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clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 12:19:13 JST clarity flowers

if we rebranded communism as “prosperity economics” and “seizing the means of production” as “supply-side democracy” I think we could make some serious inroads with working-class liberals. words don’t mean anything so why not weaponize that.

In conversation about a year ago from xoxo.zone permalink
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  clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 14:08:31 JST clarity flowers
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  - vera grey :verifiedplural:
  @QuietMisdreavus thanks I read the wikipedia page for Abundance and achieved enlightenment
  
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  vera grey :verifiedplural: (quietmisdreavus@squad.town)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 14:08:33 JST vera grey :verifiedplural:
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  @clarity "supply-side democracy" is so good tho
  
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  clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 15:04:09 JST clarity flowers
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  - jarkman
  @jarkman I get what you mean but also I’ve been reading Graeber’s “Debt” and it seems like maybe property rights and buying/selling things are pretty inevitably linked to slavery so I think we’ll need to go further than that
  
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  jarkman (jarkman@chaos.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 15:04:11 JST jarkman
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  @clarity In a similar vein, if we had separate terms for 'property rights and being able to buy and sell things' and 'the domination of all economic activity by accumulated capital' I think we'd get a lot further.
  
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  clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 15:06:31 JST clarity flowers
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  - Jeremy Kahn
  - xek
  @trochee @xek it’s unamerican to speak ill of democracy, after all
  
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  Jeremy Kahn (trochee@dair-community.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 15:06:33 JST Jeremy Kahn
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  - xek
  @clarity @xek
  "Supply side democracy" is pretty great
  
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  clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 23:02:06 JST clarity flowers
  in reply to
  - 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 🐧 🥦
  @Methylcobalamin its fine, “devotees of communism” are poor bedfellows anyway
  
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  🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 🐧 🥦 (methylcobalamin@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 17-Jun-2025 23:02:07 JST 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 🐧 🥦
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  @clarity Good luck, devotees of any movement will not like having their terms changed to be more appealing.
  
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  clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 01:20:52 JST clarity flowers
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  - Ján Bogár
  @janbogar Oh no this sounds really bad, how have I never heard of this? Help me out here, can you quantify for me how this compares to USA imperialism, the looting of the global south, the genocide of the Americas, three centuries of chattel slavery, mass incarceration, etc?
  
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  Ján Bogár (janbogar@mastodonczech.cz)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 01:20:54 JST Ján Bogár
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  @clarity please don't. We tried so you don't have to.
  https://mok.sk/en/home/
  
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  clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 01:31:12 JST clarity flowers
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  Prosperity Economics is a bold new idea that urges America to go back to the basics. Ask any honest working-class American and they'll tell you what we already know: it's time to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, support small business, and replace stifling regulations with a nimble entrepreneurial spirit. How? Supply-Side Democracy. By making tactical government investments in neighborhood companies that use this state-of-the-art structure we can create jobs and revitalize our communities.
  
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  clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 01:54:53 JST clarity flowers
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  - Ján Bogár
  @janbogar I'm confused we were counting the victims of soviet imperialism as "victims of communism", so I figured we could count victims of american imperialism as "victims of capitalism".
  
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  Ján Bogár (janbogar@mastodonczech.cz)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 01:54:54 JST Ján Bogár
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  @clarity it's not one or the other, there are other alternatives.
  Communism and imperialism are not even mutually exclusive in practice, look at the soviet imperialism or China in Tibet and Xinjiang.
  
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  clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 02:27:33 JST clarity flowers
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  - Ján Bogár
  @janbogar my guy. my guy. you are talking to an absolute stranger right now. would it kill you to ask a question or two about my priors before getting in my mentions talking to me like I'm a child?
  Some points of order:
  - I'm a transsexual. I will have no children.
  - "Communism" is a floating signifier. That's literally the joke behind the original post. It can mean a lot of different things in different contexts. I am no advocate for central planning.
  
