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Suppose communism is bad (if you think it's good this isn't addressed to you but sure feel free to chime in). How do you teach normies this?
I mean the kind of normie who lives in a world where powers far beyond them do incomprehensible things like set the prices of stuff in the store, so that some of the stuff they really want is too expensive for them, but look, the store is full of that stuff, so somebody has all this stuff but they're not letting them have it except for way too high a price, those greedy assholes.
And then you try to explain to them how markets work and how prices come to be and it all just comes across to them as some weird bootlicking apologism because they're simply not on that level.
Is there a more "down to earth" approach that is needed? Normies who have deeply internalized rules of decency and ideas of "thou shalt not steal" (often normies with religious backgrounds) seem to naturally be anti-communist.
Now I'm sure some of y'all here (you know who you are) will say these people basically just need to be oppressed because if they have their way civilization is destroyed and everything is shitty for everybody, but if you oppress them then they complain but otherwise you have a civilization that hums along. But I hate this, I feel like there has to be a way to make society work that doesn't require telling a huge segment of the population "stfu and get in line or we're putting you in a cage". And I mean obviously violent (as needed) enforcement of civilized norms is necessary, but I notice there are a lot more people who are sympathetic to communist ideas than are actual active criminals. My point is more about these people, not the active criminals (who I support putting in cages)
Is there really no way to get through to people other than to just tell them shut up and take it because we're trying to run a civilization here
It would probably help if the people trying to teach the normies actually understood what Communism was and moved beyond a Boomeric “anything I don’t like is Communism” mindset.
Problem is that we've gone so far down that road people said "fuck it" and now you have spicy social democrats claiming to be socialists now and kids larping as pro-Soviet communists because they follow Hasan Piker on TikTok.
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The big question is 'what do you mean by communism?'.
No, literally and unironically- you can have a command economy without it being communism(France has done it). You can have a society with substantial state ownership of the means of production without it being communism(modern China). You can have totalitarianism without it being communism(Saudi Arabia). If you ask communists themselves, they'll tell you communism refers to the utopian end state of the worker's paradise.
In practice, people use communism to refer to regimes run by Marxists. And it's worth looking at what Marxism is- definitions are important- Marxism is primarily a theory of history. This theory of history argues for economic processes, by far the most important being class conflict, as driving the events of history independent of great men. Basically everything Marx thought about economics was wrong(although not everything he thought about history was), but importantly, Marxism puts enough epicycles into its psychohistory that Marxists can retreat to unfalsifiability in order to defend their theories. So Marxists in charge of an economy- and all developed economies have at least some level of planning from the top- have economic theories which don't correspond to reality, and Marxists default to conspiracy theories and finger pointing when their plans don't work out. This tends to generate useless and counterproductive reprisals to try to stick to an economic plan with predetermined endpoints, because Marxists just don't stop and think that the labour theory of value prevents their spreadsheets from giving good predictions, and also because that Marxist psychohistory gives a utopian eschatology that justifies whatever the cost to stick to the plan. There is a reason traditional religions usually explicitly hold that our actions on earth can't bring about the apocalypse/mahdi/end of the kali yuga- because putting entire societies behind dumb plans is a bad thing that tends to break the machinery which makes that society run.
I think, in a real way, what makes Marxism so bad is the tendency for it to be a kind of fanaticism for the un-lindy. Religious fundamentalists rarely break the essential functioning of their societies; I suppose fascists probably could, but historical fascist regimes have lost wars instead. And of course monarchs rise to power by making deals and sticking to them, while democracies tend to prevent fanatics from holding unfettered power.
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This is of course impossible, and therefore unactionable advice.
People will always carry epithets to just mean bad in the broadest sense, fascists and communists and liberals all know this. But that does not matter. Were communism to rebrand itself as "super capitalism" as /leftypol/ liked to meme, it wouldn't solve it's inherent problems, which is what OP is looking to put a light on.
It is the territory that matters, the map is just an instrumental accessory.
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I think this comment encapsulates why we will probably end up with communism again (or at least communism-lite).
It's not about reason-based arguments. It is about signalling and reacting to "boomers" in an effort to increase one's personal social status. The more extreme those beliefs the better. And what's more extreme than advocating for the most destructive ideology of the 20th century?
I’m not trying to be cool or overly snarky. But that generation really abused the term until it lost all meaning. Everything from socialized medicine to five private corporations telling you what you could think fell under the moniker of communism. The FBI hauling dissidents off to the gulag in the middle of the night and listening to all communications was a necessary measure to defeat communism. Obama was an Islamo-Fascist-Communist. Now the highly-regarded zoomers on R/WorldNews are copying their parents and grandparents and calling me a pinko communist because I won’t take up Ronald Reagan’s grand crusade against Russia (they conveniently forget that Russia is no longer communist). I find Kamala Harris horrifying, but calling anything she’s going to do communist is just farcical. I don’t really mind that kind of rhetoric from Trump because he’s always had a rather fluid rhetorical style when it comes to his put downs, but it becomes grating when the serious minds start trying to come up with justifications about why she really is.
I hate to inject current events into a fine discussion of political ideology.
But what else do you call politicians who want to institute wealth taxes for redistribution and price controls? Socialists at the very least to be sure.
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