Daily Kos: I'm not a Progressive or a Socialist, I'm a Social Democrat. Are you

Daily Kos: I'm not a Progressive or a Socialist, I'm a Social Democrat. Are you

(archive.is/Wl791)

Has peak self-awareness been achieved?

Other urls found in this thread:

leftcom.org/en/articles/2013-12-10/mandela-–-a-hero-for-capitalism
youtube.com/watch?v=qyFMKiHFZXg.
spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-40693632.html
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

I'm literally the one who posted that yesterday.
Glad to see its taken off, I certainly thought it was fucking hilarious.

...

>>I’m not a fan of Bernie Sanders,

Daily Kos is owned by Hillary's super pacs through David Brock. Don't get excited. So is the Daily Beast. Chelsea was on their board of directors.

Eh, the term "socialist" in Europe has been synonymous with "social democrat" for decades now. I'd say we jettison the term and just call ourselves Communists to retain that subversive edge.

just more confirmation that the socdems get walled

And communist totally hasn't been associated with social democrats for a century.

Well, in their defense, they did include anti-Nazism and anti-monarchism on their ficticious campaign against what was really a campaign against communism (see: font size for Thälmann being largest).

His point was that communism has at least managed to retain it's radical sting. While the word socialism has roughly the same connotations democracy does now.

oh so you're being edgy shitheads for its own sake, rather than calling yourselves communist for the meaning of the term (for the movement which abolishes the present state of things, for the material human community,).

Good to know

The problem is that large aspects of a worker centered society have been co-opted by liberals and neoliberals as achievements of theirs even though they ain't did or weren't for that shit at the time.

It doesn't just stop at ideas and policies either they have done this wholesale with socialist thinkers and their lives. MLK for example has been co-opted wholesale by liberals despite being an admitted socialist by his own admittance and an avid reader of theorists in his youth.

the what?
This is a contradiction in terms

He wasn't "co-opted", he was a social democrat from the beginning. Calling yourself a "socialist" don't make it so.

Communism just gets the point across better. If I refer to myself as a "socialist" I'd have to give someone a whole briefing on my beliefs as well because of how meaningless and watered-down the word has become. If that makes me an edgy shithead, so be it.


This is actually my favorite definition.

Well I hope not because it's what I presume most of us are trying to achieve here. Socialist society would be worker centered by moving control of the means of production to workers as opposed to the capitalist/boss centered system we have now. Assuming a reformist standpoint for a second, this would come in notches and compromises as opposed to an instant killing off of the cappies in control.

I'm assuming you're not American if you don't think he was co-opted to the extent to which he has been falsely mythologized and retooled as a boring liberal who wanted to work within the system, has been one of the greatest accomplishments of capitalist ideology. I also don't think you have to implicitly be a socialist or even remotely pro communist for them to work their ideology magic on you in this way. In MLK's case he just so happened to be.

Here in America there is a famous saying of JFK's "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." The funny thing is this is often quoted as a general statement of how people should put country before their own personal interest, but the context within the speech and the part of that speech that they never show, was that he was specifically targeting greedy rich people who were asking to absolve themselves of their responsibilities to society. Children today very rarely learn that broader context of one of the most famous sayings/speeches in American history. It's ideology hiding shit in plain sight. JFK was hardly pro communist either or even a socialist by the most watered down definition possible. Yet him and his message were still co-opted all the same.

You don't "have to give someone a whole briefing on your beliefs as well because of how meaningless and watered-down the word has become" when using the word "communist" which, to the average listener, will almost always mean "Stalinism"?

No word is untainted. You're going to have to explain anyway.

Alright, I guess we all ought to just take up the label of social-democrat again since the connotations of a term are irrelevant.

Which is a large part of the problem
No it won't, the transition will be workers destroying their position as workers. Socialism will be classless. Production will be the conscious production of all of life.
Completely compatible with capitalism.

Reforming away capitalism isn't simply a "wrong tactic", it is impossible. Revolution is necessary for both the subjective and objective potential for communism:
"In all revolutions up till now the mode of activity always remained unscathed and it was only a question of a different distribution of this activity, a new distribution of labour to other persons, whilst the communist revolution is directed against the preceding mode of activity, does away with labour, and abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes themselves, because it is carried through by the class which no longer counts as a class in society, is not recognised as a class, and is in itself the expression of the dissolution of all classes, nationalities, etc. within present society; and
"Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew."
Unlike capitalism and feudalism, socialism and capitalism cannot co-exist with each other until the latter is finally overthrown. Socialism can only happen globally by a Dictatorship of the Proletariat (which is not the same thing as simply killing all the bourgeoisie) exerting complete control over society through the councils, led by and given its communist program by the most advanced elements, the internationalist communist party.

