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 why I said this:
If said material conditions were not present, this would be not only pointless but also nearly impossible. Especially because the contradictions are already sharpening in the West now.
A point I intentionally glossed over because it was largely meant to generalize and apply not only to Westerners, is the labour aristocracy and similar class dynamics. The portion of the working class still far from disillusioned, who have been bought off by working class concesssions from the bourgeoisie derived from imperialist superprofits.
Look at the pension situation in Europe, and France’s latest austerity measures, as an example. What happens is that most of them, once this affects them, are captured by reaction instead of revolution, the default under the imperialist capitalist superstructure. This is giving rise to a majority of fascist sympathies once the last liberal has been scratched, which you implied. The tiny organized left in the imperial core, where this happens, is a drop in the ocean as far as “reversing” this entire phenomenon is concerned.
This I won’t disagree with, because “debating” with them means to speak on their terms which should be avoided in favour of simply turning the script in your favor if you’re forced to be around them in a given situation. Secondly, the good side of this is absolutely that they will accelerate the utter exhaustion of every single attempt at “saving” and “reforming” capitalism until they eventually discover that there’s nothing to lose from the current system. Imperialist capitalism has leveraged world wars to “salvage” itself, though, which we shouldn’t forget.