Itt: normies trying to explain communism

worth*

Not really. He's conflating a variety of liberal ideas and misunderstood marxist ideas & labelling it all "communism" in a pretty empty, idiotic critique. I mean, just look at any of his other work, and/or tweets.

Yup

any person that engages in the artistic or philosophical space and does not know about or care about politics/issues of society should just stop living tbh (it's a big amount of people)

Isabelle did nothing wrong.

Most triumphant example of an internet mouthbreather. This guy makes 4chan Holla Forums look like a bunch of intellectuals.

I'm sure even "Weird Twitter" knows more politics than this guy.

I just came here for the THICC especially the giant tiddies

Mammarcho-communist revolution when?

The ideal feminist revolution…

She's a revisionist that needs to be degraded to a cumrag.

...

I ain't into furries, but something about isabelle is just human enough

underrated

I feel like our biggest hurdle in the struggle is re-educating retards like this.

most the biggest hurdle with probably changing "leftists", remember how occupy wall street was pretty much ruined by liberal idpol? Then again it could be cointelpro but either way changing them to show or establish a good leftist group will be the first biggest hurdle.

The creator wasn't really expressing a personal opinion as much as he was regurgitating pop culture beliefs based off of neoliberal ideology.

yeah I know, someone not into politics making a political joke. I was just making a statement and what our best course of action first should be

In this case, there's not much that can be done, since people put so little thought into what they believe that it's likely not even convincing anyone of anything.

yeah it's like you said, pretty much regurgitating common beliefs

If "leftism" is co-opted, why call ourselves "left"?

Just use different terms with less baggage. I'm even reluctant to call myself "socialist" these days because of how much it has come to be associated with reformism and taxes.

Just call yourself something vague but agreeable that will neither trigger liberals or upset polyps.
"Democratic libertarians" for example, "Council libertarians", "Democratic Confederalists", etc.

Those are all words that at first sight "acceptable" to both liberals and Holla Forums types. Something that isn't automatically associated with 50 trillion dead Ukranians, 1984, taxes and "muh kikes/niggers".

...

Because if you let your opponents control your terms, eventually it will be impossible to explain or argue for our beliefs at all.

What would be better is to show that they aren't true left. Have you seen the "socialist" party of america? Also being accepted with terms like that might be okay at first but then you'd have Holla Forumsyps claiming it's another conspiracy to uphold the school of witchcraft and wizardry. Basically show that liberals aren't left and that socialism isn't what people think it is and that most "socialist" movements aren't really socialist. Then again maybe it would be way harder then that, most americans think anything farther then democrats left are pure evil.

There's nothing wrong with changing terms though if the original becomes too toxic to use.

The "alt right" rarely call themselves nazis or fascists. Even though people are openly advocating white nationalism on the_donald and other places.

The problem is that rehabilitating socialism in the eyes of the unpolitical masses is much harder than just using a new term.

You can explain a thousand times that the Soviet Union wasn't socialism, that the Holodomor wasn't genocide, that it's not about taxes or just reform, but in the end it will just turn into another "Lol, communism has never been tried, right?" meme.

I think I'm going to start ironically calling myself alt-left, take the piss out of the whole thing

Man, a lot of people have thought about rebranding thing. I never seen him admit it, but I'm sure Bookchin did it on purpose, considering how studiously he avoids standard leftist nomenclature.

But rebranding ain't easy. If you forgive an overused word, it's about memetics. Leftism, especially Marxism, has an immense memetic cargo of all types: historical facts, pure theory, and even logos – the hammer and sickle is arguably the pinnacle of logo design. You can't just copy-and-paste over it all and expect it to stick.

What I think you could do, however, is to make an open, honest rebranding, instead of some copy-and-paste shit. Like, adopt a name that makes clear the connection to socialism but points out it's a different thing, have simpler language in introductory material and more traditional lingo in more advanced materials, have ready-made literature about the more contentious, "scary" points (like a FAQ I suppose) since Joe Q. Public might be interested in this whole worker ownership thing but has been spooked all his life about gulags and shit, etc.

The funny thing is that the anti-Isebelle protesters were advocating for "Proletariat Revolution" or "Proletariat Liberty". against the "Communist Regime" of Isabelle.

Either he is outstandingly ignorant, or there is more to this than the surface. I'm leaning towards the former.

Yeah, tbh my father is somewhat interested in my leftist views, but he can't get past the hammer/sickle & the term "Communism" as anything other than the authoritarian USSR

Dunno, I think that the late 80s Eastern Europe protests against the communist regimes couched their demands in Marxist terms, if only to avoid accusations of anti-revolutionism and having their skulls cracked.

Yeah, real memes can be powerful things, for better or worse, and "communism" has an immense informational load. That's why, in those polls about how many people view so-and-so ideology positively or negatively, "socialism" always gets better scores than "communism". It has a different, more favorable informational load. The idea is that you could improve on this further. I honestly think that if you simply took the original Soviet ideals (i.e. more direct democracy, more worker ownership etc.), labeled it "neo-socialism" and prepared some appropriate literature and PR material, the far left would get new members in droves.

Neo-socialism sounds pretty nazbol though. But it might just work.

Objectively shit taste. Her brother is hotter.

What's funny is there's this hipstery video series that's already doing it: youtube.com/watch?v=4fTkPv5EzB0&list=PL04L9Hu_VHHzfUWruP94IPoKm4kqq4cRH

It's better to argue content over form, as in using what the terms originally meant rather than using terms at all, but this is more wordy though.

>There is a third way - an alternative to capitalism and socialism.
I just started watching but are you sure this isn't an alt-right trap?

yeah haha people who care about politics are so dumb am i right haha

Nope, but he does later say credit unions are breddy gud. Sounds borderline marksoc.

