/burger/

Show me a single one that disagrees with OPs definition of socialism

t. capitalists

forgot my flag

Americans are actually dumb. This is not wrong just because it's a cliché.
They're also subject to a lot of propaganda, although that's hard to quantify.
I think one thing that's overlooked is that culturally, they are actually very attached to what they believe is truth. American culture has a mindset that tends to be rigid and black and white. Christians obviously refer to the bible, but scientists refer to science, libertarians and conservatives to "basic economics", SJWs to feminism/patriarchy, etc. "Wrong and right" have moral connotations, and therefore are points of contentions, and less of inquiry. I do believe social sciences and humanities are not very well served in this country, and that's part of the reason. Humanities often have a more "fluid" way of thinking, and are interested in connections, influences, links between different things, etc.
There is also a propensity to use "-ism" words in a loose way, whereas in my country I noticed that it's often seen as slippery or going too far and needing nuance, which I think is the right way to do it. Often I've seen opinions on a point of discussion that's just a detail in a wider context being described with a "-ism" for every concurrent opinion.
I think there's also an ingrained taste for familiarity. You grow up watching movies, tv shows, listening to music… made by "us". All the worldwide celebrities are from here. All the "most X" and "biggest Y" are here. It's not uncommon to hear what just happens to be the most famous thing be unironically described as "the best in the entire world", because if that wasn't the case we'd hear about it, right? A lot of one-liners, quips, burns, etc. that make discourse easy and palatable. Everybody has their little slamdunk moment that the whole audience will clap and cheer at, and you start expecting it. There's endless tolerance for "just entertainment" but very few for something else than that. Look at how often political points are made with genuine smugness, when you can just feel the speaker's eyebrows Dreamworking in real time. That's not just the "smug liberals", it's everybody. So much religious talking points are just as smug, if not more. Or sentences that begin with "seems to me…", "last I checked…".
sorry I'm being rambly, but I hope I'm touching on something here.

There has always been exploration and trade. You must be really full of shit if you believe that no one traded before the Treaty of Westphalia because people were too stupid to invent capitalism before then.

You don't need an official post to do demagoguery. For example, in most co-ops they consistently vote to lower their own wages. It's totally possible for a demagogue to convince everyone to vote this way so that the co-op could maximize its profits.

GENERALIZED COMMODITY PRODUCTION REEEE

either this is some debord tier genius or some laughable silliness.

[citation needed]

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I was always taught pic related in burger history classes. Anyone else?

Honestly we have to drop all our previous labels at this point, I was considering starting a group that would use branding like "Popular Democracy" and simply promote socialist ideas while not using the socialist label. Rhetoric could be focused around ideas of self sufficiency, making the working class politically and economically independent of the ruling class, hell you can even co-opt lolbert rhetoric and say that the workers are pulling themselves up by their bootstraps through political organization and labour action.

The thing is that you're right OP, a century of propaganda has made it so that you can say your a socialist, explain what your beliefs are, and retarded burgers will tell you that your wrong and you actually believe something different. I spent a couple hours on /k/ trying to explain that Anarchism and radlib aren't Marxism and they simply wouldn't accept it no matter what I did. Our chances will be better if we simply bypass that whole mess and communicate our ideas directly, expose the flaws of capitalism, promote workplace democracy, production for use, economic planning, etc. Otherwise it will be us against the burning dumpster fire that is American political discourse, pic related.

Yup. American education really is the worst and we really have to develop alternative educational tools so kids don't get all their "learning" from state and private outlets.

hmm it's making me think

The amount of verbal cat-flipping lefties employ in defining capitalism is laughable silliness.

This is also taught in the UK.

Don't forget about the "middle-class" OP, which further obscurants the discussion.

MarxistMatey here, Holla Forums's most notorious namefag.

