My fellow Americans, I wanna give you something to think abt. The reason y’all don’t understand socialism or communism is bc you think economics and politics are separate, or at least that they should be. They’re not, nor should they be, but what your country has done, from the Cold War onward, is teach that “capitalism” is some sort of natural, default state synonymous w freedom. The “free market” and all the “laws” applying thereto are theories proposed by various philosophers. They are ideas, meaning they are the product of a human’s mind. They’re not concrete, not based in reality.
If you take an introductory political science course, you usually start w a brief history of the discipline itself. It’s then that you learn “political scientists” were originally called “political economists,” and still are in many places, bc a country’s economy is inextricable from that country’s politics.
This was, as you’ve probably guessed, an anti-communist move. If you bring up generations to believe that social issues and economic issues are entirely separate, you essentially prevent any leftist movement from rising at all. You also get ppl who claim they are “socially liberal but economically conservative,” a claim that makes zero sense virtually anywhere else on the planet, but I digress.
This is not a debate topic, by the way. It’s not something upon which “reasonable minds” might differ. When y’all hear “liberal” you think “socially liberal,” you think tolerance, but the main thing liberals tolerate is capitalism—and beyond tolerating it, many of them thrive in it. Liberalism, as a political philosophy, created capitalism. Capitalism is inherently undemocratic, which you know firsthand if you’ve ever held a job. This country, at its founding, was inherently undemocratic, inasmuch as voting and political “rights” were only extended to men who owned land. In a primarily agrarian economy, which America’s was at its founding, land owner was synonymous w capitalist. Land is capital, it still is, you know this if you’ve ever taken out a home equity loan.
So liberals today look at those of us on the left and think we have something in common, bc they’re only looking at social issues, whereas leftists are looking primarily at what liberals would consider “economic” issues. And when a leftist properly points out that liberals are right-wing, a liberal is gonna sprout a thousand points of white-hot rage bc they see conservatives as racist misogynistic homophobes while they are tolerant and accepting and inclusive. But tolerance and acceptance and inclusivity are aspirational values to the liberal—they’ve shown time and time again that they will compromise these values if and when they get in the way of capitalism.
I bring this up bc I see a lot of liberals, online and in meatspace, sliding into leftist spaces thinking they’ll fit in, only to get butthurt as soon as they discover most leftists hate them more than we hate conservatives, bc conservatives aren’t a threat to us in the same way liberals are. Liberals effectively defang leftist movements by flattening them into social movements and then co-opting that social movement. It happened w feminism and w the civil rights movement and w the gay rights movement. In all of these movements, the leading agitators were socialists and communists, but all you learn of them in history class are their social arguments, not their economic ones.
It should come as no surprise that billionaires such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are saying and doing anti-democratic things. Capitalism is incompatible w democracy. It is. Capitalism requires poverty, requires a desperate, exploitable workforce. I know Tesla was a liberal darling for a while, that y’all felt betrayed when Elon removed his mask of tolerance and revealed himself as the tyrant he is. But he’s also always been a capitalist darling, so his “turn” is no great shock once you understand that capitalism is inherently undemocratic. This only causes cognitive dissonance to American liberals who also fangirl capitalism.
All these social issues, your identity politics and your culture wars, are just a distraction. You can’t be “equal” socially if you aren’t equal economically, and no, being equal economically does not mean that everyone is poor. It means that no one is poor. It means that no one is forced to work multiple jobs that they hate where they are abused and dehumanized just so they can eat and have a roof over their heads.
If you’re a liberal who’s confused as to why you’re under attack from the left when “we’re on the same side,” just study some economics. Read up on the history of capitalism and understand that it’s not some default state—it’s an idealistic theoretical framework w no basis in reality. From the perspective of the ppl living under it, it’s failed everywhere it’s been tried. What it does do is concentrate wealth and resources in the hands of a few who consequently have greater power than any king ever dreamed of. But this is good news! Bc it’s not reality, bc it’s imposed, we can fight it. We don’t have to bargain w it. We don’t have to keep it happy so it won’t squash us. We don’t have to beg for crumbs at its table. We can overturn it, dismantle it, and replace it w something better. The time for your kinder, gentler capitalism, if it ever existed, is long past.
Telling you liberals are right-wing is not an insult or a debate point—it’s a fact. But if it feels like an insult to you, if you don’t want to be associated w “those people”, you gotta deconstruct your capitalist framing first.
