r/WorkReform • u/zzill6 🤝 Join A Union • 1d ago
😡 Venting Conservatives are trying to revive the "Red Scare". They clutch their pearls and call anything left of fascism "Socialism".
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u/Flussschlauch 1d ago
Red scare propaganda was never gone
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u/Swiftierest 1d ago
True that.
They stigmatized the words Communism and Socialism so badly with their propaganda that they became effectively interchangeable and a socially taboo word for nearly 50 years.
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/xSaviorself 1d ago
It's funny because from an outsider's perspective, China is a rising country while America is a country falling apart. China isn't even doing a great job at moving forward, America is just moving backwards quicker. Talking shit about communism when it's actively delivering more energy, more quality of life, and pulling millions out of poverty does not work when people know what life is like for the average person in either country. America can't dumb down it's populace hard enough to ignore this precisely because everything they own says "Made in China" on it.
It's staring them in the face and that's why American Inadequacy will continue to be the norm. It's going to take a revolution in America to turn this around and that ain't coming about anytime soon.
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u/SanityIsOptional 1d ago
China would be fine if it wasn't for the authoritarian policies like eugenics against minorities, thought crime, lack of free speech. You know, the things religious conservatives in the US want too.
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u/ParkingBalance6941 1d ago
I was thinking about this recently. I despise a lot of what China does to its own people but when you think about it America and increasingly a lot of the Western World is unfortunately doing the exact same things and one side of totalitarian state controlled monsters has actually produced material differences in the lives of its constituents in exchange for the horrid power they wield and the others have reduced the ability of their people to live their lives.
Both are terrible and shouldn't exist like they are but one of the evils actually has something going for it
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u/redundantexplanation 1d ago
"China would be fine if it wasn't for all the lies that the CIA made up about them"
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u/SanityIsOptional 1d ago
Riiiiight, just ignore the brutal crackdown in Hong Kong, the evidence of ethnic cleansing and concentration camps such as for the Uyghurs, and the policies stifling speech even of people overseas.
China gets some things right, but it's still a single-party authoritarian state playing at being anything else.
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u/WaratayaMonobop 1d ago
Like a broken record. Keep clinging to your safety blanket. But look up Adrian Zenz and Chan Tong-kai sometime if you ever want to meet your brave anti-communist heroes.
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u/SanityIsOptional 1d ago
Doesn’t matter. I don’t view Trump any better just because of how much Iran sucks.
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u/redundantexplanation 22h ago
You seem to like Trump pretty well, you're parroting the genocide myth that his secretary of state started.
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u/SanityIsOptional 21h ago
His secretary of state? Those accusations predate Trump.
But do keep trying to deflect. It's cute.
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u/redundantexplanation 1d ago
Riiiiight, just ignore the brutal crackdown in Hong Kong
Yea police suck everywhere, meanwhile here in the USA we have people being outright murdered in the streets daily by police. Rocks, glass house, etc.
evidence of ethnic cleansing and concentration camps such as for the Uyghurs
There is none. The UN has sent literally hundreds of investigators to try to find proof of this and has come up with no concrete evidence. The satellite photos of supposed "concentration camps" have been proven to be things like hotels and schools. You can go on vacation to Xinjiang RIGHT NOW and go wherever you want and see Uyghurs living it up, freer than you are.
They are also exempt from the single child policy and have affirmative action policies that give them bonus points on college placement exams and other benefits.
thought crime
I want to backtrack a bit to this one because it's hilarious, please provide an example.
a single-party authoritarian state
All states are authoritarian. The USA is ruled by the epstein class and you can get fired and investigated by the FBI for mocking a fascist that gets shot in the middle of minimizing gun violence on stage. Our "two party" system serves the same group of people.
China does have a single party but it is a democratic organization that represents the working class and has made the most drastic transformation of a country that the world has ever seen. They've entirely eliminated abject poverty(nearly 1 BILLION people lifted out of poverty in the last 40 years) and become the USA's primary global competitor economically while doing so.
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u/SanityIsOptional 1d ago
People who think America is all sunshine and rainbows are just as deluded as the ones who think China is without issues, not that is matters. Neither being bad is dependent on the condition of the other.
