Who wants to convert some berniecrats on /r/SandersForPresident with me...

Have I entered the twilight zone?

How do you educate then if you don't utilize any platform available?

I don't get where this meme is from, though? Luxemburg died during a revolution lead by her.

I think it would be easy to take the common assumption that socialism in general is a welfare state or that democratic socialism is "socialism like sweden, but not a dictatorship" and that it is different from communism away, and introduce class consciousness by giving them the actual meaning of socialism and why it is necessary. A long post with a title like "We need to talk about what socialism actually means" or some shit like that would drag people in because some people might think it is some right winger trying to fuck with them, or an actual socialist looking for a bit of fresh air.

That's basically what I would like to do, but the shitty upvote system means you have to have a lot of people backing your post to become relevant. Otherwise it's just lost in the "soshulism is gubment" circlejerk.

Just submit your post here and have us upvote it. If S4P grows paranoid about us it is only publicity, and thus leading them here.

You can't turn berntards. They have to realize the contradictions inherent to capitalism on their own.

now I've seen it all

Luxemburg wasn't a leftcom.

Are you ?
Can you stop false flagging?

plz

Tell me about it,
OP is a fucking typical Leftist, not a leftcom

People realize things by receiving new information. The OP pic is a pretty good way to express the problems to people who don't really know anything.

The pic makes it seem like the capitalist is the source of the problem, not capital (profit is pretty much just mentioned in passing).

In reality, the capitalist is contained within the logic of capital, not the other way around. Anything which doesn't emphasize this, let alone totally miss it entirely is less than useless; in fact, it isn't really a critique at all, as it continues to push the very logic it set out to critique. The meme makes it seem like value, the market/competition, etc. is fine, the only problem is that the capitalists aren't competing fairly and they control everything.

Liberalism left alone is better than a false critique of capital.

they simply need to watch this. The issue with socialism is not that people disagree with it, it's that they don't know what it is. youtube.com/watch?v=ysZC0JOYYWw

...

You're never going to hit people with a comprehensive criticism of capitalism and have them just get it suddenly. At least not in the US, which is the target given /r/SandersforPresident. You have to show them parts of the system to nudge them into asking questions. And the pic criticizes the system that includes class. There are such things as market socialists, whether or not you agree with them. The important thing isn't to win people over to your pet ideology, but to shift the overton window.

"I don't like it" is not a BTFO and Wolff is a Marxian, not a Marxist.

No there isn't. Socialism =/= democratic self-management.

Capitalism administers people through things (commodities [commodity fetishism]), these objects are given social power called "value", we are organized by the law of value, the dominant force is the self-expansion of value: capital. Socialism administers things, it is the end of "economy" - this includes markets - it is social control of production.

There is communism and there is the left wing of capital (tankies, anarchists, market "socialists", etc.: Leftism)

You aren't going to convince most people to abandon the thoughts which fit capitalist social relations until they are thrust into revolutionary action, creating communist social relations. Socialists will stay a minority until the revolution.

On how you convince people, no they won't "just get it suddenly" but there is qualitative break, there isn't an ideological continuum between capitalist ideology and revolutionary communism. Tankies and "market socialists" (the left wing of capital) are just as far from revolutionary politics as liberals, fascists, anarcho-capitalists.

They aren't going to get all of Marxism right away, of course not, this does not mean that is separable into independent chunks which can suffice on their own to get anything across. They have to make the jump and plunge all the way in, even if it takes a while.

I believe my explanation above shows how this completely misses the entire point.

For one thing, socialism or communism can refer to the movement to achieve the mode of production. For another, yes that's what socialism is. Democratic self-management is fundamentally different from letting a market run things, and an economy can be said to be "mixed" in the sense that parts are planned and parts are handled with a market. There will never be an abrupt change when suddenly the whole of society is planned. It would be too much of a change all at once - production would screech to a halt while people tried to figure out how to work under the new system. And lastly, you seem to be conflating socialism and communism. Socialism is the process of transitioning to communism above all else.

Are you implying that markets = economy? Economy is simply the way that a society handles production and manages resources. What you're referring to is a change in the mode of production and resulting change in the superstructure.

No fucking shit, but quantitative change builds up to that.

Total bullshit. Marx's analysis and the analysis of other leftists (or any theorists) can be broken down into smaller parts. It's necessary to do so in order to teach them. Learning Marx all at once or over a period of years doesn't change the fundamental structure of how it's organized, just how long the process takes.

Bullshit. There are loads of people on this board who have undergone and are undergoing a shift "leftward". It's not something that you can properly map onto a spectrum, but there is a process of easy out of your established ideology and being receptive to different ideas.

I think generally "socialism" or "communism" can both refer to the mode of production, and the movement towards it (the establishment of the material human community) is called communism. "Socialism" and "communism" are pretty much interchangeable. That's the way Marx and Engels used them.

I never claimed there won't be a transition period, you're the anarchist.

No, "the transition period" is the name for the period for the transition to communism. Using "socialism" to mean "the transition period" is conducive to defining it as its own mode of production, a mistake the Bolsheviks made, which later allowed them to play more and more loosely with the word and use it to mean whatever was convenient. This is precisely why "communism" and "socialism" are today looked at as separate things. But they aren't. There is no stable system of social reproduction between capitalism and communism. That's what a revolution, a transition, is.

