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    • House Slave, Uncle Tom, Kapo, BadEmpanada

      “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

      Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

      I recently saw a video from leftist Youtuber BadEmpanada (stay with me here…) where he advocates for the generalization of the terms house slave and Uncle Tom for agitational leftist usage to insult all class traitors more broadly. You can watch the video here.

      In case the video gets taken down, to summarize, he’s advocating for more popular usage of these terms and drawing analogies to other terms like holocaust and kapo which he views as having been successfully and helpfully generalized beyond their strict context. He suggests that opposition to this comes from liberal identity politicking and American exceptionalism. He says that these terms are held sacred away from popular generalization because of the idea that American slavery is considered by Americans to be uniquely devastating, or ultimate, suffering unlike any other. He states that terms are divorced from their historical meaning all the time and that’s how language works and it’s fine.

      I had a conversation in the comments where I pushed back on this. I’ll copy paste the comments here in chronological order so they’re easy to read.

      @cbhnbd

      I’ll try to explain why, from an American perspective, both terms aren’t really that useful or helpful, and why some Marxists have a severe reaction to their usage. I can’t speak to why “the general online left” get very offended, and I suppose you’re justified to think they don’t really have great arguments for their position, but this is just my view as an American ML.

      1. Uncle Tom to me seems like a weird thing to associate with class or race betrayal. In the original novel, he is basically a Christian martyr who is beaten to death for refusing to betray his fellow slaves. The US copyright laws at the time didn’t cover stage adaptations, so a ton of white pro-slavery minstrel showrunners rewrote his character as a servile pathetic caricature for a white pro-slavery audience to make cruel entertainment out of it. The fact that the character has been successfully degraded in the mind of the public by the pro-slavery bourgeoisie probably isn’t the basis for most people rejecting the term, but the usage has always given me more uninformed vibes rather than overtly racist or black erasure, although one arms the other.

      2. House slaves (slaves who did domestic work) historically ran an increased risk of arbitrary and capricious punishment by virtue of their constant proximity to the master and his wife and children. They were also by far the most vulnerable to sexual violence. It just seems to me to generalize their condition to be like “oh you get to sleep in the house you must love the master cuz you’re so comfortable” feels very disconnected and cynical.

      Especially as Marxists, I feel like we should be able to easily see that intraracial divisions like this were historically constructed by the bourgeoisie to control labor. So to push the notion that American slaves that lived inside the master’s house had it so much better as to suggest general servility or race/class betrayal is just adopting and spreading a myth from the slaveowning bourgeoisie in my view.

      If you’re interested, check out Aptheker’s “American Negro Slave Revolts”, Davis’ “Women Race and Class” (I understand reservations about Davis since your audience is very anti-IDPOL but the sections about domestic servitude are certainly worth reading despite that), and of course Robinson’s “Black Marxism” and Du Bois’s “Black Reconstruction of America”

      @BadEmpanadaLive

      There is nothing in what you said that would render these terms inapplicable in other situations. No two situations are ever alike and no one genuine thinks there needs to be an exact 1:1 analogy before a term can ever be used in another circumstance. Otherwise why are you okay with saying “holocaust” for Gaza? Also this “as Marxist” thing? Sounds like a cult. Argue assuming people are normal human beings rather than adherents to specific scripture.

      @cbhnbd

      I guess I didn’t mean “as a Marxist” to put me in some kind of in-group but to signal where my analysis was coming from to try to contextualize stuff, which I guess in hindsight should be obvious without my having to say it. So fair enough.

      I still argue against trying to universalize a phrase like “house slave” in the way you suggest. Like… calling comfortable class traitors house slaves works on the implication that house slaves were comfortable class traitors. And this is ahistorical. It isn’t true. So I’m left to wonder why someone would WANT to generalize it in that way. This isn’t about it not being accurate 1:1 enough at all, I have no problem generalizing American terms and sanding off some of the accuracy, such as the term “scab”. It’s about, in this case specifically, the inaccuracy that the generalization is built on is an intentional inaccuracy that was designed to reinforce a racist myth. Is that really that bad of a position? I’m comforable with calling the holocaust in Gaza as such becasue they are comparable on a material basis. I wouldn’t call October 7th attacks a holocaust because that would be denegrating and inverting the reality of the source of the term. I really don’t think this is some kind of liberal idpol language policing contention. Frankly, I don’t care about America or its language being generalized.

