To any lurking good faith lemmy users who want to ask questions about socialism, you may do it in this thread, I will protect you
To all full-grown hexbears, NO DUNKING IN MY THREAD...ONLY TEACH, criminal scum who violate my Soviet will be banned three days and called a doo doo head...you have been warned
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I don't mean this as a dunk, but usually what has to get taught about leftist politics isn't the specific claims of Marxism or what socialism is. Usually what western people have to be instructed with is current/former socialist countries are legitimate places and not cartoonish dictatorships. The nationalism brain worm runs far deeper than the capitalist one. And it's that kind of sentiment that will entangle itself with their understanding of what western socialists advocate.
It's pretty normal to accept anti-capitalist sentiment, even right wingers will use that kind of rhetoric, but it's far less normal to praise the west's enemies or to even view them as valid human beings. It's why it's so common for western leftists to first and foremost condemn the west's enemies as doing socialism incorrectly.
That's just what I experience most of the time when I get curious questions about socialism. I might get the odd question about how you motivate people without money, but the bulk of questions are about stuff like what haircuts are illegal in the DPRK.
Usually what western people have to be instructed with is current/former socialist countries are legitimate places and not cartoonish dictatorships.
To reinforce your point here, I cannot stress enough how important a step learning actual details about the USSR and China was for me. Because as you say, people don't think of these as real places where countless real people had mundane, normal lives, they just imagine literal cartoon caricatures they passively absorbed from pop culture. Like one that stands out to me is reading a thorough description of the Soviet court system, where even though it took pains to stress how dysfunctional this feature or that feature was all I could think was "I've had family go through the courts in the US, I've seen firsthand what a completely mad and not at all functional system the US has, and by comparison what the Soviets were doing over half a century ago was meaningfully less dysfunctional than what we have now."
And for China, ironically it was something from anti-CPC ultras (Sorghum and Steel) that helped me realize what China had even been doing at all, because even if they stressed this systemic failure or that one they still went into detail about what the policies in question were, what the material situation on the ground was, and why those decisions were being made, leading to a clear picture of China struggling against an impossible material situation and eventually succeeding. Like every western history is just "grr arrg mean devious celestials tricked the peasants and then Mao ate all the sparrows cause they're dumb, grrr" but in the actual context even the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forwards starts to make sense in terms of the model emerging from rural communes that had implemented it successfully (or were claiming to have done so, at least) and the model of highly decentralized rural industry that's far from the coast being extremely appealing given how vulnerable centralized coastal industry would be in the event of a war with the US; the Great Leap Forward didn't work in practice, obviously, but there were clear reasons and pressures behind it instead of just the "lol gommunism dumb no food where iphone" bullshit that makes up the sum total of what liberals believe.
Yeah I sympathize with you here. I kind of arrived at communism in a non-standard way that didn't involve much nationalism to jump over (I arrived at communism through an intense hatred of America during the Iraq War). But I did have to learn how other countries deal with things in different ways, based on the circumstances given to them.
Your court system example is good. I've gotten people to realize they were wrong about their warped view of other countries by simple things like showing them pictures of people walking around Moscow in the 70s, or showing them contemporary Chinese movies or music. There are some good videos on YouTube of people walking around Pyongyang and everything seems normal. That stuff is powerful, because there's no warping it. People in socialist countries by and large have normal lives full of the same mundane things everyone else does.
i had a similar experience reading some anti-communist (i think) book in college, i forget the title but the primary antagonist guy was some bald guy with a scar on his head that would turn colors or writhe whenever he got mad, like the author was making fun of the scar, and this character basically resented the rural peasants for picking their noses all the time and just being generally ignorant uneducated people. like the whole point of the book was about how stupid and pointless it was to try to turn these idiot peasants into Modern Socialist Revolutionaries, but like all the reasoning and actions the 'antagonists' took made perfect sense to me the whole time. i forget most of the details since it was so long ago so its possible i just assumed the book was meant to be anti-communist and it was actually making some 5-d irony chess point that i would agree with if i noticed it. idk.
What’s the book?
i wish i knew, i can't remember the title for the life of me
Yeah I agree with this totally, it's why I try to hammer home that people focus on breaking down nationalism first and foremost, it is the primary issue.
imperialism is the current greatest threat to socialism worldwide, so much of a threat it even trickles down as brainrot in the minds of western people
Once nationalism is destroyed in a person they become incredibly easy to talk to about socialism though, they lose the kind of anti-tankie brainworms that exist and start taking internationalist stances. It's so easy to reach someone that has genuinely not got nationalist brainworms.
If we could figure out a strategy as reliable at breaking this down as, for example, the strategy that has reduced military recruitment... Things would really start cooking for us.
I feel like nationalism (of rich first world nations) is a part of, or at least an extremely useful tool of, Imperialism.
It's a division of the international working class into sub-groups that are then pitted against one another. If you take the perspective that racism is used within a country to divide the various groups of workers up into identity groups that are then made to fight one another internally it is the same tactic but at an international scale. Skin colour and sexuality as identity groups is just substituted for national flags as identity groups. Same old story, divide the working class up to fight each other, and rule them.