Openly support communism without thought about what the final outcome of that may actually be

Just keep working to make the world I live in better

They’re the same picture.

proactive

Doesn’t seem like they’re supportive of Israel, no

You’re looking at illegitimate power gained through wealth but not any other means, which is shortsighted.

Nope, I’m saying the wealth is legitimately accumulated, but it’s still a problem.

It’s widely accepted that wealth can and will be abused, and thats the problem.

The message works more broadly than you claim.

Doubtful, and even if it did: Republicans could just as easily run the exact same campaign against the democrats’ ‘elities’, and we’re right back where we started.

Class consciousness is the thing democrats haven’t tried because they refuse to, and it’ll be the thing that prevents them from winning.

You don’t understand, their support of lesser fascism is necessary to avoid the greater fascism, so by opposing them you’re actually supporting the greater fascism

Is that his house now? That is the most divorced-dad looking empty-room i’ve ever seen, like he just finished moving his shit out of his ex-wife’s house and hasn’t had time to get new furniture of his own

“It’s not my opinion”
spends the next ten paragraphs expressing that opinion

Insisting that the problem isn’t wealth accumulation, but instead “corrupt” wealth that just happens to be accumulated under capitalism is just delusion and denial.

Bernie and AOC are two of the most nationally-favorable politicians in the US, and the core message from both is “wealth inequality is the problem”.

I’ll just say it again: if democrats run their platform on “cronyism” and not wealth disparity and accumulation, they will continue losing. But don’t take my word for it - that’s what they’ve been running on.

Edit:

They need to beat Republicans at social media, have their own answer to right-wing influencers & podcasters like Joe Roga

Lmao, Ken Martin, that you? This is such a boomer take. This is like trying to claim Clinton lost in 2016 because she didn’t tweet enough or use the right young-person slang, skibidi

They shouldn’t control that much wealth anyway, even if it’s not ‘real’ money

It’s not about me. It’s about how others think, and they don’t necessarily think wealth is a problem.

But it is a problem, so nerfing your messaging and platform in such a way as to avoid addressing it ends up making things worse (not to mention that you end up losing the people who know it’s a problem and are frustrated at the constant running away)

I think you overestimate Americans & don’t know how many think unlike you.

Rubber, glue

At some point, democrats need to start making the case for their platform instead of tailoring it to what they think voters believe. If we believe wealth inequality is the source of the issue and needs to be addressed, then we need to go to bat for that platform instead of shying away from it because some people have been propagandized into believing it’s communist to talk about. Constantly running away from that platform makes it look more like democrats actually endorse the inequality

Merely complaining that someone is rich is oblique

“Nobody should have so much money they can buy their way into a presidential cabinet position”. That’s not oblique, that’s straight to the point

Complaining that they exercise undue power over you & cheat you out of a fair shot makes the point directly.

“This person is abusing power” vs “This person used their wealth to fuck you over”. Both are simple messages, but one is addressing the actual issue while the other is complaining about who is exercising power and not how or why they have that power to begin with

Democrats will not win on the messaging being proposed, because their own base is getting frustrated with the double-speak and impatient with the lack of progress. You can blame those people if you want but it won’t make them any more likely to win.

The… cognitive meaning? Wtf is a ‘cognitive’ meaning?

There is some reason to think criticizing power (elites stacking the deck in their favor like unelected rulers) is more likely to broadly appeal to those folk

And how do you think those elites are stacking the deck?? I think you’re intentionally dismissing something that most americans understand extremely well - that the ‘elite’ are able to stack the deck in their favor because they have obscene wealth. Elon bought his way into trump’s circle and fucked with Wisconsin’s election using his immense fortune and influence. That isn’t a mystery, not even to diehard conservatives.

The other issue with ‘kings’ is that in a MONarchy, there is only one monarch, one King. Even the people you’re claiming to speak for know that the problem extends well beyond Trump, and thinking of Elon and Bezos and Zuck and Gates all as Kings of their own kingdom unnecessarily complicates what is otherwise a clear quid-pro-quo relationship between them and a government they are supposed to be subservient to. Oligarchs may be ‘officially’ less than the governing structure they’re a part of, but they are the defining feature of a government by the name of oligarchy.

