"BECAUSE ALL OF THESE COMMUNISTS ARE RUNNING THE BIG BUSINESSES" -an actual thing I've heard a man say in the Midwest.
I'm under the impression these people play politics like sports and it's more about their 'team' winning and any actual ideology plays second fiddle.
"Blackrock is communist because they have a diversity equity and inclusion policy and are taking over the world so they can enforce it!"
Is one I've seen.
I tried my damnedest to explain to Nebraskans that the whole bud light controversy was hollow capitalist marketing but they're still convinced that the beer people are pedophiles now.
Is 'corporate communism' still a used phrase?
See, cuz, its communist because they control everything and the people at the top get all the money, and they use the money to influence society by paying off politicians!
Oh, like a mega church?
cue angry noises
its communist because they control everything
Communism is when the government corporation takes both your cows and pays you some milk.
It’s definitely all about attitude. Republicans have systematically worked to demonize and defund education. Nobody cares to be actually correct, or to find real truth.
They just want to listen to their own echos. They want to be pet and pat on the head and reassured for every hateful, lazy thought they’ve ever had
They get into the work force, (factory, farm, other blue collar jobs that are being exploited by corps) where they all complain about how stressful and seemingly fruitless their day-to-day lives are, and blame whatever the nearest and easiest target is.
Literal witch hunts. All the while getting bent over by the actual enemies - the cheats, the hateful, the liars, the lazy, the greedy, etc.
I mean ffs practically every religion out there points this shit out as bad, and yet everyone willingly sucks these types of awful people off, despite the fact. It’s mind numbing
edit: Fixed some shitty, aggro wording against my fellow working class people. that was shitty.
barely graduate highschool
Please don't equate a lack of formal education with this shit, in fact they probably did quite well in high school since it's more about conformity than education anyway.
I think you're right, this was more of an insult than it was stating facts, which isn't fair and just clouds my message - something I continue to struggle with. Thanks for keeping me honest, I'll make an edit shortly here
I used to live in central Louisiana. When I talked to the people I used to work with, it was very clear that they are in favor of what would be considered to be socialist. The MAGA folks really can be comrades if we just reach out to them like human beings and try to communicate to them on their level without being too condescending.
The hard part will be convincing them that people they don't like deserve basic human rights. The right wing religious propaganda has really taken hold of them in that regard.
I'm a big advocate for the idea that we need to start selling "manly socialism."
I want to see grainy low contrast posters of a guy in wrangler jeans posed next to an F-150 with a sledgehammer over his shoulder and text that says "You're really such a pussy that you just let some rich asshole in Redmond walk all over you? Real men unionize."
I want to sell solar power to midwesterners with video ads of rugged manly men getting off the grid. "My daddy taught me to do everything with my own two hands. Instead of suckling on the teat of that big ol power grid, I get my own from God's beautiful bounty."
I want videos of church goers saying "I'm voting for public healthcare because God told me to lift the poor and the weary."
I think there's real legs to this. Meet people where they are.
(And before anyone starts, I have no desire to break bread with these people. They hate me and everything I am. I have no illusions about that. But for real change to happen, it takes a village; even the parts of the village you want absolutely nothing to do with. I don't have to break bread with them to get them pulling in the right direction; I just have to help them see what's in their best interest.)
This is great! My husband has been suggesting gun sausage yoga where real men can be men, while also getting their stretches in...
I'd absolutely go to a place where I can hang out with dudes who also love shooting guns, eating sausages and doing yoga. And I don't even really do any of those things.
Reminds me of an old song "Union Maid" telling women they want a union man because "Married life ain't hard when you got a union card."
The MAGA folks really can be comrades if we just reach out to them
Just be straight, Christian, and white.
The hard part will be convincing them that people they don’t like deserve basic human rights. The right wing religious propaganda has really taken hold of them in that regard.
remember when mandela actually became president of south africa after spending 27 years in prison, he made a speech and said something like "the boers are no longer our enemy, they are our countrymen." Basically, they are our enemy now, because they've fallen victim to the propaganda that's been fed to them by the television they watch, the online communities they frequent, the churches they go to and the radio personalities they listen to. But if one can reach out to them, talk to them and get them to listen and hear, then it might be possible to deprogram them from those hateful stances they hold against people who are not like them.
For example, one can try to talk to them about immigration by asking why they don't like immigration. they might respond like "the immigrants take our jobs", which is the lie that is told to them so that they want to fight other working class people instead of focusing that fight on the people who actually are responsible for their suffering: the wealthy.
remember when mandela actually became president of south africa after spending 27 years in prison, he made a speech and said something like “the boers are no longer our enemy, they are our countrymen.”
