People died while trying to get better, more humane working conditions.
I tend to think we forget that things we enjoy today were won through, sometimes violent, struggle, and we take them for granted, what makes it easier to lose them.
To me this is one of the most important celebrations.
bawolff · 1h ago
One thing i find interesting is how rarely labour struggles are depicted in mainstream tv/movies.
We have every type of revolutionary tv shows, including some fairly rediculous ones (e.g. divergent) but almost never strikes. The only exception i can really think of is that one episode of battlestar galactica (maybe give star trek ds9 half a point because they treated it in such a silly fashion).
latexr · 3m ago
> maybe give star trek ds9 half a point because they treated it in such a silly fashion
DS9 episode is worth it just for “He was more than a hero, he was a union man.”
arrowsmith · 22m ago
The wonderful movie Billy Elliot takes place against the backdrop of the 1984-85 UK miners’ strike, probably the most significant labour struggle in modern British history.
Although it might not be the type of movie you’re looking for, because the miners lost.
philipallstar · 7m ago
And because the miners were causing power blackouts in the UK, and they were far, far less efficient than overseas sources, or alternatives to coal-fired power stations.
lwo32k · 51m ago
It's a very very messy process and most of the time doesn't end well because of the power imbalance. Larger the worker group more the disagreements amongst them too. My Dad was a factory manager and I grew up running around the factory, playing with workers, they would help me on my school projects etc. The same guys beat my Dad up during one particular strike. Many of them got arrested and we had a cop outside our house for months.
potato3732842 · 1h ago
>One thing i find interesting is how rarely labour struggles are depicted in mainstream tv/movies.
Same reason all sorts of other stuff has gone nearly extinct.
Mainstream entertainment media is subject to the same eyeball-hour based economics as everything else and that content doesn't resonate with enough people.
bawolff · 1h ago
Given how every second piece of mainstream entertainment is about sticking it to the man, i find that reasoning a little uncompelling.
potato3732842 · 1h ago
You can't make a hollywood movie or expensive TV series or other top tier content about something that can't be repackaged and resold to foreign audiences.
PsylentKnight · 30m ago
Labor struggles are a central theme of Disco Elysium
vidarh · 1h ago
I'm not sure I agree DS9 treated it in all that silly fashion, beyond involving the Ferengi's. It's part of what makes Rom's arc one that shows the greatest character development in Trek.
It's also one of few depictions of strikes in US TV that treated the strikers with substantially more sympathy than their counterpart. Incidentally, this is another parallel to Babylon 5, which also had a strike, and were the negotiator that was brought in was a really unsympathetic caricature.
DS9 even managed to paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, and still painted the strikers in a good light.
cess11 · 13m ago
The premise of Star Trek kind of is 'what if we reached communism and hence could science up actual space travel?', which DS9 somewhat digresses from by having these episodes about social struggle like the bar strike and the battle of the sanctuary district as well as the genocide arcs.
It speaks to the foundational values of the franchise being widely accepted that the strike episode is what is remembered as the labour thing, as if a lot of people would like the results of an egalitarian society but have been taught that the means to achieve it are somehow controversial.
philipallstar · 5m ago
If you're still inventing and discovering things, you probably don't have communism, because not all inventions are distributed equally (straight away) and not all places can be shared by all people.
rvb · 1h ago
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
belter · 22m ago
The US minimum wage is at $7.25 per hour since..24 Jul 2009, that is 16 years ago. Taking into account cumulative inflation US workers enjoy now about 68 % of the 2009 purchasing power.
In the biggest state without the federal minimum wage, Texas, individual income percentile at $20k per year ($10 per hour/40 hour work weeks/50 weeks per year) is 20th percentile. That will capture all the part time workers too, so it seems the lowest priced labor in most US labor markets is disjoint from the federal US minimum wage.
Discriminatory and biased! Why is so much attention lavished on workers? Where's International Shareholders' day? Where is a day to celebrate wealth and those who have it? Both of those things are far more important than lowly labor.
ks2048 · 1h ago
> Both of those things are far more important than lowly labor.
That's why labor gets 1 day and owners get 364.
