Socialism has garbage marketing, full stop. Probably because those who specialize in marketing tend to thrive in, and thus gravitate to, capitalist frameworks. Consequentially, a great many members of the working class are propagandized into reflexive rejection of socio-economic policies that would greatly benefit them, based on taboo buzzwords and false equivalences.
Yes, established terminology is quite useful for nuanced discussion in leftist spaces, among those who understand the distinctions between “communism”, “socialism”, “democratic socialism”, “social democracy”, “command economy”, “State capitalism”, and “totalitarian dictatorship”. But for many people, those are all synonyms. “Socialism” means gulags and breadlines and the government stealing your stuff to give it to slackers.
I propose a reactionary framework. A movement committed to abandoning familiar terminology in favor of capitalist buzzwords. Driving a wedge between “capitalism” and “market economies”, leveraging discontent of blue collar workers against big business and political cronyism.
It’s not universal healthcare, it’s alleviating the unfair healthcare burden on small businesses. It’s not universal welfare, it’s freeing business owners by replacing the minimum wage with a prosperity dividend. It’s not a socialized workplace, it’s an equity compensation initiative.
The established terms are poisoned, but the actual concepts are widely popular, if you phrase them right. The movement cannot thrive by trying to carve out a portion of the “leftist” party, it has to draw support from the entire working class. The only way to accomplish this is by abandoning the poisoned terms in favor of business terms that cannot be twisted by capitalists without destroying their own platform.
Thoughts?
You can’t build an enduring movement unless you are straightforward about what your goals are. Anything short of that is just building a social formation which is ripe for co-option. The Red Scare has completely scrambled peoples’ brains when it comes to history and politics. The situation demands political education, not scrambling people’s brains even further.
You can use people’s political ignorance to set up some pretty funny pranks. You can get people to embarrass themselves on social media, but you cannot effectively organize people while keeping them ignorant.
You say that, and yet right wing politicians consistently win elections by doing exactly that. Policies that explicitly hurt right wing voters at the benefit of the bourgeoisie are hidden behind bluster and culture war hot button issues.
That said, I’m not advocating ignorance. There’s no “Gotcha!” moment. I’m advocating an honest movement which merely chooses less stigmatized, and less stigmatizable, vocabulary to express its sincere policies.