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.
Communism is an idea. Just as capitalism is.
What fucked up things people do with that is an entirely different problem.
You can have an oppressive communist regime. You can also have an oppressive capitalistic regime. Both could be really good and beneficial for everyone.
Heck, even a dictatorship could be a good governing system given a wise and benevolent dictator who has the best of all in their mind.
The problem with all of these economic, governmental and societal systems are humans. All of those systems require a specific set of properties from humans in order to work well. The problem is, that not all humans meet those requirements. There is no system which takes humans as they are, with all their good qualities and all of their faults, to get the best out of humanity for humanity.
From an engineering perspective, this is really stupid. But it's immensely difficult as well. There are no simple solutions to the complexity of humans and their interactions. Which is why systems with self-correcting mechanisms might have an advantage. For example, democracies. However, those too have many pitfalls to address.
Point is, communism is not inherently bad. It can be good, if no one exploits it. Even capitalism can be good, if no one is greedy and exploits others. There's a lot of ifs. Improve the system or change it. Whatever might be better. But I don't think it's as simple as blaming it all on one core idea of a system itself, rather than to look how badly it was implemented.
sorry, my mistake, I totally meant to say I value "community" not "communism" ;)
(also, I'm not North American!)
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 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.
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
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.
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.
He materialist approach of Marxism misses far too much of what motivates humans to be viable.
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.
@Flatworm7591 careful with the ape holding the fasces...
Have you thought about using words like "unions" or "The New Deal?"
Would the apes be together if we had an anarchy? 🤔
Yes. You should read some basic anarchist theory, it's all about working together.
Anarchism, not anarchy. It's the left wing variety of Libertarian (although the term Libertarian was originally synonymous with anarchism). So ideologies like Syndicalism, Distributism, Georgism, Mutualism, and some forms of Communalism are Anarchist in the economic sense as they don't rely on an authoritarian state owned economic system. This is why I get annoyed when people equate capitalism with free market and socialism with state-ownership when that's actually the authoritarian-anarchist axis. Many anarchist ideologies like Mutualism have a free commodity market, but disallow a capital market.
E Plurubus Unum
I don't like memes that use a fasces to describe leftism.
Call it the other name for a bundle of sticks then. Starts with the word for a British cigarette, ends with got.
Extreme leftist trying to sound reasonable to not be immediately ostracised by real people, challenge impossible
It's really a winning strategy by the left. As long as the Nazis let their fascist flag fly, the left look normal.
If you don't confuse and scare people with ideology, I think you can meet them on a personal level.
I support moving the overton window this way.
