There’s this red sails article that pops up every once in a while. Don’t get me wrong it’s a fine article, but there’s a bit that goes “something something don’t think people are brainwashed and just need to be exposed to uncomfortable truths.”
And like, I get it. But…that’s exactly what happened to me. I mean, I’m not going to say it was exactly one thing that caused it. However, genuinely when i learned about the Iraq War in detail*, that was basically what flipped the switch in my head. Obviously I wasn’t as theoretically developed as I am today, but thats what made me genuinely want to read Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc. It was exactly that process of being exposed to information like that that made me want to be a communist, and want to fight for it.
This isn’t some debunking thing. I think what I’m trying to explain is that my story seems to be very different from other people’s, and applying my own experiences might not really work if it’s not how things commonly work.
And, as much as it is important, I do want something more in depth than just “organize and educate.” Don’t get me wrong, that’s good advice. What I’m trying to ask moreso is, what is the actually psychology going on behind these decisions here? Obviously there’s no cookie cutter/one size fits all strategy here, but some direction would be helpful in actually attempting to convince people.
*To elaborate, I always heard of Iraq as just “the war.” Kinda like how Vietnam was. But no one ever explained to me what it was and school didn’t really neither. So when I learned it was basically the US invading Iraq almost explicitly for oil and no one got punished for it and basically everyone got rich off of it besides normal people while hundreds of thousands Iraqis died, it really shook me.
These people are delusional lmao, if they can’t accept reality then theres really nothing you can do to convince them otherwise it’s better mental wise to cut your losses
Really depends on the situation. I’m not going to insist to someone that they associate with a person who is a drain on them, sans context. But speaking generally, in the imperial core, we often don’t have the luxury to be especially selective on who we associate with, if we want to make any headway on things. Most are not exactly ML and those of us who made our way to that did it because there were people who were willing to associate with us in spite of our ignorance and get through to us over time.
Why do you assume that the imperial core is revolutionary at all, why do you keep failing into this fallacy that the class interests of the first world reflects the interests of the third world? Wake up seriously, If communists want to expand the revolution they would be doing everything in their power in aiding third world countries and destroying the livelihoods of their own instead of trying to make people revolutionary, make them resentful, make them angry normalise violent rhetoric, encourage division so that whatever fabric holds that society together collapses
What you’re saying sounds a lot like encouraging barbarism in the imperial core, in the hope it will somehow make it collapse faster. Which is accelerationism and is not how revolution is built. Worsening contradictions don’t automatically translate to socialist revolution, in the imperial core or anywhere. It still has to be built and people in the imperial core can still try to build and prepare locally, while trying to have solidarity internationally as well. It is counter to having an internationalist view to throw local under the bus simply because it isn’t as revolutionary as you’d like. It is counter to having empathy in general as well.
Furthermore, the western empire is not a controlled house of cards confined within a sterilized chamber. If it collapses violently, and there is nothing significant to counter that locally, it’s still an empire with far-reaching tendrils that has nukes and other kinds of militarized violence. Don’t confuse a controlled implosion with a violent explosion, in other words. Even from this point of view of people who live in the imperial core that seems to saying “their lives matter less than those in the ‘third world’”, their downfall is not confined to only them. And if imperialism can get dismantled to the point that that’s no longer the case, the (already flimsy) argument for valuing “third world” lives more also goes out the window, since the “first world” is no longer able to exploit those people in the same way at that point anyway.
Except I don’t want a revolution in the imperial core I want their hegemony to collapse I don’t care if it’s violent I want to live in a multipolar world order since it’s magnitudes better than the current one also yes in the grand scheme their lives are lesser to me I don’t care about them
So you don’t care if indigenous people in the region that gets called the US suffer? You don’t care if children in the imperial core more broadly, suffer? You don’t care if the collapse of the empire harms people outside it in the process? You’re going to turn around and say that people who have not done harm are deserving of harm by association, is that it? What kind of sick shit are you peddling to sit here and tell me that some lives are lesser?