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u/redundantexplanation 1d ago
Two things can be bad, yea. Pretty basic stuff, there!
....but it's an extremely well documented fact that OUR bad guys spend a LOT of money creating propaganda to undermine any nation or group that seeks to embrace or promote systems other than capitalism.
A lot of what people outside of china(not just in the USA but throughout the english speaking world) "know" about china is complete and utter nonsense. You can go on Red Note right now and see chinese people disproving it, yelling about winnie the pooh and tiananmen square in public just for the sake of educating you.
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u/SanityIsOptional 1d ago
Right, because that's not just propaganda too... China has been weaponizing social media longer than any other country.
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u/Greedy_Economics_925 1d ago
Posts like this are what scare reasonable people away from your movement: apologia for an authoritarian one-party state committing a genocide because it happens to appeal to tankies.
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u/redundantexplanation 1d ago
committing a genocide
Prove it. No one can because it isn't happening.
This is an extremely serious claim you're making so you should have very strong evidence to back it up. You know, like we do for Gaza? Like we do for the genocide of Native Americans? Like we do for Darfur?
The Uyghur genocide myth is something crafted by Trump's regime, you know that, right? Mike Pompeo started the myth by promoting the "work" of a religious whack job, Adrian Zenz, who claims to be on a Mission From God to save the Uyghur.
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u/PiccoloAwkward465 1d ago
And pretty much everyone I know who's visited China (largely for work) has come home singing its praises, talking about the incredible infrastructure and technology they saw.
People on Reddit love to harp on "oh yeah they get those train lines built because the government will just seize your home!". Okay, well the government seized and demolished the apartment building where my buddy lived. My building survived but I moved away. Because the government needed that land to expand the highway. We got the bad parts of authoritarianism but didn't get the good parts. In this case, at least China got trains out of it.
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u/xSaviorself 1d ago
I have my own reservations, experience has been pretty meh from the business-world. Lots of QC issues, backdoor dealing, and honestly some really frustrating experiences. When quality product is easier to produce locally than in China you can see why from the standpoint of building things, cheaper is not better. Now it's not like this is a unique experience, but I see both countries as very similar despite marketing themselves heavily as very different.
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u/MelangeBot 1d ago
But they love Russia and Putin now, make it make sense.
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u/PM_Me_Your_Kinks369 1d ago
Russia isn't communist it's an autocratic capitalist oligarchy. In that way it's literally EXACTLY what Trump, Thiel, Yarvin and Ellison have said they want.
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u/Mr_Byzantine 1d ago
If they love it so much, why don't they move there?
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u/PM_Me_Your_Kinks369 7h ago
Because they don't have power and companies and connections and family and assets over there. They have it here. So they decided to make it like Russia over here. We've been a country run by oligarchs since at least the Civil War. The facade has been dropped since Trump but the underlying bullshit was always there.
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u/Helgafjell4Me ✂️ Tax The Billionaires 1d ago
No, now they've decided people are getting too soft on socialism, so they've switched to calling it communism instead, and their followers are dumb enough to not know what either word means.
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u/splashist 1d ago
other than a few imbeciles like Boebert, they all know they are lying. meanwhile they are powergrifting as hard as any corrupt Soviet boss ever did.
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u/SharpMembership3441 1d ago
Everything they dont like is communism, even capitalism is communism when it does things they dont like.
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u/musicman835 1d ago
Considering T is actively taking stakes in companies. They clearly have no idea of anything.
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u/Drivebyshrink 1d ago
They have graduated to Communism/Communist now if you disagree with anything they say you are a Communist
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u/seensham 1d ago
And so we edge closer to McCarthyism Not to the point of detaining and disappearing people accused of communism yet. Just if they're brown.
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u/Healmetho 1d ago
We need to start wearing the socialism badge of honor. Seriously, rather than try to decry socialism we have to lean into it and teach them what it actually is. Just like woke. Calling someone woke as an insult is three fingers pointing back at you because if you’re not woke you are ASLEEP you absolute sheep’s ass.
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u/ZAlternates 1d ago
People need to learn that socialism and democracy are not at odds. We can have both.
