For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
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luckily almost all the comments were pointing out how politically illiterate this is
i do love this guy tho who wrote a whole essay of just top tier reddit bullshit while putting on this tone like he’s the expert in the room explaining whats “really going on here” 😂
Fascism won in the west by destroying all the language required to fight it
You’re making a joke but this has always been the case, and it’s not just a west thing.
In mixed company I take very explicit care to phrase any political opinion I may have as the logical conclusion of some kind of technocratic or even corporate-style “data-driven” framework and I never use words like socialism, communism, anarchism, or even left. At most I might throw out something like “Marx is actually really interesting if you look into what he writes, even if I don’t agree with everything in there, I think he fills a hole in the way most of us were taught to understand economics”. Certainly not a more exasperated and admittedly defeatist honest opinion about how we’ve made unlimited artificial hell by allowing a very narrow and predatory view of economics define what most people think economics even means but anyway
You’d be surprised how much many people who have a kneejerk reaction to words they find “yucky” are willing to accept.
The US and the West are special in that overt fascism and overt evil opinions are exploding in mainstream popularity, but the average conservative person who isn’t in a death cult can totally understand how feeding people can cut crime in half or whatever. Online lefty stuff tends to be either way too cerebral or way too blunt, but most of us know the successful labor movements weren’t groups of philosophers or irony poisoned shitposters. They were normal people who grasped pretty straightforward ideas.
In my country the biggest “”socialist”” party is an ethnosectarian feudal family’s political arm, complete with hereditary political succession. So the word socialist is not always the best one to use, since socialists is shorthand for one feudal family’s entourage. Repeat ad nauseam. Maybe politics in the US have been completely fucked since the 1950s, but I assure you, politics here in Lebanon and in many other places have been beyond fucked for much longer.
There’s strength in being able to use the right words where it’s needed but political discourse is fucked in different ways in different places.
Same. I get chuds in my family to agree with the labor theory of value all the time. I just don't call it that.
I've heard this in spaces like this one for a while. I think I've had some convos where I've seen what you mean IRL. If I'm being a bit pessimistic, I think it's more likely that you're saying things that the person has been primed to agree with because the "close enough to socialism" signifiers you're evoking are things that are already recuperated. They'll almost certainly sink back into the status quo when the propaganda grants them moral license to settle back into a comfort zone, and when capitalism inevitably crashes into itself they won't be ready just because you nudged them left a little bit (which got translated into them watching Severance or Andor, being reminded of you, and letting the TV do the activism for them).
The obvious counter is to say, hey, I was a lib once too. But I was pretty young when I started to question it based on the kinds of arguments I use in conversation today: "democracy is good for politics, why not the economy?" "what if instead of giving endless money to billionaires, we used it to fix everyone's necessities?" etc which aren't really the question. Those things are just planting the seed and you hope that it will germinate into the right one, which I think would be better phrased as "Why should we just accept that the current order of society is the way it must be?" and is the question that lies at the base of any kind of radicalism. The central problem with this model is that you only ask that when you've lost enough faith in the system, because it inherently requires you to accept the possibility of everything going away. I believe that the older you get, it gets a lot easier to set that faith in stone, and that faith doesn't always look like religious faith, it can look super different, like
All of those are rationalizations that calcify in people as the trauma of capitalism starts to form callouses, and it makes me think that the usual thought we have that sufficiently poor conditions will radicalize people is not complete; conditions by themselves might not radicalize a population that has convinced itself it can't do anything. And that might sound like doomer talk, but I mean it in a more dynamic sense than it comes across: I also think that the opposite is true, there are already large populations that live in radicalizing conditions but haven't been radicalized, so we don't need to wait for the crisis to keep worsening. Instead, we need a nucleation point of organization for them to be shaken into some kind of action (though this is where the fight against counterinsurgency, especially in the global north, is most prescient since every org will be infiltrated).
literally 1984