Poor EJ, i dont know how he endured having to listen to all this incredibly dumb shit, i can barely stand listening to just those clips that are in the video

  • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
    ·
    2 years ago

    No, there isn't.

    This is the second time i've seen this take today. It makes no sense. I struggle to understand how even one person thought it was reasonable. This isn't just a situation where some people are doing communism wrong but they're still advancing some vaguely left line. This isn't like Bernie calling himself a socialist because he wants to pass Medicare for All. These are our enemies. There is not positive strategic value to allowing the enemy to control, pollute, and confuse the symbolic terrain. Those who are repulsed by the word "communism" will not be brought closer to class consciousness because someone who agrees with them in every respect calls themself a communist.

    To give an illustration, in the United States there is a well-funded and organized political movement, with an associated party, called "libertarianism." It is essentially a kind of rightwing ultra-neoliberalism. During the Bush administration, with the political left almost entirely absent, proletarian antipathy to state and corporate abuses of power were captured by libertarianism and funneled into support for GOP economic policies. They were very, very successful in this task. The anarchist left, which ostensibly has the historical claim on the label "libertarian," saw very little development during that same period. This continued until the open class warfare of 2008, leading to the Occupy demonstrations, during which the left failed to push a nascent mass movement in an active, organized direction against power, in part because it couldn't overturn the idea that the goal must be to return the markets to their natural state of purity as the right-libertarians claimed.

    • keepcarrot [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I agree with your overall point, but just a little pushback on a particular detail that bugged me (implied, comes up from time to time):

      I've seen people blaming Bernie for the misunderstandings of what socialism actually is, but tbh the mainstream conservative media line has been that anything left of Reagan is socialism and has been for a long time, and I think that's done way more than Bernie for muddying the waters.

      • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Yeah totally, I meant to bring up Bernie as a counterexample. He would fit comfortably in the socialist parties of Western Europe. Even if that's not saying much, I think he has been obviously beneficial to the messaging of the radical left by advancing a positive vision of a socialism that reorients the economy towards human interests and wellbeing. It doesn't solve our basic problem of the left having no influence or platform outside of Twitter and college campuses, but it opened the field for advancement.