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Had this convo last night. Friend is confused as hell about what is left/right. Frustrating trying to undo years of doublethink.
The conversation wound up with this: How do you best raise a child? With one parent’s word being the only thing to consider like a god? Or with the help of aunts/uncles, siblings, family, doctors, teachers, community, etc, to help them form their own opinion? Then ask yourself why is it that everyone considering themselves “conservative” spends the majority of the time screaming about how each one of those things is the enemy.
Yeah, I have a terminally racist relative and was trying to explain to her why we should look after refugees. I asked her if her neighbor’s house burnt down whether she would invite them inside and offer them some shelter and comfort, and she agreed that “of course” she would. Then I asked about if it was someone from the next street over, and she immediately became hesitant about it. Sometimes I think as a species we just never psychologically evolved beyond living in a tiny village and fearing anyone we don’t know personally.
She saw where you were going. Or there is someone she’s racist towards that lives on the next street.
But this is the best way to both keep discussions level headed and root out the real cause of the opposition. Avoid the labels and names and just talk about general ideas, see how far they will go with “hypotheticals” that don’t trigger the reactions they’ve been embedded with. Even better, some street epistemology, often used with religion but it can be for any beliefs. The basic idea is to ask the person about their own beliefs and guide them in reasoning why they think that. It’s far more complex than just that, but that’s the idea, to let them come to conclusions themselves rather than some debate where their defense will come up and block any more discussion.
when talking to my parents, if I say “community” instead of “communism,” or “nobody deserves to starve” instead of “free food”, and “help vulnerable people” instead of “benefits” and “everyone deserves to feel safe from harm” instead of XYZ - everyone wholeheartedly agrees!
But if I let them go off on a tangent without guiding them, then they’re “anti woke” even though they don’t know what woke means
Some of us Americans are so hopelessly fucking stupid. Kudos to you; I’d have blown up at them and never spoken to them again at some point.
I love socialism but what is with North American kid’s love for communism? I assume you guys love the idea of it but you must know that the idea of communism relies on humans not being selfish and humans willingness to share the wealth and power which is not a reality. I say this as someone who has lived and grown up under an oppressive, communist regime, not just as someone who romanticizes it.
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Again, on paper. The moment you put together a communist government with humans involved, those same communist champions will give in greed and selfishness and “everyone is equal, except for me cause I help run things so I should get a bit extra and so should my family and relatives and friends” and so on. Again, communism is great on paper but has it ever worked as it was intended? Ever?
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sorry, my mistake, I totally meant to say I value “community” not “communism” ;)
(also, I’m not North American!)
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Ok, but why are you putting Cuba’s issues at the feet of the u.s? I get it, I mean Americans destroyed my country and killed my people by funding one side of a proxy war on my country, but the Russians funded the other. But I still blame my country’s leaders for giving in and for being bought. I blame Cuban leaders for the shit show that Cuba became.
Anyways, I’m not Cuban, but I grew up in a place where communists were every bit as brutal and violent as you get. So I have an aversion to a communist government, despite the good ideas it puts forth on paper.
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Cuba failing doesn’t mean communism failed.
Also add the word ‘capitalism’ in there. It’s like I don’t even get to finish saying the word before the people I’m talking to either zones out or start defending it with: “well there is no better alternative”.
We’ve tried less democracy and we’re all out of ideas!
… Doesn’t help that it described fascism as well.
I mean that’s, like, literally their name
People really need to read Marx man…
He literally described fascism decades before it was born. He said the contradictions of capitalism would cause people to look for solutions, and a “false” path people would find was that indeed capitalism had to be overcome. But that they had to return to a pre-capitalist life, return to the land and to feudalistic idealisms. Fascist Italy literally had “guilds”…
Marx said these “anti-capitalists” would see value in communist rhetoric, because they agreed with communists half-way. But they missed that the only solution is to move forward. That before capitalism, there were contradictions that inevitably led to capitalism, and it would just happen again.
Fascism is literally miopic anti-capitalism. It’s what happens to actual justifiable dissatisfaction and anger at the system without theory and understanding.
Yes, fascism really does sound like communism. It’s the goal, it’s how it’s born. It SOUNDS like communism, but has none of the solutions or the substance.
I have read Marx. I’ve also read Gramsci in the original Italian.
My point was just that “Fascism” comes from fascio - the binding of individual sticks together to make a stronger whole.
It’s literally “Sticks together strong”
Sure, but as others have said, that is just a basic political observation that most ideologies have made. Fascism is, as I said, entirely devoid of substance. Only the appearance of such.
“Sticks together strong” is as much a political statement as “water is wet”.
I honestly don’t see how literally all politics don’t boil down to “apes together strong”.
Some of them have smart apes manipulating the rest to use their strength against their own interest. Some of them have apes going together using their strength to enforce things we don’t agree with, like racist tribalism/nationalism. But it’s all a matter of people cooperating to enforce and otherwise enable what they think they need to, to meet their goal.
