this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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So that's the change you want to see in the world. Technical linguistic grammar takes precedence over political outreach.
I fully support your desire to spread vocabular competence. My impression from your first post was that you had other priorities.
Overthrowing liberalism/capitalism and stopping fascism requires mass organization and class consciousness, part of which is often understanding these basic concepts. And people did. They have to again.
All I'm saying is that if you don't take your audience into consideration, your message will be misunderstood. If you want to use the "correct" (more debatable than you think) terminology when that terminology isn't well understood in the culture, then take the time to explain the language. Or keep scratching your head about why your getting downvotes and convincing nobody.
Yeah you do that.
I'm getting downvotes because I'm telling a bunch of bubble communists that actual communication is more important than in-group signalling. No head scratches required. It's why the left has been hopelessly ineffective for at least half a century.
Despite the erasure of the words’ meanings in the public consciousness, the concepts still exist.
If you have new, sexier names for the concepts which will accelerate their reintroduction into the public consciousness, I’m all ears.
It doesn't have to be sexier terminology, or even different terminology. Just don't drop the word "liberalism" into a conversation and expect the average person to understand what your talking about.
You could use "corporatism" which has kind of taken over that definition in common language. I know it's technically incorrect, but language also isn't static outside of academic disciplines. But ultimately you can use whatever language you want, just don't assume a particular definition will be understood without explanation.
The only people I know of who don't know what the word "liberal" means, especially in the context the person above was using it, are very ignorant Americans. To be clear, even though I don't like most Americans, I'm not blaming them for being ignorant in this particular case because they have been subjected to decades of mostly uncontested propaganda deliberately obfuscating the term. But most of the rest of the world knows what everyone is talking about when saying "liberal" and knows it's a right wing ideology. And everyone shouldn't have to hold up the conversation to preemptively explain what the word means to those who don't already know. People are generally expected to pick up the gist of a sentence or point via the context of what's being said. The context was perfectly clear and it just sounds like concern trolling to go on about needing to hand-hold and dumb down the terminology being used for "the average person."
"Neoliberalism" rather. Though that's more like mask-off imperialism. And "corporatism" is just capitalism but when you don't want to admit that the problem is capitalism.
Either way liberalism is the same idealist, individualist culture/ideology that emerges under capitalism to maintain that capitalist mode of production, and must be destroyed along with the mode of production it sustains.