Socialists in america need to reject the term progressive. It’s used in order to claim socialists as their own, as “progressive liberals” instead of as what they really are, opposition to liberals. The whole “progressive” thing is used to erase socialists and keep it buried enough that people do not become politically educated about the differences.
Agreed. Its too vague. We don’t have time left to mince words.
the best thing American socialists and communists could do is abandoning both of those words.
I like this. Do you have any suggestion for alternative terms? I think I’ve struggled with finding a different word because I don’t feel comfortable calling anyone in the Democratic Party “leftist” so I fall back on “progressive” as a default
I call them left-liberals, and depending on the specifics you can call them socdems
One that isn’t insulting to the liberals that exist under the “progressive” tent? I don’t know. The word is essentially a tent of social-democrats and socialists, and that tent is useful as an alliance but damaging in that it erases socialists from discourse as they get consumed into “progressive liberals”. This erasure results in fewer people learning the difference between socialists and liberals, in fact it makes people think socialists are liberals.
Socialists should call themselves socialists and any big-tent collaboration should be clearly labelled as a Socialist-LeftLiberal collaboration/alliance.
The benefit of calling someone like Bernie or AOC LeftLiberal instead of Progressive is it educates less political people that LeftLiberal and RightLiberal exists. This pushes the vast majority of the Democrats to the right in people’s minds and it will open up space for a “left” to exist. While doing this it also clearly educates people that Socialists and LeftLiberals are not the same thing.
You get me? If LeftLiberal becomes a thing in people’s minds then everything that is not LeftLiberal becomes right wing in people’s minds, pushing the entirety of the democrat party into the right and opening up control of what “left” exists to Socialists and Social Democrats. The benefit of this is that everyone who currently associates “left” with being good will fall into this camp over time, they will reject RightLiberals when they become associated with being right wing in their minds. So much american thinking can be boiled down to “left good, right bad” or “right good, left bad”. This can be weaponised linguistically.
It is possible to convince LeftLiberals to start doing this because they will realise how much it benefits them to make the distinction. And it is possible to convince Socialists to start doing this because it stops erasing Socialists.
Yeah that makes sense! I generally tell people “Liberals are right wing because they still support capitalism and empire” but some of the edge cases make that harder to sell. Left-liberal is a term that can fill that niche.
Exactly, and if they start to build their understanding of the world as these people being “Left-Liberal” then they will automatically start to interpret everyone outside of that as being right wing.
I know the whole political window shit is hated here but this genuinely pushes the window leftwards by doing it.
In fact, many would argue that they have used far more resources trying to stop this man’s political rise than they ever did trying to stop Donald Trump.
There it is. That’s all you need to know.
I mean fuck Bernie, with that out of the way the dude was pulling crowds like ten times the size of Biden’s during the primary, on top of that he still gets people coming out to hear his message. But no, we need pragmatic dipshits who’s policies are kill the poor and give more money to the police.
Fuck Bernie, but even more fuck the DNC for ratfucking him.
Bernie was and forever will be a compromise candidate. He wasn’t actually radical. At all. He was offering a previous era’s Keynesian treats for the imperial core and, most crucially, a more marked divergence from the standard foreign policy line than either party is comfortable acknowledging.
The fact they had a meltdown over that really should get printed out on business cards and any liberal who bleats about “radical marxism” should be forced to read and eat one of those cards before continuing.
Bernie was always the compromise.
He definitely would have won in both 2016 and 2020 in the general. Most voters wanted something different in both elections, which was Trump in 16 and Biden in 20.
Of course we’d all be complaining about all the sucdem things he’d do, but like… I don’t think he would have tore up the Iran deal, did the Abraham accords, moved the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, and so on.
I have to remind people that Bernie was not even my preferred 2020 candidate, that was Gravel
All due respect to Mike Gravel for using some of the last time he had alive to throw shit in the faces of the ghouls.
what you need to understand is that democrats in south carolina decide elections and if you disagree with that then you are a racist.
jim clyburn the fuckwad who said there are no black communists while in his office with a bust of fucking WEB DuBois and he probably met a bunch of black maoists back in the day too.
He meant no more living because of the great pains the CIA and FBI took to kill black communists.
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fuck Bernie
Obligatory for reasons of theory, but let’s not pretend we all wouldn’t have felt warm and fuzzy inside the day he won
for sure. it would have indicated a future of possibilities, including gentler transitions, and a signal that elite control over our electoral system wasn’t absolute or at least not controlled by people who are committed to full imperialist barbarism.
I’m getting older. my lower back isn’t what it was. I’d prefer to spend my sunset years gardening, painting, reading, and attending community theater and if they let me have a believable pathway to that which wasn’t soaked in blood or achieved by ignoring and stepping over the bones of friends and kind strangers being tortured, I would be so relieved.
but it seems this barrier to the all encompassing motives of capital cannot be allowed.
I think the outcome makes it clear that crowd sizes don’t mean anything. Biden’s supporters may not have come out to hear him speak, but his message of “nothing will fundamentally change” resonated with enough of them to win him the primary.
here’s how he can still win
What do you mean? Its clearly the voters fault always. /s
