Socialism has garbage marketing, full stop. Probably because those who specialize in marketing tend to thrive in, and thus gravitate to, capitalist frameworks. Consequentially, a great many members of the working class are propagandized into reflexive rejection of socio-economic policies that would greatly benefit them, based on taboo buzzwords and false equivalences.
Yes, established terminology is quite useful for nuanced discussion in leftist spaces, among those who understand the distinctions between “communism”, “socialism”, “democratic socialism”, “social democracy”, “command economy”, “State capitalism”, and “totalitarian dictatorship”. But for many people, those are all synonyms. “Socialism” means gulags and breadlines and the government stealing your stuff to give it to slackers.
I propose a reactionary framework. A movement committed to abandoning familiar terminology in favor of capitalist buzzwords. Driving a wedge between “capitalism” and “market economies”, leveraging discontent of blue collar workers against big business and political cronyism.
It’s not universal healthcare, it’s alleviating the unfair healthcare burden on small businesses. It’s not universal welfare, it’s freeing business owners by replacing the minimum wage with a prosperity dividend. It’s not a socialized workplace, it’s an equity compensation initiative.
The established terms are poisoned, but the actual concepts are widely popular, if you phrase them right. The movement cannot thrive by trying to carve out a portion of the “leftist” party, it has to draw support from the entire working class. The only way to accomplish this is by abandoning the poisoned terms in favor of business terms that cannot be twisted by capitalists without destroying their own platform.
Thoughts?
Defanging communist terminology is only going to weaken the movement and provide room for social democrats and neo-liberals to co-opt it for their own gain.
What must be done is fighting against red scare propaganda not through terminally online activities, tone policing, or a grand restructuring of vocabulary that will only make it reproduce capitalist ways of thinking, but through actual real material organizing to help people in need as well as holding a solid political platfom through which we can spread revolutionary thought. Communists of today just like liberals of the past must reject notions of the current world so that a new one may be carved in it’s wake.
Another important thing is that socialist terminology is wildly popular, it’s not without reason that it tends to be co-opted and used by reactionary environments. Thus we are only requiered more to never stop explaining.
Also when it comes to the words you proposed, they can and will be used by capitalists for their own gain.
Then only those who own small businesses may recieve such benefits, and their workers omitted.
In a capitalist economy, such a measure would be proven useless in a couple of months. Rents would rise, food cost would rise, gas prices would rise, everything would be more expensive as despite everyone becoming richer no one would be. Real wages could become not only stagnant but even lower for some, particularly those that should’ve been rewarded by UBI the most.
Fucking what? I don’t even understand what would an “equity compensation initiative” be.
And it is our duty, to not fall into the capitalists hands by creating an environment favorable to them. Give them an inch and they will take a mile.
But I have to agree left-right politics are a tumor on modern society and it saddens me we have to exist in this infantile descriptor of ideology, but we cannot easily leave them behind as all of society would have to for intellectualism to flourish.