Damn I can't believe she isn't openly Stalinist in a country where pisspig boomers think Bernie Sanders will personally execute them in Central Park
"We" can say it but an elected House rep who may or may not believe it herself probably can't if she wants to stay in that position.
I mean yeah? That is what a liberal would do. That's what we expect from her.
But it would be way more useful to criticize her and pull her left considering her popularity with young voters.
what the fuck why didn't AOC tell news man "Turn America into Vuvuzela" >:(
And was established due to radical socialist pressure. Same as all the good shit Sweden has. Or the minuscule good things America has for that matter.
They have the NHS and no one thinks of them as socialist. She's trying to normalize national healthcare, I'm guessing.
She said "what we see in... the UK." As in, a national health service. She's making common sense shit palatable to libs, there's no reason to turn on her just because she's avoiding preconceived notions Americans have drilled into their heads.
Arguably, in fact, if you say "I want socialism" to someone who you know has a completely ass backwards idea of what socialism is, that's a lie, isn't it? Even if it's a truthful statement, you're knowingly misleading someone.
That said, I don't think AOC is going to lead us to communism or anything. But to me there's no doubt that she's a good actor who's trying to secure positive change for a lot of people.
Arguably, in fact, if you say “I want socialism” to someone who you know has a completely ass backwards idea of what socialism is, that’s a lie, isn’t it? Even if it’s a truthful statement, you’re knowingly misleading someone.
This is an interesting take. If you wanted to clearly communicate that you wanted socialism to someone who immediately associates the term with poverty from siege warfare and bureaucratic degeneration, you would have to explicitly spell out the correct definition. This means saying you democratically-controlled, centrally-planned economy. It means you want with publicly owned companies and workplaces, with workers' councils collectively making decisions w.r.t. production and distribution to solve problems and satisfy urgent social needs that privately-owned, profit-maximizing firms cannot.
If you need to be snappy, "I want democracy in the workplace" is a good way to put it. It's both fast and non-misleading.
well you see in britain they have single-payer healthcare that they're systematically dismantling and she wants in on that
In response to that specific question, she might have just described what socialism is and why we need it. She could also have pointed out why the framing of the question is bullshit.
I’m not like shocked or shook by what she said, but I do question the agitational value of being asked about socialism and then effectively pointing to more capitalism as the way forward.
Most Sourh American countries are white majority, at least out of their mid to upper classes. They do have a substantial population of color including Amer-Indians kbut a significant portion of South Americans are Spanish or Portuguese speaking tanned Europeans
She's supposed to play the State Anthem of the Soviet Union and then slap Anderson Cooper right across his Vanderbilt face.
Me: If this electoral strategy is going to have any value, it's going to require challenging the American perception of socialist states.
Libs: No! Americans have to have direct material improvement first. Then they'll be more open-minded about socialist states. So let socdems say they want to be like the UK or Norway.
Me: So are people in the UK or Norway particularly open-minded about socialist states?
Libs: 🤨
Changing perceptions about socialist states has to come from the bottom up, not the top down.
Look at how Bernie's entirely truthful, extremely moderate statements on Cuba's healthcare and education programs was wielded against him. That's what happens when political leaders try to change the tune about socialist states in a country that's been strongly anti-communist for most of the last century. We have to have those conversations on the ground first.
Telling your buddies that Cuba is great helps. So does a prominent politician saying the same thing. Running away from the history of socialist projects doesn't help because:
- Enemies won't believe you anyway. People will think you're basically Castro even if you drape yourself in the NHS.
- It alienates socialist international allies.
- There's no clear point at which you can flip the switch and say "actually we meant Cuba this whole time. We were just lying." This alienates the base that you've been building.
- It serves as an antagonist to the formation of class consciousness.
Right. You have to actually make the argument and build power on a solid foundation. You aren't going to trick people into socialism.
If my goal is to actually build working class power to move towards socialism, I'd rather start with 10,000 committed communists than 1,000,000 socdems and left-libs.
You can’t convince someone to suddenly accept overt socialism after years of saying “actually, we don’t want that.”
What if you convince them to buy into Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and greatly expanded labor rights? What if you eventually get them on board with worker ownership of the means of production, all without mentioning socialism by name?
At that point you have no need to get them to accept overt socialism. You have socialism in practice; who cares what it's called? This is the start of that process -- getting people to support something like M4A.
I imagine every socialist nation would care because the US would continue to condemn them
We're so unimaginably far off from that point it's ridiculous to speculate over.
The point is that we should be focused on policies that help the working class, not winning academic discussions over which country is socialist or which country is good. Delivering something material for the working class is the best way to get them to listen to you about socialism, anyway.
