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.
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.
In the US they used this line in support of eventual disenfranchisement and mass murder of Indigenous peoples, Africans, Chinese, Mexicans. By the white labour unions, no less. First the “uncivilized immigrants” are brought into the country (or accepted as the subjects from within), then they work in inhumane conditions to build the cities, infrastructure and industry, and then they are displaced out of workplaces they created by the white European labour force.
In your case - ask your relative how often they see white workers in construction and utility, in the food and farm industry, in (especially lower-end) service jobs. Is this the result of unfair competition of privileged immigrants against the white brits willing to work these jobs, or are they filling the labour underclass that sustains the comfy privileged lives of the white collar labour? Who makes your £10 curry, and who grows the rice for it?
Look up the relevant stats distribution in crime, that’s the easiest thing to disprove right away. As well as crime against the immigrants.
And if you can make them read a book, “Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat” by J. Sakai will not leave any place for this type of bullshit in their head.
Good ideas! Thank you.
I’d love it if he actually would read Settlers. Lets see if I can nudge him to pick it up at some point.
If your relative is worth your emotional investment, time and your mental health then go for it, and please let us all know what strategy, if any, ended up working for you. Please take care of yourself.
What are the strategic consequences of decisively rejecting the tripartite social theory advanced by Orwell, and adopting Marx’s all-encompassing one instead? The basic call to action looks something like this:
Stop accusing the masses of being “brainwashed.” Stop treating them as cattle, stop attempting to rouse them into action by scolding them with exposure to “unpleasant truths.”
Accept instead that they have been avoiding those truths for a reason. You were able to break through the propaganda barrier, and so could they if they really wanted to. Many of these people see you as the fool, and in many cases not without reason.
Understanding people as intelligent beings, craft a political strategy that convincingly makes the case for why they and their lot are very likely to benefit from joining your political project. Not in some utopian infinite timescale, but soon.
If you cannot make this case, then forget about convincing the person in question. Focus instead on finding other people to whom such a case can be made. This will lead you directly to class analysis.
https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
Brits, like all westerners, could carve their identity and culture from the marxists and communists who helped get the concessions that created the West as we know it, using the leverage of the threat of the USSR.
https://redsails.org/concessions/
Instead they collectively choose their idenitity on the ongoing centuries of genocide and exploitation of the global south personified in their Churchills, Royalty and military that they deify.
At some level they perceive to materially benefit from the above dynamic; their “whiteness” hinges on this savagery and it is a tall order to unpack this. The Great Replacement Theory and mass violence from the supposed hordes is just White Cultural Projection.
They are not brainwashed. The narratives are a license for bigotry.
Best of luck.
They are not brainwashed. The narratives are a license for bigotry.
I completely agree with you here. From numerous times that I have debated with people around me(including westerners and pro western Latam country men), the redsails articles are the most plausible explanation to their behavior. Also, within my marxist reading circles, we reached that same conclusions as redsails explained. Capitalism breed supremacism and false notions of superiority the working class for the sake of reducing solidarity among the oppressed.
Just as an example, in Mexico, we also see that working class people that harbor pro capitalist ideas are usually accepting the licencing of fallacious ideas such as: aspiracionismo(or “the poor is poor because they want to”).
People that have this pro capitalist want to feel superior to the less fortunate so they adopt behaviors that are basically anti solidarity and apathetic to the people that suffer under this inhumane capitalist system.
Very sad to see westerners in this thread actively trying to appeal to idealist notions of “brainwashing”. It feels that they are just seeking excuses and giving away their power to choose what to believe. Propaganda is not powerful and as we have seen in recent times it is actively losing power within the oppressed.
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They are not brainwashed. The narratives are a license for bigotry.
They are brainwashed though. As am I undoubtedly still, even if I’m less brainwashed than I used to be. It’s sort of impossible not to be somewhat brainwashed when you’re immersed in colonial culture and just about everything involved in it, is designed to reinforce it.
Material conditions do matter, also, don’t get me wrong. They are just not the whole of it. Class traitors in history prove that people can break free of the immediate allure of their material conditions and make sacrifices for better; it’s just more of an uphill battle for them than it is for someone whose conditions make them desperate enough to be primed for any excuse to raise hell.
Also, I don’t think saying people are brainwashed has to be in contradiction to people being intelligent. People can be brainwashed in part because they are intelligent. Were they only lead by base instinct, there would not be much more you could do than lure them with reward and punishment. But that is not the case. We are complex emotional and rationalizing beings, and within that tangled web, the spiders of the narrative world can weave lies to trap people into confused corners of thinking, sometimes ones that go against their own well-being. The answer to this is not to be afraid of narrative or spooked by spectral figures who would weave lies in the shadows, but to confront narrative head on as an inherent part of our existence. To not shy away from it and instead understand how powerful it is, on both an individual and collective level.
So in summary, white westerners are brainwashed, but that’s not because they’re cattle, it’s because their lives are woven into storytelling and those who direct the story can (to some degree of success) warp the people. The unpleasant truths need to be heard if they are to understand why our story is so different than the dominant one. But sure, it’s not about scolding them exactly, it’s about narrative influence and political power. And yes, showing them how you can realistically help is critical. But within the fact they’re complex beings also means that they shouldn’t be reduced to needing only placation like it’s all base instinct. They don’t just need help, they need to know why it is you’re able to help in a way that another system won’t.
