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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
I feel writing off America's hostility to socialism as just a product of Macarthyism is too easy. It's this thing the left does whenever it looses. Rather than accept the fact that their messaging was wrong, or maybe just maybe some of their ideas were bunk, they make up some elaborate conspiracy. In that regard they are similar to Republicans who blamed Romney's loss on not being conservative enough.
No I think their is something deeper in the American psyche that makes us dislike socialism. I remember hearing Marx himself saying something about America being virtually immune to Communist or Socialist revolution.
I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.@Fighteer/desdendelle Yes, but we're quite possibly in the early days of a revolution in automation and machine intelligence, which could drastically reduce the amount of labor required for the economy to function, and eventually replace human activity in every sector of the economy. That's a scenario that looks rather frighteningly (at least if your part of the bourgeois) close to what Marx projected as the cause of capitalism's downfall. Proposals for how to make a post-automation economy work sound more like Market Socialism (Socialism with elements of capitalism) than Social Democracy (capitalism with elements of socialism), and while it's entirely likely it won't be called socialism, it's still going to be a form of postcapitalist system.
Some Breitbart reporter, who interestingly enough self-identifies as a "Faggot." Though honestly, I kinda respect that particular bit of his, it's kinda like how the African-American community reclaimed the term "black", which previously had even worse connotations than "negro" or "colored", during the 60s.
edited 14th Jun '16 7:48:38 PM by CaptainCapsase
In fairness, his support for Trump is based on accelerationism (he'll cause the system to collapse, which can only be good despite the history of that backfiring spectacularly) rather than any love for his policies. I wonder if its crossed his mind that he's using Marxist-Leninist logic.
edited 14th Jun '16 7:50:38 PM by CaptainCapsase
The man is a charlatan devoid of any principles. He's going with Trump because the neo-Nazi idiots he's pandering to like him.
It's not new. He deemed video gamers as virgin basement dwellers up until a certain non-story happened.
As much as I want to see him get his comeuppance, nothing can happen to him that won't martyr him short of him buying the farm the way Elvis did. And that would be an insult to Elvis.
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot@Capsase: The problem with post scarcity socialism is that I can't see how it will work in the real world. One of two things will happen, one stagnation, where, because the few who work are taxed so much and probably held in low social regard,i.e as evil capitalists, nobody will work, and the system will be forced to rely on the taxes of fewer and fewer people.
Or, the rich decide they no longer need the general populace and move with their machines to Mars or maybe an orbital space station, or maybe just exterminate or "cull" the proles, seeing the amount of hatred they have for the current welfare states I could easily see them developing an eliminationist mentality, especially if their is a high degree of social tension in said society.
I Bring Doom,and a bit of gloom, but mostly gloom.McCarthyism presumably helped, but socialism did a very good job on its own discrediting itself.
edited 14th Jun '16 8:10:44 PM by Stormtroper
And that's how I ended up in the wardrobe. It Just Bugs Me!"Socialism" needed to split itself from the Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries on the one hand and the free-love hippie commune types on the other, and concentrate on becoming an ideology that could moderate the excesses of capitalism without tearing down the economic value that markets bring to the table.
That did happen, quietly, and successfully in many places, but the public image was too tarnished by its worst excesses.
Of course, the United States was founded by a bunch of capitalist-statists on the one hand and libertarian "sovereign citizens" on the other, and has fought a tense and often violent battle between the two for centuries. Socialism in the sense that Europeans would recognize it barely enters into the picture, having had its heyday in the mid-20th century despite all the protestations of the right, and never being called that lest it spook people.
edited 14th Jun '16 8:13:21 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"@Fighteer: Socialism isn't inherently incompatible with a market system or money based economy; in fact, I'd go so far as to say that a sufficiently regulated capitalist system is indistinguishable from Market Socialism.
@Jack: The point in time where it becomes feasible to implement a straight up Kill the Poor solution comes well after the point at which mass civil unrest and revolutions become inevitable without dramatic societal changes. Now, that could entail the collapse of industrial society and/or human extinction, but assuming we can avoid self-destructing (which I'd say is a big if), it's not going to be possible to pull something like that off.
edited 14th Jun '16 8:36:29 PM by CaptainCapsase
"No I think their is something deeper in the American psyche that makes us dislike socialism. I remember hearing Marx himself saying something about America being virtually immune to Communist or Socialist revolution."
That smacks of American exceptionalism, which any thinking man or woman should accept as pure bunk. The reason America never had a communist or socialist revolution was because socialism was implemented moderately and peacefully through the existing political apparatus. Our dislike for socialism is a dislike for the word "socialism," since the New Deal and the Great Society were nakedly, albeit moderately, red, but repackaged so that dumb voters didn't associate it with the boogeyman du jour.
edited 14th Jun '16 9:30:28 PM by CrimsonZephyr
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."I'd argue the opposite: America isn't uniquely immune to Communism, but rather, some nations are uniquely weak to it-it takes really special circumstances to pull Communism off in the first place, and these circumstances are highly unsustainable. It's the same with socialism, only less so.
Leviticus 19:34
I'd agree it's an unsustainable system in our current world, but in a heavily automated economy where a sizable plurality of the working age population simply isn't capable of doing useful work, any system that remains predominately capitalist starts looking increasingly dystopian the longer it goes on.
edited 14th Jun '16 9:53:56 PM by CaptainCapsase

The NRA is blaming Obama and political correctness for the shooting
.
Because of course they would. Between this and the conspiracy theorists, I'm starting to feel like grabbing an LVOA-S and... taking it out on some silhouette targets.
Know Your Meme: The place got subverted by the alt-right a long time ago. There simply isn't enough left there for me to suffer it.
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot