Form a new party!!!
Don’t call it Labor or Labour. Don’t call it Green. Don’t call it progressive. Don’t call it socialist or liberal.
Just give it a name that people understand and don’t have preexisting bias against. “For The People”
Take on BOTH the democrats and GOP. Become popular overnight. Keep hammering home it is not about skin colour, race or country of origin, but about the billionaires that aren’t happy with paying no tax and having billions. Make it about the 99%.
It is the only way you’ll get your country back without excessive violence. The two status quo parties are hollowed out from the inside. And both are infiltrated by foreign interests.
That’s what Bernie is saying. He’s calling all progressives to run as Independent, aka No Party Preference, down ballot so we can shove the Corporate DNC into the GOP where they so desperately want to be anyway.
The Cowboy Party (Named after the most popular/recognizable NFL team)
Or, how about:
The Murica Party
Then you put Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as your president. I’ve had debates about the feasibility of this approach and this is the modern Ronald Reagan play.
The thing is, you can “not call it socialism” all you like. The fact is that it is socialism, you have to respect people’s intelligence enough to know that they will figure that out (or be easily convinced of it, if you really need an argument that doesn’t respect their intelligence). When this happens, and even moreso when you inevitably reveal yourself to be socialist, it will make you look deeply insincere and subversive, because you yourself will have fed into this taboo and not done the work of separating the term from its negative stigma or generating positive media for it.
Socialism is simply the fact of the matter and being socialist means caring about material reality enough to not just lie and gaslight as a means of convincing people. When you get attacked for being socialist, you will not be able to backpedal without sabotaging your own movement, because there will be a litany of evidence that you are socialist. As there should be, or you would not have the support of actual ideological socialists (remember that whole material reality thing I just mentioned).
The material reason why socialism is a “no-no” word is because when the right attacks it, the liberal establishment does what they always do; they backpedal. Not only does this make the right’s criticism look reasonable, because it confirms there is real reason to fear being associated with socialism; but it ensures that the people only ever hear the arguments against socialism, never the arguments for it. All of the arguments which are intrinsically associated with socialism; which you have done all this work to propagate; are never connected to it optically, and the people never learn what it actually is, leaving all of your policy open to attack.
What you are suggesting here is not the solution but exactly the issue that has brought us to this point.
The only way that you will ever launder the term “socialism” is by openly advocating for socialism and calling it what it is when you do. You just aren’t going to beat the establishment at their own game; rather, we must show the people what it is to be respected and hear policy based in material reality that will actually address their needs, and you will win support from across the spectrum.
I disagree. And I don’t mean to preach, but there is a power in words and using them (or not using them). The fight over the word and meaning of socialism is not what “the people” need right now, that can come later. This has been happening in the US closing in on a century. It’s not those tolerant of material reality (as you say) you need to convince, it’s those that would benefit from “the peoples” agenda that don’t acknowledge material reality. Ride the wave of making billionaires pay.
Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.
Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security.
Socialism is what they called farm price supports.
Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.
Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.
When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan “Down With Socialism” on the banner of his “great crusade,” that is really not what he means at all.
What he really means is “Down with Progress–down with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal,” and “down with Harry Truman’s fair Deal.” That’s all he means.
Harry Truman
Don’t swim against this right now. These programs from the new deal and fair deal are not even called socialist by American standards anymore.
This quote is an example of what I am talking about though. Roosevelt had to take great strides to ease the great depression, because of mass protest movements at the time openly led by socialist/communist parties, but he could not go so far as to address the economic system that created the great depression. Nor could the capitalist class allow these policies to be associated with the socialists that visibly fought for them. Doing so would threaten the power of capital; this is not long after the bolshevik revolution that created the USSR, so there was major fears of similar movements taking root in the US.
This is not Truman defending the new deal, this is him distancing the new deal from socialism.
The new deal was not socialist, which is by design, but it was made up of things that socialists would have certainly fought for and taken even further if their effort was sincerely meant to achieve socialism.
It’s time to stop letting socialism be used as a scare word. Sure, the loudest ones will continue to bury their heads in the sand, but those people weren’t going to be won over anyways. Furthermore, you aren’t going to win people over by talking down to them, and you cannot address their needs in a sincere manner if your base assumption is that they aren’t intelligent enough to understand their own lives.
edit: I’m also not suggesting that we should be fighting over “the word and meaning of socialism”; precisely the opposite, in fact. I’m saying that we should be living examples of what a socialist is and what socialists advocate for. We should be seen in our communities doing the ground work of organizing and being role models for what we believe in.