(Just realized that's roughly in the ballpark of CEO-to-worker wage ratio. ~290:1)
alabastervlog · 29m ago
It's truly under-appreciated how much the rich do for the economy, and indeed, for the workers, by having some database rows in some computers with their names on them.
NhanH · 2h ago
That’s just Black Friday.
amarcheschi · 2h ago
I'd say that's just any other day
bawolff · 1h ago
In the united states, it is nov 18 (National Entrepreneur Day)
It wasn’t even satire. It was based on this opinion from WSJ
> Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?
> I would call attention to the parallels of Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."
According to the US, whose movements originated the May Day holiday, it's officially "Law Day," which is the day we celebrate obedience to the law (I assume by not celebrating May Day.)
The Voice of America is the only media outlet I've ever heard actually celebrating Law Day. An old job of mine had a poster on the wall for Law Day that VoA had actually printed and given away for some reason.
nonrandomstring · 1h ago
I associate May 1 with getting mashed in Helsinki as for many years I
spent it in Finland, with amazing parties in the park for Vappu [0]
the Spring Festival. It's a celebration of Spring, labour day, and
also "education and industry" since people proudly wear their school
colours, company badges and graduation caps. Quite an atmosphere!
With all the “fascist” and “Nazi” labels being thrown around these days—often without much historical context—here’s a surprising fact I just learned: Nazi Germany was the first non-communist country to officially make May 1st, International Workers’ Day, a national public holiday.
rtkwe · 1h ago
Kind of. You have to ignore US Labor Day being established in 1894 which is essentially the same thing just Americanized by not sharing the day with the rest of the world.
vidarh · 1h ago
Note that the spread of Labor Day owed a lot to intentional efforts to counter May 1st as a commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre.
So US Labour Day is an intentionally captured, defanged, neutered version.
regularization · 36m ago
Mexico began celebrating May Day in 1923, before Germany.
I mean the nazis were nominally socialist. And they had heavy price and wage controls and de facto government control of much of industry. They used communism-lite.
vman81 · 1h ago
Much like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is nominally democratic.
sambeau · 31m ago
Incorrect.
Here's a large amount of reading matter to explain. Fill your boots.
Well it was a (total) war economy, not communism lite.
dismalaf · 1h ago
Mussolini's definition of fascism (he's the one who popularly coined it, after all) isn't that far off from communism. In a fascist state, all corporations are loyal to the state and do it's bidding. It's basically communism but with private(ish) ownership of capital.
schmidtleonard · 1h ago
Socialism is collective ownership of capital. "Socialism but with private ownership of capital" is like "water but without wetness." So we call it something else.
Gallons of ink have been spilled talking about how the two types of populism are similar -- horseshoe theory -- but the reason why it's a horseshoe and not a circle is exactly the issue of capital ownership.
ty6853 · 1h ago
If we're going to use a puritanical definition of socialism then we'll also use one for ownership. Under which the owners of capital under Naziism -- weren't.
They were more akin to socialist party bosses -- do what the nazis say at the directed wages, prices, and quantities and then take your socialist party boss cut off the top.
schmidtleonard · 1h ago
It's not puritanical to say water is wet. Words mean things. All economies shifted towards command economies during the war. Even the USA. But the USA didn't genocide Jews or starve Kulaks. So your idea that it's all socialism is both practically and theoretically bunk. (You said "communism" but if you can't tell fascism from socialism you definitely can't tell socialism from communism.)
More to the point, it's the type of bunk that is being pushed by the people currently in power to argue that every vaguely left-leaning person in the USA is actually a secret communist revolutionary and should be crushed by any means necessary, law and constitution and common decency be damned:
JD Vance put a blurb on this book praising its core argument. This is how the fascists currently in power will expand their extrajudicial purges from hispanics to political opponents. It's dark shit, and you're helping them.
ty6853 · 12m ago
I don't know anything about Vance's book. I don't understand why people keep pointing to Musk or Vance as if I must be some devout follower or corrupted by same. Even when I was an actual communist in philosophy, as a youngin way before I knew about Musk or Vance, I held the belief that the nazis had a lot of the qualities of the intermediary institutions Marx advocated for. Ludwig Von Mises wrote about it decades ago when he escaped their continental reach.