      @cbhnbd

      I’m realizing that i misunderstood which “as marxists” thing you mentioned. Oops. Yeah, I just meant that since I’m a Marxist and you are too that gives us some kind of common ground of literature reference. I didn’t suggest “Marxists must behave this way” but that Marxists have read Marx Engels etc. and are familiar with the concepts I mentioned after. I meant it as though “as fellow Ottoman studies scholars, i can pull on the fact that we are both familiar with…” or something. Sorry for analogizing, Americans are kinda simple we like doing that.

      @LilLobz

      What slave owners are we holding up by using the term “house slave”? What actual harm is this doing? FWIW i personally wouldnt use house slave but I’m really struggling to see ANYTHING problematic about “Uncle Tom”. Everyone understands the colloquial definition of it and African Americans use it in that way. What relevance does misunderstanding of the initial character have?

      @cbhnbd

      well admittedly the house slave argument is a lot clearer than Uncle Tom. From what I understand, the popular usage among black radicals to criticize a go-slow, pacifist, well-meaning capitulationist really heated up in the 1950s-60s because the majority of Americans’ exposure to the story was through the minstrel Tom Shows. There’s an article from 2008 where Kim Wallace-Sanders, a professor in African American studies, said “In three years of research, I have yet to find one similar example outside the U.S. of Uncle Tom bring used as… an insult,” which at least to me indicates some lasting effect of the Tom Shows as a uniquely American-affecting factor. Maybe the inciting moment of this usage in the 20th century was when Rev. G Alexander McGuire used it as an impassioned insult during the first convention of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA where he posits an Uncle Tom as a “black man with a white heart”, and says they need to get them out of positions of power. McGuire, as well as Garvey and the UNIA were basically radical pro-black Christian conservative capitalists. That’s all to say that it has been used as an intraracial slur policing black behavior for around 100 years.

      Yes there’s the class betrayal element but it has been, for a very long time, a word reserved exclusively to describe black people. Like if we’re gonna call William O’Neal or MLK Jr. or Clarence Thomas or Ben Carson a race traitor or a sellout or class capitulator or an Uncle Tom… why bring their specific race into it? Because it’s more agitational? And if your point is to say “if we generalize it then we aren’t really talking about race,” that reads to me like stripping the word of its specific racialized history of oppression. I’m advocating to act like the history of the usage of the word as a racial slur is material.

      And if we’re using Malcolm as a role model (not that you specifically did but i saw another popular comment do it) to justify our generalization of the word, can we try to remember that Malcolm was, in fact, a black person? And if my saying that nonblack people shouldn’t try to coopt black racial slurs is too idpol for people, then I would suggest avoiding citing Malcolm as it suits you because his theory of black liberation was pretty idpol. Read his “Message to the Grass Roots” and ask yourself how you think Malcolm would feel about white people coopting Uncle Tom. Duh!

      This reminds me of an incident during the 2016 US presidential election where some white political writer or something would call black TV show host Montel Williams an Uncle Tom for supporting a republican candidate. Williams tweeted at them (paraphrasing) “Why don’t you stop beating around the bush and call me a house n***er?”

      Sorry for the tangents. I’m just typing at this point lol. But yeah I guess my point is taking a racial insult and reusing it for generic class critique is unnecessary and damaging. To your point about “who does this harm?”, I’m not really sure what to say. Do you think language can never be harmful? Or that black people wouldn’t really care or get hurt or be worse off if the world generalized a racial slur about them? To be honest, in my mind, I’m thinking about Vološinov’s “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language” (who controls meaning, how social struggle and history and power relations shape language, sign purity), but I think the vulgar argument of “rehabilitating and generalizing a racial slur is bad” is decent enough hopefully.