But if one can reach out to them, talk to them and get them to listen and hear
Facts Don’t Change Minds – Social Networks, Group Dialogue, and Stories Do
The best way to break someone out of a partisan media death spiral is to cut the power cord to their television.
I absolutely agree that there are a host of people in a gray zone of misinformation who can be pulled back from the brink. But I'm not multi-billion dollar media mogul capable of saturating their every waking hour with counter-programming. And I'd be foolish to assert I could undo in a few short dialogues what they've ingested after decades.
If you look at what the Feds did with TikTok, that's the real working strategy. Cut people off from a contrary media diet. Shut down radio stations. Starve out newspapers. De-tenure professors with unorthodox historical bias. K-Street Project any lobbyist who won't exclusively back your people. Purge political parties of anyone sympathetic to rival views. Blacklist the Dixie Chicks and get Donahue fired.
That's how you shape the public discourse.
Not by politely asking your 60-year-old uncle to turn down the Michael Savage Radio Hour for a minute and reconsider his white nationalist views.
“the boers are no longer our enemy, they are our countrymen.”
South African here... a disturbingly large proportion of the "boers" don't see it that way - and it's been more than thirty years.
When I was a lad we used to say
the only reason to be Christian is to be in the closet with a priest
The other two were definitely musts though you would see “n-words beware” “no n-words allowed” graffiti on signs and others of that ilk. Even today you will find Swastika drawn on things around town
Been saying this for a while.
We have to work harder to communicate with some of these people. There's definitely a lot of right wingers that are straight up gone(genuine fascists/neo nazis who know what they're doing), but there's a lot that are simply brainwashed or fear mongered. Instead of laughing at them we should be trying to bring them back to the right path.
But how do you do that? We can try to convince and provide all the evidence in the world and we still get met with "deep state" and get told almost every scientist and doctor is part of a secret pact to make us eat bugs.
To say nothing of how difficult it is to talk to people who would rather you didn't exist.
"... reach out to them like human beings and try to communicate to them on their level..."
So which is it? Are we supposed to treat them like human beings able to have a rational, reasonable, and logical discussion, or do we communicate on their level of bigotry, hatred, threats, and violence? How do I lower myself to a level that wholeheartedly believes that certain races are subhuman and don't deserve rights, that females have a place and that place is subservient to men, or that homosexual people should be put to death?
I get that it's distasteful to give anyone their due when they have hate in their heart.
That said, people are mutli-faceted. We can engage with one another on one or many axes, and GP is suggesting that we pick and choose the ones where there is common ground. The key is to be mindful that this person is not your friend, but when it comes to some specific political point, they are aligned with you. Demonstrating that this is possible and fruitful is key to fighting back against polarization and black/white thinking.
The alternative is a permanently divided political landscape where everyone and everything is deadlocked, and we argue about wedge topics forever.
I don't know if any of that is possible when "alternative facts" are treated as reality and their guiding force is some rando on 4chan.
Hey, I hear ya - some people really are seeing the world upside-down.
I'm not saying it's easy nor that everyone is reachable. But what I am saying is that a lot of powerful forces have a vested interest in keeping everyone divided. Whose game are you gonna play? Yours or theirs?
"The MAGA folks really could be comrades if they weren't prioritizing cishet white Christian supremacist hierarchy over a functioning society."
Yeah I agree but that's kindof a fundamental difference of opinion that reaching out hasn't done much to change.
if we just reach out to them like human beings and try to communicate to them
That's going to be hard while they are pushing you into a mass grave.
You're not wrong - but you're ignoring the fact that this only applies to a certain amount of them. Unfortunately, there is also a portion of them that can only be reached through the use of force.
The MAGA folks really can be comrades if we just reach out to them like human beings and try to communicate to them on their level without being too condescending.
Oh my sweet summer child
This has been happening for decades.
Just the other day someone posted a video from the 80s when more strict seatbelt and drinking + driving laws came into place.
The chuds were all bleating about communism....
It was common where I grew up well into the 90s for people to go on about how seat belts “trap” you in a car during a wreck… as opposed to flinging you from it to die on the road instead, I guess?
My uncle survived because he was thrown clear!!
Everyone has a story about a guy who got flung clear. I've never met anyone who has actually been flung clear. I do have a friend who got trapped in a car after it flipped when her hand was pinned by a broken seat. But the seat belt saved her life.
Even more basic - I’ll bet none of those people had been in an accident serious enough to eject them in the first place. Who needs a seatbelt when you can just hold on?
