People are getting it but still not accepting that its the system....

[RadioRaheem84]

http://mainstreetbrigade.org/

Watch the little SNL video in the middle of the screen to get what I am saying. People are understanding that banks and credit card companies are creating nothing but speculative bubbles, but what they're failing to understand is that if all it took was financial regulation to solve this mess then I am sure policymakers would've done it by now. The politicians as well as the capitalists know that there is hardly a productive economy to fall back on and that the country has been relying on debt finance to stay afloat. Regulations would actually deepen the economy further absent massive government spending to awaken the real economy.

Why can't they see this the way the Monthly Review crowd so easily and brilliantly pointed out? That this was a systematic rollback of the earlier stagnant economy of the past and a transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top. Why do they just blame it on "greed" and "banks" and little stuff like that?

[Red Commissar]

Focusing populist rage is a convenient way to side-step a more pressing matter. It is amusing to see politicians say that they're on the side of "main street" rather than "wall street", and the people have often repeated this a lot.

As for the US, it has traditionally ran on a structure of responding to, be it half-assed, rather than preventing problems.

[CartCollector]

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.

There you go.

[Orange Juche]

I think if you put together a little quiz, cut out Marxist buzzwords like "class," "proletariat," "capitalists," "bourgeoisie," etc, and asked a good load of people... you'd find a lot of average people would actually support anti-capitalist ideals.

For example, "Would you more prefer that the business you work for be democratically run by the employees?" Most people I talk to that are casually politically minded, when ask these kinds of questions, sway in this direction. The problem is the big red stain left over from McCarthyism and pro-capitalist propaganda during the cold war. As soon as you say "Marx," "Communism," or "Anarchism," their brain freezes like the blue (or is it red in this case?) screen of death.

[CartCollector]

The problem is the big red stain left over from McCarthyism and pro-capitalist propaganda during the cold war. As soon as you say "Marx," "Communism," or "Anarchism," their brain freezes like the blue (or is it red in this case?) screen of death.

Well you have to admit that the USSR and the socialist nations that supported it didn't do that good a job of advertising socialism to the US. Threatening to nuke people isn't going to bring them over to your side, and having living conditions that are on the whole worse (not to mention less free) than the people you're trying to convert isn't going to encourage them to switch to your economic system.

Though really if you want to throw them for a loop ask them where Marx wrote that communism meant taking away human rights.