CO-OPTING “SOCIALISM"

With Silicon Valley Bank having recently crashed and burned - with all manner of other banks not doing terribly well at the moment - everyone is holding their breaths, and waiting for the US government to rain trillions on these useless and parasitic institutions. (They've already started in minor ways).

While we, as a society, collectively face one of the most harrowing economic crises of the last twenty-seven-and-a-half minutes, a lot of old catch phrases are bubbling back to the surface again. "Too big to fail," "golden parachutes," and of course, an all time favorite of the Berniecrats: "socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor."

I see this logic being repeated, not just in Democrat and radlib circles, but from comrades who really should know better. There's a meme going around right now, depicting Captain America, labeled "Banks' Profits," just above the same image photoshopped with a hammer and sickle, labelled: "Banks' Losses."

This sentiment is widespread, and it's poisonous.

Socialism isn't when the government distributes tax money.

Socialism is when a proletarian state controls the means of production - when the very mechanisms through which societal wealth is accumulated in the first place are all transfered from the tyranny of the private sector to a democratically accountable public institution.

Giving bailouts to banks is the furthest from socialism that you can possibly get. It's not a divergence from, but rather a feature of, neoliberal capitalism.

We need to call that what it is.

Policing online discourse, however, is, of course, ridiculous. I'm not writing this purely to argue with memes, but rather, to point at disturbing trends in the American left at large - trends that have been festering for quite some time.

We need to stop ceding ground to the fucking liberals. We need to stop letting them muddy the waters - stop letting them co-opt and soften both our language and our ideas.

The notion that socialism is somehow connected to distribution of tax revenue only furthers fascist and "libertarian" talking points on the Republican right. On the Democrat side if things, (also far right wing), the idea that the so-called "Nordic model" of redistributionism is a viable alternative to combatting Western imperialism in the Global South - the idea that this somehow constitutes "socialism"? It's a maniacally evil, and fundamentally untenable position for Christians.

For communists to hold this position too, and to pretend for one second that "socialism" is when the government does stuff? It's fucking stupid.

As #Occupy talking points inevitably resurface in reaction to the bank crisis du jour, we need to use this as a teaching moment - to deny tepid wannabe reformists, (let's face it - they can't even get basic reforms done), and cede no ground whatsoever.

We need to teach people what our movement really stands for, not recycle reactionaries' intentional distortions of it. We need to build that movement. We need to become ideologically coherent.

If we do not, then the revolution fails, and along with it, any hope that we could possibly have of navigating the climate apocalypse that looms mere decades away, and, in fact, has already begun.

Those are the stakes. We cannot afford to borrow diffusionary ideas and tactics from the Democratic Party of all fucking places.