One of my close friends from elementary school was a good argument for seatbelts. She lost her Dad when he was ejected from his Jeep while off-roading, and it rolled over him
I am personally a good argument for seat belts. I nearly died in an accident because I wasn't wearing one in the back seat. Luckily, I bounced off on the driver's seat, breaking half of my ribs in the process, instead of being ejected from the car.
A lot of that was infomercial TV grifting too. There were so many companies selling "emergency tools" to cut seatbelts and shatter windows a few years ago.
I thinks it’s really just normal human resistance to change. I do remember being resistant to seatbelt requirements, mostly because it seemed so unnecessary and uncomfortable.
Even knowing the statistics, I didn’t have family who had been in an accident where the seatbelt would have helped - plus of course I wore a seatbelt (in front). It was interesting that being in the back seat was always different somehow, but you also don’t always have inertial reel or adjustable belts, so I wonder if it comes down to convenience and comfort
Not all radical leftists are Communists. There are plenty of anarchists. There are even accelerationists, though those are rare.
Normally I don't have any time for stuff making fun of trump supporters. Vile as their views may be, most memes and comments I see in this vein make me feel uncomfortable - maybe it feels like punching down or making fun of the disabled, or maybe a lot feel classist? I dunno.
Anyway this I like. So thanks!
Well said. I haven’t felt exactly the same for the average meme, but when views are mischaracterized it can be frustrating. When someone so awful wins a presidential election, it’s time to try to pull apart the stupidity seen on the surface, and make a good faith effort to understand where it came from.
Sometimes it’ll be hopeless, maybe often. Blind hatred isn’t going to be too productive to analyze, but somebody moderately conservative feeling unheard in a “flyover state”… progress could be made there. Sometimes!
Probably. Does anyone really believe all the BS spewed forth by conservative politicians?
During COViD, I did have a bit of a discussion with an anti-vaxxer. He denied believing a lot of the extreme views, although said he had more conservative family that did. For him, it came down to being low risk as someone rural and not wanting the government to tell him what do. He also had a naive look at statistics showing Florida did pretty well without any precautions.
I didn’t have the statistics to give a closer look except to talk about some of the differences. I didn’t get anywhere pointing out that he visited more populated areas and was in Boston right then. I didn’t even get anywhere pointing out that they ran a home daycare.
So, I don’t know, definitely conservative, definitely in denial, definitely not able to look at the bigger picture. He denied extremist views but did seem to accept them as common background.
we laugh, but this is just incredibly sad. everyone is succeptible to propaganda (even you) and sadly the richest people have used that fact, plus a decent chunk of cash, to manipulate the most succeptible, least educated, and least likely to encounter counter-propaganda of those into believing their lie.
does that forgive their crimes? fuck no. but it speaks to the deeply corrupt power of capital and white supremacy, how it is used to keep down the very base that claims to support it.
Our biggest problem is that we started fighting back 20 years too late.
Right wing radio has been polluting their minds for decades and calling us Satan lovers and baby killers, and all we did was watch the Daily Show and chuckle away at the "dumb people"
Well... Those dumb people, poisoned by decades of propaganda, came of voting age, have infected all levels of government and now we're standing here with a pikachu face.
We have a huge uphill battle and it's going to be very hard, particularly because progressives are so easily fractured. We put up these ridiculous Puritan tests that no person can survive and we keep losing ground while the right lines up lockstep behind their candidate no matter how revolting, because 20 years of propaganda has thought them that no matter how vile Trump is, Biden must be JUST AS vile as him and even worse on top of it.
i agree but 20 years is putting it mildly. Overman and HUAC was almost a century ago and McCarthyism has been well and alive since.
a systemic disease has a systemic root. i wouldn’t put the blame on any one generation of leftists when capitalist white supremacy spans dozens.
I've heard that the idea for outsourcing labor came from observations American capitalists made of factories in the USSR, so maybe they're onto something /s
Check out Marcuse's 1969 "Essay on Liberation":
"By virtue of its basic position in the production process, by virtue of its numerical weight and the weight of exploitation, the working class is still the historical agent of revolution; by virtue of its sharing the stabilizing needs of the system, it has become a conservative, even counterrevolutionary force. [...] In the advanced capitalist countries, the radicalization of the working classes is counteracted by a socially engineered arrest of consciousness, and by the development and satisfaction of needs which perpetuate the servitude of the exploited. A vested interest in the existing system is thus fostered in the instinctual structure of the exploited, and the rupture with the continuum of repression - a necessary precondition of liberation - does not occur."
https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1969-essay-on-liberation.html
Thanks for the recommendation!
i like to think of the economic trifecta as a triangle.