I also see an argument for a different tact & same results in rustier, less urban states.

I have family in those states, and even though we have differing voting habits, they have always shared my resentment against those with ill-begotten obscene wealth and influence. It is often one of the few things we have in common politically, and I think democrats just don’t want it to be true.

“People shouldn’t be able to have that much money when everyone else is struggling”

You’re right, that is completely unrelatable, who would ever think like that

People really like first not admitting they didn’t read, then doubling down on absolute nonsense around here.

You speaking for yourself there?

There’s a reason why Marx coined a term referencing ‘dictatorship’ that included elements like ‘direct democracy’. He sought to exclude the capital class entirely from it, and so referred to it as dictatorship ‘of the working class’. Marx specifically saw liberal democracy as one designed for the borurgeoisie, and so using that as a basis of comparison for a socialist project is counter-productive

When liberals accuse China of being a ‘dictatorship’, they’re pointing to the parts of China’s democracy that differ from western democracy that specifically have to do with the inclusion of the capital class. Even a single-party state can be of the working-class and have direct-democracy, as is China’s.

You’re free to disapprove of China’s system of government (I have scruples about it myself), you simply can’t reasonably argue they are a dictatorship by any modern standards(at least, in no other way than in Marx’s own use of the term).

Far from ‘approving’ of their system of governance, though, their state-controlled economy is definitionally socialist.

I don’t see anything wrong with talking about the oligarchs as “kings” as well. I think that language could work just as well with Zuck, Bezos, etc. as it would with Trump.

I disagree, I don’t think people would resonate with that language as applied to other, ‘good’/quiet billionaires like Gates, Buffet, or Page - in fact I think that’s exactly the point of swapping terms because it sounds more specific to how those billionaires utilize their wealth and influence instead of the fact that they have it to begin with.

It’s the guy who is trying to play king

yea… except he’s just the end result of a far broader problem

This is exactly the concern with hand-wringing over semantics- the democrats aren’t losing because they aren’t being vocal enough about their opposition to Trump, they’re losing because they’re actively avoiding the root problem.

Pick another word for oligarchs if you want, so long as the attention is being drawn to the root problem of wealth inequality and the billionare class. Don’t just abandon the issue because you’re afraid it looks like you might be critiquing our economic model when that’s absolutely what we’re doing

Yea but opposing ‘kings’ isn’t even close to the problem of ‘oligarchs’

One is very clearly a result of a capitalist system, the other is a looser critique of authority generally.

If it was really not ideologically tilted she’d suggest ‘billionaire’ instead of oligarch, but the dems are afraid of losing the support of the 'good billionaires

A ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ has elements of democracy, but it is explicitly not the same as a liberal democracy (nor is it really the same as a straight-out dictatorship). It’s possible that some people prefer the Trotsky version of socialist states (one where multiple socialist parties might compete for power), but the ML single-party version is still very much within marxist theory.

The Chinese political system is democratic, just not in the same ways a western democracy might be. Western liberals seem to either not know (?) how the Chinese system works, or miss-understand what ‘democracy’ means as it pertains to Marx’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Either way, @explodicle@sh.itjust.works seems to be operating under a liberal-democratic understanding of democracy, but that’s really not a given in marxist theory.

on behalf of and within the confines of the ruling proletarian state party

Yup.

Yes, that famous part of Das Capital where marx coins the term “democracy of the proletariat”

The workers control the means of production?

More than 60% of the Chinese economy is state owned and controlled, and as of I think a year ago they democratized Chinese company structures by mandating assemblies of employee representatives. The state having majority control and direction of the Chinese economy and market is the primary complaint of western trade partners, I don’t know why people are always surprised by this.

I get that people really do not like the authoritarian aspects of the Chinese government, but state-controlled economies are pretty much the exact intent behind ‘worker-controlled means of production’ in marxism.

China is very much a socialist economy