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Me: If this electoral strategy is going to have any value, it’s going to require challenging the American perception of socialist states.
Libs: No! Americans have to have direct material improvement first. Then they’ll be more open-minded about socialist states. So let socdems say they want to be like the UK or Norway.
Me: So are people in the UK or Norway particularly open-minded about socialist states?
Libs: 🤨
Changing perceptions about socialist states has to come from the bottom up, not the top down.
Look at how Bernie’s entirely truthful, extremely moderate statements on Cuba’s healthcare and education programs was wielded against him. That’s what happens when political leaders try to change the tune about socialist states in a country that’s been strongly anti-communist for most of the last century. We have to have those conversations on the ground first.
Telling your buddies that Cuba is great helps. So does a prominent politician saying the same thing. Running away from the history of socialist projects doesn’t help because:
- Enemies won’t believe you anyway. People will think you’re basically Castro even if you drape yourself in the NHS.
- It alienates socialist international allies.
- There’s no clear point at which you can flip the switch and say “actually we meant Cuba this whole time. We were just lying.” This alienates the base that you’ve been building.
- It serves as an antagonist to the formation of class consciousness.
If you tell your buddies Cuba is great, the worst that can happen is they’ll think your political opinions are shit. And because you get to have an actual exchange with them – i.e., whatever you say about Cuba isn’t filtered through network media and social media until it becomes nothing more than “@hagensfohawk loves commie dictators” – you have a shot at breaking through superficial talking points and getting your buddies to reconsider what they know.
If a politician says Cuba is great, well, we know what happens – Bernie did it not even a year ago. He gained zero support from the left that he didn’t already have. All it did was launch a few fresh media cycles of “Bernie’s a commie!!1!!!” And while you’re right that they’ll call you a commie anyway, playing the same hits gets old after a while and loses its effectiveness. Giving them fresh meat can’t help and only hurts.
The only way to change that is if you and I have enough conversations with our buddies to where “hey, Cuba’s actually good” becomes a majority opinion.
I guess if your only goal is to win office, then sure, saying Maduro is an authoritarian won’t hurt. But if you goal is to build class consciousness and move towards socialism, then it definitely hurts.
She’s not saying Maduro is an authoritarian here, though.
But if you goal is to build class consciousness
There are dozens of better ways to build class consciousness than talking about countries no one in America really knows about except in talking point form. Talking about universal healthcare instead of getting into a struggle session over a country that hasn’t existed for 25 years is one of them.
Just off the top of my head she could have called bullshit on his framing and segued into talking about socialism: what it is, what it’s goals are, how it is relevant to the vast majority of the American working class, what a socialist methodology in building a new world would imply, etc. But she’d have to have those hidden power levels to begin with, which she doesn’t. What you see is very often what you get with these things.
Well obviously giving everyone a history lesson doesn’t in and of itself build class consciousness. But running away from your own history while celebrating social democracy (which is crumbling elsewhere by the way) doesn’t do it either.
Yeah and that all starts by telling a former CIA spook Vanderbilt descendant in an interview on a corporate news channel that the Soviet Union was good, actually.
It’d be better if she never sat down with clowns like this, but I genuinely don’t know what you think the strategy should be when talking to a dumb dumb mainstream virulently anti-communist organization like CNN.
Edit: lmao downbears don’t mean I’m wrong, clowns.
I don’t get why on this site and especially on the old sub, AOC gets like 10X the shit we give Bernie - who almost never gets criticized other than for bowing out when he did and endorsing Biden - when both their stated policies are functionally the same thing.
Probably because she’s a lot younger and still has plenty of time for her politics to get much worse.
But yeah, Bernie deserves more criticism for many of the same reasons. Both are Dem entryists presenting themselves as “democratic socialists” when the limits of their imaginations are somewhere in the neighborhood of FDR New Deal liberalism and the right wing of social democracy. Bernie deserves even more shit than AOC does for promoting a sort of US-American social imperialism, consistently supporting the growth of the military-industrial complex.
lol imagine not contorting your face in to the vivid image of Iosif Stalin before answering yes to that question
What is she supposed to say?
She’s supposed to play the State Anthem of the Soviet Union and then slap Anderson Cooper right across his Vanderbilt face.
In response to that specific question, she might have just described what socialism is and why we need it. She could also have pointed out why the framing of the question is bullshit.
I’m not like shocked or shook by what she said, but I do question the agitational value of being asked about socialism and then effectively pointing to more capitalism as the way forward.
all of those places are lurching rightward and dismantling social democracy you fuckin’… god damn
