Or:
“What if we give it to people that aren’t like you?”
This is what’s frustrating about trying to talk to people about socialism. It’s everything that liberal capitalist democracy claims to be but isn’t. They’ve just been brainwashed into thinking it just means authoritarianism.
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Democracy: You want a government by the people, of the people, for the people? Well a system that lets the rich and powerful pour their vast resources into corrupting it doesn’t allow for that. And that’s before we even get into the explicit ways in which US “democracy” was set up to be resistant to popular influences. Also, in a less direct way, the more of society that is privatized, the less in under the preview of whatever semblance of democratic control we do have.
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Freedom: Under capitalism, your freedom is directly proportional to your wealth. Rich people and corporations can do whatever the hell they want and can often do things that infringe on the freedoms of others, but if you’re poor, or even just not super rich, your ability to make choices in life is heavily constrained by what the market offers and what you can afford. If you can’t afford to lose your job, you have to follow what your boss tells you. But hey, that’s not a government, so it doesn’t count right?
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Meritocracy: People want to be rewarded for their hard work and keep that reward? Well capitalism doesn’t reward hard work. It rewards having enough money and power to siphon the value of other people’s hard work. It doesn’t matter what people did to get to the top, they could have inherited it, they could have done crimes, etc. They could be completely undeserving of it and still be put in charge and still take your money.
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Innovation: Capitalism doesn’t promote innovation as anything more than a byproduct of a different force. ANYTHING that makes profit is incentivized, regardless of how productive it is for society. Sometimes that’s new tech, but things that are equally valid under capitalism include: Weapons, cheap plastic crap, getting people addicted to things, finding ways to offer less and charge more, suing others to try to stop them from using anything vaguely similar to what you own IP for (regardless of if you were even the ones to originally make the thing instead of just acquiring the IP) etc. Under this framework, you can even consider lobbying the government as profit generating activity. You spend some money to get the government to do things that will allow you to make more money in the future.
I could go on, but you get the idea. It’s just really hard to make the jump from having people agree with these things to realizing that the system itself is to blame and that in order to do better we need to change it.
That’s what we call a branding problem. Capitalism is also really really good at branding and it is also really really good at propagandizing in a way that makes other ways of life seem scary so we continue to do capitalism.
Its why I stopped reading The Saga of Tanya the Evil, she starts espousing about how capitalism is “gods greatest gift to mankind”…
To be fair you’re really not supposed to agree with Tanya. “Capitalism is God’s greatest gift to mankind” sounds about right for an unapologetic psychopath.
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Same thing if you ask MSM-poisoned people if they think ethnostates are inherently unjust and dysfunctional without first mentioning that Israel is one.
Dang, haven’t played in a while but I guess even My Singing Monsters isn’t safe, that’s discouraging
Dude, I’m not sure “ethnostate” isn’t some fucking used-car-lot buzzword like “the spend”, but I know Israel has done a lot of bad shit to everyone around them.
Maybe account for jargon?
I’m not sure “ethnostate” isn’t some fucking used-car-lot buzzword
Allow me to put you at ease, then: it’s not.
An ethnostate is a country that enforces the supremacy of one ethnicity at the expense of all others.
Examples other than Israel include Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa, most of the former Yugoslavian Republics during the war in the 90s, as well as current day countries such as several Muslim/Arab majority countries, Hungary, Russia, Belarus, and increasingly the US.
How is that different from China, Japan, South Korea, or any of countless other countries with a dominant ethnicity and laws that try to preserve it? Heck, I would even call Quebec an ethnostate if it were independent of Canada.
What laws do they have to preserve their ethnicity?
I’m not sure what laws those three specific examples have, but they allow foreigners to emigrate there and live there. An ethnostate would be violently opposed to the idea; think Stephen Miller in the US, he literally wants all non whites removed by force.
Now I’m not expert and it’s possible that those 3 examples do still count. But unlike Israel, with the exception of China, they are not currently right now commiting genocide. So it’s still different, except for China, and people who are paying attention are also mad at China.
That is why the hegemon is controlling all language. Just saying. I don’t have a solution. But maybe teach people to understand concepts instead of going by the gut feeling of government/boss brainwash.
One time I pissed off a bunch of people because they wanted to create a community where food is shared and work is divided.
I said, “Oh that’s a commune!” And they all nodded proudly.
Then I said, “Which is the foundation of communism.”
And they immediately started flipping the fuck out because people get triggered by that.
I expect the comments below to be the same.
That’s why I think it’s important to be objective. Like with Objectivism!
Don’t forget science and scientology!
In middle or highschool there was a kid who thought I was a scientologist, because they thought it meant atheist.
Then if you say it they’ll raise 1950s farming failures and blame Socialism (rather than the conman Lysenko and his Lysenkoism)…
…and then pretend gulags were death camps… Even those for the 18 million that went through the gulag system the vast majority survived (one million dead out of 18 million isn’t a death camp, even if they were political punishment camps).
Those are arguments against Authoritarianism, not Socialism!
One million people died in soviet Gulags around the time of Nazi invasion. 25 million people died "altogether* in the USSR as a consequence of Nazi invasion.
Gulags weren’t particularly deadly, the whole country was because of fucking nazis
I feel like the former is also an argument against dogmatic ideologies, being unwilling or unable to question things can lead to some pretty bad misunderstandings.
What would you say to people like someone I know (who gets all information from fb and xitter) who insists that we arent in capitalism, we are in corporatism, and TRUE free market capitalism is the end all be all (Ancap, Basically).
I explain over and over how it DOESNT work because of capitalisms inherent nature to create monopolies and the ownership class but they just say a free market cant have a monopoly. I disagree. But theyre not really worth arguing with, lol.
Side note, they are poor and make financially stupid decisions, generally they think theyre right about everything because they watch youtube. Its frustrating.
If this person doesn’t trust you, you probably can’t get deep-seated beliefs out of them.
If they trust you, you have to make the slowly nudge them towards making the conclusions themselves. Ask a lot of questions, talk about how reigning in the corporations rather than unshackling them would be better at ending corporatism, and over time move towards more fundamental questions.
The ability to persuade someone of a viewpoint depends on how many assumptions, previously arrived at conclusions, and morals you share.
when the delinquent yells “Marxist!” in the dunce corner.
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