During the civil rights era George Lincoln Rockwell basically built the modern American nazi movement despite calling himself a nazi, the main difference between us and GLR and the nazis is that we have no proper organization the first step is to organize the second is to lean into the communist and revolutionary label as much as possible and do things to get noticed in the media.

I think you should move away from labels to convince normies. Here is how they react when you say words.

Socialism: I don't want to pay more taxes
Communism: Oh, so you support genocide
Anarchism: But then everyone would kill everyone else without police

Talk to them about democratizing the workplace, organizing production through democracy instead market forces and breaking down national borders and they might listen but if you call things by their names, they shut down immediately. If you've ever read 1984, this is a less extreme version of crimestop, people react in pre programmed patterns to the things porky wants them to avoid, so you need to circumvent these barriers. Later on, you can tell them that this is what communism is actually about and they'll say "nobody ever told me that" but if you start out calling it communism, you will get nowhere.

I have an anecdote on this behaviour from my own past.
I once heard or read somewhere about that book Debt:The first 1000 years, at least I think that was it's name. The author was being interviewed and talked about his ideas. In the end, he said that we should move towards something more akin to communism. Up until that part, I was considering buying that book but after I heard that it supported communist ideas, it immediately went into my mental trashbin.
This is how I used to think and this is how a lot of other liberals think, if you want any chance to convince them, don't use the labels.

This.

What's the point of getting people on board with the ideas if they have no idea what to call them? It would be just as effective as doing nothing at all.

The point is to call them something else other than "socialism", "communism" or other trigger-words.

The idea doesn't die because we give it a different label, but it can become more appealing.

A good point, but I dunno, I said in another thread that in our increasingly postmodern world, controlling the image might be more important than controlling the object. And arguably, all this time of Pax Americana and Europaea have reduced the appeal of open calls for revolution.

That's a good idea, but not mutually exclusive with rebranding. In fact, they might complement each other, like
mentions.

I love it when normies try to explain communism. It's one of the few times I get to have a good laugh.
youtube.com/watch?v=uBglfm9lBxw

How? This idea crops up every now and then and it's fucking annoying. Everyone suggesting it has no idea how to push it forwards, they're just giving themselves an excuse not to bother.
So, what? We rebrand communism and socialism "Shamwow", then republish all the texts under different names suitable to the region and hope absolutely nobody notices this sleight of hand and points it out?

Dumb.

When will you be ready to embrace Libertarian Municipalism and Democratic Confederalism?

It's already happening.

It worked with the "alt-right" and the "human biodiversity" movement.

And look what happened to the alt-right, as soon as you rebrand you open yourself up to being less defined as a movement and you'll end up with liberals hijacking it. I just find it funny that every week or so there's someone here that has ended up here because of the current strategy of laying out all the policies and then when the person has agreed drop the mindbomb that those ideas are socialist, complaining that that strategy doesn't work. Despite them being here, as a socialist, evidence to the fact that it does work.

What about market socialism?

OK Holla Forums I'm gonna drop some facts about the AC:NL world and you tell me what system it most resembles, ok?

oh yeah and another thing, there are no child labour laws, as two kids work under Nook's employment. Also there's no schools in town.

My best guess: colonialism/imperialism

No, pretty sure the cartoon is a normie criticism of "le bad communism XDDDD"

Yeah I think he's making a deliberate effort at rebranding, but he seems to have memetically breaken away completely from socialism, you know? I think that's holding it back. He – and all of us, for that matter – should tap into the good impression many people still have about socialism. A complete break means he has to reinvent the wheel.

You kinda end up excluding a lot of other socialist currents. I think that a very important lesson from Bolshevism is that the second wave of socialism ought to be more pluralistic.

Bookchin already figured this out dam.

What do you think "communalism" was code for?

Yeah but

...

American kid's cartoon/propaganda that demonizes communism. I've never seen that before.

You need to leave.

His understanding of communism and politics in general is so little that it makes Jon tron look smart in comparison.

This is what I'm saying.

Actually the alt-right couldn't've hoped for better as far as not missing the point goes. There was no way they were going to get everyone to stop listening to hip hop and salsa and pick up classical again.

I agree, we should call ourselves socialist but it should be a secondary label. Communalist is more clear. It implies refined communism.

I have a more forgiving interpretation of this video.

As he's made clear in his Brain Dump that went into feminism and Ghostbusters, he's no reactionary, and as he's made clear intentionally pissing off the Steven Universe fanbase, he really hates shitlibs. To me he seems like the very definition of a centrist defined by indifference. He has a punk past (look no further than Luigi's Day Out) and has no attachment to tradition or opposition to various kinds of progress.

KNOWING THESE THINGS ABOUT HIM. I think it figures that he knows at least a little bit more about radical politics than the immediate impression is. It stands to reason that he knows the "doesn't work" central planning meme only applies to forms of socialism that actually advocate for central planning. "People are too individualistic" is something that tankies have actually said and redistributing resources is something the Soviets actually did upon taking power. And honestly even on the meme-left in punk/anarkid spheres it's pretty understandable to get the impression that Marx was a tankie because tankies always call themselves Marxist to shove out more liberal Marxists. And the KGB made it a point to conflate the communist ideology and the Soviet system, to the point that even Orwell called the socialists he didn't like "communists".

It's possible that he has the impression that shitlibs are communists which is why he mentions social justice and that's not actually 100% false. Plus he hangs out at least a little bit with the voice actor for Isabelle here, Shoe0nHead, who's a GG "anti-SJW" (not reactionary but pretty close)