Capitalist democracy is incapable of providing an outlet for proletarian power, it can only exist through almost complete submission to the state by all, the moment this becomes questioned, the capitalist state has no problem throwing of its democratic cloak.

I'm from what is arguably the capital of American liberalism, Portland.
It's hardly false mythologization, he was a class-collaborationist reformist to the bone. He and the Black Panthers, were fantastic tools to funnel real black radical action into confines that capital could easily defeat (directly or through integration into bourgeois politics).
If you would like to know more about precisely why people like MLK are praised by the capitalist media see:
leftcom.org/en/articles/2013-12-10/mandela-–-a-hero-for-capitalism

The only good thing he did was get shot in the head
Capital corrects the capitalists when they deviate. Capitalists are simply the puppet for capital, and they disposed of when capital finds them no longer useful. Left-wing nationalism is still nationalism, completely compatible with capitalism.

If humanity is to progress, the nation-state will be completely obliterated, and the world proletariat, working through its dictatorship will transform society.
Reverence for the bourgeois state in any form makes you an enemy of the international proletariat.

By simply a different faction of capitalists.


Social Democracy was always just that - petty-bourgeois democratic, as Marx pointed out, even though many future communists worked within it. Social Democracy didn't just magically change overnight in 1914. Neither did the anarcho-syndicalist unions which rallied workers to the war.

My point wasn't that any term will do, just that edge-factor is not a good reason for picking one.

The fuck?

Their reasoning was pretty much the same as Marx's and Engels' reasoning for choosing the label "Communist" instead of "Socialist" for their Communist Manifesto, so I don't know what you're getting so mad about.

>Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a socialist manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases men outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the “educated" classes for support. Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of total social change, called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of communism; still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to produce the Utopian communism of Cabet in France, and of Weitling in Germany. Thus, in 1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, “respectable”; communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that “the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself,” there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take. Moreover, we have, ever since, been far from repudiating it.

You might be able to argue that they should have known this by now, but they're certainly not edgy shitheads or whatever, unless you want to call Marx and Engels that.

Talk about a non-sequitor.
Unless you are so fucking stupid that you actually thing "communism" means the same thing to the average person today as it did in Europe in the 19th century.

Yeah, the Transitional Program is complete horseshit, we all know that "Fight for $15" shit they helped get started never went anywhere, ruining threads on Holla Forums with walls of text about how nothing is real socialism is the true revolutionary praxis.

It's neither a non-sequitur nor does the term "communism" need to mean the same thing in both eras. My point was that the earlier user made the same argument as Engels.

Well I guess you can see it that way, but I don't think most socialists have. It's true that they have argued for a classless society, but I don't think that means awareness of difference and definitions of what we are would immediately collapse and historical examples of to be generous "attempts" at socialism show this to be the case. We cant be pro something if we don't know why the opposition isn't good by comparison. Granted maybe if a socialist society was successful in a positive extent to where the elimination of bosses was achieved for a long period of time, we might start to see an erosion for a need to name these things. The point is I'm willing to indulge the idea, I'm not completely ruling out this scenario.

I'll agree to disagree on MLK and the Black Panthers. I don't think Fred Hampton was killed by the FBI because he was perceived as being a non-radical by white society. Although in a sense you're right because they were touted as being far more radical and dangerous than they actually were in my opinion, but not for reasons I think socialists would agree on with the rest of mainstream society at the time. Mandela I will agree on to an extent. I wasn't defending JFK merely showing how ideology can be be used to co-opt anti-capitalist messages even from people who are very much not anti-capitalists. Co-option and white washing was my main point from my first post onward. Liberals often take credit or decontextualize things in the pursuit of defending capitalism, this is one of the center pieces of modern ideology.

What the fuck am I reading?

Not sure if you're trying to insinuate that it is or isn't, but Andrew Kliman here pretty convincingly shows that a "transitional program", as it is understood, is indeed bullshit: youtube.com/watch?v=qyFMKiHFZXg. And Kliman's part of the MHI, which is a left communist organization following Dunayevskaya and her work.

