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.
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.