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.
Everyone believes brainwashing is real but somehow they are exempt.
Yet I literally said “I am undoubtedly still somewhat brainwashed.”
“Brainwashing” is essentially a CIA invention.
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.
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?
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.
Yet I literally said “I am undoubtedly still somewhat brainwashed.”
I am saying you are not.
Because the internet…
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?
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.
Counterpoint - USA and COVID or vaccines in general.
I am saying you are not.
Okay? That has nothing to do with what you said that I quoted. Your claim was and I quote:
Everyone believes brainwashing is real but somehow they are exempt.
Which I told you is not true via my own view of myself.
What magic did you use that is not freely available to everyone else? :)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I think he’s worth, ofc. But surely, if he consciously puts the fascist boots on and becomes a full blown bourgeoisie boot licker, then I’m not wasting my breath any longer.
Hopefully he can be helped. Thanks!
then I’m not wasting my breath any longer
Good and thank you! Learn from our/my mistakes and lessons; the dialectical materialist approach really helped me much better understand how this stuff works and better understand failures of persuasion; it better helped me develop revolutionary optimism.
I hate that redsails “no such thing as brainwashing” line. Its a pedantic semantic argument that doesn’t address the meaning of the word as it is used.
People can and do often go against their own material conditions because they have been propagandized to do so. It isn’t difficult when the entire education and media system is designed to do it. People have been convinced to go against their personal interests since the beginning of history. That is why religion and nationalism exist.
It is not “semantics”. There is real world implications here. Understanding that is how one would hope to find the solution. Otherwise you have to concede the West can never be saved; which may be correct.
The difference in a nutshell is this: using liberal methods in identifiying “logical fallacies” to “win an argument” vs understanding which material conditions you could appeal to make the case for your target that they will benefit from your perspective within the short term; ie a class analysis.
Look at how 80%+ israelis support genocide and tell me that is not because their society has brainwashed them. You can use other words if you like but there is a massive propaganda machine that convinces people to work against their own interest and makes them believe things that are not true. That is what most people mean by brainwashing. It isn’t infallible but it is very effective.
What is the other argument if propaganda and education can’t force people to believe things that are inhuman and untrue? Are you saying that all people are genocidal rapists if they can get away with it? Or is it just that some people are just genetically predisposed to genocide?
Do you believe that israelis can be saved?
It is their relationship as settler colonialists that largely determines what they choose to believe. We should be dialectical materialists here. The idea does not come before the material conditions.
Their “emancipation” will only come when those they oppress are liberated.
Material conditions include exposure to ideas and information. Materialism isn’t all just about people’s physical well being and wealth.
Materialism is the opposite of Idealism which posits that “ideas” are what shapes reality and nothing is concrete. Materialist analysis must incorporate ideas and thoughts by understanding that they are the result of physical processes and can affect reality by impelling physical acts.
israel is the most dangerous place for Jewish people and has been since it became a state. Why do they believe “Jews need a place of their own to be safe” and migrate to the worst place in the world to be Jewish? That is not materialist interest that is being brain washed to believe a lie.
The zionist entity is not in Jewish peoples best interest. (This is not a point of contention) Most Jewish people before the holocaust knew zionism was a bad idea but in the years after the Shoa the zionist propoganda machine (and terrorism against Jewish communities outside israel) brainwashed people into believing what their parents and grand parents knew was untrue.
Zionist Jews get to steal housing and have easy work and access to nice beaches etc. As settlers. The bargain that they have accepted is that they may have to join in on settler terror, and that sometimes there may be backlash if they don’t sufficiently crush their enemy. It’s not brainwashing. Israeli propaganda is meant to help massage their pathetic egos and give them justifications for being scum, not to brainwash them into being scum.
Material conditions include exposure to ideas and information. Materialism isn’t all just about people’s physical well being and wealth.
I’m not saying otherwise.
I am not sure what really to say here that is not just repeating what I said earlier.
Israelis do materially benefit from this exploitative relationship and it is idealism to think otherwise; you have anti-zionists views because of the struggles of the Palestinian peoples for national liberation not the other way round.
brainwashed people into believing what their parents and grand parents knew was untrue.
Well convinced them by offering an easy route to get a house, a hot “idf chick” and extractions from white supremacy (Judeo-Christian Values). So materialistic benefits.
Just the ideas of jewish exceptionalism, Promised Lands, pain supremacy,“we are under attack forevermore and need a shelter” and the zionist version of the “Christ of Europe” rhetoric, maintain and enlarge the materialist fundation of the settler colony.
Lumpenworker/sub-proletarians need to be baited by selfish reasons then you can expand their worldview to anti-racist/imperialist/global solidarity. Sub-proletarians are very hard to radicalize because they despise the “fellow poor” to a very high degree. They have also completely accepted themselves as “lesser”, buying into the capitalist world order.
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