Not necessarily
Capitalism doesn't mean "free markets" (what are you, a fucking ancap?). Capitalism means "a mode of production where the ruling force is that of capital". Democratic self-management is entirely compatible with this. They will continually decide to exploit themselves. The poles "proletariat" - "capital" remain completely intact.

Capitalism is fine with a certain extent of the planning of people via things. What the fuck do you think a firm/company/business is? Put on a national level does not break capitalist social relations, capitalist logic will assert itself (black markets, trading between industries, etc.), and the supposed "planning" will reveal itself to all along have been the organization of people by things (the russians were always trying to come up with some mathematical formula that would organize the economy for them, in the 60's it became law for firms to ignore the "plan" if it would be profitable, which shows that capitalist categories never disappeared)

Real soviet democracy would not have made the USSR socialist.

I think all this confusion can be laid to rest by simply asking yourself, "what is capital?".
It doesn't cease being the self-expansion of value just because you cast a vote for it to happen.

No, I'm implying "markets" are in the category "economy".

No it isn't. Primitive communism isn't "an economy". That is projection of current categories into societies where it didn't and won't exist. "Economy" was not separate from the rest of life, There was nothing to differentiate production from anything else. This how it will be in communism, self-development becomes production.

The "base-superstructure" model is part of the critique of capitalism. It does not fit other modes of production. Try explaining to a serf, a lord, a king, a slave, a master, or a hunter-gatherer, the difference between economy and politics, let alone the latter the difference between production and the rest of life.

You're missing the entire point. What is the break, it is one from ideology, not gradual changes towards a break into another ideology.

1. Marx wasn't a Leftist.
"Marx and [I have] fought harder all our lives against the alleged Socialists than against anyone else."
- Engels
2. No it can't. There isn't a "Marxist economics" or a Marxist "politics", there is a Marxist critique of political economy. Marxism is an (open, expanding) whole doctrine of relentless critique. Ruthless criticism can't be broken into pieces.

That's not what I mean, I think we may be talking about two different things.
Marxist doctrine is not a thing in one's head, it is a system of critique.

Either way, I think both of us are missing the forest for the trees.

My original point was simply that a critique of capitalism aimed only at the capitalist isn't merely insufficient, it completely misses the entire essence of the problem.

People have taken to calling the system in place during the transition period "socialism," which is a meaningful distinction. Usage of words evolve over time just like ideologies or critiques do. Words serve the purpose of communicating, and it's useful to refer to the society between a revolution and communism as socialism.

People used "mixed economy" to mean "a little socialism and a little capitalism" which is nonsense if you use the correct definitions of those words. What isn't nonsense is that there can be varying degrees of planning versus market forces deciding economic activity. People who fail to understand that different people will take the same words to mean different things won't understand that this is what people mean when they say "mixed economy" because they're using different definitions. The idea at the core, that some economic activity is regulated by, to put things in your terms, capital in some respects and planning in others. Because there is no overnight transition, there will be a phase where the economy behaves this way; the idea is to shape it so that it will transition to communism instead of reverting any changes and simply remaining capitalism.

It does if people vote for it to not happen, and then it doesn't.

Economy is simply when multiple parties collaborate to meet their needs through specialization and distribution. The warped ideology under capitalism would tell you that such behavior naturally or necessarily takes the form of capitalism.

Class functions in the same basic way regardless of the exact form it takes. Society still forms according to the mode of production in any system, even one without class.
Try explaining it to your average person today. It's possible but difficult because the system has been analyzed already. Marx paid comparatively little attention to other modes of production because they were less relevant or familiar to him.
Are you talking about explaining this to hunter-gatherers? Because they had a great deal of downtime. You could argue that mythic story structure is an outgrowth of the dichotomy between production in the form of hunting and the rest of life - where the hero ventures into the unknown wilds to bring back something of value to his tribe.

Well call it what you want but it's still a person's idiosyncratic worldview.

Yeah, that's the same problem as Bernie Sanders calling himself a socialist.
There's more than one way to divide things than the categories devised by bourgeois intellectuals. You yourself have been breaking it up by posting selections of the criticism ITT. If it really was impossible to break it up all that could be said is "Read Marx".
Not the practice, but the content can.

Sure, but that system has content.
This is why using the proper words is important, and the same reasoning behind why people refer to the mode of production after capitalism as "communism" and the transition period as "socialism" - clarity.

You're the one who keeps bringing up details when the topic is how to take the basic step of spreading class consciousness. I'm engaging with you but we're only a few posts into the exchange - I haven't forgotten the point.

The critique in the OP image is not of the capitalist per se but the system that includes a capitalist. Its purpose is not to be a Marxist critique in the sense that you mean but to (1) identify that class is a part of capitalism and (2) open people to the idea that critique thereof is possible. The west, especially the US, is overwhelmed with capitalist ideology so one has to be careful in their critique. Clarification and correction can come later, but in order to have someone contributing to the critique or participating in a movement toward communism, they first have to get to the point of even being receptive to such a thing.

Wouldn't Lenin's corpse be a stronger candidate ?