I guess Americans really are kind of rediscovering socialism...

[Brandon's Impotent Rage]

So I was watching this video on TYT (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmNUfQUGfxM), wherein they discuss how 'socialism' doesn't really seem to be that scary to Americans anymore.

Now, of course, they make the common liberal mistake of equating socialism with welfare and public works (mostly because of how screwed up American political discourse is). However, they do correctly point out the struggles of the Labor movement and the benefits from it that we Americans tend to take for granted. They do correctly point out that the American political conversation has shifted so far to the right that an actual American Left is virtually nonexistent. They point out that, whereas the rest of the world celebrates May Day, we have the lukewarm 'Labor Day'.

But the part that gives me hope is towards the end, where the guest host from AJ+ correctly points out that socialism doesn't mean public works, and that there needs to be an economy that works for the people instead of the stock market.

'Course, she then kind of drops the ball when she says we need to 'get past the -ism and focus on the values', but that isn't what got my interest. As their conversation goes on to the end, it seemed like they all collectively realized that a need for 'an economy that works for the people' is what is needed.

I kind of wanted to scream: "Yeah, it's called SOCIALISM goddamit!" An economy that's 'in sync with the people'? An economy that's concerned with people getting their needs met instead of profits? THAT'S SOCIALISM!

This is rather representative of a lot of Americans, however. We KNOW there's something wrong. We KNOW that there's a possible solution. But we've been so thoroughly BRAINWASHED by the Ruling class and the State that the very word 'Socialism' is virtually impossible to just come out and defend.

But hey, this is how class consciousness starts. We're trying to dig ourselves out of the decades of programming, trying to retake the definitions of certain words and phrases, but we seem to be realizing that Capitalism is anathema to the Freedom we aspire to.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Americans are less scared of "Socialist", but generally speaking "Marxist", "Anarchist" and "Communist" still makes them freak out.

[Aslan]

Depends on where you are at. If you live in Vermont (or how I like to call it Sanderstan) you'll get more positive comments. If you live in the south like me, pretty much any leftist organization is hated. The Midwest is also pretty conservative as well.

But Marxism and anarchism are pretty feared because of plain ignorance of what they truly are.

[Vee]

to me it seems like the socialism these people are comfortable with isn't the same as the socialism we advocate. it looks like a lot of them believe socialism is just capitalism with a strong welfare system.

[John Nada]

52% of Hilary Clinton supporters think socialism is positive:
Senator Bernie Sanders’s speech on Thursday explaining his democratic socialist ideology carried little risk among supporters and other Democrats: A solid majority of them have a positive impression of socialism, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released this month.

Fifty-six percent of those Democratic primary voters questioned said they felt positive about socialism as a governing philosophy, versus 29 percent who took a negative view.

In an address Thursday afternoon at Georgetown University, Mr. Sanders argued that the redistribution of wealth was at the heart of the American social contract, seeking to link himself with the legacies of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin D. Roosevelt. The applause he drew should come as little surprise: Sixty-nine percent of Sanders supporters see socialism in a positive light, versus just 21 percent who view it negatively.

Even most of those supporting Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination approve of socialism, 52 percent to 32 percent.

Still, Mr. Sanders’s unabashed use of the term could become a liability were he to reach the general election. Just 32 percent of all Americans rate socialism positively, compared to 52 percent who view it negatively.

Over all, Democrats are just about as keen on socialism as they are on capitalism. In a Gallup survey from November 2012, 53 percent of all Democrats gave socialism a positive rating, while 55 percent did so for capitalism.

This is a needle that Mr. Sanders attempted to thread in his remarks on Thursday. “The next time you hear me attacked as a socialist — like tomorrow — remember this: I don’t believe government should take over the grocery store down the street, or own the means of production,” he said. “But I do believe that the middle class and the working families of this country, who produce the wealth of this county, deserve a decent standard of living, and that their incomes should go up, not down.”

According to a Gallup poll from this year, 52 percent of Americans – and three-quarters of Democrats – believe that government should raise taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth to poorer Americans, a key component of Mr. Sanders’s agenda.

Socialism gets some of its highest marks from Democratic voters under 30, 63 percent of whom rate it positively, and from another crucial demographic that has largely eluded Mr. Sanders — African-Americans, who say they support socialism by a ratio of 2 to 1. http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/11/20/poll-watch-democrats-even-clinton-supporters-warm-to-socialism/?ref=us&_r=0

This reminds me of The Communist Manifesto's "Bourgeois Socialism"
A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.

To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.

We may cite Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misère as an example of this form.

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.

Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.

Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism.

It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the working class. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch03.htm

The subjective conditions in the US are low at present, even if the objective ones have never been better. In the shitty comments in that YouTube video, only like 7 out of 910 comments seemed like they knew what socialism is, either from an anarchist or Marxist perspective. Naturally people, including proletarians, are going to have a concept of Socialism safely within the confines of Capitalism and well within the ruling class's dominate ideology. As of now, it's slight nicer (imperialist-)capitalism at home, without talk of a class struggle, proletarian socialist revolution and workers seizing power as a class.

[RedKobra]

The trouble is there's only so far non-marxists are willing to go when it comes to people-economy not market-economy. A humanized economy would still suffer from all of the contradictions and tensions that Marx wrote about. Its why co-ops don't work. Eventually you end up even more exploited than you were when you were working for a Capitalist. You won't start off as alienated but over time the force of Capitalism will reassert itself. The only way to avoid this collision course with crisis and eventually social conflict is Communism. A post commodity, post class society. The future would look bright indeed if all we had to do was reintroduce the New Deal or Britain's 1945 welfare state & NHS but as we've seen these sticking plasters are just that. You'll enjoy the make believe for a while but your children and their children will be thrown into the grinder as Capitalism reasserts its control over society. It really is Communism or Barbarism.

[Opsroom]

Americans are less scared of "Socialist", but generally speaking "Marxist", "Anarchist" and "Communist" still makes them freak out.

The average American probably thinks of anarchism as a right-wing ideology because "no government!"

[Sewer Socialist]

The Red Scare is fading, but most people were nonetheless taught in school in this country that communism means complete state control (look at the ten planks of the Manifesto!), starvation, gulags, brainwashing, 1984, etc.

But rents are skyrocketing, wages are stagnant, there are numerous videos of the cops executing people in the streets, a seemingly endless string of wars, the recent memory of economic crisis looming ecological disaster, no capitalist solution in sight, an increasingly menacing right wing, etc., and the negation of these things will have to be attractive, so of course we need a politician will have to come in and tell us the "socialist" solution to these things.

We just need to make ourselves visible in opposition to politicians, highlighting the fault lines, and showing the unity of struggle, and the socialist movement will be something to point to and observe, experience, and participate in, rather than a theoretical abstraction we can try to explain at parties.

[Working Class Hero]

I've seen some Bernie Sanders supporters say that Leonidas and Teddy Roosevelt were socialists. I've seen people say that the FBI is socialists.

Americans want to talk about socialism, which is good, but they don't have a clue what it actually is.

[ckaihatsu]

At *this* point in technology and economics people should really be questioning 'Where does it all go', since farming -- for example -- is now practically effortless, and so many other kinds of productivity are automated to where everyone should be proclaiming 'Where is my robot butler' -- !

With such a surfeit of production we should be expecting commodity prices to *plummet* -- which they have -- which, again, begs the question of who / which parties should benefit from such productive prowess. From this reality it's just a thought-step away to imagine a full-fledged communistic 'gift economy' where a few volunteers do society's socially necessary work, with everyone benefitting commonly, with no 'economics' needed.