Just to clarify, Im talking about my face to face interactions with people. I know social democracy is imperialist, unworkable, and doomed to fail. But I have trouble articulating why socialism is the only way forward. I can point out all the problems with capitalism, though.
There’s too much baggage associated with the S word; people immediately point to 100 billion dead vuvuzela. If I had to think of the biggest stumbling block to convincing people, it’s the controversial history associated with socialism. And I just don’t know enough about each individual “atrocity” and “failure” that happened in order to debunk it all. I feel like in order to convince anyone, you have to know basically the entire history of every socialist country by memory. And if I cared enough I could probably learn, but then I give into my pessimism and think “what’s the point? The people are too propagandized to convert.”
Probably the wrong comm to post in, but I give up trying to think of the right one to mark this as.
It depends on the person.
If I feel like I’m in physical danger, I voted for Trump. I don’t give a fuck. An Uber driver literally told me last week that, “anyone who voted for that dumb son of a bitch [Biden] needs to be taken out back and shot”. I didn’t vote for Biden, but am visibly queer and apparently this was an appropriate escalation from complaining about gas prices.
If it’s someone you meet casually who isn’t involved in local politics or something, frankly, your stated politics are much more a centerpiece for discussion than they are a statement of intent. Liberalism, etc.
It it’s some who you feel may recur in your life and actually act based on your answer to the question, the further right they are, the more likely I am to play word games and state positions than use any words. For what it’s worth, this is a core tenant of early union organizing (don’t say the U word) so I don’t view it as incompatible with socialism in particular or with working class politics more generally. You can’t control what people associate with a word, but you can get better at stating your case issue by issue.
And then if this is someone you’re relatively close with, you can be up front and just try to be the person in their life who they associate with “socialism, but reasonable” and you can work on familiarizing them with the actual positions and history gradually over time. Real organizing and radicalization is about building strong social bonds through a mutual understanding of shared oppression.
Yep. If you're an American like me, it's very possible that giving it a name like "socialism" is actually unhelpful. Americans have such absolute brainworms regarding that word, they seem to just completely shut down once it's mentioned. If it's someone you'll interact with more than once, if you start just talking positions they will in all likelihood think you have some good thoughts if they too are working class. Build up that trust and eventually if you decide to give it a name they may actually consider that this "socialism" thing isn't as scary as they were led to believe.
I’m sorry that you are put in that position. I sorta know what that’s like. Hopefully it isn’t too often.