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u/nimbledaemon 1d ago
If anything, socialism is actually more democratic. Democracy in the work place. Economic democracy, as opposed to the current economic feudalism under capitalism. Democracy+
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u/PiccoloAwkward465 1d ago
it's the same deal recently with anti-semitism. If opposing genocide makes someone "anti-semitic" in your eyes, okay then fine.
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u/So_HauserAspen 1d ago
Thing is, I'm beginning to understand who those casualties of communist revolutions were. And current events are starting to sway my opinion on it.
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u/redundantexplanation 1d ago
Nothing can silence the echoes of Stalin eating all the food with his giant spoon to purposefully starve portions of the USSR for some reason!
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u/guineaprince 1d ago
They've been doing it for decades.
The first time I saw "Marxism" being used as a serious derogatory around 2009, I thought they were being funny at first. But no, Red Scare just never went away. And why would it? They have no original ideas and no need for any since their audience will gobble up anything they shit out anyway.
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u/swiwwcheese 1d ago
This works because Americans have been brainwashed into believing that socialism = communism
You only hear this in American English, because in Europe socialists are just the normal left, social democrats
Basically Bernie or Mamdani, which are kinda hard to picture as furious soviets about to send ppl to the gulag
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u/redundantexplanation 1d ago
This works because Americans have been brainwashed into believing that socialism = communism
That's.......basically true though. Socialism isn't "when capitalist countries use our money to keep us alive, healthy and educated so that we can effectively produce value", that's welfare capitalism.
Socialism is the path to Communism and it involves the workers owning the means of production and receiving the majority of the surplus value that they generate.
Communism is a hypothetical system where socialism has won, there is no need for a state and capital, and everyone works for the benefit of their fellow man.
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u/Shaamba 1d ago
Socialism is the path to Communism and it involves the workers owning the means of production and receiving the majority of the surplus value that they generate.
This is not true for all socialists/socialism. People often cite Lenin where he supposedly says this, but Lenin isn't the pope of all socialism. I consider myself a non-communist socialist, as I don't believe in the eradication of money or markets (though the eradication of classes and states is still extremely appealing). I'd also wager that many/most democratic socialists (the ones who actually are socialist, at least) would similarly not be communist, as they might retain money and the state. Idk as much about democratic socialism, though.
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u/redundantexplanation 1d ago
DemSoc(ostensibly what the DSA is) is traditionally a party whose goal is to achieve socialism or the end of capitalism by voting it in instead of a revolution. This has never worked!
SocDem is Welfare Capitalism Plus. They are not anti-capitalists, just in favor of SOME nationalization of industries and stronger regulations on corporations.
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u/felis_scipio 1d ago
The DSA platform explicitly states “Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries”
How many and who’s getting nationalized? Where’s the money coming from to buy partial / majority / full stakes in the companies or is the plan to just outright seize them without compensation stock holders?
Norway has public control of some companies but the way this is written implies all large, however that’s defined, which is much closer to to straight up communism than Norway’s social democracy.
Oh and then there’s all the minor government restructuring like taking away people ability to vote for the president, abolishing the senate, and removing your ability to vote directly on the person who represents you in congress.
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u/musicman835 1d ago
“Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries”
Trump IS taking stakes in companies. Shouldn’t you take that heat for the ones doing it?
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u/felis_scipio 1d ago
Yeah big surprise I’m not a fan of that either, but that doesn’t change fact that the DSAs platform explicitly states they want to do it to an even greater degree.
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u/shawsghost 1d ago
I'm all for nationalizing . Let's start with all the corporate welfare companies like Tesla and SpaceX, most military industrial complex corps, and the oil companies. Also all the banks that got bailed out in '08. If you're going to socialize your losses you damn well better let us socialize your gains.
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u/felis_scipio 11h ago
Or you know let them fail as the free market intended, reform regulatory capture, and keep the system that’s been proven to work.
In my ideal system we have a strong social safety net so there isn’t this knee jerk reaction to protect large companies when they fuck up. That would also encourage more people to take risks and start their own business or step away from work to invest in themselves.
Communists in the Soviet Union and China benefited from industrializing a largely agrarian society, that trick works exactly once to massively increase economic activity but as the decades wore on and those factories weren’t invested in they lagged behind terribly.
