Comment by Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net on David Cross: Why America Sucks at Everything [Gravel Institute]

I’ll be honest, I fucking hated this.

It’s an argument for a new social contract. A new social democracy. Not for socialism. And it calls Denmark socialist.

It calls Denmark socialist with “mild social democracy” on the screen

I don’t care. Convincing people into the social democracy position first with the belief it will lead them to socialism afterwards has failed in literally hundreds of countries. If the American left goes down this misguided route then the outcome will be a new social contract via reformism, not socialism. Just like it has in literally every other western country that went down this road in the past.

Argue for socialism. Not a fake middle ground. Social democracy is literally the biggest threat to the left movement next to fascism, it is our enemy.

The goal is to counter right-wing propaganda. Considering what most Americans’ views are, this stuff is definitely the right direction to be pushing people. I bet if you ran a poll on this site, most of us were SocDems before we were communists.

If you think this kind of content makes the Left worse off than before, you need to log off and talk to Americans.

Hard disagree. Pushing americans to social democracy is literally the opposite of what we want. Social democracy is where movements go to fucking die.

If you create a social democrat movement in the process of building your socialist movement you will NEVER achieve socialism, you will only achieve social democracy, and the outcome of that is setting up some future generation 80 years down the line to fight the same fucking battle you failed at because capitalism will strip those socdem victories as soon as it can.

Learn from the fucking past. The entirety of Eastern Europe rejected social democracy and flipped socialist, not one of them had a socdem movement. The entirety of Western Europe had a social democratic movement and the socialist movement died in every single fucking country.

It should be viewed as being as much the enemy as fascism is. If you do not understand this you are not actually trying to achieve socialism. You are not thinking straight or you are a wrecker who only wants to achieve social democracy and nothing more. I implore you to think this through. Pushing people to ““friendly”” capitalism will not be a victory it will be a massive monumental failure. What do you want? Do you want socialism? Or do you want to just win some basic improvements to quality of life and damn everyone that comes after you to a hundred years more capitalism? Because that’s what you’re doing if you choose that path, damning 5 generations.

Once again: We could do a poll on this site, and I’d bet my fucking life that at least 50% of this site had socdem views before becoming communists.

20th Century European socdem movements were to their core anticommunist. There were real communist movements with social power behind them, and the socdems fought against them. That doesn’t exist in America. Americans don’t become socdems because they have an ideological commitment to anticommunism, they become socdems because they see the flaws in our system, but since the political climate here is so right-wing, actual socialism is entirely out of anything approaching the mainstream conversation. Let me reiterate from the first line of this comment, this site is full of American former socdems turned communists.

You’re right about 20th Century European socdem movements, but the current political climate of the United States is in no way equivalent, and I struggle to see ANY situation in which it’s a bad thing to make people more conscious of class and of the utter failure of the American system to provide for people.

lol at calling me a wrecker

Someone else in the comments here described this as a bernie level radicalizer, not theory or accurate or something to strive for, but a great intro to radicalization

I don’t buy it. I’m having perfectly good success radicalising Americans with socialism, just socialism. A segue is not required.

My anger might be seriously increased because I’m actually from Europe, and perhaps when I engage with Americans that’s partially why they respond fine to socialist arguments instead of social democratic, but whatever it is this bothers me a lot. I do not have any problems convincing people to be socialists.

Breadtube are doing the whole social democratic routine and have you seen what awful fucking audiences it is creating? Radlibs. It creates radlibs. They haven’t moved anywhere in 3 fucking years and they’re only becoming more and more anti anything to the left of them. They’re not good. Trying to go the segue route is a bad idea.

Gravel are doing great pushing actual socialist arguments. They should just continue that. I will stop spreading them if they go down this route because it’s legitimately not the right path to go down.

I know what you’re saying, but I doubt you’re radicalizing those folks with premade speeches that you deliver over and over to each of them, but instead each radicalization is tailor made.

I agree that this is not up to par with individual praxis, but you can’t scale that up effectively without concessions. I think this video will do more good in it’s current state than if it were more hardline, more radical, and more acceptable to us. I’m sure there’s some way to make it work, but videos like this I can show to my parents and them supplement/ correct it myself, where harder stuff would put them off

I think I do pretty much the same routine every time. I typically start with teaching people that all socialists want communism. This blows their brains because they can’t believe it, then they learn more and realise it’s true. Every segment of socialism whether it’s communists, demsocs, syndacalists or anarchists wants to achieve a communist society, it’s just a matter of disagreement over how to get there.

From that point onwards I teach them what capitalism actually is. I teach them the marxist definitions of classes within capitalism. I teach them the basic function of exploitation under capitalism using landlording as a simple example of a capitalist exploiting a worker with property ownership then extrapolate that out into business owners too.

I send them on their way with the recommendation they get into several communities, they then learn more about it in their own time.

Repeated interactions and touching on international issues as often as possible lead them towards internationalist attitudes. They become proper comrades.

My experience has been that it’s easier to convert young people from conservative american families than young people from liberal families. Possibly because the conservative young people have had their parents calling the democrats bad the whole time so you don’t have to break that down at all. Their families also intuitively understand that something is fucky with the system but don’t understand what it is.

Don’t fall for the social democracy thing. It was possible to do in a different time under different circumstances. It is not possible now and will not be until a new event on scale with the Russian revolution shakes capitalism. Those of us lucky enough to be born into the vestigial welfare states still enjoys a lot of freedoms but they are being undone as the contradictions of capitalism intensifies and the very social democrats who praise themselves for the class compromise are oftentimes leading the undoing.

Breadtube if it didn’t suck.

Post videos you genuinely enjoy and want to share, duh. Celebrate the diversity of interests shared by chapochatters by posting a deep dive into Venetian kelp farming, I dunno. Also media criticism, bite-sized versions of left-wing theory, all the stuff you expected. But I am curious about that kelp farming thing now that you mentioned it.

Low effort / spam videos might be removed, especially weeb content.

There is a cytube that you can paste videos into and watch with whoever happens to be around. It’s open submission unless there’s something important to commandeer it with at the time.

A weekly watch party happens every Saturday (Sunday down under), with video nominations Saturday-Monday, voting Monday-Thursday. See the pin for whatever stage it’s currently in.

David Cross: Why America Sucks at Everything [Gravel Institute](www.youtube.com)

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