This is exactly what I was dealing with on Instagram just yesterday. Some burger conservatard commented an "smh" type comment on my 8 Values test results, which defined me as a "libertarian socialist". This insufferably dumb Americunt kept spouting all the unpleasantly familiar burger memes, i.e. "socialism is theft/immoral", "capitalism is the only system that works", "capitalism created Google", "just look at Venezuela", "you lefties don't understand basic economics", "capitalism is voluntary", "anyone making over $500k is the 1%", etc.

I argued with him for a good while before telling him to actually read socialist theory, but he kept spamming me with his brainless burgerfag memes, so I blocked him just so I wouldn't have to put up with his shit anymore, hence why his comments may be invisible. They are when I pull the comments page up, anyway.

Sure, there are many silly burgers out there. I won't deny that. But you lefties have a much bigger problem in your addiction to theory and autistic attachment to abstract ideas and definitions. In this way you see the world from the point of view of the definitions rather than the other way around.

The result of this is what I have experienced with irl and online leftists a lot, that is, a refusal to let any failure of a socialist/communist-aspiring country be called 'socialism' or 'communism'. Often, your argument seems to be:
This is essentially a No True Scotsman fallacy which comes in new, shiny, red packaging. A country in which a 'socialist' revolution occurred, a 'socialist' government came to power while getting the masses to chant about the wonders of 'socialism' is suddenly not representative of socialism because the experiment never worked out.

An example might be Mao's China. Mao was part of a Marxist study group in his youth. Mao joined the Communist Party. Mao fought with the Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War. When Mao came to power, he tried collectivisation during the Great Leap Forward, banning private agricultural plots. This failed and tens of millions of peasants (not porkies, not landlords, peasants) died, often directly due to the centralisation of food production, which robbed peasants of food through state quotas.

The point is: Mao was a Communist and tried key communist policies. Yet because China never reached the promised land of stateless communism, you leftists still shriek and point to your abstract ideals from your abstract theory. If you haven't got it already, this is your problem: you do not allow for the possibility that your theory is wrong. You assume your own conclusion through the definition. You beg the question of whether socialism/communism is successful by defining it as a success in the first place.

Yes, I know socialism and communism are different. The above applies to both.

The problem is that you're impenetrably stupid, not that leftists deny a country is socialism or not.

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Excellent strategy, retard.

Because we are Hobbesian, we think Marxism is completely looney. So we do you all a favor and address Rawls instead because we think he steelmans contemporary Socialist societies better than you do.

i like how the letters in Lenin's poster phonetically translate to 'sndige'. they also couldn't find a cyrillic letter shaped like 'G', so they just slapped the roman version in hoping no one would notice i guess

They died because people who had no business harvesting crops were class-cucked into supporting the Revolution.

They died because China is so population dense that any time the slightest thing goes wrong tens of millions of people die.

In any event I find it hard to get worked up about these incidental deaths when they would have never happened in the first place had the West not systematically worked to dismember and destabilize the Chinese state and addict its people to opium, among a bunch of other shit.

So yeah, it's hard for me to get upset by an accidental fuck up when it's preceded by a century of purposefully inflicted misery by capitalists that killed exponentially more people that they were either trying to exploit or exterminate.

You're talking about it as if the weather was to blame, as well as making it sound like a few dozen elderly people kicked the bucket. The weather played a tiny role in the late 1950s/early 1960s harvests compared to Mao's communist policies, the reversal of some of which (e.g. collectivisation and peasants being allowed to have private plots) correlates strongly with tens of millions of people not dying. The fact is that any fuckup by a government like Mao's is amplified a thousandfold due to the amount of control they have over what the peasants produce.

We could take another example outside of China, which you seem to discount due to some bizarre (and unsourced) reasoning about population density.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, britannica.com/place/Ukraine/The-famine-of-1932-33#ref404577

Again, the level of control of the economy necessary to any government which aspires to socialism or eventual communism leads to ruin even if there is enough food for everyone to eat.

It doesn't matter how many people you think were killed because of capitalism. That doesn't make your system good. Not to turn this into an argument about Chinese history, but war waged by a foreign government is also fundamentally different to starvation by your own government.

Right-wing is being intellectually bankrupt when it's not being intellectually dishonest. News at 11.