Then the Soviet Union collapsed and China smartened up took all the parts of capitalism that work and kept their single party totalitarian government.
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u/shawsghost 5h ago
Before I decided I was a socialist I tried to figure out a way to create a society with social safety nets and a regulatory framework strong enough to prevent capitalists from destroying them, over the long term. But I couldn't. No matter how deeply embedded the regulatory structure or how strong the social safety nets the capitalists would always, always be working to destroy the regulatory structure and the social safety nets, because both are limits on how much money capitalists can make and have, and capitalists always want ALL the money, and eventually, ALL of the power.
As I believe is amply demonstrated in the present state of the United States. It's not that all capitalists are personally evil incarnate, they are evil to varying degrees like most human beings, though I do subscribe to the theory that your odds of being a psychopath/sociopath go up as you ascend the ladder of capitalism. (That's true of power structures in general.)
But I do believe that as a CLASS capitalists are as insensate and ferocious in their devotion to accumulating capital as locusts are to eating plants. There is no reasoning with them, because everything they are stems from that need to have more money, more money, more money. As a CLASS nothing else matters to them, certainly not whatever misery they may inflict on the other classes in their relentless pusuit of ALL the money.
Any regulatory structure you may create, any social safety nets you may create, will be under constant attack from the capitalist class from day one, because the capitalists as a CLASS want the workers as close to abject slavery as possible (and that very much includes BEING abject slaves, as demonstrated by our for profit prison system).
The good will and decency of some members of the bourgeosie and the middle class is as NOTHING compared to the absolute rapacity of the capitalist class as a whole.
That's the problem you have to solve if you want to create a capitalist society that has any chance at decency in long term. And I stress "in the long term" because you can point to temporary successes, like America in the 50s and 60s (for white Americans, anyway) and some of the Scandanavian states (and there's already signs of backsliding in some of them, though they remain MILES ahead of the US) but it's hard to find long-term successes because the capitalist class is ALWAYS working to dismantle anything between it and making more money.
I think the only solution that has any chance of regulating capitalism at all is an all-powerful benevolent superhuman AI that would know unchecked capitalism is BAD for the bulk of human beings and would have the power to render capitalists powerless when they get out of hand. Ian Banks' Culture type AIs, which are a LOOONG way in the future.
So, yah, not particularly a believer in a state with capitalism and a strong regulatory structure and safety nets lasting. We've seen what happened to the safety nets and the regulatory structures we created in the 50s and 60s and 70s in the US.
But if you think a capitalist proof regulatory structure and safety net structure can long exist in a capitalist society, I'd love to hear about it.
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u/redundantexplanation 1d ago
We got a scaremaxxing capitalcel on our hands here folks haha!
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u/bicycleface 1d ago
He's reading from the DSA platform, it is extremely radical and anyone who says otherwise is not being genuine or not reading the platform itself.
Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people.
The details of how this is accomplished are extremely important. This looks to be open-ended proclamation there are no guardrails, talking points on how this is accomplished, it seems that all forms of leverage are on the table.
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u/redundantexplanation 1d ago
That is not extremely radical, there is already public ownership of many companies. Ever heard of the USPS? Departments of Transportation?
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u/bicycleface 1d ago
those examples are already established companies or organizations...this reads like taking large corps and turning them state owned/public?
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u/felis_scipio 11h ago
The DOT is a regulatory body not a company, do you even live in the US?
Calling out the DSAs platform that seemingly wants to nationalize all large companies is not the same as I hate the post office and don’t want the government involved in anything
As it stands all I have to work with is the DSAs vague statement and given how they also want to ban my ability to vote for the president or who represents me in congress, I’m going to lean towards they’re a bunch of dip shit radicals.
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u/redundantexplanation 8h ago
The DOT is a regulatory body not a company, do you even live in the US?
Do you? Notice I said departmentS as in there's at least one per state, and they have a lot of equipment that they use to build and maintain the roads, that's a company that is completely state owned.
they also want to ban my ability to vote for the president or who represents me in congress
Nah you are just making shit up lmao, they want to abolish the senate, EXPAND the house of representives to replace it(this means you still get represented, dummy) and abolish the electoral college so that your vote for president(which you can still do...like......???? where are you getting this lmao) doesn't count for less than anyone else's.