I'm under no illusion Nazis meet the wet definition of communism, which IIRC when distilled down to just the 'water' without impurities doesn't even have a central government.
dismalaf · 55m ago
> Socialism is collective ownership of capital
Collective ownership in practice means state ownership. And state control.
Fascism has state control as well.
vidarh · 36m ago
Many socialist and communist ideologies are explicitly opposed to even the existence of a state, and/or want a weak state. Some of them see state control of capital as inherently instituting class rule, and so consider it inherently a threat to their goals. In other words, while you will find ideologies that call themselves socialist that favor a state, the a strong state or even the existence of one is not a defining feature of socialism.
It is, however, an inherent, defining feature of fascism.
dismalaf · 21m ago
How exactly would a stateless socialism work? No matter what you call it, it'll always end up looking like a national state.
vidarh · 6m ago
At least a dozen different socialist ideologies have entirely different answers to that. First you'll need to decide what you consider a state. Some - e.g. anarchists and other libertarian socialists reject the state outright, and don't want anything to replace it. Others reject "only" top down/involuntary authority, or want any replacement to be minimal in scope (e.g. communes).
A defining trait of a national state is sovereignty over a territory and control of the use of violence in that territory, and those are both traits that multiple socialist ideologies explicitly reject.
Whether or not you believe any of the variations can work is orthogonal to the point that socialism is not a singular ideology, but a spectrum of ideologies that where many reject the state, and so the existence of one is not a defining trait of socialism.
Insisting that it is, is a bit like insisting that capitalism is the same as fascism because capitalism too rlies on a state (to enforce property rights). If anything, capitalism is inherently tied to the existence of a state because of the need to enforcep property rights that many socialist ideologies reject. But very few socialists would equate capitalism with fascism (some would).
skyyler · 48m ago
You're pointing at a superficial similarity while ignoring the serious ideological differences.
Fascism comes with a deeply stratified class hierarchy. Collective ownership in the socialist sense is incompatible with this.
dismalaf · 23m ago
> superficial similarity
You mean the actual similarity.
The ideological aspect IS the superficial part when you put it into practice.
skyyler · 17m ago
No, I mean a superficial similarity. The ideological aspect drives all aspects of government.
Did you come to the understanding you have through careful consideration and thought? Are you open to re-consideration of the ideas you have about this?
cmrdporcupine · 1h ago
Except Mussolini defines what he's doing explicitly in opposition to socialism, as a break from the socialist movement he had sort-of been a part of before his rise to prominence. Both he and the NAZIs saw themselves as trying to save the country from socialists & communists.
Just because the American education system defined "socialism" as "when the government does stuff" doesn't mean that's what it is, in, y'know, the actual real historical world.
Revolutionary socialism / communism = a working class movement trying to overthrow the dominance of the capitalist class. So putting the working class above all else.
Fascism = a nationalist movement trying to dissolve all class and other distinctions into the nation. So putting the nation above all else.
The role of the state may look effectually similar in the practices of both, but the reason and practice for doing so is entirely different.
lenerdenator · 1h ago
> Fascism = a nationalist movement trying to dissolve all class and other distinctions into the nation. So putting the nation above all else.
The role of the state may look effectually similar in the practices of both, but the reason and practice for doing so is entirely different.
At least in Marxism-Leninism, you have a party vanguard implementing a dictatorship of the proletariat that could be somewhat analogous to the bureaucracy of the fascist state, so I'd say that the practices are fairly similar in at least some situations. The major difference would be that Marxism-Leninism advances the idea of that bureaucracy also using some sort of democratic process to operate and make decisions, but as we know, that can be easily undermined with a cult of personality.
zmgsabst · 57m ago
There are people who think looking at the structures of power, eg the role of the state, is more useful than looking at propaganda when discussing politics. In the behaviorist sense that what people do is a better revelation of their beliefs than what they say.
