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Gonna have to disagree friend.
These tweets are at best inconsequential, what this person is advocating for isn’t in line with what we want as socialists and is just misleading people and muddying communication.
If someone is coming into the fold it’s because they heard about our ideals and agreed with them not because they liked some radlibs misunderstanding of what socialism is. It’s entirely likely that they’d be rebuffed by actual socialism if they entered into a community thinking they were getting Canada health care.
Also I feel like maybe we shouldn’t put the line at which point we consider people being purist at “liberals wanting a capitalist colonial power but a bit nicer to its poor people and doing imperialism all over to pay for it.”
If someone is coming into the fold it’s because they heard about our ideals and agreed with them not because they liked some radlibs misunderstanding of what socialism is.
On the contrary, tons of people got turned onto actual socialism by hearing Bernie talk about stuff like M4A and then digging deeper.
I mean I still think it’s good to criticize these things to point out that they’re not socialism to reaffirm that division especially for any baby leftist that may have stumbled in from Bernie or whatever as you say.
As far as what amount of Bernie bros end up subscribing to any given tendency of socialism and what just stay libs or whatever (stupidpol has a high amount of them as I understand it) without any data, we’d just be arguing over which of our intuitions are correct.
I’m not saying there’s not a few people who may make it through but it’s still good to reaffirm what it is we’re about, and also the main thing I took issue with really is the idea that we’re being too “purist” for not accepting something that’s not only patently not socialism as part of our ideology, but something that really is inherently antithetical to it in every way that really counts.
it’s good to criticize these things to point out that they’re not socialism to reaffirm that division
It is. A lot of communication strategies are worth supporting, because we’re not talking to people who are all in the same place politically. We’re talking to some folks who will still instinctively run from any mention of “socialism,” we’re talking to some who are at the point where the “public healthcare isn’t socialism, you know” conversation is appropriate, and we’re talking to some who are fully on board with the idea of actual socialism and just need to flesh out their understanding of the details.
As far as what amount of Bernie bros end up subscribing to any given tendency of socialism and what just stay libs or whatever
If you’re looking for something firmer than intuitions, here’s an unscientific poll suggesting a huge majority of users here used to be libs. Here’s a post sitting at 2600+ on /r/dankleft about DSA-style folks rapidly running left. None of this is technically data, but we’re unlikely to get data, and I think it’s unquestionable that significant numbers of people who get as far left as the farthest-left politicians in the political mainstream don’t stop there.
something that really is inherently antithetical to it in every way that really counts
This is just messaging, on Twitter. The only possible purpose it can serve is to get people hostile to socialism to soften that hostility. It’s not a serious discussion about what socialism really is – it’s nothing more than “hey think of socialism in terms of things you want and countries you like.” If that gets people over the hurdle of viscerally rejecting socialism on sight, it’s incredibly helpful.
i know dozens of lefty-curious libs who get on board with the ideas in the tweet versus a few “read theory” socialists and i know which type people like being around. there’s a reason bernie was so popular.
Well yea and also their ideas are a lot more palatable to the status quo then full socialism. They’ve spent 70 years red scaring and demonizing our ideas. The policies that soccdems like Bernie and these kinds of tweets espouse have historically been reserved to throw out as a way to assuage revolutionary fervor but 2020 kind of showed us that that may be a thing of the past.
Either way I think it’s fair to say it’s not representative of anything we’d want to see as a change in the order of things, generally. And again settler colonial states robbing developing countries to half ass take care of their own people while still being ruled by capital is simply not good enough with the world being in as dire of a situation as it is.
The fact that real socialism is harder to get across than social Democrat ideas in a bourgeois capital state really isn’t as much of an indictment of “read theory” people as much as it is on the control of the status quo and framing of which ideas are acceptable by organizations such as the cia and capital controlled media/education.