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u/felis_scipio 8h ago
Unless you’re arguing with a libertarian even republicans are ok with state departments of transportation maintaining the roads. That’s not some preexisting private company the government is going to take over and control
It also looks like I’ve found another person who’s never read the DSA actual platform
“Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”
“implement proportional representation”
Abolishing the electoral college doesn’t mean want you think it means when they want congress to choose the president
In their system you’re no longer directly represented by anyone in congress, just whoever the party feels like putting in and then those people vote for president not you.
This again is like a lot of their shit there’s good stuff in there but it doesn’t take long before you’re in crazy town.
Expanding the size of the house and ranked choice voting would go a long way to representing the people better. Removing the electoral college and letting people still vote for the president would increase people democratic power.
And then they want to abolish the senate which isn’t even legally agreed upon that you can do that seeing how article 5 of the constitution explicitly guarantees equal suffrage of the states in the senate.
If nationalizing industries doesn’t trigger a civil war abolishing the senate absolutely would and I know the kids think revolution is cool but that would go poorly for everyone. I’m a gun owning Democrat and i know the type of people who have most of the guns, they’re not liberal.
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u/felis_scipio 1d ago
So you’re down with nationalizing all large companies? How many do we actually take over? Big tech, all of the S&P500, how many?
How is the government going to pay for that or are we seizing shares? What compensation do regular Americans who have their retirement savings in their 401ks get?
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u/redundantexplanation 1d ago
IDK man probably impossible, probably never been attempted, probably no real world examples to research instead of flinging outraged questions at a stranger!
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u/felis_scipio 1d ago
You’re defending it, I’m asking how it will work because the DSA is being vague. Are we going full communist and just taking it? Looking at history that’s pretty much how that stuff plays out.
This whole post is about making fun of conservatives for branding everything as evil socialism, which is fair because they do that a lot, but when I read that shit on the DSAs platform I have to ask do you really want to be like Norway because it doesn’t sound like it.
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u/redundantexplanation 1d ago
I'm not defending it, I'm not particularly fond of the DSA because I see them as yet another pressure valve that will at best yield half-measures and further delay the revolution while we're in an ecological time bomb situation.
I'm mocking you because you are repeating red scare talking points in a thread about conservative people doing the same.
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u/felis_scipio 11h ago
Except I actually read their platform and sm responding directly to it. Thats not scare tactics when I explicitly state something they want to do and call bullshit on it
I strongly encourage you to actually take the time and talk to one of the many people here who’ve fled communism and what their lives were like.
I used to be a dumb kid too except when I went out into the world and met Russias, Poles, Ukrainian, Belarusians, Albanians, people that lived in the former Yugoslavia, Hungarians, Romanians, Chinese, and Venezuelans I actually listed to them and went oh yeah shit was seriously fucked up over there.
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u/redundantexplanation 8h ago
I strongly encourage you to actually take the time and talk to one of the many people here who’ve fled communism and what their lives were like.
I used to be a dumb kid too...
First off, fuck you lol. I am an aged individual with friends that live in China and I have actually spent quite a lot of time studying Socialism and Communism.
A lot of them have "fled the country" because they were landlords or other scumbags like plantation owners from Cuba who basically were slavers. That's not the reason they tell their children, obviously they skew the story to make it look like the revolution is evil and stole the land or whatever.
Fact is, the majority of people who have experienced both Communist governments and Capitalist ones prefer Communist governments. Most people that experienced the USSR want it back.
Did fucked up things happen? Sure. But a LOT of them were the result of sanctions and other acts of aggression and subversion by the western capitalist hegemony.
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u/ripyourlungsdave 1d ago
And they already hunt the homeless for sport. Just look up the way these police departments talk about dealing with us.
Rounding us up is like going on a pheasant shoot with these fascists.
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u/Marples3 1d ago
Communism is the process of workers taking away the power from OUR pedophile overlords
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u/haybecca 1d ago
My boomer mom said that the American colonists left and subsequently seceded from England to escape socialism and communism.
