Reform UK is clearly winning over the minds of class unconscious workers. One of them is a young relative of mine. I’d love to have a talk in future, in a good setting, to help the lad out of this reactionary path he’s headed now.
It’s the typical stuff: immigrants committing sexual violence, stealing jobs, out breeding the “whites”, coming into the country illegally, given all the money, not working, benefit exploiting, being uncivilised savages etc.
I’ve heard the co-workers are enforcing this reactionary world view. Obviously I cannot barge in to the workplace, and change the environment, so I’m expecting this will take quite a bit longer than one afternoon tea lasts.
I believe he’ll be a fine lad, if he doesn’t fall any further, and finds a way out. I just feel I shouldn’t let him to dive deeper. There is already plenty of fascist propaganda to dispel.
How would you, dear online comrades, go about setting a young lumpen lad on the path to gain class consciousness?
PS. Title in the tune of Drunken Sailor.
It is very difficult to convince someone against their material interests.
The thing is westerners do get a bigger piece of the pie if they squeeze the foreigners more in their current political economy; they are not incorrect in that assessment.
Material interests is not just the exclusion of poverty; it is the subsidy of the quality of life at the expense of the global masses - the cultural narratives reinforce this dynamic - it does not start the other way round. We are not idealists here.
It has been decades of internet and “free access” to information, why aren’t westerners on the whole more enlightened? Why can’t they intelligently search the counter-narratives like you have, even just to better understand the perspective of the “enemy” to better take them down?
“Brainwashing” is essentially a CIA invention. Everyone believes brainwashing is real but somehow they are exempt. So either everyone is brainwashed or noone is. If you wanted a different spin on it: for which class is your (or my) brainwashing in service of?
People smarter and more charismatic than us have failed at this as exemplified by the modern West; isn’t it better to consider which strategies from a scientific point of view may more likely win rather than rehash pseudoscientific ventures? Wouldn’t you want to know why and how others have failed so that you may succeed? One’s theory of political change shouldn’t be the serependity of knowledge.
Marxism is a science and the Redsails articles linked are worth a read.
It is also worth a scientific approach in understanding and reflecting why we here as individual MLs believe what we do; what material interests have we realigned with - we should not assume we are above it all (you already agree with the latter).
This is an oppurtunity to learn past “brainwashing”; go for it and hopefully you will find a way to succeed with it.
Edited to add: to make this a little less abstract and a bit more concrete (after all this is an ML forum) for the OP this would mean making the case to his relative that solidarity with the people of colour in question is in his material interests within the short term. If that case can’t be made then the OP may want to consider more fruitful endeavours.
Yet I literally said “I am undoubtedly still somewhat brainwashed.”
It seems like you are getting caught up on the word itself and losing sight of the underlying meaning. We can call it something else if you’d like. Propagandized, mislead, whatever. The point is that narrative has an influence on people. Otherwise the empire would not go to the lengths it does to control media, at home and abroad.
Because the internet is not “free access” to information. The internet as a concept is free, but in reality, it is no more free than the “free” in “free speech.” China did its “great firewall” for a reason. Look at how isolated we are here, in part because reddit didn’t like communist perspectives being represented as they were. Is that “free”? Of course not. If I search for any given topic of the day, Google is not going to say “here’s a marxist perspective and here’s a capitalist perspective, think it through and choose for yourself.” They are going to be biased toward the capitalist perspective and you may have to dig hard to find the marxist perspective, if you can find it through a normal search at all.
Again, it is not either or and I am not arguing that people are only lead by how they think and what they believe. I am saying that it is both and you appear to be arguing that the propaganda side of things is not really a priority, so I’m emphasizing that it is.
I am saying you are not.
What magic did you use that is not freely available to everyone else? :)
Propaganda are licenses to affirm the worldview one is seeking. They are not tools of control because it “brainwashes” people; they are tools of control because they allow licenses for a sizable enough of the western populations to discipline against those that want to usurp the current hegemony.
It’s better to think of these in concrete terms. Let’s use some stereotypical examples to drive the point home. I am going to assume you may know USAmerican socially conservative news outlet owned by Murdoch, Fox News. What would happen to the Fox News audience if Fox News started promote more progressive talking points such as the emanicpation of people of colour? Would the audience now become progressive? Or would they seek elsewhere claiming that “liberal media” has captured Fox News too?
Now there could be two answers to the above. One is decades of “brainwashing” cannot be undone quickly which then has the problem of unfalsifiablity and presumes the “duration of watching age to be brainwashed” of the population.
Or we could consider the material conditions of why the above is so. In doing the latter, one is then forced to consider which parts of the population has revolutionary potential and which do not (class analysis).
We would not for example consider the bourgoisie “brainwashed”; we have to extend the same considerations to labour aristocrats and western labour who engage in class collaboration against the global south.
Is your assertion is that people in the right material conditions are always revolutionary and can not be mislead?
Germ theory is real. If you can make the case that washing your hands will extend your quality of life within the short term the person will be persuaded.
