United States | News & Politics

People don’t know their asses from their elbows. Liberalism has a definition, which Marxists (and still some liberal Europeans) have never forgotten, though thanks to red scare purges and two cold wars, others have forgotten. Now, in Orwellian fashion, “liberalism” and “socialism” are floating signifiers, so we have liberals like Sanders calling themselves socialists, despite never calling for abolishing private ownership of the means of production.

Wikipedia: socialism: Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.

Wikipedia: liberalism: Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law.

“Private property,” a.k.a. “the means of production.”

American politicians throw around the word "communist" as an insult because it is an easy way to leverage "communism is bad/the enemy" sentiments built up by propaganda during the cold war. Americans, overall, tend to have absolutely no idea what communism is or what socialism is. The history and definitions aren't taught in school and what is taught is simplistic and incorrect. Despite its pretenses of open investigation, Americans are heavily propagandized.

Biden and Bernie aren't that far from one another, in reality. They both support the oppressive political economic system that drives most misery and deprivation around the world and, as you can see in this post, Bernie falls in line behind Biden/Harris despite supposedly disagreeing with them. He thinks he is on their team and that it would be bad to actually oppose them in any principle, including the current genocide in Palestine that both of them support. He was also screwed over by Biden and the party twice when he ran for president and still does things like this, which tells you how committed he is to subjugsting himself to the political organs of capital.

Communism can be a term that is hard to understand because not only do Americans use it without having any idea what it means, it has been used with meaning in at least three different ways. In terms of Marxist theory, communism is a predicted way of being free of states, class, etc that comes about due to the working class controlling economic production. Communists are a particular brand of Marxists that seek to overturn the capitalist order and elevate the working class via a disciplined party structure and way of understanding the world. Finally, the concept of a communist country has often been used to describe those countries where communust revolutions succeeded and they control the state. Of course, those states cannot themselves constitute communism in the Marxist sense because they are nation-states and Marx's communism has no states.

It may also be helpful for me to talk about the term "liberal". Historically and around the world, liberalism has stood for the dominant political ideology of capitalism and is a product of capitalism. It holds that markets should be created and maintained for capitalism and tends to promote a very specific version of democracy that suits capital's interests and keeps it in control. As the dominant ideology of this domineering system, it is if course very undemocratic, particularly when it comes to destroying other countries. This is what most people around the world see as liberalism and it is what socialists criticize as liberalism. In the US, however, lineral has come to mean "arguably slightly left of center", a goalpost that of course moves around. Though often American " liberals" are very right wing and are even to the right of Republicans on many issues.

But in the usual international sense, virtually every politician in the United States is a liberal.