      @finaldungeon-c1h

      For Christ’s sake, if you were really a Marxist-Leninist, you’d know these are just slogans. This is for agitation, not propaganda. They are didactic, uncomfortable, and describe in a concrete way what it implies to make deals with the oppressor

      @cbhnbd

      I can appreciate to an extent the point about agitation but I think your wires are crossed a little with the terms. You say that the point is agitation, not propaganda, then say that the terms are didactic. But the purpose of propaganda is education and explanation and the purpose of agitation is mobilization and emotion. So if it’s didactic and mobilizing then we would say it’s agitprop. Since you mentioned my political background, I figured I would point this out since Lenin was pretty clear in his description of these. Anyways.

      I never really got the impression in my life that the socialist movement was so starving and clamoring for agitational words to describe this particular phenomena that there’s a necessity to rehabilitate racial slurs for it. That’s how I feel about it. Have you personally felt like calling someone a race traitor, class traitor, gusano, bootlicker, scab, etc. was insufficiently didactic or concrete as to warrant adding another couple words with histories of usage as racial slurs into the mix? Is it not possible to do any better than this?

      And what exactly is didactic or concrete about comparing someone’s general servility and class submission to a house slave when house slaves historically weren’t either of those things? Idk why I see this trend so often on the left, that it’s permissible to be not even imprecise but wholly dishonest and incorrect (here about the social conditions of a house slave) to agitate? In my view it’s like… guys, if we think our analysis about political economy etc. is true why are we so desperate to communicate our ideas that we could stomach tacitly perpetuating bourgeois racial mythology? We can agitate on the basis of actual existing conditions.

      I’m sorry to say that I’m not really sure what about that position stands in opposition with my being a Marxist-Leninist. Hopefully I didn’t come across as too unfairly defensive or snarky but I’m not really sure how else to respond to the argument that it’s permissible just because it’s agitational.

      There isn’t that much I wanted to share beyond preserving this conversation here. I was planning to write something about it but I kinda got it all out in those comments lol.

      There were a few things I didn’t really have space to mention. The “kapo” thing he mentions in the video, that “people say kapo a lot and I haven’t really seen anyone but Zionists get angry about that”. Huh? As in: we all use kapo all the time so why is house slave any different?


      He says it so passingly I had to rewind to make sure I heard him right. Who the fuck is we? Maybe he’s spending time in different left spaces than I am to be hearing people use this word (almost certainly so). The few instances where I’ve seen that word used at all is when Zionists use it to insult other Jews that aren’t pro-Israel. In 2017, David Friedman, who would become Trump’s ambassador to Israel, called liberal Jewish-American lobby group J Street “worse than kapos” for their support of a two state solution. Recently, UK based Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet called Jews who said Kaddish (mourning/memorializing the deaths) for Palestinians killed recently on the Gaza border “kapos”. I’ve always just known this word in modern usage to be a generically cruel and evil thing that Jews call other Jews to characterize them as traitors.

      The abstraction of “people” he uses ubiquitously in his video. People hate when I use this word. People use this word all the time. People don’t have any valid reasons for not allowing us to generalize this. “People all around the world look to the US as a unique bastion of struggle,” “Is this something that can be utilized to help people understand things?”

      I don’t want to rant about this too much since it can come across as nitpicky but it isn’t rigorous to talk like this. There’s no reason to be imprecise in that way unless you’re doing it to conceal who specifically you’re talking about. Or just laziness maybe. I don’t think either of those have any business in forward-facing Marxist discourse. There is no “people” as such, this is like first semester social sciences methodology. Ironically, I think it comes from the bourgeois idealism that he appears to oppose.

      BadEmpanadas has been criticized by others in the past for, among other things, taking a little too much pleasure in playing the role of the guy who does drama, debate, and reaction content. So to see this video where he says we need more words, or better words, or more hurtful words, to describe class traitors is not surprising to me. It’s the same kind of bourgeois individualizing that social democrats do with billionaires, Trump, etc., framing the individual decisions or identities of a few bad eggs as what’s standing in the way of liberation.