“this is GOOD socialism, not that BAD socialism"
But she's not saying that. She's not even talking about socialism -- she's talking about stuff like Medicare for All.
The question was a bad-faith attempt to suck her into a debate about foreign countries most people in America know nothing about; it's a derailment tactic. It's good she didn't take the bait. If you talk about universal healthcare -- and overwhelmingly popular policy -- people listen. If you talk about the Soviet Union (at least in this context) people tune out.
If you tell your buddies Cuba is great, the worst that can happen is they'll think your political opinions are shit. And because you get to have an actual exchange with them -- i.e., whatever you say about Cuba isn't filtered through network media and social media until it becomes nothing more than "@hagensfohawk loves commie dictators" -- you have a shot at breaking through superficial talking points and getting your buddies to reconsider what they know.
If a politician says Cuba is great, well, we know what happens -- Bernie did it not even a year ago. He gained zero support from the left that he didn't already have. All it did was launch a few fresh media cycles of "Bernie's a commie!!1!!!" And while you're right that they'll call you a commie anyway, playing the same hits gets old after a while and loses its effectiveness. Giving them fresh meat can't help and only hurts.
The only way to change that is if you and I have enough conversations with our buddies to where "hey, Cuba's actually good" becomes a majority opinion.
I guess if your only goal is to win office, then sure, saying Maduro is an authoritarian won't hurt. But if you goal is to build class consciousness and move towards socialism, then it definitely hurts.
She's not saying Maduro is an authoritarian here, though.
But if you goal is to build class consciousness
There are dozens of better ways to build class consciousness than talking about countries no one in America really knows about except in talking point form. Talking about universal healthcare instead of getting into a struggle session over a country that hasn't existed for 25 years is one of them.
Well obviously giving everyone a history lesson doesn't in and of itself build class consciousness. But running away from your own history while celebrating social democracy (which is crumbling elsewhere by the way) doesn't do it either.
I get what you're saying, but I don't think most people think like this. The people who she's speaking to certainly don't think like this -- she's speaking to people who don't know what class consciousness or social democracy even are.
When people (who aren't terminally-online leftists like us) think of AOC, they think of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. Rather than fighting endless battles over which countries are good and which countries are bad before even getting to the part where she pushes polices that might actually affect people, she's saying "look, this stuff is what the countries you think highly of already do." It's not running from history because it's not a historical discussion, it's a policy discussion. It doesn't matter whether those countries are good or whether other countries are also good. It's strictly about saying this is not scary, it's good.
Just off the top of my head she could have called bullshit on his framing and segued into talking about socialism: what it is, what it's goals are, how it is relevant to the vast majority of the American working class, what a socialist methodology in building a new world would imply, etc. But she'd have to have those hidden power levels to begin with, which she doesn't. What you see is very often what you get with these things.
Yeah and that all starts by telling a former CIA spook Vanderbilt descendant in an interview on a corporate news channel that the Soviet Union was good, actually.
It'd be better if she never sat down with clowns like this, but I genuinely don't know what you think the strategy should be when talking to a dumb dumb mainstream virulently anti-communist organization like CNN.
Edit: lmao downbears don't mean I'm wrong, clowns.
You're not gonna convince them lol. Too many online leftists seem think that the most important thing in building a socialist movement is making sure that everyone has the right ideas about everything, and that means we need to debate with libs about whether or not Fidel and Lenin were good.
This is what happens when you spend to much time arguing on reddit and twitter.
When/if Socialism comes to the US, it's not gonan come because we convinced people that Mao was actually cool, itll be because we built a movement that improves peoples material conditions. Arguing about historical figures from foreign countries has almost no relevance to building a working class movement. Most working people dont give a fuck about Mao.
I don't get why on this site and especially on the old sub, AOC gets like 10X the shit we give Bernie - who almost never gets criticized other than for bowing out when he did and endorsing Biden - when both their stated policies are functionally the same thing.
Probably because she's a lot younger and still has plenty of time for her politics to get much worse.
But yeah, Bernie deserves more criticism for many of the same reasons. Both are Dem entryists presenting themselves as "democratic socialists" when the limits of their imaginations are somewhere in the neighborhood of FDR New Deal liberalism and the right wing of social democracy. Bernie deserves even more shit than AOC does for promoting a sort of US-American social imperialism, consistently supporting the growth of the military-industrial complex.
lol imagine not contorting your face in to the vivid image of Iosif Stalin before answering yes to that question
Imagine calling yourself a leftist politician and not instantly beheading the Vanderbilt interviewing you 😎
all of those places are lurching rightward and dismantling social democracy you fuckin'... god damn
Ah yes, not paying lip service to socialist states. The most cardinal of cardinal sins.
