If we never speak to those who disagree we’ll never recruit new members. It sucks sometimes, and obviously there are people who will refuse to acknowledge the objective reality they live in. But assigning labels to others do dismiss was exactly the mistake the Mensheviks made towards the peasants. I still argue for spending energy on recruiting 10 easy candidates rather than 1 difficult one but isolating to only like minded people wont build revolution.
I have a liberal friend who stopped talking to me for a month because I called Kamala a zionist. He was a big Mamdani fan too but seems to have backtracked a bit since he started getting crucified online. They have no scientific or logical basis for any of their political views.
Perfectly okay with racist, genocidal violence abroad as long as they can live comfortably. People like that deserve trump
It sounds to me that this liberal was the one who decided to stop being friends. At some point though, you do reach the end of the rope with liberals, and that’s where you get the “So where are the revolutionaries coming to save us???” type shit. That though, is probably a result of too much theory and not enough practice, at least in my experience. If you don’t have the ability to be like, “Why don’t you come to an event with me and my party/org” because you’re not in an organization, you really have no way of demonstrating what you’re talking about to anyone. It’s a lot easier to say “Well, I’m doing <this>” than it is to say “Well you should be doing <this>”. People are probably more receptive to the former than the latter.
You have to approach liberals with the knowledge that they have a bourgeois education that lacks many fundamental concepts. Definitely avoid talking about a concrete revolution in the USA to someone who only knows a caricature of revolution etc etc.
Spouting controversial talking points to liberals is less than useless. They are scared of sudden movements and will just bark at you or run off and do this.
Nobody becomes a Marxist-Leninist in a day.
My most successful method for conversion so far has worked twice: Establish yourself as hating the most heinously evil billionaires (they always hate them too) -> expand that to ALL billionaires -> Talk about China executing these billionaires -> glaze the hell out of China -> Tell them that China is communist > when they say nuh-uh China is capitalist, THIS is the perfect opportunity to teach them about dialectical materialism and the communist manifesto, and if you’re lucky you might get them to listen to the 90 minute audiobook.
Thank Christ for China. Otherwise this would be impossible, and I myself would have remained ignorant.
Where I am in Europe, my go to is usually to talk about neocolonialism and unequal exchange. People just take these systems for granted and don’t understand how they function. It is very easy to just lay out how it works and people will be more and more disillusioned with western hypocrisy. Especially now when many are having doubts with regards to continued support for Israel, etc.
I’m such a coward that I always couch my educational rants in something I know they already agree with. Is it accurate to say that “rich people” in “France” essentially get free resources from Africa through owning extraction?
On the “is China communist” topic, at some point I often roll out:
If your whole government and everyone in it formally rejects capitalism and cares about people, someone who actually believes those things could rise in a way that is impossible under capitalism.
Sure, I’ve never been there, I don’t speak Mandarin, I haven’t done a graduate-level inquiry into the nature of their government. Sure, governments lie about their intentions all the time. But if someone was a Real Communist and wanted to go far in government, China greases the skids for them the same way the U.S. greases the skids for a wealthy guy who’s willing to sell out to the highest bidder.
I used to be friends with a liberal, but he became a Marxist. Still close friends and reading Marxist texts together in a book club. I know it’s very rare, but it can happen. I had plenty less good experiences too. Another friend that I had a huge argument over Palestine with over a year ago became at least way more left and they recently apologized to me telling me I was right from the start.
I don’t think it’s even that rare, it’s just that it’s a process for most people, not something that happens overnight. Which includes people who consider themselves marxist, communist, etc.; declaring yourself to be one doesn’t immediately get rid of all pre-existing bougie schools of thought from your mind. I always think of Stalin talking about the USSR having self-crit. Or Mao’s stuff like Oppose Book Worship.
If we understand ourselves as existing in many possible stages, with a process to transition from one to another, I think it’s easier to see why it’s both feasible to educate someone away from liberalism to communism and is also likely going to take time to get there.
Yes, that’s true, thank you
Thank you for what you do in educating others.
If you predict the direction that the US is going based upon historical trends, you will usually be right. If you predict where it is going based upon which party is in office, you will be wrong about half the time. Yes, there is no good reason to believe it would have been different under Kamala. You could’ve predicted the increase in ICE funding, for example, by looking at the trend that every administration prior, both Republican and Democrat, consistently have increased ICE funding. Kamala was even literally campaigning on massively increasing funding to border control agencies. Liberals just live in a fantasy land whereby it is always a utopia in their counterfactual world that doesn’t exist and then scoff at you and say you are too absurd to take seriously if you question that their counterfactual world would’ve really been all that different, yet never provide evidence to suggest it would have been.
I don’t know why liberals keep reading privilege into a desire for revolution, because then what are the oppressed?
Advocates for incrementalism?
Their political education is western media where the revolutionary strawmen turns out to be self-serving and hypocritical by being gasp the one thing they (communists) hate. It is an ever repeating trope.
Subconsciously they despise communists for not playing along with the performance of righteousness that they conduct - Eating the right foods, watching the right media, wearing the trendiest clothes from the right brands, exposing the right views in the right „civilized“ manner, saying the hottest takes du jour - performance, performance, performance, all of course funneled through consumerism.
They think communists are angry (white) teenagers who idk get pampered by sacrificing prestige, job opportunities, relationships, family and other markers of success in a capitalist society- Oh and give their LIFE to our cause. Massive projection from the liberals.
Liberals think everything bad boils down to individusl priviliges which are idealist instead of structural economic relations. Thus indicating a necessary but though solution to a problem becomes a privilige because to them it implies that you can only advocate for that because it would not inconvenience you because you somehow have some idealist attribute shielding you from the tough work you suggest.
what are the oppressed? Advocates for incrementalism?
A lot are, there’s no way around this. There isn’t any mass revolutionary movement in the U.S., and there really aren’t even regional ones. At best you have a decent PSL chapter that’s probably dwarfed by your local DSA. Incrementalism is the only game in town at the moment, so a lot of people support it because there isn’t anything better.
The argument against incrementalism is that it doesn’t work. If an incremental improvement is your goal from the start you’ll get only scraps and they’ll always be subject to being rolled back – look at abortion, look at wage gains, look at the halting steps to check the imperial machine. It’s not privileged to recognize when someone is trying to buy you off with scraps, and being oppressed does not magically grant anyone political acumen.
The fact they are speaks to how liberalism is still the dominant ideology and by extension the most accessible ideology.
But I guess my broader point is that the oppressed and exploited don’t lean as moderate as liberals project them to be, that it’s actually a sign of privilege to believe incrementalism works when it objectively doesn’t work for the vast majority of people. Liberals tell on themselves this way.
I think we should reject the “which take is more privileged” framing wholesale. You can argue it either way, it’s all hypothetical (in the sense it’s “people who think this must be privileged” rather than talking about actual people and their opinions), and it ignores the real question: what’s actually going to improve people’s lives in a meaningful way.
Oh for sure, when all else fails you can simply accuse the other of privilege so you won’t have to think about what they might have to say. It’s a thought-terminating technique.
I still maintain however that from a polemic point of view it’s interesting to note the hypocrisy of liberals accusing OTHERS of privilege when they look up to people like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton.
Hot take, but I don’t think that isolating ourselves is gonna help us in any way. Also, not all libs are made equal; the less fanatical might actually listen
They need to realize that, yes, we don’t have to live the way we currently do now.
This is how you’re speaking about liberals?
I don’t understand