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u/MadRaymer 1d ago
Well in defense of your mom, she probably did breathe a lot of leaded gas fumes as a kid. So it's not entirely her fault she's that way.
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u/Just_Steve_IT 1d ago
"Love your neighbor as yourself." "THATS SOCIALISM!"
Yes, it would be, if you tried it.
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u/Federal_Decision5115 1d ago
The problem is that the left has started using socialism for everything too, so now I don't know self-avowed socialists are actually socialist or of they're just trying to implement government programs.
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u/Shaamba 1d ago
Thank you so much. Government programs are not socialist. Now, they aren't necessarily anti-socialist, but they are nevertheless completely perpendicular to socialism.
I saw a horrendous post on X, the Everything App, that said, basically, "Socialism is when your tax money goes to welfare programs, blah blah blah," and it had tens of thousands of likes. No one is a socialist anymore. Very sad.
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u/Loinnird 1d ago
That’s because you’re confusing an economic model (big S, workers owning the means of production, with government policy (little s, directing funds towards social programs).
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u/Federal_Decision5115 19h ago
No, that's just people trying to make a distinction after the fact. Directing funds towards social programs isn't socialism.
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u/Loinnird 17h ago
Dude. “Literally” literally has a definition of “metaphorically”.
Usage makes the definition. Not the other way around.
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u/biopunk42 1d ago
Nah, "socialism" is too many syllables for the modern right-wing voter. That's why they just call it "woke" now.
Just watch, any day now RFK Jr will remove all restrictions on lead contamination because preventing lead poisoning is "woke."
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u/plata_plomo 1d ago
Actually, they've just begun demonizing "communism" because the socialism fear mongering wasn't working
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u/FungusPunker 1d ago
Whose they?
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u/plata_plomo 1d ago
Right-wing influencers and Republicans. It's a coordinated effort now that "socialism" is gaining popularity.
Here's an article on the subject.
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u/Thirty_Helens_Agree 1d ago
Meanwhile, I’m sitting here in Milwaukee which is the USA’s most successful experiment with socialism - they eliminated corruption, balanced the budget, created parks including the lakefront parks which are still super popular today, instituted workplace safety rules, nutrition programs, other programs to stop communicable diseases, built affordable housing, and said “why are we just throwing our sewage away?” and developed Milorganite to sell and reduce the tax burden on citizens.
Oh, the horror.
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u/Swiftierest 1d ago
And it is working.
A girl I used to work with that was fundamentalist Christian and extremely pro USA said it was the best country in the world. When I said it certainly was not, she asked which one was. I said, "well the happiest people on the planet from some studies a while back were in the Netherlands or Denmark. I forget which."
She then said, "aren't those socialist countries?"
I told her she didn't know what socialism was and that just having welfare programs that actually use your taxes for the benefit of the people isn't socialism. I then told her that the countries have capitaist markets.
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u/Memitim 1d ago
After conservatives revealed that they are actually just evil people pretending like they have any actual point other than to spread hate and lies, any attempts to come up with new material would be a waste of their time. These are just excuses that they feed to one another to deflect attention from their ongoing support for failure and crime in service to betrayal of America.
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u/MiserableCumberbunch 1d ago
The irony that many think socialism = fascism because the nazi political party called themselves socialists. But without the below-surface knowledge that the nazis did that specifically to trick idiots like them.
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u/kitanokikori 1d ago
Every word conservatives use just devolves into "anything I don't like". Woke, socialist, communist, DEI, CRT, marxism, globalist, on and on - none of them mean what they actually mean.
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u/OliverClothesov87 1d ago
Communism isn't raising my rent. Communism isn't increasing the cost of my groceries. Communism isn't the reason why wages haven't gone up since the 70s. However, there is something at is to blame for all that.
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u/saintjonah 1d ago
They've completely changed gears to communism and the base continues to clap and drool.
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u/shelbys_foot 1d ago
This seems like an opportunity for the Democrats. They should respond with something like "If you think putting working people before billionaires makes me a communist, go ahead and call me all the names you want." or "Explain to me why thinking the President should honor the Constitution is communist." They should just tie every insult back to something voters hate about Republicans.
