Arguing with Rational Lib
Original Post
Source
Bill Maher says his vote is in play because some Democrat-adjacent figures said kind things about Karl Marx. Marx, for those who are unaware, was a guy who was alive when black people were enslaved by the cotton industry and preteen children worked in coal mines, and figured capitalism wasn’t looking so great.
Against the people whose words offend Maher is a coalition of those who tried to throw his vote (along with the rest of ours) out in 2020. These are people who put troops on our streets, support banners and monuments to Trump while he’s in office, and openly kill civilians in the ocean, who even they admit are civilians, based on vague claims that they’re trafficking unspecified drugs. Those are the people Maher is seriously considering voting for. He will support proud serial killers with actual civilian blood on their hands over people who say things he refuses to understand the context of.
Socialism is the library, public education, medicare, medicaid, emergency services, even the military. If you think free college is socialism, there’s no logical way for you to consider free primary education, which pretty much everyone sees as a good thing, anything else.
Sadly Americans have become indoctrinated over decades with a knee-jerk fear of “socialism” (a word now seemingly defined by whatever Republicans choose to call it), to the degree that they’d vote for a party that moves us closer to every policy of Stalin’s and Mao’s except for helping the poor.
Maher is an idiot, but also an indicator of the country’s idiocy. This is the kind of mental task that just sucks, but he can’t be ignored. We know Republicans are going to use this line of attack in the next several months - are Democrats ready? And how will they respond? With unity and strength or with infighting and avoiding the blame?
Response
I hate to be the third one to make this point, but “socialism”, as critiqued by Maher here, has nothing to do with libraries. It is about the public ownership of the means of production, so the abolition of capitalism. And yes, the DSA do explicitly say they want to do that on their national platform. Then there is also a concern with even more radical groups inside the DSA, such as the “Red Star Caucus”, which calls itself Marxist-Leninist and wants a vanguard party to initiate a revolution.
Now I don’t care whether you think all of this is good or bad, I just want to clarify the moderate left position on this.
O1
Who owns the means of production of library services? Who owns the buildings and shelves, and pays the librarians?
If socialism is defined as the total abolition of capitalism, then there's a lot of things that have been called “socialist” - like socialized healthcare, that should be considered not particularly radical.
R1
I agree, many of the policies aren’t radical and shouldn’t be called socialist. I think conservative loons did a disservice by calling Obamacare socialist, and inadvertently trivialized socialism.
That doesn’t mean I’m not against DSA because they do hold actually radical beliefs as I outlined in my previous response.