The difference between what we are accused of and what we are actually doing is stark, which can’t be pointed out if we’re constantly distancing ourselves from anyone that calls themselves socialist simply because we’re afraid of the word. There is so much present day and past evidence; from the rich history that was erased in the red scare and all of this anti-socialist sentiment; for us to draw on instead of trying to distance ourselves from the reality that what we advocate for is anti-capitalist in nature.
Buddy half of American voters voted for trump. We are well past “insulting their intelligence”. The reality is that the majority of American voters are stupid, lazy, or both.
Separately I don’t think you know what socialism is if you think progressive policies are socialist. Just because “social programs” and socialism share a common word doesn’t mean they are the same thing.
Simultaneously, American voters are “stupid, lazy, or both”, but intelligent and well-read enough to understand what you mean when you explain the difference between social welfare and outright socialism as you are backpedaling on being a socialist.
That being said; I’m not talking about progressive policies, I’m talking about socialism. There might be plenty of progressive policies between here and socialism, but the end of that side of the spectrum is socialism.
Socialism? Americans would be happy to have health care, better workers‘ rights, affordable education. Just like most other advanced economies in Europe, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and so on. That’s not socialism, that’s capitalism with regulations and social programs. Nobody really wants socialism, which was as utter failure everywhere it was tried.
Anywhere socialism has existed, it has done so under the threat of global capitalism which is led by the United States. The countries you listed are only able to maintain their wealth and relative comfort by taking advantage of the global south. They benefit from obscuring that relationship so that the people who see that benefit, don’t have to reckon with the extent of it and how it enables the oppression of all of us and holds us back as a whole.
Today, the global North drains from the South commodities worth $2.2 trillion per year, in Northern prices. For perspective, that amount of money would be enough to end extreme poverty, globally, fifteen times over.
Over the whole period from 1960 to today, the drain totalled $62 trillion in real terms. If this value had been retained by the South and contributed to Southern growth, tracking with the South’s growth rates over this period, it would be worth $152 trillion today.
These are extraordinary sums. For the global North (and here we mean the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Korea, and the rich economies of Europe), the gains are so large that, for the past couple of decades, they have outstripped the rate of economic growth. In other words, net growth in the North relies on appropriation from the rest of the world.
Let me give you the quick and dirty, oversimplified rundown of how that relationship plays out:
Power, under capitalism, resides in capital, which isn’t just money but also resources and property. In order to maintain power, capitalism requires infinite and continuous growth, which of course requires more and more resources to sustain.
Say a given country decides it would like to own its resources nationally and use the wealth generated by those resources to support the growth and welfare of their own people. Capitalist nations are able to wield state power against those countries whenever they encounter this sort of difficulty. This includes leveraging state and capitalist media to run propaganda campaigns, which sour public perception of that country’s national leadership; funding coups and covert operations against them; giving money and training to militant minority resistance groups; and when all else fails, all out war, while messy, is a very lucrative means to the end of converting the resources of global south nations into private capital for the global north.
This capital is then wielded within the capitalist world to manipulate political outcomes in favor of the private owners of capital and to prevent the working class from gaining the consciousness that would enable them to struggle for the things you mentioned; health care, worker’s rights, affordable education; as they slowly strip away what was won from past struggles.
I believe this lovely quote by Ella Baker, a major activist and leader behind the civil rights movement, is relevant to the conversation;
A nice gathering like today is not enough. You have to go back and reach out to your neighbors who don’t speak to you. And you have to reach out to your friends who think they are making it good. And get them to understand that they–as well as you and I–cannot be free in America or anywhere else where there is capitalism and imperialism. Until we can get people to recognize that they themselves have to make the struggle and have to make the fight for freedom every day in the year, every year until they win it.
Your wall of text is ahistorical. Yugoslavia is a counter example. They received American aid after WW2 to rebuild.
Half of Europe lived under real socialism and it was a fucking terrible time for many reasons.
During the Cold War the Soviet led block and the non aligned movement together had sufficient resources, knowledge, and people to get their shit together independently of the US.
Forgive me for actually caring about the subject. Clearly you have other priorities.
You mean this aid to Yugoslavia?