      Strategizing about what words to call the individual moral failure of some persons who capitulate with capitalists is not something I’ve ever really considered before all of this. It also occurs to me now that this kind of individualizing is… identity politics? Aren’t we, by labeling people “Uncle Tom”, like… ascribing to them a fixed identity category, rather than struggling against the class interests and relations driving their behavior? I’m sure I’m botching the language a bit there. Either way, I hope that most Marxists are too busy studying or struggling in more… constructive spaces to worry about what mean word to call Zionists. Anyways.

      Actually not anyways. I forgot. This comment BadEmpanadas makes:

      “Also this “as Marxist” thing? Sounds like a cult. Argue assuming people are normal human beings rather than adherents to specific scripture.”

      He’s SO transparently dealing in the American bourgeois liberal identity politics currency he says he’s critical of, I couldn’t come up with a better example. He reads my section:

      “Especially as Marxists, I feel like we should be able to easily see that intraracial divisions like this were historically constructed by the bourgeoisie to control labor. So to push the notion that American slaves that lived inside the master’s house had it so much better as to suggest general servility or race/class betrayal is just adopting and spreading a myth from the slaveowning bourgeoisie in my view.”

      suggesting we have a shared framework of class analysis (which I now realize afterwards, we probably don’t lol) and an epistemological common ground. He interpreted that as a display of sect indentification. Mind you, I didn’t say anything to the effect of “Marx said this so we should obey him” or “All true Marxists must adhere to this quote” or something. He made the conceptual connection to represent me as in-group posturing becasue he automatically interprets the word Marxist as a tribal identity category rather than a methodology of critique. Sound familiar?

      Also, how could the phrase “Argue assuming people are normal human beings,” not immediately be clocked by a leftist audience as liberal moralism? Appealing to individual-focused “common sense” intuition? Are there any Milton Friedman enjoyers in the chat? Ayn Rand?

      Being a communist but carrying yourself as though you’re a non-communist is so fucking weird.

      Overall though, I saw a lot of support and one very heartfelt reply to my comments, which made me feel very proud, so I was pretty happy about that. It seems like there are many viewers of these big leftist channels who are confused but earnestly interested in kind of analysis Marxism has to offer.

    • How not to do socialist messaging

      I recently saw a twitter conversation (so… stay with me here) that I wanted to write about to use as a springboard for talking about effective messaging. In reality, it might be that the conversation was distressing enough to me that I felt the need to write about it for catharsis, but I think it’s true that it’s an excellent distillation of some of the most common pitfalls for leftist messaging. As a disclaimer, I understand that the people involved in the conversation might not be politically trained, nor are they using this conversation in some kind of “disciplined academic context” or some highly critical or technical context. With all that said, I think it’s too perfect an example not to discuss. Check out the tweets here, and I’ll post them again later so they’re easier to scroll to for reference.

      [The image shows a twitter conversation between multiple users about whether or not welfare programs, such as social security and Medicare, are considered “socialist policies”.

      The conversation begins with a user quote tweeting what looks like a poll of democratic voters, asking them questions about what they would prefer in a hypothetical political candidate. In the quote tweet, they post a cropped image of the results which indicate that voting for a person who is “protecting Medicare and social security” is very popular, while voting for someone who is “a socialist” is very unpopular. The user comments “everybody is 12 years old”.

      Someone replies “are u saying that social security and medicare are socialist measures?” to which the original poster replies “both are instances of government intervention in areas that could otherwise be private , so yes”
      A third user comments “thats not socialism” and the original poster replies “it is literally in the dictionary definition” with a cropped image of a statement which reads: “Far more common are social democracies, such as Sweden and Denmark: democratically elected governments that employ some socialist practices but within a capitalist framework in the belief that extensive state regulation paired with limited state ownership produces a fair distribution of income without impairing economic growth. While in the past social democracy and democratic socialism both referred to movements seeking a fully socialist system, the two terms have diverged.”]
      [The picture shows a continuation of the previous conversation on twitter. The original poster tweets a cropped image from the aforementioned poll showing the favorability of 4 categories: bringing down the prices of food, goods, and services; making healthcare and prescription drugs more affordable; making housing more affordable; implementing Universal Healthcare. They caption the image with “you cannot accomplish any of these things without govt regulation of private industry . is it the whole nine yards of collective ownership of the means of production ? obviously not . but govt regulation of a service is a well established part of the very definition of socialism”

      They reply to their own tweet by quote tweeting another user to bring higher visibility to their message which reads “Because of phrasing. “Socialist practices under a capitalist framework” doesn’t resonate with voters, even if it’s more accurate. And in general, someone who advocates for these practices, whether they call themselves one or not, can be described as “a socialist”.”

