To not find middle class ‘socialists’ laughing at the poor and uneducated very funny.

[Mightymucks]

I’m currently a mature student and am on a lot of FB pages related to my Uni. I need to be on there for news, but an awful lot of the content seems to be middle class self proclaimed socialists laughing at jokes poking fun at the thick unwashed masses who might have the temerity not to slavishly agree with them on every issue.

Take this morning. One of them posted a joke about an imaginary rabid Brexiteer called ‘Sharon from Croydon’ who voted for Brexit ‘because she thinks brown neurosurgeons are stealing jobs she would have been qualified for if she hadn’t dropped out of her hair and beauty NVQ’. Cue much hilarity from these students and lots of comments about ‘thick northerners’ whose capability of engaging with the political process doesn’t extend beyond looking at one slogan on a bus.

I called him ‘a snob’ and he responded that he was ‘calling out racism’ despite the fact that ‘Sharon’ is fictional and therefore doesn’t need calling out. It was just a series of lazy stereotypes designed to stoke predjudice and exactly the thing socialism is supposed to be explicitly against?

A symptom of this in a ward by the Uni near me Labour has actually removed a local candidate with long standing Labour links and huge respect from locals because he is
‘too working class’ for the students to vote for and replaced him with a history academic from out of town.

I should point out that in my working class northern area I don’t know a single person who isn’t aware that Marxism and socialism represents the working classes and the poor and uneducated. But apparently a University education doesn’t extend to teaching that these days.

I also know it isn’t universal in Labour because I had a fantastic female middle aged canvasser around this weekend who was totally clued up on issues of local concern like school funding and libraries and actually convinced me to vote for them.

But AIBU to hate these middle class millennial fuckwits who pretend they’re socialists but are actually massive fucking crashing snobs?

I can't remember the exact details, but his findings were that capitalism was the most violent system by a long, long way. This is NOT for a second to diminish the horrors of the gulags or the holocaust, but to question the presumption that capitalism is a peaceful, benign system.

So would you prefer to live under national socialism or communism rather than liberal capitalist democracy? Funny how Derrida never fucked off to live out his life in one of those countries instead...
It's almost as if he was full of shit!

No, I'd rather we built a better, fairer kind of society for the future that looks nothing like national socialism, soviet communism or liberal capitalist democracy!!

Part of the issue here is a failure to see the externalisation of harms. If you're a nine year old working in a sweatshop to make goods for the European liberal capitalist democractic market, your position and feelings towards the system are likely to be very different from those of a wealthy, white, well-off European consumer. Ditto for people whose homes are being bombed in resource wars.

That doesn't make sense, Whales. If he'd said that all people suffer more horrors under capitalism than all people under socialism and communism, you'd have a point.

It is actually possible to recognise you are doing ok under one system but that it does not benefit everyone, or even the majority.

I can't understand this bizarre attitude of "well move elsewhere then". Like, don't bother giving a shit about your fellow citizens, just fuck off somewhere nicer because you have the resources to.

Also, if you'd actually read Spectres of Marx instead of spouting about it being 'full of shit' without having done so, you'd know that the book is, in large part, an attempt to offer a robust response to uncritical support for Marxism, in the light of the atrocities committed by communist regimes in the C20. It's hardly therefore a pro-communist piece of propaganda.

One of my colleagues at work waxes lyrical about the fact his wife is a full on communist.

Yet was anyone to casually declare their partner was a fascist I suspect that would be far less well received.

That’s perhaps the difference. Socialism is romanticised in this country, despite its horrific historic crimes. The young love the equality aspect of socialism never realising that, to make one person more equal, it is necessary to lessen someone else’s freedom.

Find me a functional replacement for liberal capitalist democracy that will provide more freedom and a higher standard of living and then I'll be happy to consider it. You almost certainly won't be able to.

Our current system is the least worst of several bad options.

I had a corbynista tell me that our current economic system hadn’t worked out so great and it was time for a change and I didn’t know what to say. Didn’t work out so great as compared with Russia and how well that worked out?

