-_-

Link so y'all don't call me a lib again.

They also like V*ush. Think "eat the rich" is a metaphor for taxation. And say Tankies turned them from Anarcho-Communist to a Neoliberal. Think the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact meant the Soviet Union was fascist. Like, okay, how fucking twisted do your priorities have to be that you dunk on a state that hasn't existed for 30 fucking years instead of, you know, your own state that is currently involved in who know how many fascist conspiracies. And that's it. I'm not going any deeper into their timeline. I'm too tired.

    • panopticon [comrade/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I've had the opinion for a while now, that Bernie's attempts to rehabilitate public opinion around socialism have done harm as well as good (but still probably a net improvement)... the rhetoric about socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor just adds to the confusion by conflating socialism with welfare, which only reinforces the reactionary fear mongering around welfare economics without getting people to think about their social relationship to the means of production and all the class interests and contradictions that spill out of that.

        • MarxMadness [comrade/them]
          ·
          4 years ago

          I don't see this. A ton of people who started moving left with one of the Bernie campaigns are now farther left than those campaigns. Doesn't that suggest that those campaigns were effective at eventually leading people to a better understanding?

            • TheOldRazzleDazzle [he/him]
              ·
              4 years ago

              What's a ton, 1000 lbs? So maybe 5-7 grown adults?

              If we count people in terms of biomass, yeah, I'm going to say potentially 10s of thousands of tons of people or more are further left now than where his campaign was in 2016-2020, which largely amounted to taxing rich people more to pay for free college and being friends with Joe Biden but having "very different plans."

            • MarxMadness [comrade/them]
              ·
              4 years ago

              Yes, a ton. Obviously we don't have a mass movement yet, but there are almost 100,000 DSA members now (and the DSA itself gives Bernie a lot of credit for that) and probably two or three times that many people who are to the left of Bernie but unaffiliated (or affiliated with a different org). And they're not just members as a bit -- the DSA has actually put people in federal, state, and local offices. There's something we can work with there, and it's growing.

                • MarxMadness [comrade/them]
                  ·
                  4 years ago

                  my local one has 3000 or so members, but their active membership is only around 2-3% of that (60-100 people attend general meetings and/or working groups)

                  This is good to be mindful of, but it sounds pretty typical of political organizations (it might even be more engagement than most political organizations see). Consider how many Democrats are in your city/county compared to how many show up to any sort of Democratic Party meeting.

            • MarxMadness [comrade/them]
              ·
              4 years ago

              I should think these things through a bit more before posting lol.

              Let's not get carried away here! Posting from the hip is the only way to fly.

              And you're right, the Bernie campaign itself didn't lead people to the left of it. What it did was provide people with an easy first step down the path to leftism, and put them in contact with people who could take them another step, and then another. Getting people even to that position is extremely difficult, so for me the Bernie campaign was an enormous net positive.

    • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      More than anything else in the world, the fact that they treat fascism as a socialist concept is one of the most disgusting things the public education system does. Just say you want to funnel anyone with a few IQ points into the nazis, why don't you? Like, they are all like "oh, how scary that they were socialist, that's horrifying and makes them weak" but also "the nazis were so strong we could only barely defeat them with the three strongest nations to ever exist. Also the soviet union was socialist and stronger than the nazis but don;t think about that holodomor 10 billion dead." I honestly have no idea what we were supposed to take from this distorted view of history.