      The original poster self-replies again finishing with “last thing i’ll say : many of you adhere strictly to an aged framework of socialist policy . mamdani , for ex. , is a ‘socialist’ candidate within the eyes of the electorate ; he did not run on full blown socialism . it’s frustrating to see so many replies act oblivious to that .
      Another user replies to the first post in the picture saying “I’ve been saying this. Having a renamed American socialism would actually be effective for the median voter.” The original poster agrees, finishing with “whatever it takes for people to gain some class consciousness i’m here for”.]

      Here’s a link to the poll result tweet itself if you’re interested. It’s worth noting though that the pollster, Blueprint Research, is funded by Zionist LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman who has a history of backing political operations that target Democrats who are critical of Israel. This person made a post about this.

      Before I get on to what I really want to talk about I guess it would be a good idea to first get out of the way that the original poster is promoting an idea that is wrong (or at least incomplete). It’s the semantic argument about what qualifies some policy to be called “socialist”. So hopefully I can untangle that enough for the purposes of moving on without thinking back about it too much.

      The term socialism (or French socialisme) appears first in the 1830s among French and English thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen, among others. Their ideas for what it meant may have varied but they at least shared a vision that the current society which was organized around competitive individualism should be reorganized around collective or social production. Marx would give socialism its most exact and lasting economic meaning. For Marx, capitalism is a system defined by private ownership of the means of production, wage labor as the dominant economic relation, surplus value expropriation by the bourgeois class, and production for exchange/profit. Socialism, in a strict sense, is defined as a system with social/collective ownership of the means of production, the end or complete transformation of wage labor, surplus value being socially appropriated, and production for use/human need.

      Since Marx, there have been countless instances of parties that call themselves socialist which advocate for things other than this particular transformation. In times and places where Marx was very popular, it has been an effective political branding/rhetorical tool for parties to enrich themselves off the mass appeal of Marxism. In times and places where Marx was very unpopular, as in the USA, socialism has been used as a scare word to describe any increase in any governmental involvement to construe it as being radical or subversive. This deliberate misuse of the term is the origin of this meme from Marxist economist Richard Wolff. (maybe Marx-ish economist is a more appropriate description. He’s like THE leading example of a “Marxist” public intellectual who actually commits this conflation himself… while not totally disqualifying by itself, it’s one of many symptoms of what could be a strange and tenuous understanding of Marxism.)

      There is also a historical association between welfare programs and socialism because many socialist or labor parties will advocate for welfare-state policies through bourgeois parliaments.

      The “dictionary definition” the user pulls is from the Merriam-Webster page for socialism, which is found here. I hope it doesn’t need to be said that a general dictionary isn’t going to give a complete picture of a word as it’s used in a precise theoretical framework. The definitions it offers, which the poster conveniently ignores, are not all that disagreeable. It should also raise some alarm bells that what we’re looking at in image 1 is not the definition of socialism, but is an excerpt from a usage guide to disambiguate socialism, social democracy, and democratic socialism. It offers some background on the divergence of democratic socialism and social democracy, but its point that welfare programs found in social democracies might be considered “socialist policies” is dubious.

      Medicare, as an example, is a social-democratic welfare program that reduces cost burden on seniors, but it doesn’t socialize healthcare. It leaves the capitalist profit structure of healthcare intact, so it isn’t a “socialist policy” in any strict economic sense. It’s public payment assistance towards private capital. That this could somehow be considered a “step towards” socialism has been thoroughly contested, and in my view discredited, for over a hundred years. See: Reformism in the Russian Social-Democratic Movement, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Reform or Revolution, or The State and Revolution.

