What's your approach to engaging in a conversation about politics in the company of people who hold reactionary beliefs?
What's your approach to engaging in a conversation about politics in the company of people who hold reactionary beliefs?
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!
Anti-aircraft cannon. I follow the leadership of Comrade Kim.
Serious answer: I keep the focus on the problems at home. When they veer into "muh China" stuff, I poke holes in it, redirect, point out hypocrisy, and pivot back to home by pointing out that our government here has a much bigger impact on us than the government in China.
When discussing socialism, I just point out that a lot of reforms would be very nice, but they continually fail to materialize as the government shoots them down in favor of squeezing the population harder and harder. Constant recessions, the impossibility of infinite growth, etc. As @BarrelsBallot@lemmygrad.ml says, the consequences of actions speak louder than words. Liberal politicians make everything worse, people support reactionary politicians who make everything even worse than that, and progressive politicians are shot down during takeoff. People either come around to the idea that the system is broken and Hitler 2.0 isn't going to fix it, or they don't, very often based on their class position.
When they start doing "enemy country bad" stuff, it's so easy to clown on them for being a dorkass sheep who trusts the government all of a sudden
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.