Anytime I talk to a capitalist, they agree then think and say sounds like socialism. Then say socialism would be nice and can’t explain why capitalism is better.
His Hers Its
He’s She’s It’s
Man, c/me_irl has been on fire lately 🔥
I built this thing to assist reddit refugees: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-deep-lighthouse/
“Socialism is when the government does stuff. And if it does a whole lot of stuff, that’s communism!”
So let’s come up with a different name for it? Worked for the GOP with “election integrity” (aka “voter intimidation”).
Shareism? Fairism? Equalism? Commonsenseism?
So let’s come up with a different name for it?
National Socialism has been very popular of late. Maybe we try that.
Americanism? Force them to say they’re anti-american? On the other hand, they say they’re anti-anti-fascism, so maybe that won’t work.
But I think there is something to the idea of taking progressive ideas and wrapping them in a thin layer of american exceptionalism to get certain kinds of people on board. Don’t say “recycle to save the earth”. Say “only in AMERICA can we turn trash into COOL SHIT. FUCK YEAH! AMERI-CYCLE YOUR SHIT”
Anarchists: First time?
Everyone knows what Anarchy is. It’s when you run around in a big circle waving your arms and shouting “This is Anarchy!”
Also, “we’re abolishing hierarchies” is a very popular idea among people at the bottom of a hierarchy and very unpopular among people working their way up the ladder. That’s why younger people (especially high schoolers / college-aged types) and service-sector workers are quick to adopt it while the elderly and the professional class tend to revile it.
Well, people enjoy others having less rights so they have more.
“What do you mean I can’t have slaves farm cotton for me?!” - Yes it’s that simple, you just have to make one cynical joke.
People like the commodity fetish because it removes the act of consuming from the process of sausage-making.
I don’t think there’s a superabundance of people who explicitly want to own slaves. Even when slavery was legal, you had a large and outspoken contingent of abolitionists who revolted at the intimate presence of slaves and slavery within their neighborhoods. Anti-slavery sentiment was what fueled the Northern effort to win the civil war.
At the same time, if you can disguise the mechanism of slavery and divorce the public by distance from the brutality of the institution, it is very easy to win tacit approval for the fruits of slave labor. This is particularly true when you’re selling commodity goods to an impoverished underclass.
Slavery as a function of imperialism wins consent of the governed by guaranteeing them a minimum standard of living that their foreign contemporaries lack. Slavery as an act imposed on the immediate population brings reflexive disgust and active opposition.
When they shout freedom they mean freedom to not freedom from
Honestly, Idk why both can’t exist together. Socialism for poor and needy, but if someone’s pockets are full, you’re welcome to spend it on anything you like. Like socialism must be absolute for necessities, like food, water. Rest the government can decide.
Congratulations, you invented the „Social Democrat“ Keep kapitalism, but soften it up a bit.
Coworker: No way. That’d be socialism.
Me: Socialism isn’t a bad thing. Do you like having a fire department and roads? Those are collective funding of collectively beneficial services through government programs. Socialism.
Coworker: That’s different.
Me: No, it’s not. How is it different?
Coworker: That’s… Socialism is… Um… Yeah, well…
Me: No, it’s not. How is it different?
Well, for starters, my fire department and my road construction/maintenance are heavily privatized.
Socialism is simultaneously any public spending and also explicitly when nobody owns anything, depending on what they want to argue.
So, Socialism has never worked, but also, a fraction of the safety nets that Europe has is Socialism.
Ring-wingers. It’s good socialism if a billion dollar company gets a giant bailout from the federal government. It’s wellfare socialism if any of the 5,000 employees laid off by said company get any fork of unemployment…they should have planned better
The best things in our country are Socialist - public schools, parks, playgrounds, libraries, museums, roads, bridges, etc.
Getting rid of any Socialist influences means a society where the ONLY priority is making money for some rich guy. Want to have a picnic at the park? Go make money. Want your kid to go to school? They have to make money. You can’t afford it anyway.
The only people who can enjoy leisure time are rich people, because leisure is expensive, and only rich people can afford it.
The best things in our country are Socialist - public schools, parks, playgrounds, libraries, museums, roads, bridges, etc.