In that perspective, we can look at progressivism, communism, and fascism as different perspectives on technocratic managerialism — all of whom experienced similar problems, eg, purging/sterilizing undesirables via eugenics programs.
vidarh · 39m ago
The Bolsheviks literally carried out a coup against socialists, and murdered a long range of socialists and communists who took up weapons against them to try to prevent their dictatorship. In that perspective it's clear that these are not singular ideologies, but sets of ideologies were individual variations often have very little in common.
alabastervlog · 1h ago
They broke the labor unions, and sent union organizers to the concentration camps—they were among the first to go. They employed mass slave labor. They collaborated closely with and enriched capital owners. Collectivism wasn't a feature of their government.
They weren't socialist at all. It's a common talking point from modern fascist apologists (I'm not accusing you of being one—this nonsense leaks out into the popular culture and just gets picked up by accident, too) but it has zero basis in reality if you run down a list of what they did. It doesn't remotely look like what an even lightly-socialist-leaning government would do. Such claims are always supported by pointing at the name (LOL. LMFAO.), making things up, and maybe cherry-picking a couple things that seem socialist-ish if you squint really hard and don't put them in context. There's some early rhetoric about it, but zero action, that was just a cynical appeal to populism, usually accompanied with attempts to redefine socialism itself to mean not-socialism—they wanted the word, but not the meaning.
tlogan · 1h ago
The real labor unions were also banned in communist countries.
Labor unions in communist countries were directly controlled by the Communist Party.
ty6853 · 1h ago
The 'communist' countries generally did these same things. The russians famously just straight up executed anarcho-communists and competing socialist factions and any union of persons associated with such. They employed essentially slave labor in the fields, taxing their grain to the point they could hardly survive. Party bosses were the 'capital' owners enjoying private cars, prime apartments, and de facto private ownership of the fruits of the working class.
Of course there is no real communism, there is no real socialism, and there is no real fascism. Nevertheless if I'm talking to some guy on a street I'll understand what he means if talks about com-bloc eastern europe or asia, and I understood OP was referring to communist countries in the way in which the term is typically used.
dragonwriter · 1h ago
> The 'communist' countries generally did these same things.
There's a reason that Communists that don't follow Leninism or its derivatives tend to view the countries that call themselves “Communist” (all of which follow Leninism or one of its derivatives) as only rhetorically socialist in system and substantively state capitalist at best, as they are run by a narrow and self-perpetuating elites exploiting the working class through, among other means, control of the non-financial means of production.
Der_Einzige · 1h ago
I hate that all the bluster about "socialist or non socialist" doesn't bring up the evidence for each side.
It's very much a "it started socialist but they were used and quickly purged from the party" situation.
They used the label "socialist" only early on for propagandistic purposes so they could destroy / substitute themselves for the socialist movement -- which was powerful and omnipresent across Europe. Germany had just gone through a failed socialist revolution and the largest force in civil society were social democrats and socialists, so using this language was useful for them, and early on they had people in their ranks who were trying to somehow fuse nationalism with some sort of socialism. Those people were exterminated.
All the NAZI leadership (after the knight of the long knives) openly spoke of their hatred of any kind of socialism -- philosophically and organizationally -- and of all socialists and socialists of all kinds were the first to be put in death camps. The entire moral and ethical framework -- the celebration of the nation and race above all else, the subservience to a singular leader, etc. reflect a hatred of socialist (internationalism, secularism, class solidarity instead of nationalism, helping the poor and weak, women's liberation) values which were considered "degenerate" and "Jewish"
(And unlike Stalinism/Maoism which also reflects similar outcomes in this case the goal is explicit and stated and propagandistically proclaimed rather than hidden under a layer of Bolshevik ideology)
So I'm not sure why libertarians etc (and recently Elon Musk) in the US keep repeating this assertion ("NAZIsm is socialism!) as some kind of fact. It only underscores a lack of knowledge of history, it's not some "gotcha", it's a self-own that only takes advantage of people who don't know the history.
vidarh · 42m ago
It's worth adding that the change of the name to NSDAP also happened before Hitler consolidated control and "Socialist" was added over his objections.
With respect to people repeating this idiotic claim, it dates at least back to the 70's in various places, seemingly as a counter for groups on the right that wanted to create distance from the nazis.
schmidtleonard · 1h ago
Ditto for the Niemoller poem. They love it so much as a template that most of them completely forgot what it said before they scribbled over it:
First they came for the Communists...