      There is no orthodox or mainstream Marxist theoretical basis for using the word socialist in this way, which one might care about if they considered themselves a Marxist. If, as it may be in this case, the person involved in the argument isn’t themselves a socialist, that’s fine, but they have no ground to act indignant and superior towards the general liberal electorate for also misunderstanding the term in much the same way.

      In that sense, it’s a perfectly coherent position to be against voting for a socialist but in favor of voting for protection of welfare policies if you’re the type who thinks capitalism ought to be managed and harnessed rather than destroyed and replaced. If it were put more concretely in these terms, it would surely be the vast majority opinion of voters in the Democratic party, as somewhat evidenced by the poll in the first image.

      I know my explanation is short here but if you’re still stuck on the point of “socialist policies in capitalist frameworks”, I’m sorry to say that I think you probably won’t get much out of the rest of this blog. I would suggest checking out SocialismForAll on youtube for excellent human-read audiobooks and other material.

      You know… despite everything I said, I think being wrong about what constitutes a socialist policy in a capitalist system (if there can even be such a thing in the first place) is fine. Everyone is wrong about shit all the time. Who cares? What I want to talk about is how we can have more effective messaging and outreach as Marxists.

      I’m also realizing that this previous section was much longer than I thought it would be. My bad.

      I guess there’s really 3 lessons here. Be honest about what socialism is, speak to persuade, and fight for meaning.

      First, not all ways of “spreading class consciousness” are equal in worth. Contrast the final message in image 2 “whatever it takes for people to gain some class consciousness i’m here for” with the flimsy position they’re advocating for. In this specific case, it’s clear that the poster just holds an incorrect view. That’s fine. However, we have seen elsewhere, especially in social democrat circles not unrelated to this particular conversation, the idea that we should teach inaccurate but well meaning ideas as a convenient way to try to onboard people to the socialist cause. I say it just isn’t necessary or helpful.

      Class consciousness is a necessary step towards socialism, sure, but it isn’t our end goal here. Being dishonest and imprecise about concepts to the so-called backward masses as an attempt to make them more aware of their class position is just building up a conceptual debt that they’ll have to unlearn and relearn correctly later, otherwise they themselves will go about teaching expedient-but-not-quite-complete ideas until it’s muddied to something unrecognizable. It also has a side effect of treating non-communists like kids who aren’t smart enough to understand the real “full blown socialism” concepts, so let’s just make up true-adjacent shit to get them interested in the meantime.

      Social programs that assist workers are important. People are justified for wanting them and they are worth fighting for. That doesn’t mean that it’s strategically sound to start telling people “you know, that stuff is actually socialism” to try to superficially win them over or push them left.

      It’s like teaching a foreign language, but instead of starting with an earnest and difficult program of phonology from day 1, you teach someone the language using only English phonemes “just to get their foot in the door”, or “to get them interested and feeling like they’re making progress”. So they’re taught terrible and incorrect pronunciation, they’re either not understood by native speakers or they’re infantilized with an “aww, they’re trying” pat on the head. Likewise, labeling Medicare or rent control or labor rights as “socialist” because it’s expedient can delay or prevent people from developing a real understanding of what socialism is.

      Second is tone. I’ll repeat that I understand that these people don’t think they’re in some kind of forward-facing position of authority or education on socialism. I’m using this only as an example insofar as it’s also a big problem with the much larger personalities who ARE supposed to be political authorities and educators on the left. And maybe to suggest secondarily that if you’re posting stuff as a socialist, you should feel empowered and take yourself seriously enough to act as a representative of what you really believe. Especially so if you want to publicly represent socialism, which you already do in some sense, whether you think so or not, when you have a conversation about it.

      The worst offender is the comment in the first image that reads “that’s not socialism”. The cool, cynical, I’m-smarter-than-you, vague posturing, (ostensibly from someone whose position I might actually agree with most out of everyone in the images) here keeps the poster emotionally safe from criticism, but it’s clearly ineffective political communication. Am I suggesting that this specific user should have gotten as disturbed as I did, to write a fucking blog post about it to explain his position? Maybe not, but hopefully you can agree it’s still worth it to try a little harder and do a little more pedagogical work than what was done here, especially when the person you’re replying to already appears to be on the left and might just need a genuine correction on a definition of a word.

