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.
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?
False consciousness exists as well as the choice to accept the lies behind it. In other words, people have the choice to believe into racist, classist or any supremacist idea promoted by capitalism.
People aren’t brainless/helpless victims but conscious beings choosing to look for ideas that makes them feel superior to the unfortunate under capitalism.
The point of the RedSails article is to highlight that people are capable of choosing to abandon those supremacist/pro-capitalist lies in favor of liberation. Ignoring that capacity to choose is not helpful but it leads you to look down on people.
Men make their own history but they do not make it as they please. That’s dialectical materialism. They are capable of choices within the limits of being products of their historical and material conditions, and part of that includes the ideological superstructure that shapes the way they’re able to think.
The material case isn’t always enough, sometimes you’re working against decades of propaganda and lies that require reeducation.
There are people that choose to go beyond their historical and material conditions. Acknowledging people’s capacity of choice will help you understand impressive stories like Monika Ertl from Germany:
Monica grew up in a closed, racist circle, dominated by both her father and another sinister figure she affectionately referred to as “Uncle Klaus.” A German businessman (the pseudonym of Klaus Barbie (1913-1991) and former head of the Gestapo in Lyon, France) better known as the “Butcher of Lyon.”
She lived in an extreme world surrounded by old Nazi torturers. Any disturbing sign didn’t seem strange to her. However, the death of Argentine guerrilla Ernesto Che Guevara in the Bolivian jungle (October 1967) had been the final push for her ideals. Mónica, according to her sister Beatriz, “worshipped ‘Che’ as if he were a God.”
Even with her horrible conditions, She chose differently from the people around her. She chose to say NO to the fascist ideology within her circle and went to join a marxist guerrilla and then join an op to avenge Che Guevara by killing his murderer.
People like Monica prove what darkernations was trying to help you understand throughout this whole thread but you refuse to acknowledge. People are capable of choosing not to abide and follow along supremacist notions promoted by the ideological superstructure of capitalism. Redsails is correct in his analysis.
Acknowledging that people have the capacity to refuse the licensing of supremacist/superiority notions promoted by capitalism will help you understand the strategy explained by RedSails in the article:
To choose to engage in such idealism warrants an insulation from the consequences that only orientialism could afford. The prejudice that allows the oppressor and his collaborator this leeway derives from a material privilege to accomodate such an apologism.
There are people who kill themselves and their families by refusing to mask. They don’t seem insulated from consequences to me?
They live in the privilege that COVID disproportionately affect people of colour due to inequal access to healthcare and comorbidities reflecting wealth distrubutions.
I wonder why that escaped you.
I wonder what the differences in lived experiences and demographics who read that Redsails article and say yeah that better reflects their reality versus those who feel they feel better served still by liberal concepts of indoctrination and brainwashing putting the ideal before the material.
The ideological superstructure exists. This is also dialectics. I wonder why you dismiss the role of ideology entirely.
I merely think people can be mislead and miseducated and propagandized by the lies their teachers and media and religious leaders tell them, and that this can lead to distorted politics that work against the material interests of the people that learn it.
Reeducation is necessary for a reason.
Ideological superstructure can only exist with a material basis. Exploitative relationships between peoples exist with a flow of material gain in the direction of the oppressor and their collaborators; it is not just ideological - in fact when that material relationship changes the ideology has to re-adapt.
Dialectical materialism and with that marxism-leninism partly has an appeal because it takes out so much of the frustation of the contradictions of the world.
When one is at the receiving end of white supremacism for years on end, and to feel that “if only they understood the truth then maybe they will stop” leading to a vacuous nihilism bound by endless racist propaganda, and then to have that weight to be lifted off you when it is understood that they are not “brainwashed” is sometimes an experience that has to be felt to be believed. It fills one with revolutionary optimism that the world can be changed for the better.