Minister X wrote:I find what you leave out so instructive!
danivon wrote:The recognition that there are different classes and that they have competing interests is not new or confined to socialism, but the desire to reduce those differences is a large part of what inspired it.

Reduce the differences? How gentle and nice. How innocent. I always thought that a large part of the original motives of socialism were to reverse, not reduce, the differences; that socialism was (and has always been?) hostile to the upper classes. Not so? I'm misinformed?
Reverse? No. That would simply mean a new ruling class. Reduce is the right word. Reduce to zero.

Now, socialism has always been antipathetic towards the ruling classes. Revolutionary socialists, and in particular Communists and Anarchists have always been about removing the ruling classes with violence.

Us democratic socialists prefer to do it over time, through consent.

Perhaps the last 30-odd years of total opposition to socialism has all been based on the misunderstanding that the idiocy you were involved in as a youth was not actually socialism?