this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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I am called a socialist by a lot of people who call themselves socialist, but I am called capitalist to a lot of people who call themselves capitalist. As I said, the word has taken on many different meanings by people who interpret or misinterpret Marx's ideas differently.
I don't align myself with any named doctrine because the names are reductive and often misleading or conflicting. If you consider me socialist because of your definition of socialism I won't tell you otherwise, but I will push back if someone tells me to call myself socialist because I don't agree with the more common interpretations of what it means to be socialist.
All squares are quadrilaterals and all cubes contain squares, but a cube is not a quadrilateral, it merely looks like a quadrilateral in some projections. It may look like a hexagon in others. Projections don't show the whole shape
Game recognize game, that was an excellent response.
I'd just point out that there has been a decades-long crusade against socialism in the west, starting during the WWII and through the cold war, and the "socialism = state run economy" shtick comes from confused westerners who've bought into the red-scare propaganda. A lot of people feel quite comfortable imagining the USSR and Moaist China as the idealistic image of what socialism is, because it's quite easy to write them off as failed "authoritarian" projects (a lot of reasons for those scare quotes, but I won't go into it). Fair enough that you don't want to be associated with that scary image, but all I'd say is that by avoiding the word with all its nuance, you loose the detailed and rich debate about it that can inform how one could approach a socialist system of organization, even the one you just described. And as long as we're stuck arguing about semantic definitions and being pitted against one another, we're not effectively unifying under our common interest, which would be the end to private ownership over the means of production.
I agree with most of this, I just don't think we can afford to discount the power of stigma when it's easier to go around that stigma and choose other names to unite under. The left has no problem getting hateful and even simply distasteful words out of common usage by drawing attention to what makes them problematic, sometimes even with proposed changes that are more inflammatory than the original (Looking at you, "Latinx"). I don't see why we can't do the same for the term "Socialism" and use something with less historical baggage in order to better appeal to moderates without sacrificing any actual ideological shifts.