I’ll watch commentary channels on YouTube as background noise, but so many of them fall short. So much of the time it’s just “capitalism bad” or “(insert thing here) is actually MAGA.” Some of them sound like they just read off of r/LateStageCapitalism and think it’s deep.
I fucking hate "late stage capitalism" as this nebulous term to discuss the excesses of our neoliberal world order that get conflated with capitalism more broadly. As strange as it may sound: Marx was
significantly closer to Adam Smith (i.e. Wealth of Nations where American libertarians take "invisible hand" out of context and ignore the rest of the book) than he was to people like Lenin, Stalin, or Mao. You know what made 20th century American capitalism legitimately cool stuff? The fact that there were genuine institutional guardrails like Glass-Steagall, proper welfare safety nets that had properly defined eligibility requirements that the vast majority of Americans could utilise, labour unions with teeth, institutions that weren't yet ideologically captured, and widespread trust in those institutions to represent the average jack-off's interests... among countless other odds and ends that people just take for granted nowadays.
I also fucking hate the kneejerk American lolbert/paleocon/ancap tendency to conflate
any social safety net with socialism. No, you goddamn idiots. The modern welfare state was pioneered by Bismarck specifically to beat 19th century German socialists at their own game. The workers of the world can't very well unite against the yoke of bourgeois tyranny if said tyrants were willing to throw a
very substantial olive branch their way. Yeah, there really is a discussion to be had about the inefficiencies, inadequacies, and shortcomings that the modern American welfare state has. You know what ain't the answer? Crying "socialism" any time a municipality tries rolling out universal pre-K, or pilots a public health plan that's already hamstrung by the number of doctors willing to take that insurance plan. If America really was a "socialist" country, let alone substantially trending toward socialism, we'd have nationwide bread lines and
not a goddamn obesity crisis.
You really wanna nip the socialist menace in the bud now and forever? The name of the game isn't convincing everyone to read Atlas Shrugged Fountainhead Ayn Rand bullshit or Von Mises Rothbard lunacy; it's convincing your elected officials to actually reinstate the social safety nets, protections, and such that your grandparents and parents were able to leverage but you can't because you were born right as those things got gutted.