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  Ján Bogár (janbogar@mastodonczech.cz)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 02:27:35 JST Ján Bogár
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  @clarity 2/2 And your kids won't go to the uni, they will be plumbers. Do you want to change that? Do something in return.
  This is why eastern europian countries are so corrupt to this day.
  Take of that what you will.
  
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  Ján Bogár (janbogar@mastodonczech.cz)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 02:27:36 JST Ján Bogár
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  @clarity listen, all I am telling you, as someone from a country that spent four decades under communism, is that it fucked us up.
  We were one of the prosperous communist countries. Still a lot of people died at the border trying to get to the west, killed by our own border guards.
  Central planning was a perfect tool of opression and corruption. Did you anger a party member? You won't get the pretty house in the city, but an old one in some backwater place.
  1/2
  
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  clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 02:32:23 JST clarity flowers
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  - Ján Bogár
  @janbogar
  - Specifically, I'm an an advocate for cooperatives, communes, ecological frames of thought, degrowth, abolition, and practices like democratic confederalism. I use "communism" as a word on mastodon with the exact same callousness that I joke about using "prosperity economics" – it's a word that a bunch of my friends have a positive association with for cultural contextual reasons, and I can employ it as a rhetorical tool to gain leverage for targeted political objectives.
  
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  clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 02:38:05 JST clarity flowers
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  - Ján Bogár
  @janbogar
  By reacting so emphatically to the word "communism" without an ounce of curiosity, you signal that you too are easily manipulated by games of language. Instead of looking for the content of an idea, you treat your signifiers like sacred and pure objects capable of being reasoned about in and of themselves. If you chain yourself to ontology like this you will be made someone else's pawn.
  
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  clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 05:28:04 JST clarity flowers
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  - Simplicator
  @Simplicator no I don’t think a wealth tax is a part of the Prosperity Economics policy slate. Instead we propose the “family values tax” on gross revenue and employee payroll: the greater the physical distance between the location of purchase or worksite and the residence of the majority shareholders, the higher the tax — paid directly into municipality budgets.
  
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  Simplicator (simplicator@federate.social)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 05:28:05 JST Simplicator
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  @clarity Also a severe wealth tax etc. as “economic separation of powers”
  
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  clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 05:38:17 JST clarity flowers
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  - Simplicator
  @Simplicator this is off the cuff and silly but the larger point is: wealth taxes by themselves do not build dual power or change relations of production
  
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  clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Wednesday, 18-Jun-2025 06:01:44 JST clarity flowers
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  - Ján Bogár
  @janbogar AND FINALLY: my dad was a general contractor for much of his life and didn’t go to college and he’s one of the best men I know. “A plumber” is one of the most aspirational things a person can be (imagine life without them!!!!). I’d be proud to raise one. You show your bias too plainly.
  
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  clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 19-Jun-2025 01:25:22 JST clarity flowers
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  - Ján Bogár
  @janbogar Lmao
  
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  Ján Bogár (janbogar@mastodonczech.cz)'s status on Thursday, 19-Jun-2025 01:25:24 JST Ján Bogár
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  @clarity 2/2
  Imagine a different conversation, where someone makes a joke about rebranding collonialism and a congolese person tells them it's in bad taste.
  And they would defend it, that they just use the word collonialism because their friends have possitive connotations with it, and that the Congolese should first check their priors, because they just want the good stuff, like bringing civilisation to savages and having access to resources.
  You would recognize the absurdity, right?
  
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  Ján Bogár (janbogar@mastodonczech.cz)'s status on Thursday, 19-Jun-2025 01:25:25 JST Ján Bogár
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  @clarity my girl, you are absurd :D
  If you are happily childless and you father was a proud plumber, good for you, nothing wrong with that. It changes nothing about the fact that targetting family and denying desired occupation and education was a common and well documented mode of opression under communism here.
  You are telling a first generation post-opressive regime person they should not cling to onthologies and that you just want the good flavour out of it. Are you for real?
  1/2
  
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  clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Thursday, 19-Jun-2025 01:25:51 JST clarity flowers
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  - Ján Bogár
  @janbogar I would simply not get in a stranger’s mentions actually
  
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