Then they came for the Socialists...
Then they came for the trade unionists...
Then they came for the Jews
ty6853 · 1h ago
All of which also happened in some 'communist' countries.
the USSR came after all of those (who weren't Bolshevik aligned) but the Jews, they did let the jews live but they closed many of the synogogues and many of them had to flee to barely hospitable fringe regions to practice their religion.
cmrdporcupine · 1h ago
Sure, and I actually wouldn't call the leadership of the USSR at that time (Stalinists) socialists either. It wasn't even that they wiped out those "who weren't Bolshevik aligned". The entire 1917 Bolshevik leadership was exterminated by Stalin by the end of the 20s.
(And frankly people who grew up in the Eastern Bloc in USSR-times were not taught this in history class, either. Or they got a distorted version of it)
What was established there in the late 20s and early 30s was very much a return of many of the forms of Tsarist autocracy, but with a paint job.
"Socialism in one country" and the efforts around it was the re-establishment of Great Russian Nationalism and a cult around a leader as the motive force of everything. Underneath that there was some usage of aspects of "Marxist" ideology, so it's not nearly as clear as what happened in Germany, but it's not dissimilar.
There's a reason why the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was able to be signed.
vidarh · 53m ago
I'd be willing to consider them "socialist" in the way that Marx used socialism. There's after all a whole chapter in the Communist Manifesto dedicated to forms of socialism that were all wildly different ideologies, ranging from the utopian to the outright feudalist.
In that Marxist sense, that "socialism" has a very limited implication about a very limited set of concepts around putative public ownership of the means of production, one could call the Stalinists socialist. But by that use, then one should be aware that it's a trait of a set of ideologies that otherwise have pretty much nothing to do with each other.
And indeed, he called out the "return of many of the forms of Tsarist autocracy, but with a paint job" explicitly in describing "feudal socialism".
A later preface (by Engels, I think? I think it was one of the prefaces from after Marx death) points out that they used the word "communist" because the word socialist at the time had become largely associated with some of those ideologies that they did not want to be confused with. And of course "communism" has since become equally overloaded by ideologies so different their adherents have pretty much nothing in common.
Already before Lenin died, there was already the notion of "left" and "right" communism, as two incompatible camps that were not even single ideologies, but sets of ideologies. Hence Lenin's "'Left-Wing' Communism: An Infantile Disorder" that covered a range of "left" communist ideologies (because the Bolsheviks were considered "right" communists)
I tend to think we forget that things we enjoy today were won through, sometimes violent, struggle, and we take them for granted, what makes it easier to lose them.
To me this is one of the most important celebrations.
We have every type of revolutionary tv shows, including some fairly rediculous ones (e.g. divergent) but almost never strikes. The only exception i can really think of is that one episode of battlestar galactica (maybe give star trek ds9 half a point because they treated it in such a silly fashion).
For reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Association_(Star_Trek:_De...
Although it might not be the type of movie you’re looking for, because the miners lost.
Same reason all sorts of other stuff has gone nearly extinct.
Mainstream entertainment media is subject to the same eyeball-hour based economics as everything else and that content doesn't resonate with enough people.
It's also one of few depictions of strikes in US TV that treated the strikers with substantially more sympathy than their counterpart. Incidentally, this is another parallel to Babylon 5, which also had a strike, and were the negotiator that was brought in was a really unsympathetic caricature.
DS9 even managed to paraphrase the Communist Manifesto, and still painted the strikers in a good light.
It speaks to the foundational values of the franchise being widely accepted that the strike episode is what is remembered as the labour thing, as if a lot of people would like the results of an egalitarian society but have been taught that the means to achieve it are somehow controversial.
— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_US_states_by_minimum_w...
In the biggest state without the federal minimum wage, Texas, individual income percentile at $20k per year ($10 per hour/40 hour work weeks/50 weeks per year) is 20th percentile. That will capture all the part time workers too, so it seems the lowest priced labor in most US labor markets is disjoint from the federal US minimum wage.
https://dqydj.com/scripts/cps/2024_income_calculators/2024_i...
