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.
Consider the role the ideological superstructure plays and don’t just reduce everything to the material base. The base and superstructure play off of each other, it’s not a one-way relationship.
It’s like you don’t believe that people can be tricked, or that reeducation is as easy as just telling people the truth.
Darkernations is doing the thing the redsails article is preaching against. Only instead of believing they are “special” because they have seen through the lies, they believe everyone can see through the lies but darkernations is one of the “Special Morally superior” who is rejecting the lies.
I’m saying when we fail we have to consider why; I’m saying that people intelligently seek the narratives that they do to uphold their material perspectives which undermines your claim above.
And you give the impression there’s a bit of projection of going on; what you said about the Israelis is downright bigoted against Palestenians, I didn’t want to call that out because it may derail what we are talking about but here we are.
I’m not saying otherwise.
Quoting myself:
You need to do both. There is an ideological battle, you can’t just eschew the ideological terrain to liberals.
Ideology exists. You have to combat it, even if it’s also not possible to win purely on an ideological terrain without also being engaged with the material base.
No argument from me here against that.
What I would like to stress how we go about it in a more exacting way: make one’s case that adopting one’s perspective will provide a material benefit within the short term to the person or group you are targeting and if one fails to do so then consider the relative class characteristics that obstructs this, and thereby refining how and whom you approach.
I definitely agree that making the material case is very persuasive and we should do it, but that’s not what you were saying.
We were talking about brainwashing.
When someone is so exposed to years of algorithmic lies and ideological programming that they actually do not understand their own material interests i.e. someone with preexisting conditions refusing to mask, even when they’re asked to and would only benefit from it and there aren’t downsides like heat or exertion. There are times when the material case will not reach someone because they have been mislead and miseducated.
That’s what it is to be brainwashed.
I think that miseducation only sticks if there is an ongoing perceived material benefit.
“Perceived” is doing some work there.
Making people perceive benefits that aren’t real can also be called a form of brainwashing.
And that perception is rooted in reality. Western labour collaborate against the global south because they materially benefit from this exploitation.
We are talking about this in the context of attempting to convince someone off their fascist sympathies. I offered a mutually acceptable pragmatism in the context of persuasion with a focus on class analysis, which I would like to stress was my original point, but you want to double down on idealist concepts of indoctrination. I am not going to entertain Western Apologism.
If your paradigm of persuasion does not evolve past what a liberal can offer then it is not my burden to bear to rob the oppressor and his class collaborators of their agency.
Do you just… not believe false consciousness exists?
I’m saying rather strategising with the aim to “reveal the truth” you should instead consider a class analysis and make the case that you can offer a greater material benefit and if you can’t you have to be honest about why. It is more than just a “battle of ideas”; ie not to fall to idealism.