We currently live in a post scarcity world. Yes right now. The only reason we have poverty in today’s world is that it financially benefits an extreme minority of humans on earth. We currently can provide for everyone and still live the same level of comfort we have now, but imaginary line on graph must go up.
Funnily enough, even the fascists agree. The man who convinced me of that fact, and thus of socialism compared to social democracy, was Jordan “Literally a Nazi” Peterson.
In some rant of his he threw out some factoid to claim that population growth can keep expanding forever because “each new worker produces seven times more resources than they will consume in their life”
Regardless of the literal brain damage it takes to come to that conclusion from that factoid, the actual numbers aren’t far off. It’s a bit more complicated but the result is the same, a post scarcity society beset by parasites.
This isn’t true, if everyone in the world raised their living standards to first world countries, we would’ve already consumed all of earths finite resources many times over.
False. Not saying that we can change to a system that provides for everyone over night but there are no real resources scarcities. Just fascist that want you to think that way.
Man, it’s annoying what characters like Mao and Stalin (as well as America) have done to those words.
Evil spoon man 😢
🥄👿
scary socialism coming to give people a better life in general
Evil Mao almost doubling the life expectancy and having an average growth rate of 7% for decades 😢
D-didn’t he also destroy the agricultural system in place displacing millions of people and then destroy their cultural heritage? I might have missed a /s
I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic. But no. He didn’t.
Unless by “agricultural system” and “cultural tradition” you mean the semi-feudal system of pre-CPC China. Then yes, he did.
Now China has the highest percentage of home ownership in the world!
Hell, the word “union” is such a dirty word in tech that I’ve literally watched people complain about employee treatment, praise employees empowering others, while saying “I’m against unions in all forms, but (lists what a union is)”.
It just goes to show that branding is important. You can list something that people would 100% agree with, tell them it’s the bogeyman, and they’ll change their mind immediately. Call it something else, and you’ll probably have work councils (unions), community support (socialism), and premium health insurance (free healthcare).
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I got some rednecks to almost agree with me about socialism at a party once.
We were outside this quaint little town that was supported almost entirely by a cement factory. People in the town had been working there for three generations. The entire town depended on the factory for its existence. If that factory closed down the town would die.
But the person who makes that decision doesn’t live in the town. He doesn’t even live in this country. He’s just some rich dude in France who can wipe an American town off the map at a whim. Didn’t we fight a revolution to stop that sort of thing? Shouldn’t the people who do the work have a say in what happens?
I could see the dawning realization in their eyes just before some chud pointed out that was technically socialism and that shut down the discussion.
Not technically; explicitly. Not the garbage they’ve been shoveled down their throats all this time. Real change with real benefits to the workers. But I guess they don’t want that for whatever reason.
Could have been worse. You might have tricked them into socialism and then seen them turn it nationalist and give ownership to the police chief.
I find it funny that it costs $30k to criminalize a homeless person, and $10k to offer supportive housing. Yet we choose the expensive option.
Same with energy we have solar, and batteries… Yet we power cars with gasoline, we have hemp yet we make things out of plastics
how do we even undo that stigma?
almost everyone i talk to who hates marxism doesnt even know what it is.
We got:
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Double down and fix public perception/rectify the definition
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Switch to a different term
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Avoid terms all together, focus on ideas and values
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Demolish any positive opinions of capitalism
Maybe there is more options, but to me #2 is probably a losing strategy, as conservatives/fascists will continue to dirty whatever new label is made, just as they’ve done with everything else. It’ll just get us back to square 1.
A mix of #1 and #3 is probably the move. Get everybody on board with the ideas and values, while making slow progress in the background on #1.
#4 is another one that can and should always be worked on
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I hate marxism, but that’s because I’m a Mutualist and agree with Proudhon’s criticisms of Marx.
I think it’s pretty easy to talk about the sort of political policies you want to see without feeling the need to attach political ideologies to them. You can talk about wealth redistribution all day without ever mentioning socialism.
in sweden we have the concept of “folkhemmet” (the people’s home) which i like a lot for this reason, it’s a big part of why sweden is such a nice place to live.
Sweden has something like 20% of housing under housing cooperatives which I like as a Mutualist who doesn’t like shareholder ownership or government ownership.
I usually just talk about worker and consumer cooperatives and if I have to name an ideology I say Mutualism.
In your view, what differentiates Mutualism from Anarcho-syndicalism, and on the other end, from Anarcho-communism?
Isn’t the goal to use words that won’t scare the libs?
Based on @[email protected] 's other comments under this post Mutualism seems to be a label they really identify with, and I was just curious about why. I consider myself an anarchist but don’t really read theory, so I guess I’m trying to make sense of the differences in these hyper-specific labels.
@Flatworm7591 careful with the ape holding the fasces…
Have you thought about using words like “unions” or “The New Deal?”