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Bernie said that Cuba had a good literacy program and got negged by the news for months over it. None of the others will ever dare to fly half that close to the sun of praising historical or existing socialism.
Because Bernie showed there’s nothing to be gained by making that argument, at least right now.
Do we want to win, or do we want to hear people say nice things about the USSR?
Mainstream media will never say anything nice about socialists anyways, it doesn’t matter how you package it.
The packaging of an idea matters a great deal. You can get people to agree with all sorts of socialist principles, but if you start talking about socialism a lot are going to punch out.
This isn’t to say we should never utter the word “socialism,” and your point about the futility of completely catering to mainstream media is a good one. It’s really about picking the right battles, and figuring out where the benefit of talking about socialism as socialism is worth the flak you’ll inevitably catch from it. I don’t think Bernie really picked anything up from his Cuba comments, and he got a ton of overtly-negative coverage over it. It’s difficult to underestimate how rabid U.S. anticommunism is.
Here’s my take on this argument:
Imagine you’re in a debate with a capitalist, and you say some shit like “I agree with you that the USSR, and China, and Cuba, and Vietnam, and Laos, and Venezuela, and Yugoslavia were all bad, but here’s why we should do communism again anyway.” You’re not convincing anybody of shit with that terrible discourse. Left anticommunism makes you sound extremely weak, and every time you engage in it you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
If we want to change the conversation about historical and existing socialism, and I believe that that conversation needs to be changed in order to further our goals of socialism, we need to start by having a large enough cohort of people saying without qualifiers that the socialist countries were good that that opinion can enter into the mainstream discourse.
Left anticommunism makes you sound extremely weak, and every time you engage in it you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
Left anticommunism is bad, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about politicians not proactively mentioning those countries, or at worst reframing the discussion when those countries are brought up in bad faith as obvious bait. No one who throws “bUt VuVuZeLa!11!!” into a conversation actually wants to have a serious discussion about the shape of the Venezuelan government or economy, and no politician is going to change minds on that, unless maybe they’re the president. I’m fine with politicians recognizing unfavorable rhetorical territory and choosing to fight elsewhere.
we need to start by having a large enough cohort of people saying without qualifiers that the socialist countries were good that that opinion can enter into the mainstream discourse.
I agree. The reason I kept emphasizing politicians in the first part of my comment is that they’re not the right ones to lead the charge here. They have something to lose by engaging in that fight, and victory over U.S. anticommunism (take a step back and think about how monumental of an undertaking that is) is far enough off that they should be focusing on more immediate, more concrete policies that affect people’s daily lives.
But you and I, and other leftists on the ground? We don’t have an elected politician or a potentially-useful political career to tank, and we can get into the type of extended, personalized discussions that are necessary to deprogram someone suffering from anticommunism-by-default. That’s why I’ll personally go to bat for socialist states all day, but I’m not going to blame the likes of progressive Democrats for not getting into the weeds about the good done by Chinese land reform.