Omar Bradley was also an outspoken supporter of providing aid and improving relations with Yugoslavia, stating in an address to Congress on 30 November 1950 that “In the first place, if we could even take them out of the hostile camp and make them neutral, that is one step. If you can get them to act as a threat, that’s a second step. if you can get them to actively participate on your side, that is an even further step and then, of course, if you had a commitment, where their efforts were integrated with those of ours on the defence, that would still be a further step.” This marked the beginning of US military aid to a communist nation in order to counter Soviet ambitions in the region, leading to greater strives in United States–Yugoslavia relations.
The aid to Yugoslavia that is an example of the US being hostile towards socialist states and cynically providing support to anyone that would align with it against its enemies? The same US whose loans are notoriously difficult to pay back, leaving the recipients permanently indebted to the US? Surely we are talking about different aid Yugoslavia, that couldn’t be your single counter example.
During the Cold War the Soviet led block and the non aligned movement together had sufficient resources, knowledge, and people to get their shit together independently of the US.
Yes, and for the most part they did. Let’s not for get that in 1917 the Russian Empire was still a medieval state with similar technology. After the USSR was founded; their last famine would be in 1947, which happened as a result of WWII; and I’m not sure if you remember this but they would be the only other world power than the US at the time. In the 1970s, the average soviet had higher caloric intake than the average American. They beat the US to space, fought through several invasions and international boycotts, though with a much lower GDP than the US. They had to spend 15% of their GDP to the US’s 5-7% to compete with the US militarily. This was of course reasonable to do as the US had set itself out to be a hostile threat to the very idea of socialism, but was a major sacrifice nonetheless.
Standards of living in across the Soviet bloc dropped substantially in the 90s after the fall of the USSR as corrupt governments and wealthy elite privatized the USSR’s resources. Even today, Russians earn under $10,000 per capita, about the same as the Soviet Union in the 80s. There is a lot more depth and complexity to this history than you would like to make it seem.
Don’t worry about getting it right 100% perfect in the planning phase, the important thing is to just get fucking moving. If either trying to shake up the democrats or forming a third party end up being wrong, then learn from it and keep moving. We can’t afford to miss the launch window because we couldn’t agree that the plan was perfect.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that about the left in general, that the perfect is always the enemy of the good. Meanwhile the right’s out there like “yeah, a lot of you are going to die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make”.
Ones I like after going on a Thesaurus and US Declaration of Independence wiki hole. The ones further below are just ones I thought were okay as they came to me.
It’s already split. If Democratic party runs another centrist/neoliberal candidate it will continue to be split. There is no indication that they’ll run anyone left of kamala.
Form a new party!!! Don’t call it Labor or Labour. Don’t call it Green. Don’t call it progressive. Don’t call it socialist or liberal.
Just give it a name that people understand and don’t have preexisting bias against. “For The People”
Take on BOTH the democrats and GOP. Become popular overnight. Keep hammering home it is not about skin colour, race or country of origin, but about the billionaires that aren’t happy with paying no tax and having billions. Make it about the 99%.
It is the only way you’ll get your country back without excessive violence. The two status quo parties are hollowed out from the inside. And both are infiltrated by foreign interests.
That’s what Bernie is saying. He’s calling all progressives to run as Independent, aka No Party Preference, down ballot so we can shove the Corporate DNC into the GOP where they so desperately want to be anyway.
IIRC, he also called for the corpocentrists to get primaried.
“People” = “Communist”
Agreed.
Gotta take a page out of idiocracy here folks.
The Cowboy Party (Named after the most popular/recognizable NFL team)
Or, how about:
The Murica Party
Then you put Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as your president. I’ve had debates about the feasibility of this approach and this is the modern Ronald Reagan play.
Please anyone but “The Turd” he’s just another slimy businessman and will grift this country out of more money.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=j_6bscCG7OA
The cowboys are probably the more at divisive team in the country.
The 99% Party. It’s a slick way of calling it a worker’s party without sounding like a communist party.
The thing is, you can “not call it socialism” all you like. The fact is that it is socialism, you have to respect people’s intelligence enough to know that they will figure that out (or be easily convinced of it, if you really need an argument that doesn’t respect their intelligence). When this happens, and even moreso when you inevitably reveal yourself to be socialist, it will make you look deeply insincere and subversive, because you yourself will have fed into this taboo and not done the work of separating the term from its negative stigma or generating positive media for it.
Socialism is simply the fact of the matter and being socialist means caring about material reality enough to not just lie and gaslight as a means of convincing people. When you get attacked for being socialist, you will not be able to backpedal without sabotaging your own movement, because there will be a litany of evidence that you are socialist. As there should be, or you would not have the support of actual ideological socialists (remember that whole material reality thing I just mentioned).