"Scott Bessent believes federal minimum wage should not be increased" - https://www.nbcnews.com/video/scott-bessent-believes-federal...
That's why labor gets 1 day and owners get 364.
(Just realized that's roughly in the ballpark of CEO-to-worker wage ratio. ~290:1)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5zQpN28xa4
> Progressive Kristallnacht Coming? > I would call attention to the parallels of Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304549504579316...
I prefer to raise awareness to the plight of the rich with music:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ej7dfPL7Kho&pp=ygUNc2F2ZSB0aGUgc...
The Voice of America is the only media outlet I've ever heard actually celebrating Law Day. An old job of mine had a poster on the wall for Law Day that VoA had actually printed and given away for some reason.
[0] https://en.biginfinland.com/vappu-spring-fest-finland/
So US Labour Day is an intentionally captured, defanged, neutered version.
Here's a large amount of reading matter to explain. Fill your boots.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/europe/#wiki...
Gallons of ink have been spilled talking about how the two types of populism are similar -- horseshoe theory -- but the reason why it's a horseshoe and not a circle is exactly the issue of capital ownership.
They were more akin to socialist party bosses -- do what the nazis say at the directed wages, prices, and quantities and then take your socialist party boss cut off the top.
More to the point, it's the type of bunk that is being pushed by the people currently in power to argue that every vaguely left-leaning person in the USA is actually a secret communist revolutionary and should be crushed by any means necessary, law and constitution and common decency be damned:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unhumans
JD Vance put a blurb on this book praising its core argument. This is how the fascists currently in power will expand their extrajudicial purges from hispanics to political opponents. It's dark shit, and you're helping them.
I'm under no illusion Nazis meet the wet definition of communism, which IIRC when distilled down to just the 'water' without impurities doesn't even have a central government.
Collective ownership in practice means state ownership. And state control.
Fascism has state control as well.
It is, however, an inherent, defining feature of fascism.
A defining trait of a national state is sovereignty over a territory and control of the use of violence in that territory, and those are both traits that multiple socialist ideologies explicitly reject.
Whether or not you believe any of the variations can work is orthogonal to the point that socialism is not a singular ideology, but a spectrum of ideologies that where many reject the state, and so the existence of one is not a defining trait of socialism.
Insisting that it is, is a bit like insisting that capitalism is the same as fascism because capitalism too rlies on a state (to enforce property rights). If anything, capitalism is inherently tied to the existence of a state because of the need to enforcep property rights that many socialist ideologies reject. But very few socialists would equate capitalism with fascism (some would).
Fascism comes with a deeply stratified class hierarchy. Collective ownership in the socialist sense is incompatible with this.
You mean the actual similarity.
The ideological aspect IS the superficial part when you put it into practice.
Did you come to the understanding you have through careful consideration and thought? Are you open to re-consideration of the ideas you have about this?
Just because the American education system defined "socialism" as "when the government does stuff" doesn't mean that's what it is, in, y'know, the actual real historical world.
Revolutionary socialism / communism = a working class movement trying to overthrow the dominance of the capitalist class. So putting the working class above all else.
Fascism = a nationalist movement trying to dissolve all class and other distinctions into the nation. So putting the nation above all else.
The role of the state may look effectually similar in the practices of both, but the reason and practice for doing so is entirely different.
At least in Marxism-Leninism, you have a party vanguard implementing a dictatorship of the proletariat that could be somewhat analogous to the bureaucracy of the fascist state, so I'd say that the practices are fairly similar in at least some situations. The major difference would be that Marxism-Leninism advances the idea of that bureaucracy also using some sort of democratic process to operate and make decisions, but as we know, that can be easily undermined with a cult of personality.
In that perspective, we can look at progressivism, communism, and fascism as different perspectives on technocratic managerialism — all of whom experienced similar problems, eg, purging/sterilizing undesirables via eugenics programs.