But you’re trying to explain this to people who believe the best things in our country are strip clubs, Disneyland amusement parks, Caribbean Cruises, luxury SUVs, and gold toilets.
But wasn’t it better when everyone worked 7 days a week and your children died in the mines?
that’s different because those also benefit corporations…
So do most others, and not even with many more steps. Fire department means fires are fought, saving structures, including corporately owned ones. Housing the homeless means they aren’t breaking into buildings to find a place to sleep, including corporately owned ones.
Most people support capitalist nations with strong social programs. They generally do not support full socialism.
Most people support economic policies if they think they’re getting a net-benefit from them.
If you can deliver propaganda to convince them that they are economic losers - particularly by reviling the popular figureheads of those economic policies - they’ll sour on the policies quickly. You can see this in MAGA-world on a routine basis. Trumpies will quickly go out of pocket for some get rich investment scam, while foaming at the mouth against private businesses they’re told are unfairly raising prices.
The issue is almost never socialism v capitalism in the abstract. It is consistently “what’s in it for me?”, with one’s personal savviness and educational experience dictating where you break on the socialism/capitalism spectrum.
I disagree, but defitions matter and people generally don’t agree on all political definitions. History has a lot of failed socialist experiments, but pretty much all of its successes were hybrids with capitalism.
History has a lot of failed socialist experiments
Every socialist experiment is the end result of a failed capitalist experiment. Often, a slew of failed capitalist experiments.
But that hardly matters in the here-and-now. We’re trapped in a brutal dictatorial police state governed by heartless sociopaths and their legions of dimwitted thugs. Trying to argue with ICE Agent Jonathan Ross over the finer points of economic policy won’t benefit you, because he’s paid very well to not listen and just keep firing.
Similarly, the pent up public desire for liberation, for democracy, and for a bit of social justice isn’t going to go away because you cooked up a spreadsheet showing the long term GDP of respective socialist and capitalist states. We’re well past the point of high minded academic bullshit.
all of its successes were hybrids with capitalism
Every successful socialist state has ended up having to do business with the prevailing global hegemony. Of course, you could say the same of the feudalists. Nobody got to ignore the knock-knock-knock of Theodore Roosevelt’s White Fleet a century ago and Trump’s US Navy hasn’t been any kinder in the modern day.
But in another hundred years? If China or India or Brazil become the prevailing global economic powerhouse, I have to wonder what hegemonic propaganda your great-grandkids are going to be regurgitating to justify their own status quo.
Maybe the solution is to just… stop saying its name?
If the ideas are extremely popular, but the terminology is extremely unpopular, the solution seems obvious. Cut it out with the scary Marxist words and express the ideas in less vilified language.
Liberalism tried that, it turns out it is just capitalism but with a few extra bonuses for the haves and a bit extra oppression for the have nots. It’s feel good capitalism. It’s also why people will argue about whether Nordic Capitalism is or isn’t Socialism. Just because they don’t call it socialism. But they have universal healthcare, progressive social rights, strong worker unions, universal free education. BUT, they don’t socialize the means of production, thus it is not socialism.
It turns out, that if a country historically gets rich enough from pillaging and plundering poorer countries, you can fake all the popular progressive policies without actually going into actual socialism. See also, Switzerland, or “never ask a Swiss bank how they got so rich”.
Sounds like the old fashioned Capitalist solution of a RE-BRAND is called for.
Well just call it Neo-Socialism, fuck it up a little so it isn’t perfect and doesn’t work as promised, but still makes money for the wealthy, and struggle with the poor implementation for another century, before we have another Civil War.
That’s called social democracy and we tried that already with FDR and the New Deal. There were 2 compromises; stay capitalist but with high taxes on the rich and heavy regulation, and make sure black people can’t benefit from the social programs.
Those 2 compromises doomed the project because after the civil rights movement successfully forced the government to extend benefits to black people the business community (which remained powerful because of the former compromise) was able to use the racist backlash to dismantle the social safety net and eliminate the taxes on the rich almost entirely.
If you don’t curtail the power of big business they will seize upon every opportunity to undo whatever progress you’ve made, and racism provides them a perfect opportunity.
