above, socialism also believes (or USE to believe...more on that later) that concepts like nationalism, religion etc are just trickery that the ruling classes use in order to keep the lower classes divided so that they don't unite against the wealthy.
And that is how it use to be. Until millennial sjws happened
First, let's explain why sjws even exist.
Sjws are basically what happens when you combine spoiled and poor upbringing with narcissism and entitlement mentality. This is very important to remember, because it gives context to the things that they believe and why they believe it, and why their version of "socialism" is so much more different (and worse) compared to earlier generations of socialists.
So what makes this new generation of "socialists" so much worse? Mostly 7 things:
1. Rejection of the class conflict theory in favor of nonsense identity politics. This is largely in part because many sjws are themselves spoiled brats belonging to the wealthier classes and as a result making it all about social class/money would risk making them look stupid. So instead they shift the focus away from money/class over to something else, and in doing so basically defeat the purpose of marxism by implying money doesn't really matter. So according to their garbage belief system a black billionaire is more oppressed than a poor white person for example. This is literally the reverse of what marx believed and in fact is arguably more similar to far-right ideology than marxism.
2. The incorporation of garbage movements like feminism and LGBT nonsense into the socialist movement even though neither of those things have anything to do with socialism or criticism of capitalism. In fact historically most socialist regimes prior to the end of the cold war were actually anti-LGBT and forced traditional marriage values on their populations.
3. Disregard for the welfare of the poor in favor of dogmatic environmentalism that negatively effects the lower classes, just so that they can feel morally superior. By comparison the soviet union considered environmentalism a form of bourgeois snobbery (which it is) and wanted nothing to do with it.
4. Embracing open borders even though it's wildly unpopular in many cases even among minorities (blacks in the USA for example don't like open borders). This is largely because sjws themselves as pointed out earlier often belong to the wealthier classes and don't care about the poor despite of their claims of otherwise.
5. Embracing neo-liberalism. This is perhaps the most hilarious one. Because many socialists are now just spoiled rich white kids whom only care about useless garbage like identity and climate change they are actually totally cool with destructive neo-liberal policies like globalism and support globalist policies such as free trade and the EU. In fact many of these "socialists" aren't even really socialists at all because of this.
6. Refusal to admit foreign cultures can't always coexist with socialism. Take for example Islam which is as anti-socialist as it gets to a point where even some liberal figures like Bill Maher has admitted Islam is dangerous and yet everybody just dismisses this as a right-wing meme. lol ok.
7. Total lack of tolerance for any debate or criticism on the current state of the socialist movement. Literally every single socialist reddit or forum I have found imposes draconian rules about what is or isn't allowed to be discussed and will ban anybody that so much as hints at the idea that the current state of the movement is garbage and that all this sjw nonsense is worthless. I blame this on the spoiled nature of millennials whom were never taught to respect anybody but themselves. That's not even mentioning the extreme level of emotional fragility of these dumb children whom are so mentally weak that they felt the need to invent laughable concepts such as "micro-agressions" and "trigger-warnings". Any meaningful discussion on anything in any socialist space is basically impossible now which means there is zero chance of the movement ever being reformed.
So to summarize:
Pre-millennial socialism:
-Workers are being harmed through wage exploitation
-Capitalism is bad
-People should look past race & religion and unite against the rich
-Creating opportunities for the poor is important
Millennial sjw socialism:
-Rich black people are being harmed through mean tweets
-Capitalism is bad sometimes but ok if I get cheaper Iphones through third world exploitation
-Race is extremely important to our identity and some races are innately evil and oppressive
-Saving the trees is more important than creating jobs or welfare for the poor
So yea, I'm really pissed. Socialism is a valid ideology, but I feel that it's now been completely ruined beyond repair by these brats