People often tend to conflate communism and socialism down into one plane, but i don't think they're similar enough, socialism is more inverse to communism than anything. It's also more closely related to capitalism than communism (the modern western conceptualization of socialism at least)
to put it bluntly, communism is a subset of socialism.
i'm not wrong? socialism and communism are often more similar to eachother than capitalism, in the sense that they tend not to like private capital, but modern socialism is more like capitalism if it thought private capital should be collective capital instead, given how entities corpos, and businesses tend to work.
Communism as people tend to refer to is the usual USSR type beat shit or mao's china, modern china is more akin to authoritarian capitalism than it is communism, even though they claim to be communist. Even so called "socialist european countries" tend to be capitalism but without private healthcare and education most of the time.
you must not be very familiar with the concepts of ideological frameworks.
and modern political philosophy is much different than it was when the founding fathers were the ones writing it. The times change, it's important to keep that in mind.
Much like any government will, or at least it should be doing, to keep up with it's population needs.
idk man you were talking about political philosophy, i was talking about political philosophy. Seems pretty related to me.
Communism is when you get your work done, the output goes to the good of the group. It’s taken by the centralized power, then redistributed.
Capitalism is when you get your work done, you choose to sell or keep the output. Under capitalism, the scenario where someone else owns your work can only happen with your consent. It’s called “contracts”, and the consensual nature of contracts is why it’s called a “free market”.
So, to summarize:
Any questions?
I'm not sure I would call it consentual when you are strongarmed into a shitty contract because the other option is starving to death.
This tracks. Pretty much need to be a moron to think communism is a good idea, Trump supporters seem like a good match. Enjoy.
The meme says everything about you we needed to know - there's no need for you to add additional confirmation.
Well capitalism is like getting a blow job, it's something that makes you feel good. Communism is more like sucking dick, like something no one wants to do. Yeah, pretty sure I got this figured out.
Edit - this is political memes and we're all very serious
Communism is more like sucking dick, like something no one wants to do.
Speak for yourself. Plenty of people actually enjoy foreplay, you know.
If you like kissing, there's something similar about giving a blowjob. The lips are an erogenous zone and it's kind of the same soft sensation.
But if you insist on your comparison, capitalism is like forced deep-throating: cumming by making someone else vomit.
sucking dick, like something no one wants to do
When you assume everyone else's dick is as fugly as your own
Unfortunately it seems like those words have largely lost all meaning regardless of the political leanings of the user. So many times I see someone blame environmental destruction or poverty or warfare or whatever on "capitalism" and I wonder if they've ever heard of 90% of the history of humanity. You don't need capitalism for any of that.
Yes, who can forget the famous Babylonian mountains of plastic, or the chemical spills of 300BC. Ancient Greece was never the same after that.
Industrial productivity comes at the cost of the environment. It's just a fact that snark won't change, or who owns the means of production.
Like, that's just how mining works. You take stuff out of the ground and it doesn't grow back, and, spoilers, mine tailings were some toxic shit even in antiquity.
Logging at least has the option of reforestation but that requires humans to stop building on the clear cut land.
Even industrial pollution isn't a new concern. The scale might be, but traditional tanneries and smitheries would poison the rivers and land of cities.
Your comment is a good example of two of the classic global warming denial tactics.
You're claim about industrial productivity causing unavoidable damage to the environment is setting up a binary in order to pretend the badness is unavoidable. In reality, different industrial procedures have vastly varying effects on the environment. One procedure might have an incredibly small effect relative to another, but if we listen to your claim, we would lump them all together and shrug our shoulders because it's necessary to have industry in modern society.
And then there's the scale argument. Well, the scale argument is another kind of deflection. I think the background assumption is that because human beings have done things on a small scale for the past few hundred years, we shouldn't worry that things have been ramped up in the last half century. Of course that doesn't make sense because the world population has risen massively, and the effects of increased climate change end up causing irreversible damage, damage that wasn't even close to being caused a hundred years ago.
And finally, the fatalistic tone itself is a deflection tactic. In fact we have created a lot of legislation to fix problems created by pollution. We have successfully regulated a ton of environmental problems away. So if we're trying to use history as a measure of how to create the future, let's get even more regulation into place.
It’s also setting up the fallacy that capitalism is completely unregulated. We have tons of regulations setting up the marketplace that capital works within, and that should certainly include societal goals like “clean up after yourself”. You don’t get to abdicate your responsibility, then blame it on capitalism
Industrial productivity comes at the cost of the environment.
There's no industrial productivity that comes from sustainability. You can only harvest to exhaustion. And you can never give back any more than you take.