I fully agree that the reconfiguration of our government will include the basic axiom that the government’s and money supply’s primary objective is to serve the people, not business or the wealthy.
Those entities will be made to understand they operate their businesses and fortunes at the pleasure of the American people, and the moment they start using their money to benefit themselves at the expense of the Citizens is the moment their corporations are seized by the government to be operated for the benefit of the nation, their fortunes confiscated, and the Capitalist criminals imprisoned.
After that, the rest will fall in line quickly. They work for us, not the other way around.
We’ve had periods in the US where the government passed powerful anti-trust legislation, broke up monopolies, and even nationalized certain industries. It should be clear from the current situation that this state of affairs didn’t last. As long as the underlying economic system allows people to accumulate wealth and then leverage that wealth into power no reforms that oppose the interests of big business will last. Even the Nordic social democratic countries are constantly having to fight austerity policies pushed by their business communities.
The only way to break this cycle is by collectivizing the means of production and abolishing private property (in Marxian economics this refers specifically to the means of production being privately owned and involved in an economic enterprise employing wage labor). I personally believe that social democracy can be an important step in the right direction, but if we stop there it just won’t last.
That’s been my approach with face to face conversations with some of my more right leaning (idiot) coworkers. Never, ever use the word “socialism”. It’ll scare em off. Describe its components and it’s amazing how much of of it they’re just on board with cuz it makes sense.
And that’s usually where I leave it… hopefully the seed takes root and they realize on their own later that all these awesome sounding things wrapped up into one package is socialism, but if it comes from me they’ll reject it immediately.
my more right leaning (idiot) coworkers
Tell em you heard Dump is becoming socialist by collecting money from everyone to support the Epstein class. Actually don’t use his name at first and say you heard politicians are starting a socialist movement to take everyone’s money and redistribute it to the people who own things so it can trickle down again.
I remember long ago when AOC first became talked about by conservatives. Fox News had popped up bullet points on the screen of some of the things she’d been talking about in her message to people, and then quickly removed them when they realized that without a label, even hard core Republicans might be okay with them.
A lot of the conversation about public policy has degraded to “Listen to this bitch, she sounds so fucking dumb, who talks like that? A dumb bitch, that’s who” and “Shut up, you’re poor and you just want everyone else to be poor”.
FOX took a minute to evolve from its William F. Buckley / Milton Friedman style highly academic bullshit to its modern WWE-style punching a nerd in the dick on TV and calling them gay incarnation. As a result, the reactionary social media has largely displaced them among under-60 conservative ahem “thought-leaders”.
They did the same thing when portraying Mamdani:
Don’t threaten me with a good time
And chose such a great photo of him as well, to go along with it, hahaha.
I’ve never seen a photo of this dude that didn’t look great though, tbh. He’s photogenic as fuck
Wait, Fox News framed them as bad things? Jfc I suppose it IS Fox News. Their viewers are stupid as fuck.
You know we’re fucked when Make the world a little less worse for some people is enough to send 1/3 of this country into a shitfit.
That’s how they do it. They convince everyone that LGBTQIA+ people and immigrants are the reason everything sucks, so we need to sacrifice everything in order to deal with them. Then when someone says “I want a bunch of good things that everyone wants, and also protection for LGBTQIA+ and abolishment of ICE!” they see those last 2 things and immediately throw out everything else that they would love to have, because that’s the sacrifice they’ve been conditioned to make.
Brilliant take
What a bunch of dummies. Or maybe an inside plant. lol
I have no gf, but you have gf. In socialisim we now have shared girlfriend.
Am I socializing right?
Or is it more like you get her front side. But I get the back side?
Can I trade a cheek for a boob?
I have no gf
This checks out.
Naturally, objectifying women is the best example you could argue againt socialism with?
If you have debt, are you saying it’s like someone else owns your gf?
It’s now OUR debt, and some Chad’s girlfriend.
Until you say it is name.
How hard can it be learning that “it’s” is the contraction of “it is”?
Also, are these people aware that the word “its” exists in the English language?
If you see an apostrophe with a pronoun, it must be part of a contraction.
its—possessive adjective of it
it’s—contraction for “it is”
Stupid English.
We should have never discarded the genitive case.
Its*