The material reason why socialism is a “no-no” word is because when the right attacks it, the liberal establishment does what they always do; they backpedal. Not only does this make the right’s criticism look reasonable, because it confirms there is real reason to fear being associated with socialism; but it ensures that the people only ever hear the arguments against socialism, never the arguments for it. All of the arguments which are intrinsically associated with socialism; which you have done all this work to propagate; are never connected to it optically, and the people never learn what it actually is, leaving all of your policy open to attack.
What you are suggesting here is not the solution but exactly the issue that has brought us to this point.
The only way that you will ever launder the term “socialism” is by openly advocating for socialism and calling it what it is when you do. You just aren’t going to beat the establishment at their own game; rather, we must show the people what it is to be respected and hear policy based in material reality that will actually address their needs, and you will win support from across the spectrum.
I disagree. And I don’t mean to preach, but there is a power in words and using them (or not using them). The fight over the word and meaning of socialism is not what “the people” need right now, that can come later. This has been happening in the US closing in on a century. It’s not those tolerant of material reality (as you say) you need to convince, it’s those that would benefit from “the peoples” agenda that don’t acknowledge material reality. Ride the wave of making billionaires pay.
Don’t swim against this right now. These programs from the new deal and fair deal are not even called socialist by American standards anymore.
This quote is an example of what I am talking about though. Roosevelt had to take great strides to ease the great depression, because of mass protest movements at the time openly led by socialist/communist parties, but he could not go so far as to address the economic system that created the great depression. Nor could the capitalist class allow these policies to be associated with the socialists that visibly fought for them. Doing so would threaten the power of capital; this is not long after the bolshevik revolution that created the USSR, so there was major fears of similar movements taking root in the US.
This is not Truman defending the new deal, this is him distancing the new deal from socialism.
The new deal was not socialist, which is by design, but it was made up of things that socialists would have certainly fought for and taken even further if their effort was sincerely meant to achieve socialism.
It’s time to stop letting socialism be used as a scare word. Sure, the loudest ones will continue to bury their heads in the sand, but those people weren’t going to be won over anyways. Furthermore, you aren’t going to win people over by talking down to them, and you cannot address their needs in a sincere manner if your base assumption is that they aren’t intelligent enough to understand their own lives.
Buddy half of American voters voted for trump. We are well past “insulting their intelligence”. The reality is that the majority of American voters are stupid, lazy, or both.
Separately I don’t think you know what socialism is if you think progressive policies are socialist. Just because “social programs” and socialism share a common word doesn’t mean they are the same thing.
If American voters are as stupid as you claim then it shouldn’t be hard to trick them into changing their vote.
Simultaneously, American voters are “stupid, lazy, or both”, but intelligent and well-read enough to understand what you mean when you explain the difference between social welfare and outright socialism as you are backpedaling on being a socialist.
That being said; I’m not talking about progressive policies, I’m talking about socialism. There might be plenty of progressive policies between here and socialism, but the end of that side of the spectrum is socialism.
Socialism? Americans would be happy to have health care, better workers‘ rights, affordable education. Just like most other advanced economies in Europe, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and so on. That’s not socialism, that’s capitalism with regulations and social programs. Nobody really wants socialism, which was as utter failure everywhere it was tried.
Anywhere socialism has existed, it has done so under the threat of global capitalism which is led by the United States. The countries you listed are only able to maintain their wealth and relative comfort by taking advantage of the global south. They benefit from obscuring that relationship so that the people who see that benefit, don’t have to reckon with the extent of it and how it enables the oppression of all of us and holds us back as a whole.
Let me give you the quick and dirty, oversimplified rundown of how that relationship plays out:
Power, under capitalism, resides in capital, which isn’t just money but also resources and property. In order to maintain power, capitalism requires infinite and continuous growth, which of course requires more and more resources to sustain.
Say a given country decides it would like to own its resources nationally and use the wealth generated by those resources to support the growth and welfare of their own people. Capitalist nations are able to wield state power against those countries whenever they encounter this sort of difficulty. This includes leveraging state and capitalist media to run propaganda campaigns, which sour public perception of that country’s national leadership; funding coups and covert operations against them; giving money and training to militant minority resistance groups; and when all else fails, all out war, while messy, is a very lucrative means to the end of converting the resources of global south nations into private capital for the global north.
This capital is then wielded within the capitalist world to manipulate political outcomes in favor of the private owners of capital and to prevent the working class from gaining the consciousness that would enable them to struggle for the things you mentioned; health care, worker’s rights, affordable education; as they slowly strip away what was won from past struggles.