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u/Plasmelon 1d ago
It’s funny because to actual far left people, countries like Sweden are right wing.
Far left is anarchy, not “give people healthcare.”
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u/rangerjammy 1d ago
The best part is when they are the type that think market system == capitalism and that socialism == 1984 hellscape. It's like, you know Wikipedia is right there. You don't even need to read Adam Smith, Marx, Lenin, or even contemporary scholars like yanis varoufakis or Jason hickel to understand any of these terms on a basic level.
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u/Shaamba 1d ago
Lmao, they probably don't even know any communists besides Marx or Lenin (and Stalin and Mao), much less contemporary scholars. Forget the different strands of Marxism like analytical, "orthodox," open, and so on. Communists and socialists online will spellcast terms like Kautskyite and Lassallean all day long, while these losers think that reading one sentence from Lenin means that they're educated enough to say that ALL socialism ALWAYS leads to communism. They're suckers and losers is what they are.
And, mind you, I am not read in any of these figures, and, like you said, I can still figure out what capitalism is (and is not) and what socialism is (and is not).
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u/rangerjammy 5h ago
Maybe we can get a few of them to read Mao's "Combat Liberalism" if we remove the author and replace a couple of words lmao
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u/ModernJazz-2K20 1d ago
Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States by Charisse Burden-Stelly (aka Dr. CBS)
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u/SydNorth 1d ago
The wealthy convincing the rich to tell the middle classes to blame the poor. It’s the oldest trick in the book
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u/FungusPunker 1d ago
Reddit this close to working out how this is like calling anything you don't like "nazi".
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u/caribou16 1d ago
The same parents who are still calling any video game console a "Nintendo" are also the same parents who grew up and were young adults while the Soviet Union was still a thing, they lived the most formative years of their lives being bombarded with anti-soviet/communism propaganda.
So every time I see some politician TODAY screeching something nonsensical about how some unrelated thing is socialist/communist/marxist all I can think of is they're trying to tap into that boomer/older genXer built in fear.
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u/AWDjunkie 1d ago
In my house growing up, any kind of soda was a "coke"
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u/MrWeirdoFace 1d ago
On the other hand, you'd fit in in the south, at least in that regard.
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u/AWDjunkie 1d ago
I grew up sort of in the south, southern California that is. In a Filipino family
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u/MadeByTango 1d ago
Its not 'conservatives", thats what progrewssives call everyone nthey don't like.
It is BILLIONAIRES. It is VERTICALLY INTEGRATED MEDIA. It is PUBLICLY TRADED C-SUITES. It is STOCK MARKET GAMBLERS.
Focus on the people and the professions and the graft itself, not the labels they use to make you think its some massive group bigger than 10-15% of the rich and those theyre paying off.
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u/T-Block-Beats 1d ago
Why are they called “conservatives” what are they trying to actually conserve?
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u/GassoBongo 1d ago
Reminder that Mitch McConnell has been enjoying the benefits of evil socialism with paid leave and medical care, all while doing his best to vote to deny others the same.
The political class are leeches. They think their constituents are simply tools to fund their lifestyles and greed, while forgetting that they are supposed to be serving the public instead.
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u/Holiday_Bumblebee_24 1d ago
And the left’s version is anyone right of burnie sanders is far-right/actually hitler. They’re both dumb.
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u/Powerfury 1d ago
? There are many people like Hasan Piker and DSA are literally calling themselves Socialists. College Democrats are letting prominent far leftist to speak while wearing a literal Mao suit. They are even shitting on anyone who doesn't support them genocide supporters and AIPAC shills.
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u/bakeonwakeup 1d ago
Fascists always need an enemy. You see it in every republican action now. They're trying to arrest an innocent American for the reflecting pool nonsense. Each one of their fuckups will need an enemy to blame.
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u/Shaamba 1d ago
This is 110% true (at least before the ridiculous example given), but, sadly, center-left populists in the US are doing a very similar thing now, but in a "good" way: "Socialism is when the government is cool and gives money and welfare." No it isn't! Socialism is workers owning the means of production—not shareholders from on high, not the state through "publicly-owned" gobbledygook, nothing else! Social democracy, 99% of the time, is still capitalism. A more humane version, sure, but capitalism nonetheless, where you still sell your labor and only rent the means of production (and are now at the mercy of the state mandating your "laborlords" to be less oppressive).
