a basic dictionary of plain english Leftism

bastlynn:

obiternihili:

abomination-of-gender:

in all seriousness though I do think that we have a general problem of like, Left ideas being great and people generally agreeing with them, but Left terms being something that has long been demonized and even when it hasn’t, it’s been obscured by a century plus of theorization.

in that way frankly it’s like a lot of other struggles- activists have to overcome the hurdle of people not even knowing what they’re talking about, and there’s a struggle for basic vocabulary to express the ideas.

richard wolff is just about the only anticapitalist activist I can think of who actively works to define his terms, and rephrases classical theory into modern, comprehensible language. in the spirit of that, here’s a few subsitutions I’ve found effective in my own conversations.

• don’t say “worker”, say “employee”. not all workers are employees, but in a US context the lion’s share of them are. Similarly, don’t say “capitalist”, say “employer”. "the workers are exploited by their bosses" is a sentence from 1920. “Employers routinely find ways to screw over their employees” is just a basic fact everyone knows.
• you gotta define what capitalism is. most people hear “capitalism” and they think “Free market”. While they’re related as of late, they’re not the same at all. Capital-ism is a system of resource production defined by capital-ists, who are people who own capital. What’s capital? It’s anything that can be used for production. A factory is capital. land is capital. Money generally isn’t capital, unless you’ve invested it
• you also gotta distinguish between the market and capital. The market, on the other hand, is a method of resource exchange. Markets exist independently of capitalism: slave societies used markets to buy and sell slaves and other goods, despite the fact that slavery isn’t capitalism. Slavery has master and slave, not employer and employee.
• you gotta distinguish between capitalists and the merely wealthy. i’ve met a lot of leftists who miss this one for some reason. a heart surgeon might be wealthy but they’re not necessarily a capitalist- they work for their income, and are highly compensated for that work. A landlord, on the other hand, is a capitalist (though not necessarily an employer), because their income comes from land that they own & the rent that they charge the people who live on it.
• you gotta define what socialism and communism are. "the workers own the means of production" is vague and stale. “the employees of a company have just as much of a say in production and profit distribution as the CEOs and the shareholders” is better. Talking about “democratically-run enterprises” is another good way to phrase it.
• you gotta be able to point out real-world examples of socialism. the mondragon corporation is the ur-example of course, but credit unions and food cooperatives are also good examples. there are many, many examples of socialist firms existing and thriving in competition with capitalist ones- all the while, treating both the employees and the communitiies they live in better. (Yes, you can have socialist and capitalist firms existing side-by-side!)
• you gotta find ways to work with terrible definitions of socialism and communism. everyone and their dog has a terrible definition of socialism and communism, including actual governments which call themselves communist. the USSR, for example, called itself communist- but in its case, they considered the government to be a proxy for the people. so by the government owning all of the capital in the country, it was just as good as every individual citizen. in reality of course it was something closer to state capitalism- a handful of government bureaucrats owning and controlling all of the capital.

holy fucking shit THIS

In all seriousness – this is really useful advice. Get to the words that mean what you’re trying to say but don’t have a whole crapton of bad associations. So you can argue the actual point instead of getting distracted.