I believe this lovely quote by Ella Baker, a major activist and leader behind the civil rights movement, is relevant to the conversation;
Your wall of text is ahistorical. Yugoslavia is a counter example. They received American aid after WW2 to rebuild.
Half of Europe lived under real socialism and it was a fucking terrible time for many reasons.
During the Cold War the Soviet led block and the non aligned movement together had sufficient resources, knowledge, and people to get their shit together independently of the US.
Forgive me for actually caring about the subject. Clearly you have other priorities.
You mean this aid to Yugoslavia?
The aid to Yugoslavia that is an example of the US being hostile towards socialist states and cynically providing support to anyone that would align with it against its enemies? The same US whose loans are notoriously difficult to pay back, leaving the recipients permanently indebted to the US? Surely we are talking about different aid Yugoslavia, that couldn’t be your single counter example.
Yes, and for the most part they did. Let’s not for get that in 1917 the Russian Empire was still a medieval state with similar technology. After the USSR was founded; their last famine would be in 1947, which happened as a result of WWII; and I’m not sure if you remember this but they would be the only other world power than the US at the time. In the 1970s, the average soviet had higher caloric intake than the average American. They beat the US to space, fought through several invasions and international boycotts, though with a much lower GDP than the US. They had to spend 15% of their GDP to the US’s 5-7% to compete with the US militarily. This was of course reasonable to do as the US had set itself out to be a hostile threat to the very idea of socialism, but was a major sacrifice nonetheless.
Standards of living in across the Soviet bloc dropped substantially in the 90s after the fall of the USSR as corrupt governments and wealthy elite privatized the USSR’s resources. Even today, Russians earn under $10,000 per capita, about the same as the Soviet Union in the 80s. There is a lot more depth and complexity to this history than you would like to make it seem.
Not very practical while the US voting system is still first-post-the-post. Y’all need to fix that first.
Unless it really works like it has the potential to. Then the repugs and dems would be totally cooked.
Don’t worry about getting it right 100% perfect in the planning phase, the important thing is to just get fucking moving. If either trying to shake up the democrats or forming a third party end up being wrong, then learn from it and keep moving. We can’t afford to miss the launch window because we couldn’t agree that the plan was perfect.
The “We can’t do this because it doesn’t solve 100% of our problems” excuse.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that about the left in general, that the perfect is always the enemy of the good. Meanwhile the right’s out there like “yeah, a lot of you are going to die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make”.
I’m pretty sure that name (or similar) has been used in ways that… don’t sit very well with people!
The “Do Something” party
Ones I like after going on a Thesaurus and US Declaration of Independence wiki hole. The ones further below are just ones I thought were okay as they came to me.
===========
People’s Voice Party
American Party
Workers Party
Freedom Party
Citizens Party
Peoples Party
Revolutionary Party
Common Party
United Party
==============
Workers Party
Blue Collar Party
Trades Party
Skilled Party
Collar Party
Rust Party
American Party
Freedom Party
Citizen’s Party
Liberty Party
People’s Party
Civil Party
Center Party
Working Party
99 Party
99% Party
Luigi Party
Rights Party
Blue Party
United Party
Sovereign Party
Human Party
Marching Party
US Party
Founding Party
Founders Party
National Party
Revolutionary Party
Colonial Party
Fundamental Party
Common Sense Party
People’s Choice Party
People’s Voice Party
Laws of Nature Party
Nature Party
Equal Party
Pursuit of Happiness Party
Standing Party
Family Party
Native Party
Great Party
Fighting Party
Party in the USA
Let’s get this Party started
Party Animal
Birthday Party
The Party Party
The Freedom party
The Justice Party
I like Freedom Party, take that word back.
The Individualist Party
EverForward Party
Onward Together Party
Inspired Collaboration Party
Positive Frontier Party
Don’t don’t don’t split the vote. Not even Trump was that stupid.
It’s already split. If Democratic party runs another centrist/neoliberal candidate it will continue to be split. There is no indication that they’ll run anyone left of kamala.
Now’s the time.
Dems are managing to split the vote all on their own it seems
Workers Party
Blue Collar Party
Trades Party
Skilled Party
Collar Party
Rust Party
American Party
Freedom Party
Citizen’s Party
Liberty Party
People’s Party
Civil Party
Center Party
Bernie is already third party, doofus. And if you want to fix anything you have to vote DNC.