She isn’t a marxist, but she has described herself as a communist and regularly rails against imperialism and propaganda as a whole, on top of having friendly relationships with marxists and also pushes back against reactionary thought like anti “wokism” or whatever else right wing opportunists are wailing about. Guess this is kind of a smaller part of how we should go about “left” unity.
You know, that description fits me pretty well. I’ve always been “left”. I drifted over the line to communist, and then drifted into Marxist as I read more theory and learnt the truth about AES states. What really makes my blood boil though is imperialism, fascism, and the propaganda that enables them. I want to try to fight those as best I can before worrying about being a perfect Marxist. Perhaps it’s similar with her?
The problem with this is that it’s very hard to actually fight propaganda without a Marxist understanding of how it works. Just telling people the truth doesn’t really do a lot in most cases. To be effective at counter-propaganda, we have to understand how it actually works in the first place, and theories like ‘brainwashing’ don’t enable us to do that. To effectively fight propaganda, we have to first understand its material origins, relations to different classes, and modes of operation (licensing and bullying rather than brainwashing). These parts are missing from Johnstone’s analysis and that makes her counter-propaganda less effective. This article goes into it in more details, and Red Sails has a whole bunch of articles on the topic.
Thank you for the literature! I will read it.
that’s fair. I feel like this kind of person is ripe for turning into a marxist but then again idk