You have to make the case that whatever progressive concern you have, or socialist emancipatory project you want to engage in, will materially benefit the target audience within the short term. It is in that process you will discover who has revolutionary potential; we have to be dialectical materialists.
Germ theory is real, and yet there are people who won’t wear masks despite it clearly being in their material interests to do so and will in fact react with open hostility to anyone who tries to make the case that they should wear a mask. They will not be persuaded no matter what you say, even though it might kill them and their families. They have every reason to accept reality, and yet…
How do you explain this without acknowledging the power of other persuasive forces that are working against germ theory?
I am not saying it’s a done deal. I used germ theory as an example precisely because despite its scientific basis people may have other considerations. You have to consider, for example, what material conditions those people who do not want to wear masks benefit from within the short term by not wearing masks. You have to make the case why in the short term they would benefit by wearing a mask, and if not then consider the class conditions that may make it challenging.
There are certainly material conditions where the short term benefit of not masking might seem to outweigh the longterm benefit of masking, but a person who is convinced that masks don’t do anything will not wear them in any material conditions. It doesn’t matter what the science says, it doesn’t matter what reality is, they will not wear a mask even though it’s in their material interests.
Then in the other direction, there are people who exist under material conditions that make masking very difficult and cumbersome, and yet they do it anyway despite not even having preexisting conditions because they believe masking works.
People have been lied to, and this distorts their ability to understand their material interests.
Science is not apolitical; it is not neutral. You will have to make the case beyond appealing to science (edited to add: as accepted by liberals), ie consider a class analysis? What are the privileges afforded to one that they can get away with not wearing a mask, for example.
Counterpoint - USA and COVID or vaccines in general.
They are being truer and less hypocritical to the liberal ideal than liberals who are not anti-vaccination.
Okay? That has nothing to do with what you said that I quoted. Your claim was and I quote:
Which I told you is not true via my own view of myself.
I know what you’re doing here. It’s not the point you think it is because I’ve never claimed that circumstances are identical for everyone. I’m talking about system level generalities. Do you want me to go back through my history and try to explain how I got to the point I’m at? Because I can if you’d like, there’s nothing to hide, it’s just a fair bit of remembering and explaining to go over.
That’s not “the two answers” to the above. I can already think of more. 1) There are stories of people who got their parents off of Fox News and their parents started becoming less “reactionary” for lack of a better word. So already the evidence supports what I’m saying. 2) Your hypothetical example of a drastic change in what Fox News is saying should result in distrust the same as it would for any news station because a certain amount of trust goes into the dynamic and a sudden drastic shift in narrative would (reasonably) cause people to get suspicious. Any who didn’t notice and didn’t get suspicious may start changing what they’re thinking over time, given the evidence in point 1.
Let’s consider another example. Mao’s China and reeducation efforts, some of which were so successful they reformed “the last emperor”. It took time and some shaming of him with first person accounts from people he had wronged to get through, and I’m sure it helped immensely that he had no power at that point, but it stands out to me because it shows how far you can go when you have the power to do so and use it effectively.
They are tangled up in narrative the same as anyone else. See former emperor example above. It’s just much easier for us to dismiss them as pointless to try to persuade (or just morally grating to try, perhaps feeling like they don’t deserve an out) if they are actually in the oppressor class. Or in some contexts, it’s literally a matter of life or death, and you don’t have time to be sitting around trying to move them via words (like in the case of the USSR fighting Nazi Germany).
I can tell you right now I definitely did not understand the imperial dynamic for most of my life. I have little to no recollection of understanding the rich and poor dynamic either, for most of my life. I’d say that I was essentially politically illiterate in many ways. I could reason through a political issue in isolation and come up with what seemed like a reasonable take on it, similar to how someone who can’t read might still be able to slowly sound out some words, but I could not properly put it in context and tended toward individualist thinking, like wondering how a rich person could want so much excess while others are starving. I was not getting then that it’s often more about power, which is why companies will spend lots of money to crush unions instead of simply paying a decent wage. Anyway, the point being that I was not secretly knowing the imperial dynamic and embracing it because it benefited me. I just did not know. I’m sure there are crypto-fascists who would fit that description, but that was not me. I thought for a while that the US was more or less “flawed but trying to do good”. Hell, I didn’t even know until after I found my way to ML what the US had done to Korea, for example. I just knew there was this thing called the Korean War and that it was considered justified from the USian perspective.
Maybe consider the material conditions that may have helped you on your journey so those patterns could be recognised in others where appropriate, like I have said elsewhere our theory of change cannot be the serependity of knowledge.
There’s a more exacting reason; to maximise one’s time on groups who would be most fruitful ie those in the west who would benefit from the fall of the USAmerican imperialism. Unless your anecdotal data could be replicated at scale then it isn’t much better than serependity; and the West isn’t getting more progressive suggesting the opposite. The “trust” that you are talking about are the material conditions that supercede the idealist conception of brainwashing.
Offer your target a case where they will benefit in the short term from having your perspective and if you cannot make the material case for this then consider the class characteristics that make this challenging. It is in that journey that you will have a deeper class analysis and discover how you could become more successful.