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.
Critical support to Roderic from Red Sails while he tries to convince Johnstone to engage with scientific theories surrounding propaganda and political behavior (Marxism).
Brainwashing theory doesn’t hold up to reality so treating it as a model of why Americans and other European diaspora are passive to supportive of Imperialism is a misdiagnosis and leads to unreliable treatment. Counter propaganda is only so effective and is never going to threaten Empire and class society in general.
So tbh, if she doesn’t want to accept criticism from Marxists then we should really just ignore her and others like her. We need to put our own theories out to people we are organizing around and for.
So tbh, if she doesn’t want to accept criticism from Marxists
she does, kind of ? She never truly rails against him when does that, and I think as far as I know they still follow each other so there’s no real bad blood between them, that’s kinda what I mean
I’ve never seen her engage with these critiques in good faith. She seems to mostly just get really defensive and refuses to rethink her strategy or the theory in general. A big point here, I think, is the fact that her business model where her readers pay her, reinforces that kind of non-Marxist analysis of propaganda, because it lets the readers feel as an educated and truth-knowing elite above the majority of the masses that are ‘brainwashed’.
Maybe ur right, tbh im scrambling from the palestine news rn
It’s important to keep in mind that, in science, all models are wrong but some are useful. If we claim to have a scientific analysis on society and politics we need to account for that : the liberal model of thought is wrong but useful to justify imperialism, the generic left model of Johnstone is wrong but useful to get people to question themselves, and yes even ours, the ML MZT model is wrong, but it’s the most useful to build a strong revolution
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?
I want to try to fight those as best I can before worrying about being a perfect Marxist.
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
She has a lot of great takes, but at one point (in like 2020?) recommended a red-brown alliance as the way to go.
I think she’s well worth reading, but I have some reservations.
Like any individual she has blind spots in her analysis. Also, people can engage and view the world through a Marxist lens without formally subscribing to an ideology. She obviously is versed in leftist theory, given the general reasoning and the conclusions she comes to in her writing.
She echoes so much of what the M-L left is already saying. Her writing is useful to us in that way that it’s accessible to non-communists as well.