They weren't socialist at all. It's a common talking point from modern fascist apologists (I'm not accusing you of being one—this nonsense leaks out into the popular culture and just gets picked up by accident, too) but it has zero basis in reality if you run down a list of what they did. It doesn't remotely look like what an even lightly-socialist-leaning government would do. Such claims are always supported by pointing at the name (LOL. LMFAO.), making things up, and maybe cherry-picking a couple things that seem socialist-ish if you squint really hard and don't put them in context. There's some early rhetoric about it, but zero action, that was just a cynical appeal to populism, usually accompanied with attempts to redefine socialism itself to mean not-socialism—they wanted the word, but not the meaning.
Labor unions in communist countries were directly controlled by the Communist Party.
Of course there is no real communism, there is no real socialism, and there is no real fascism. Nevertheless if I'm talking to some guy on a street I'll understand what he means if talks about com-bloc eastern europe or asia, and I understood OP was referring to communist countries in the way in which the term is typically used.
There's a reason that Communists that don't follow Leninism or its derivatives tend to view the countries that call themselves “Communist” (all of which follow Leninism or one of its derivatives) as only rhetorically socialist in system and substantively state capitalist at best, as they are run by a narrow and self-perpetuating elites exploiting the working class through, among other means, control of the non-financial means of production.
It's very much a "it started socialist but they were used and quickly purged from the party" situation.
1. Evidence for socialism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beefsteak_Nazi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strasserism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_R%C3%B6hm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung
2. Evidence against socialism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mefo_bills
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Meeting_of_20_February_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrielleneingabe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freundeskreis_der_Wirtschaft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_sector_participation_i...
See for example this pamphlet:
https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/haken3...
All the NAZI leadership (after the knight of the long knives) openly spoke of their hatred of any kind of socialism -- philosophically and organizationally -- and of all socialists and socialists of all kinds were the first to be put in death camps. The entire moral and ethical framework -- the celebration of the nation and race above all else, the subservience to a singular leader, etc. reflect a hatred of socialist (internationalism, secularism, class solidarity instead of nationalism, helping the poor and weak, women's liberation) values which were considered "degenerate" and "Jewish"
(And unlike Stalinism/Maoism which also reflects similar outcomes in this case the goal is explicit and stated and propagandistically proclaimed rather than hidden under a layer of Bolshevik ideology)
So I'm not sure why libertarians etc (and recently Elon Musk) in the US keep repeating this assertion ("NAZIsm is socialism!) as some kind of fact. It only underscores a lack of knowledge of history, it's not some "gotcha", it's a self-own that only takes advantage of people who don't know the history.
With respect to people repeating this idiotic claim, it dates at least back to the 70's in various places, seemingly as a counter for groups on the right that wanted to create distance from the nazis.
the USSR came after all of those (who weren't Bolshevik aligned) but the Jews, they did let the jews live but they closed many of the synogogues and many of them had to flee to barely hospitable fringe regions to practice their religion.
(And frankly people who grew up in the Eastern Bloc in USSR-times were not taught this in history class, either. Or they got a distorted version of it)
What was established there in the late 20s and early 30s was very much a return of many of the forms of Tsarist autocracy, but with a paint job.
"Socialism in one country" and the efforts around it was the re-establishment of Great Russian Nationalism and a cult around a leader as the motive force of everything. Underneath that there was some usage of aspects of "Marxist" ideology, so it's not nearly as clear as what happened in Germany, but it's not dissimilar.
There's a reason why the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was able to be signed.
In that Marxist sense, that "socialism" has a very limited implication about a very limited set of concepts around putative public ownership of the means of production, one could call the Stalinists socialist. But by that use, then one should be aware that it's a trait of a set of ideologies that otherwise have pretty much nothing to do with each other.
And indeed, he called out the "return of many of the forms of Tsarist autocracy, but with a paint job" explicitly in describing "feudal socialism".
A later preface (by Engels, I think? I think it was one of the prefaces from after Marx death) points out that they used the word "communist" because the word socialist at the time had become largely associated with some of those ideologies that they did not want to be confused with. And of course "communism" has since become equally overloaded by ideologies so different their adherents have pretty much nothing in common.
Already before Lenin died, there was already the notion of "left" and "right" communism, as two incompatible camps that were not even single ideologies, but sets of ideologies. Hence Lenin's "'Left-Wing' Communism: An Infantile Disorder" that covered a range of "left" communist ideologies (because the Bolsheviks were considered "right" communists)