As Marxists, who desire the overthrow of the bourgeois capitalist state through revolution, one of the best ways for us to spread revolutionary consciousness and its ideals is through explaining whenever we get the opportunity. Not through necessarily reciting every volume of Capital in depth, but applying theory to give succinct explanations to real-world phenomenons in the neoliberal world anyone would understand. It will not turn a liberal into a unionizing Marxist and anti-imperialist overnight, but instead it’s obviously incremental.
Sadly, we can’t directly accomplish that from a comradely online space like this one, but we can use it to develop strategies!
We must never stop explaining. We know that when the people understand, they cannot help but follow us.
as Thomas Sankara once said.
So share your experiences, and let’s learn from eachother, question eachother, and make a space for constructive criticism.
Be they liberals, socdems, reformists, bourgeois nationalists, conservatives of all kinds, hell, even fascist-adjacents… any rightoid sympathies, whatever the case.
And my fellow comrades of the Global South probably have experiences with the defeatist types who are nihilistic and end up becoming imperialist bootlickers, due to adopting a neocolonial inferiority complex.
Do you prefer to calmly engage through theory in simplified terms applied to real world examples they would understand and relate to? Perhaps focusing on making them see the contradictions and guiding them to answer questions themselves through dialectical materialism? Do you simply prefer to disengage and let them be, depending on the situation? Do you sometimes balance between “preserving your sanity” and standing your ground?
For the Westerners, I would assume you’d often avoid the “trigger words” of communism and socialism due to red scare propaganda.
Perhaps it depends on how susceptible they are to cognitive dissonance (i.e. how much they seem perceive their beliefs as a personality trait)?
Very curious to hear about everyone’s experiences!
That’s an interesting approach, efficient way to flip the script and shut down all the propaganda which is exactly meant to DISTRACT from what happens at home.
Indeed, which serves as material proof that achieving socialism within bourgeois electoralism (or “democracy” as it labels itself) is not sustainable because it does not overthrow the ruling class (bourgeoisie) in favor of a new one (proletariat), and instead leverages the tools of the existing ruling class. Makes you think of a certain Allende… Or those who simply sell out.