:I-was-saying:
edit: tbh i mostly think about cuba because its like right there
whomst amongst us has not Hans? let them cast the first :cocktail:
I think about Bolivia because they recently survived getting Chile’d. Pretty worried if Biden will go after them harder.
if he doesnt want to id be beyond wildly surprised. biden is a cia stooge in a way that trump simply is not, so the u.s foreign policy is going to be set by the worst imperialist warhawks possible for the next four years.
gonna be sanctions and posturing for sure, cause there always is, but like you said, bolivia managed to take the country back from a u.s backed fascist coup already, so wtf else is the u.s gonna foment?
:MAS:
Bernie said that Cuba had a good literacy program and got negged by the news for months over it. None of the others will ever dare to fly half that close to the sun of praising historical or existing socialism.
Because Bernie showed there's nothing to be gained by making that argument, at least right now.
Do we want to win, or do we want to hear people say nice things about the USSR?
Mainstream media will never say anything nice about socialists anyways, it doesn't matter how you package it.
The packaging of an idea matters a great deal. You can get people to agree with all sorts of socialist principles, but if you start talking about socialism a lot are going to punch out.
This isn't to say we should never utter the word "socialism," and your point about the futility of completely catering to mainstream media is a good one. It's really about picking the right battles, and figuring out where the benefit of talking about socialism as socialism is worth the flak you'll inevitably catch from it. I don't think Bernie really picked anything up from his Cuba comments, and he got a ton of overtly-negative coverage over it. It's difficult to underestimate how rabid U.S. anticommunism is.
Here's my take on this argument:
Imagine you're in a debate with a capitalist, and you say some shit like "I agree with you that the USSR, and China, and Cuba, and Vietnam, and Laos, and Venezuela, and Yugoslavia were all bad, but here's why we should do communism again anyway." You're not convincing anybody of shit with that terrible discourse. Left anticommunism makes you sound extremely weak, and every time you engage in it you're shooting yourself in the foot.
If we want to change the conversation about historical and existing socialism, and I believe that that conversation needs to be changed in order to further our goals of socialism, we need to start by having a large enough cohort of people saying without qualifiers that the socialist countries were good that that opinion can enter into the mainstream discourse.
Left anticommunism makes you sound extremely weak, and every time you engage in it you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
Left anticommunism is bad, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about politicians not proactively mentioning those countries, or at worst reframing the discussion when those countries are brought up in bad faith as obvious bait. No one who throws "bUt VuVuZeLa!11!!" into a conversation actually wants to have a serious discussion about the shape of the Venezuelan government or economy, and no politician is going to change minds on that, unless maybe they're the president. I'm fine with politicians recognizing unfavorable rhetorical territory and choosing to fight elsewhere.
we need to start by having a large enough cohort of people saying without qualifiers that the socialist countries were good that that opinion can enter into the mainstream discourse.
I agree. The reason I kept emphasizing politicians in the first part of my comment is that they're not the right ones to lead the charge here. They have something to lose by engaging in that fight, and victory over U.S. anticommunism (take a step back and think about how monumental of an undertaking that is) is far enough off that they should be focusing on more immediate, more concrete policies that affect people's daily lives.
But you and I, and other leftists on the ground? We don't have an elected politician or a potentially-useful political career to tank, and we can get into the type of extended, personalized discussions that are necessary to deprogram someone suffering from anticommunism-by-default. That's why I'll personally go to bat for socialist states all day, but I'm not going to blame the likes of progressive Democrats for not getting into the weeds about the good done by Chinese land reform.
is this the successful strategy of Bernie's campaigns I keep hearing about? First world succdems are global parasites as much as their rightwing counterparts.
Literally "soshialism is when the gubment does stuff, the more stuff it does the more soshialism it is; when it does a real lot of stuff, that's communism."
During Marx's time, and I think up till the Russian Revolution, the word socialism and communism were interchangable. They meant the exact same thing.
When I hear socialism: :ak47: :amerikkka: :hammer-sickle: :weird-bolshevik:
Socialism is when your neoliberal ghoul prime minister is hot and guilds a pipeline while wearing colourful socks.
but you dont understand if the workers have healthcare and we start calling social democracy socialism and capitalism socialism for the rich, then we uhhhhh???? we get real socialism?
I met an American over the summer who hopped a train out here and got stranded. He legit believed that Canada was socialist. People don't know what words mean.
We hear socialism & don't think about socialism. Big generational difference.
Their health insurance system is on par with US's, but tiny bit better for lower income levels
Populated heavily with chuds, only difference with US chuds is they are too spineless to be racist to your face
Their banks heavily fund arms development
World's shittiest companies put their HQ's there to take advantage of tax evasion and lax legal system
Their banks happily take money from world's biggest douchebags and only block access to money when shit hits the fan
Upsides are social security is better than US for unemployment, de facto minimum wage is fairly good, good investment in public transport etc.
I wrote a big essay about how much I hate America from the perspective of "foreign relations". Maybe I'll post it another time, but I'll just say that America is so cruel and depraved to the workers of the world and I think about that before I think about all the cool shit that Americans stand to gain from socialism.
I was feeling spicy when I wrote it, so I wanted to cool down: lest I be put on a list. With a cooler head tomorrow, I've realized that there's no list that I'll be put on that I'm not already on. But in case it isn't obvious: this is an RP for my Minecraft Earth server. The player who crafted America has been very rude to the rest of us in the game. 100% parody and any other interpretation is a falsity.
"This is so America-centric too. I think of capitalism and I think about the millions and millions of people murdered for things as trivial as banana prices. I think of the depravity with which America talks about itself as a peace keeper. I think about the burning of oil when there's a surplus and the food that gets thrown away to preserve the price. I think about the callousness and single-mindedness with which climate change is ignored. And the plastic flooding the shores of Haiti. Or how about America being the only country in the world to drop a nuclear weapon on a civilian population because they didn't want Russia to fight the Japanese and get a better spot at the table? How about the rehabilitation of nazis and their integration into American empire? When I think of the cold war, I think about how it started with the missiles America put in Turkey and the extent to which they increased their nuclear stockpile before the USSR defended the rest of the world against them. The shit that you can point out in a history book or on official sources doesn't even scratch the surface of all the conspiratorial, off-the-records shit that probably happened for the petrodollar. These people are fucking ghouls and their actions are inextricably linked to the furthering of economic control by the few people at the top. Maybe he thinks about capitalism as working a part time job in the summer so that he could pay for college and have the equivalent of $30k leftover, but that's not what happens in 2021 and that's not what ever happened in the rest of the world.
I also think about the health outcomes in Cuba and their exporting of doctors. I think about Castro surviving the yapping hounds of the CIA. I think about Mao doing the most comprehensive wealth distribution the world has ever seen. I think about Lenin beating the odds and getting concessions through force. I think about how much shit South America has to endure while all the while being pressured by a puppet UN. Or how about China shrugging off US sanctions and military bases while showing successes in central planning? There's a lot to be said about all of these projects and the horrors they see, but holy. fucking. shit. America's leading export is arms and horror. The least America can do is cease to exist instead of helping right any of the numerous wrongs it has done in defense of its capital owners from day fucking 1. It is only with respect to this that I think about how violent, depraved, and unnecessarily cruel the austerity of capitalism is for the citizens of America."