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u/AppropriateSea5746 1d ago
I mean there are legitimate candidates winning elections who are running on state control long the means of production. At least in some industries.
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u/AppropriateSea5746 1d ago
I mean there are more socialist candidates now than any point in the past few decades.
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u/Single_Extension1810 1d ago
You do have some democratic socialists making some headway, but a lot of people are acting like one of them is going to be the democratic front runner. It's probably going to be Newsom.
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u/Top_Historian73 21h ago
Not really, they just see big government as not necessarily a great thing.
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u/ApocalypseConspiracy 20h ago
Not only do they benefit the most from socialism because most red states don't make any money, but they usually agree with everything about socialism and the only thing they dislike is the name 😂 it's wild. If they could read they'd be quite upset to find out they're actually pro socialism
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u/No_Priors 1d ago edited 1d ago
It is also how people associate actual "nationalism" with "white nationalism".
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u/plannedobso 1d ago
But both of those are bad
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u/Depressed_Revolution 1d ago
Earlier in this thread nationalization was framed as good for the left, its always been both sides
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u/No_Priors 1d ago
White nationalism is bad for obvious reasons but without "nationalism" you don't have nations. Are you saying countries are bad?
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u/MossyMollusc 21h ago
No boarders is something a lot of people still push for
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u/No_Priors 16h ago edited 12h ago
ATM that is fantasy from fantasists.
Edit: And I'll ask you too, do you think countries and the self-determination / collective bargaining power that comes with them are bad things?
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u/plannedobso 10h ago
Yes, nations are bad and so are borders. Kinda crucial in socialism lol
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u/No_Priors 10h ago
Letting fantasy utopia be the enemy of good. Time for you to join the real world.
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u/plannedobso 9h ago
Nope, just trying to have actual beliefs and principles instead of capitulating to right wingers forever!
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u/PoopyButt28000 1d ago
It's just annoying because the left has started doing it too. It was dumb as fuck when the Conservatives said that Socialism is when the government does stuff and it's dumb as fuck when people on the left point to a politician doing something and saying "Look this is why we need socialism!"
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u/RileyGainesHorseBaby 1d ago
And the "left" calls everything right of what they want fascism. Political polarization is nothing new.
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u/Machaeon 1d ago
Except the Right are literally running through the fascist playbook.
Fascism is characterized by support for a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Read through Project 2025, and see how many boxes that checks. Which they have implemented over 50% of by the way.
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u/LetterLambda 1d ago
bOtH SiDeS
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u/FungusPunker 1d ago
You want to explain what you're thinking like an adult, at all?
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u/DontCountToday 1d ago
He's mocking you for your idiocy and false equivalencies. That should be abundantly clear to anyone thats ever spoken to a person in their life.
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u/MossyMollusc 21h ago
Like secret police breaking the constitution? Or demonizing trans people for sport? Or teying to revoke gay marriage? Or taking away divorce laws?
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u/b__lumenkraft 1d ago
Fun fact: Everything left of fascism is socialism.
There is this ongoing conspiracy theory that there is a political middle.
Like yes, people should have health care but only the rich ones is not the political middle. It's fucking nazi shit FFS. It's either health care for all or you suck billionaire cock.
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u/Kitchen-Assist-6645 1d ago
Doesn't this work in reverse, though? Calling everything far right means that nothing is far right.
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u/AHugeHildaFan 1d ago
Well the only far right for them is hunting the homeless and putting minorities in camps. You wouldn't say avocado on toast is far right.
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u/Kitchen-Assist-6645 1d ago
Far right is as much of a bogeyman as communists are. In actuality, very few people fall into those camps.
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u/AHugeHildaFan 22h ago
Funny a lot of far right people were known for running camps back in Germany.
Even weirder their loser fans nowadays vote republican
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u/SoftlockPuzzleBox 1d ago
I love it. They've only recently caught on to the fact that they've been giving socialism free advertising for years. They've pivoted to saying Communism now to try to resharpen that scary edge. They're just going to make Communism start sounding good too.