Can someone tell me why Marxist is such a bad thing compared to white nationalist?
Go back to my post #103. It's not "such a bad thing". The Right has just seized on it and lumped it together with the other publication "Communist Manifesto" which appeared decades later and had a co-author in Friedrich Engels.
There is an economist named
Richard Wolff who had taught at Amherst, the New School for Social Research, Yale, CCNY and U of Utah. He'd been interviewed in a lengthy series by Bill Moyers some years ago. He's a Marxist economist, or he teaches "Marxist economics" and lists as a specialty "class analysis".
He had noted that there is an entity called the "Marxist firm" or "Marxist corporation", such that the majority of the business owners were the employees of the business, and he cited various examples of these businesses showing that they worked. They sustained themselves in the market-place.
Let's get this straight, though, while I'm still having my morning coffee. From the time of the Stalin Scare and the McCarthy Hearings and blacklists, the Right has been the most ardent purveyor of "Anti-Communism" targeting anything that comes out of the "Socialist toolbox". Much of government is a matter of collective action and could be said to issue forth from that toolbox -- providing goods and services that the private sector did not, could not, would not and will not provide.
George Kennan was a principal author of early Cold War Strategic Doctrine toward "containment of Communism". He noted that the problem with the Russians was less of their being communists and more of their being Russians -- who had a thousand-year history of autocratic rule. They were serfs before the Bolsheviks, they were serfs under Communism, and they are serfs now. The entire point of our strategic doctrine was to oppose Totalitarianism or Authoritarianism -- a concept under which Fascism and Communism are both included. But it was sold to the public against the backdrop of Stalin. With or without Stalin, the Soviet economy barely worked.
We know that total collectivism and abolishment of private ownership or private property don't work. And we know that the imposition of communism requires a totalitarian dictatorship -- which we do not want.
But I'm not going to get my panties in a bunch for "embracing class struggle". As a matter of statistics and probability, if you were born into the Middle Class, you are most likely to remain in the Middle Class. We better ourselves materially by judiciously choosing profitable chess-board squares from which to pursue our lives. Many people fail to pick the optimum, but they work hard and make a living. And the pursuit of wealth can crowd out other productive efforts that are part of the life experience.
So when Alexandra Ocasio Cortez describes herself as a "democratic socialist", I'm not in the least alarmed, but only unhappy for her that she gives herself this label so she can more easily be attacked by the Right. Is she holding up though? She damn well is.
But we have to be knowledgeable about the history and progression of myths that have driven Public Opinion for a good part of a century. Remember "Paper Moon" with Ryan and Tatum O'Neal? Remember the scene where the little girl gets chased by the rotund woman shouting "Come back here, ya little Communiss'!!" Then you find the paranoia that infected the Manhattan Project, with a threat that was real but the upending of several innocent lives. And the Hollywood blacklists of the '50s.
The truth, though, is that what is happening now under Trump is the same phenomenon the public feared coming from the external threat of "International Communism". Is North Korean "Communist"? That's what they say, but in many respects, North Korea is Fascist and displays something residual of the pre-WWII occupation by Japanese Fascists.
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