cryptoleft

Chocolate rainmaker. Singer. Thinker. Voice

I feel this way increasingly about the labels we are slinging around.  What’s the solution?  How do we refer to the bastardized form of capitalism we live under?

🥑🍋 Farmer / LAMP stack dev / Husband / 🌈 Dad / Web1 dude loving a web3 world / Collector of things digital & physical / 
CdeP ‘94

i agree but have a different takeaway on this - i think they are no longer helpful labels. better words don't exist, true, but personally i prefer to avoid using any of "capitalism, fascism, socialism, libertarian" etc.

all tend to be more polarizing or dogwhistle in nature. the definitions are so misunderstood, and so disputed, that you're more likely to "hit a landmine" and trigger an unintentional reaction in your listeners*. unlikely to have productive discourse after that.

you have more effective discussions (imho) if you find ways to express your point without leaning on these extra spicy terms.

(*i mean in general, and when speaking in public, or to strangers. if you're in a college course on polysci, you can reasonably expect your audience to have a better grasp of these terms, and can employ them with less risk... but if you're posting on Twitter or speaking to a crowd, safe to assume that at least 50% of your audience is gonna have a *drastically* different definition of these words than you do.)

With the goal of advancing the conversation instead of wading through semantics.  I’d apply the same question to modern day uses of:  fascism, socialism etc.  We use these terms loosely to describe things that have only a few facets of the “pure” form.  They are still helpful labels and better words don’t seem to exist

Just infiltrate lying definitions and speak the truth. The truth isn’t a plane flight. It does not have to announce its arrival.

One of my late mentors— Alan Nasser— a classicist and Marxist philosopher—told each of his students: “You must be able to argue any position you oppose better than its strongest supporter.”

The problem we have with social media is that people learn weak “straw man” caricatures of opposing views. Because of this, they’re not able to infiltrate power and trojan-horse it from within. 

The nimble revolutionary should be learned enough to deploy subterfuge, deception and guile. That’s exactly how whatever they’re opposing came to power.