On the whole spectres of Marx thing, the communists who think that Russia got caught in the dictatorship phase and it wasn’t ‘real communism’ or that we would implement communism so much better, these days - what when we can’t get multi nationals to pay any tax as it is?

I had to gasp at the ‘not to diminish the gulags and the holocaust but...’

If you’re weighing up all the war deaths as capitalism, are you seriously claiming that we didn’t need to fight ww2 and life would be lovely?

Where do the bs numbers on liberal democratic capitalism being most violent come from? Other than someone’s bottom.

Capitalism has a murky history I agree.

But - capitalism offers the maximum freedoms to the maximum number of people.

By contrast socialism is a race to the bottom where all become equally poor, controlled by the state and miserable.

But - capitalism offers the maximum freedoms to the maximum number of people.

which is actually bollocks given that the gap between rich and poor is getting ever wider.

www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/jun/17/wealth-gap-rises-as-uk-home-ownership-falls-resolution-foundation

the gap between rich and poor widening is to do with the lack of redistribution in inheritance tax, chiefly and really bugger all to do with capitalism!

Capitalist societies can be high tax societies. Poor people in the UK are still free...they aren't watched by any secret police.

Capitalist societies can be high tax societies. Poor people in the UK are still free...they aren't watched by any secret police.

Yes, I'm sure those reliant on food banks or stuck on zero hour contracts would agree.

But - capitalism offers the maximum freedoms to the maximum number of people.

which is actually bollocks given that the gap between rich and poor is getting ever wider.

The gap is irrelevant - the absolute standard of living is vastly higher in liberal capitalist democracies than anywhere on the planet, or in human history, for that matter.

i don't see your point really ghost, you think they'd rather be in a gulag than reliant on foodbanks? All you're really saying is more redistribution needs to happen, you don't need communism, totalitarianism or in fact any kind of regime change for that.

So the alternative is a gulag or exploitative capitalism. That's LITERALLY all you can think?

Serious imagination fail.

i don't need imagination to imagine gulags, secret police, or political purges where people were carted off and shot, sadly. No imagination required at all there.

If the alternatives were so great, they would've been stuck with...

You haven't answered why you don't think more redistribution under the current system isn't the answer.

I find this a tricky one. I would say I'm middle class, left, socialist and am very sympathetic towards those in need. I give a lot to charity and would never dream of complaining about any state funded benefit I receive like the NHS.
But...I can't stand stupid people like some of those examples muted here already. Sharon from Croydon may be fictional but I think we all know that her thinking plays a huge part in why we're leaving the EU. Fair game.

pigmcpigface

Serious imagination fail.

We don't need to imagine very much - the 20th century showed us exactly where the dreams of well-meaning utopians end. Give me a thousand years of so-called "exploitative" capitalist democracy over the unholy shitstorm that would replace it.

Wow. We have populism, nationalism and the scapegoating of minority groups. Attacks on the rule of law. Frightening rhetoric like "enemies of the people". Stark similarities to the 1930's. This is actually happening in the UK today, 2018. Awful lack of awareness here.

We should be afraid of communism because what? Someone suggested renationalising the railways? Project fear in full swing amongst the usual suspects.

Stark similarities to the 1930's. This is actually happening in the UK today, 2018. Awful lack of awareness here.

It takes a loooooooot of bedwetting to imagine the present day is anything like the 1930s.

It takes a loooooooot of bedwetting to imagine the present day is anything like the 1930s.

Well, people generally sleepwalk into these things.

GhostofFrankGrimes
One thing we can finally agree labour throwing women under a bus to seem groovey and woke with trans and young people promising free education and what not populism gone mad

Just watched a documentary on Cuba the socialists utopia

And the older women said to her son

But you don’t know what it was like before we’re poor and the rich flaunted their wealth and now we’re all equal

And the younger son said
Yes mama equally poor

And if this is indeed a utopia why on earth will they not let anyone leave 🤭

Bit like the eu

No, that isn't populism. Thats helping future generations that have been punished by Tory policy and derided as snowflakes by the gutter press. If the right are really big on inclusion I'm sure they'd welcome policy that helps young people. Too busy deporting people I guess.