It’s good these handful of right wing journos are attributing this widely popular sentiment to the left
I am literally Ilyich over here hating my Healthcare Insurance Company.
Communists in america should probably drop left/right language and adjust. Oppose both of them, say you're not part of either, you reject it, you're the working class and the other side are the UnitedHealthcare CEOs of this world.
I guarantee this will open up a lot of people with this approach who have been primed and trained to reject even hearing the left or the woke all this time.
Lead with class war. Once the foot is in the door they'll learn more about the real left later anyway, the important thing is getting the foot in the door to begin with.
Communists in america should probably drop left/right language and adjust
I actually don't agree. I don't see how conceding your language use to the right wing is good or helpful. "Union? What do you mean union? This is no union, it's just a collective... I mean social... I mean a worker defence association. Yeah, we're a worker defence association!"
How are you going to then get these people to approach [insert your brand of communism/anarchism] if they're still primed against the terminology? What I think we must do is to achieve victories for the workers and to call things by their name, and when they see that the scary communists/anarchists are actually the ones fighting for them, maybe they won't look so scary anymore.
Not saying everyone should reivindicate it and that you dont have a point, second thought is a good example of what you say, but IMO it has to be the starting point of a pipeline, not the general attitude of leftism in the US (or Europe for that matter)
Absolutely. It muddies the water and makes communism and third wayism sound like the same thing. People are too ideologically stupid to know that they're not, so it's not a great idea to leave that door open.
yes crypto communism is not the right approach. it just postpones dealing with people's brain worms around the word which should be done sooner rather than later. and lying to people is not a basis for a movement.
I'm just saying don't lead with it.
Imagine you're a door salesman and you lead with selling communism instead of saying something you 100% know people already agree with. One gets you in the door while the other gets the door slammed in your face. Meet people where they're at.
I flip flop between this mainly with how I've seen boomers agree with so many socialist talking points then short circuit when you call it what it is, socialism. I feel younger generations aren't as primed with it though and with material conditions sucking and worse off than boomers more open to being like "yeah we should destroy the capitalists cuss my rent ain't getting any cheaper either way". Anti communist brain worms only work truly on those that don't also have to constantly live in a continually declining living standard.
i don't agree at all that crypto-communism is the right approach, people need to learn that it's not a bad word. we disdain to conceal our aims, etc. I don't think lying to people is any basis for a mass movement. young people are more ready for it than you think.
I agree with you in principle, but the semantics surrounding left/right/communism/capitalism have been so profoundly and intentionally corrupted that they communication becomes impossible.
Basically you need to build a coherent ideology before you can tear down preconceptions.
I'm not saying crypto-communism, I'm saying don't lead with it.
Imagine you're a door salesman and you lead with selling communism instead of saying something you 100% know people already agree with. One gets you in the door while the other gets the door slammed in your face. Meet people where they're at.
of course we can be strategic with language use when agitating, but i still disagree with your suggestion that anybody "drop left/right language". that strikes me as ceding language definitions to liberal ones which i think is always a mistake. the goal should be to educate people so they can see through the liberal/right wing occlusions of political language and frameworks, not to engage with those as if they are legitimate.
The trouble is there will be a lot of working class USAmericans, like there are Brits, whose ideology will side with the wealthy….for whatever reason.
I kind of agree, but I don't think we should directly say we dislike the left but we should shit allllll over the Democrats and Republicans and say that neither of those parties are what we represent. Many Americans believe leftism and communism = neoliberalism. We must criticize Democrats and neoliberals constantly.
The thing is that "left" and "right" in the minds of americans mean "democrat" and "republican" or "woke" and "chud". Left means pro-lgbt, anti-gun, anti abortion. Right means the opposite of those things.
This isn't the correct starting point to get a foot in the door. As soon as they hear these words they immediately conjure up all the cartoon caricatures they have in their heads and shut down. The starting point, the correct one, is actually what the nazis have been doing for a decade now that we've been obliviously not really paying attention to. It's "I'm not right or left I'm against both of em".
This got them a foot in the door, and once their foot was in the door where people were actually listening to them without shutting down they brought them all to their side.
Now, I'm not saying necessarily to oppose the left. But we have got to learn what works and what does not and it does not work as an opener. It only works after establishing rapport first, after they already agree with most of what we have to say.
Fascist scum like Matt Walsh are worried they will be shot just like that CEO. They're scared.
It boggles the mind that this fuck is a right-wing personality just because they want to capture the pedophile demographic.
It's impossible to me to imagine sharing an opinion with him. It would make me feel physically ill.
You'd think he'd learn after Shapiro got roasted, but they work for the same boss and get the same orders lol. Nice round number to get roasted by his own too.
It's as if culture wars and the alike don't work if there aren't anyone to divide, which is the part that the Ben Shapiros and the white supremacist losers such as Matt in the picture seem to forget.
it's absolutely nonsensical for these right wingers to be happy about the CEO being shot.
he was doing exactly what their political ideology encouraged and allowed him to do. it makes no sense. this dude is just as evil as any other CEO who is condemning people to slave labor or whatever other example you'd want to give, so why is it that if people said those CEOs should get the same treatment, most right wingers would lose their shit? i think personally it's because their lives are detached from the suffering all the other CEOs cause, but they probably had a family member or friend personally die due to how health insurance works in this country. so they aren't even being based or anything, they're just selfishly saying it's bad when their family suffers the consequences of capitalism with no care for anybody else who has to in other ways.
he was doing exactly what their political ideology encouraged and allowed him to do
Most people don't consciously have an explicit political ideology. They have an assortment of things they do or do not like and will call themselves whatever their favorite talking head (or the status quo if it is working well for them) describes themselves as
That talking head is usually chosen based on which of the collection of likes/dislikes the person finds most importantThis is what Zizek calls a Pure Ideology. One in which there is no self-reflection to align ones values with an ideology that actually has those values. Instead the material conditions of the world around them make it impossible for them to do so.
It's for the same reason JD Vance promises to his followers that Trump will "stick it to Wall Street". Your average Trump voter isn't a capitalist ideologue. They don't like billionaires, they don't like their bosses, they don't care if CEOs get hunted in the streets. They're pro-capitalist solely because Fox News says it's good, they haven't the slightest clue what it means.
You gotta remember that most people aren't complete freaks and are capable of empathy. There's a very good reason nobody knows what capitalism actually entails and why there's so much anti-communist fearmongering. Because if people actually knew what these words meant, many right-wingers would change their minds.
So many conservatives don’t think the problem is systemic to capitalism or that’s this is how the system is meant to work. They honestly believe it is just greedy people abusing the system and ruining capitalism for everyone else.
There’s still an education gap, as well as the empathy gap you mentioned.