This is the nature of industry and not at all the nature of profit chasing.
Like, that’s just how mining works.
No mining but strip mining.
Even industrial pollution isn’t a new concern.
An unsolvable concern. Certainly not one that industrial recycling and waste mitigation can address.
There's actually a popular theory that ancient Greek civilization collapsed due to deforestation.
More recent and concrete examples: The Aral Sea, victim of the infamously capitalist Soviet Union. The Great Chinese Famine, precipitated by the notoriously capitalistic excesses of the Chinese Communist Party.
Pointing out the devastating results of communism attempts in the past is usually met with outright denial or disclaimers about those not being true attempts at communism, which probably has some validity. However the unfortunate part is that real, true communism simply can't work because of how selfish and tribal humans are, how easily they create enemies of others, in groups and out groups. Communism inevitably devolves into an authoritarian regime, which is an utter failure of the principle of Communism. People in this thread want to bash conservatives for being stupid and not understanding communism, but the reality is that most conservatives simply don't believe that it works. These irreconcilable views are all the evidence you need that communism simply isn't viable unless there is a fundamental change in how humans work.
So many times I see someone blame environmental destruction or poverty or warfare or whatever on “capitalism”
Can't imagine what the BP Horizon rig explosion or the economic emiseration caused by prison privatization or the MIC arms export industry would have to do with capitalism.
These people are probably just on too much TikTok.
So for example the Soviet Union never had environmental disasters, prison labor and slavery, or its own military-industrial complex?
Obviously bad stuff like that happens. The point is that it's not caused by capitalism, but by more basic and general human nature. The people who think "if only we could get rid of capitalism these bad things wouldn't happen" are being ridiculous.
So for example the Soviet Union never had environmental disasters, prison labor and slavery, or its own military-industrial complex?
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. So certainly not since then.
I'm a little surprised you didn't pivot to China. But then you might have to ask what they've been up to in the Gobi Desert or with their domestic air pollution or in pursuit of zero-emissions international bulk shipping
In fact China is one of the only countries set to OVERACHIEVE its climate goals by 2030
Obviously bad stuff like that happens.
If we're just running the numbers, we'll consistently find that privatization consistently increases the rate of pollution despite reducing gross productive volumes.
In that sense, capitalism is absolutely responsible for Net Increase In Per Capita Pollution.
It isn't merely that bad things happen. It is that in a private model, the economic benefit of production is given priority over the social cost of ecological degradation. Soviet central planned economies, operating as a holistic body, must account for waste. And while they can have a tolerance of it in pursuit of longer term goals, they cannot ignore ecological costs indefinitely. The Dengist industrial period is a perfect case in point. Although, under Lenin at least, the Russian Soviets gave ecological preservation a priority not known since at least Catherine the Great.
"Capitalism" in the functional sense is an ecological moral hazard. Westward expansion is uniformly recognized as an ecological blight, with a number of very plain incentives to wage war through ecological destruction, most notably during the Indian Wars. And plantation ecology was nearly as bad as its labor practice, with southern tobacco farming rapidly depleting the soil and causing crop failure that even 18th century rural aristocrats couldn't ignore.
These two economic systems are not the same in this regard.
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Irrelevant, they were around when the things I linked to happened.
I'm a little surprised you didn't pivot to China.
I've mentioned China in one of my other comments in this thread, specifically the Great Chinese Famine. I'm not interested in making an exhaustive list when a few counterexamples prove the point fine on their own.
My point has never been that only capitalist/non-capitalist countries do awful things to the environment or economy or whatnot. My point is the opposite, in fact. There's no particular correlation, people are selfish and short-sighted regardless of what economic system they're working within. Because people remain people.
Irrelevant
Might want to consult the recent history of plastics and the per capita rate of fossil fuel consumption before and after.
specifically the Great Chinese Famine.
The Last Chinese Famine? The one right before Chinese industrial agriculture ended famines in the country ever since?
My point has never been that only capitalist/non-capitalist countries do awful things
Whatever policy you have or practice you perform, privatization makes the ecological harm worse.
Once you decouple the cost of waste from the surplus of production, your industrial practices get worse.
That means capitalism is directly leading to excess waste.
Yes, the Great Chinese Famine, in which tens of millions of people starved to death due to botched agricultural policies under a communist government. A collectivist agricultural system, in which the farms were very much not "privatized."
due to botched agricultural policies
The botched agricultural policies in China were the same adopted in Western states for decades.
A collectivist agricultural system
Are you seriously arguing the problem with China in 1959 was a lack of landlords?
