It just seems to me like a super vague, unweildy, super emotionally charged word.
Conversation
Conservatives use "socialism" almost the same way you use "capitalism" to connote everything they see as bad. In reality we have a mix of both.
1
I do think all forms of capitalism are bad. Now.
It's a system born of knowledge and culture as it was a few hundred years ago, and is now horrifically outdated, anachronistic, and destructive.
It wasn't always thus. But context is all.
1
Isn't this an argument across levels of analysis?
Ted seems to be contending that you are overassociating negative characteristics of social reality with capitalism (I agree), and you that capitalism is a dysfunctional system of governance in need of replacement (I also agree).
4
How can one over-associate an ideological label that refers to an economic, cultural, and social hegemony?
It influences everything.
1
Extremely easily, in fact.
All it takes is conflating sociopolitical hegemony with biological or technological hegemony.
Does capitalism steer all human impulses, including negative ones? Is it a defining cause of ecological destruction. I say no, not even remotely.
3
I think capitalism is a strange attractor for a range of our current material conditions, and therefore easily conflated with those conditions as such.
3
1
I don't think it's reducible. I think it's hegemony in terms of top-down power, in terms of monopoly over shared cultural production, makes it fundamental to everything around us today in a cultural context that is the prime driver of malleability and change.
1
I disagree that superstructures or attractors are primary.
Capitalism is not measured in ppm. CO2 is.
Climate systems don't care who or what lights the fire, only that it burns. That capitalism encourages an unnecessary, deleterious amount of fire-starting is a different story.
2
1
Neoliberalism is the most comprehensive, subtle, insidious, and damaging mass indoctrination effort in human history, and it's not going to be undone without reference to it and directly against it.
2
Hey, I don't disagree much with that. I just find myself more concerned with humans ourselves and our spectacular & relentless ability to Fuck Shit Up, than the latest shitfuckery we're up to
In an academic setting, I'd be with you, and often have been.