There is power and meaning in words. Socialism is safe; it's establishment politics. Tell a banker that the socialists are winning massive support and he'll be slightly annoyed at the extra regulations he might face - tell him that Communists are gaining massive support and he'll piss his pants. One of the words signals a radical challenge to the established order and the will to change the current system, the other signifies passivity and compromise.

Which is what I mean by "edgy shithead". You want a word that sounds edgy, rather than explaining what you mean (which you will have to do anyway). What the banker will think of is stalinism, which it is perfectly reasonable for anyone, worker or capitalist. to be afraid of. Come the revolution, the workers in the banks will burn the money in the vault and hoist the red flag on the top of the building, not be afraid for their lives because they think some dictator is going to throw them to the wall.

Or, he'll think of China and will still just be slightly annoyed by new regulations.

minimum wage actually had class struggle behind, it come on

It's an improvement, although I'd rather the Bernie crowd did that just getting SocDem back into common vernacular is already pretty amazing.

I couldn't ask for better proving the socdem essence of tankieism

Literally wordsoup

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Is that a picture of you?

????

Thats good because I dont wash my hands after going to the bathroo

Describe the real movement then

What's Daily Kos? Kill on sight?

"We did not resist, we did not throw hurdles into the way of the victorious political opponent", wrote the author. "The old ones (in the SPD leadership) are concerned about their fame. Like old, ridiculous actors or singers they never notice when the curtain has fallen."
"We were, and stayed, in all the full blood parliamentarians, that is, we talked about things, but they did, they mastered them. While concentration camps were already being built and many of our followers were shot dead we got into fierce struggle for seats."
[…]
When the Not Socialists entered in 1932 on a ford with the Zentrum and thus won a majority in the Reichstag, Hoegner and his comrades considered it merely an "enjoyable game". It is true that the Social Democrats sensed that "a black and brown government was in the air," but they had no other idea than to "annoy our Zentrum colleagues with the song of the black-brown girl."
[…]
On March 23, 1933, the SPD alone voted against the Enforcement Act, which gave the Hitler government an almost unlimited power of power. And when the SPD chairman, Otto Wels, had explained the reasons why his party had to refuse to approve this law, Hitler once again hurried to the podium, kicked off the SPD, and concluded, "You, gentlemen, are no longer needed I do not want you to vote for the Enabling Act, but Germany should be free, but not through you. "
Hoegner: "That clapped and snapped like a whip on our heads, that fell like a fierce fire on us."
Nevertheless, at the Reichstag meeting of May 17, 1933, the SPD, together with the Not Socialists, voted in favor of the program proclaimed by Hitler to remove the restrictions imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles ("equality of Germany"), which caused astonishment
[…]
The last Reichstag meeting, to which Social Democrats were admitted, was "even more agonizing for many of us than our presence at the meeting of March 23, 1933. At the time we had expected to lose our lives in the worst case, but this time Some of us felt that we were losing our honor. "
But when Hitler began his speech, the comrades experienced a surprise. The new chancellor avoided any attack on the SPD, even for the Nazi opponent Hoegner sounded the speech "extremely moderate": "A more gentle peace speech could not have been held by Stresemann." When Göring called for the vote, the members of the SPD parliamentary group rose and voted in favor of the Reichstag declaration.
Hoegner described this as follows: "Thereupon an agitator of the other deputies broke loose, and even our most implacable adversary, Adolf Hitler, seemed to be moved for a moment, and he rose and clapped us applause, but the President of the Reichstag, Goering, stood up Spoke magnificently: "The German people are always united when their destiny is. Then the German national deputies began to sing the German song. Most of our ranks were singing. Some ran tears down their cheeks. It was as if social democrats, who were always cursed as the lost sons of the fatherland, had for a moment immortalized the common mother of Germany. "
spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-40693632.html

Nothing slowed down communist idea and class consciousness of people as social democracy did. The whole thing is capitalist psy-op to make class conscious people who sympathize to socialist idea to remain classcucked.
Just like modern day feminism brings female issues down to virtue signaling and ways to exploit some people for money with no real equality.

but muh 3 arrows

YOU'RE A FUCKING LEFTCOM!

You ignored that "socialism" and "communism" are two different transitions, chief.

That makes you miss the points about the need to go from one to the other.