      I’m not saying don’t ever sound angry or don’t be mean to people. Bourgeois spaces will never accept Marxists no matter how fresh their haircut is or how straight their teeth are or how good their manners are because Marxism is by definition unpalatable to the ruling class and its defenders. Just don’t fall into smug in-group posturing that alienates or dismisses outsiders if your goal is persuasion (as in: building class consciousness).

      Looking at both images, the initial quote “everybody is 12 years old” coming from the same person who claims “whatever it takes for people to gain some class consciousness i’m here for” isn’t just a tone issue but a clear mismatch in function. Being dismissive and belittling to people, while supposedly wanting to win over some imagined “other populace”, somehow not realizing that they’re much the same thing. It should be obvious that very few people outside our cause are going to consider changing their mind because of someone mocking them. It makes them defensive, not interested.

      Using a tone like this also increases your reputational risk when inevitably you’re wrong about something, as in this case. It’s hard to walk back from a self-righteous and arrogant attitude when you realize you’re wrong about something, which SHOULD be happening pretty often if you’re taking this stuff seriously. It can lead to arguments where you dig your heels in and feel like you need to defend something which is wrong, or construe it in a vague and confusing way for the sake of preserving your image. That’s liberalism. Socialists need to be willing to show some humility and willingness to be proven wrong, so it would serve us well to at least act like that’s possible.

      Third, the pedantry over who the word socialism belongs to. It belongs to socialists. To roll over and concede ground to social democrats, or Merriam-Webster, or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or self-described socialist Elon Musk, or whatever other bourgeois element that wants to strip the word of its true meaning, is a total ideological failure. Ideological struggle is partly a struggle over language and meaning. If we’re willing to allow socialism to be defanged to just meaning welfare policies or more government, it’s already a victory for capitalists. They can continue to push socialism to mean whatever they want for their political purposes. Social democrats can call their welfare policies “socialism” to keep people pacified and confused. And socialists have a harder and harder time describing their project.

      There’s the comment in image 2 saying that Mamdani, for example, is a “socialist” candidate within the eyes of the electorate, which is true since the electorate has a misguided understanding of the term, but instead of framing this is an ideological problem that we need to struggle against, the poster points this out to confirm their usage of the term in this way as being acceptable because of its popularity. I wonder how, in their mind, the liberal electorate whom they first accuse of “being 12 years old” for their lack of understanding, should now be given credibility as arbiters of the meaning of socialism. It’s really inexcusable in my view.

      The same point could be made about an appeal to a Merriam-Webster definition, which, as a side note, is a total red flag suggesting to me that the commenter here probably isn’t a Marxist or is at least very beginner-level. Language is in constant flux. Since ideology is made up of signs, and language realizes signs, language can be understood as the fundamental material and medium of superstructure. See: Marxism and the Philosophy of Language by Valentin Voloshinov. A common dictionary definition might accurately capture its ubiquity within dominant common practice, which in this case is to say, a definition that we should be trying to struggle against in the first place.

      It’s a perfectly acceptable position to see this poll and be upset by the contradiction of people wanting welfare policies but not wanting socialism, which is a system that would bring workers benefits beyond what these welfare policies could possibly reach. Most people don’t know what socialism is. So… why confuse people? It connects with my first point here. It’s much better pedagogically to teach the technical language from the very beginninng, the socialist definition, the correct one, and disabuse people from the liberal re-definition whenever it comes up. I’m not talking about making everything as complicated as possible and trying to explain dialectics to strangers online all the time. But at least try to take back some space on the meaning of the very name of your movement, and don’t hodge-podge it with “well he uses the word like this, and she uses it like this, and my enemies actually use the word like this, so it can mean anything anyone wants”. It’s hopefully clear at this point why this isn’t actually helpful.

      I’ve spent too long on this already and I don’t know if some kind of conclusion is really necessary. I think socialists can do better than they have been with political messaging and this felt like an admittedly stupid but pretty pure example of some of those issues.