I was talking to a friend yesterday who is also a coder. His parents are Chinese from the region where Hong Kong is, but he was raised in America. And he kept saying that capitalism is not perfect, but is the best that we got and that there is not real freedom on socialism because you cannot vote the poliburo out and that Marxism has been tried and didn’t work out but that capitalism adapts to the real world with trial and error and blah blah.
No matter what I said, he wouldn’t yield. We spent an hour and a half on a discussion about it. It ended up with him saying “We are not going to convince each other so let’s stop”. Mind you that he was the one who kept asking me question but barely let me speak.
He was like “I read about Marxism, and I just realized that it doesn’t apply to the real world”
It’s largely no use trying to convince those who aren’t willing to be, so focus your efforts on those who are. More comrades is a good thing, you don’t have to pick the hardest fights to get more comrades, you can pick the easy ones and social pressures and material conditions changing will make the more against easier to convert in the future. Trust that the dialectic is always in motion, they may not be open now, but might in the future as conditions change.
What do you mean by this?
Since you have a programming background, think of it like recursion. A function that runs, then calls itself has fundamentally changed inputs. Dialectics proceeds as spirals, this recursive loop is a cycle that always progresses quantitatively until the character qualitatively changes.
In practical example, as Capitalism decays, conditions quantitatively weaken for workers, which will eventually result in a qualitative shift in perspective and openness to new ideas.
On a related note, I’ve also noticed that we basically have a Darwinian competition between different world models. Different groups of people subscribe to a particular explanation of how the world works, and that becomes their ideology. Some people go through this process consciously, but vast majority just internalize the world view from people around them as they grow up.
Once somebody settles on a particular world view then it’s natural for them to reject conflicting views since there’s no way to prove whether one view or the other is correct in most cases. And I tend to think of this in terms of thermodynamics where people have complex graphs of ideas in their heads, and when any particular idea is challenged then the whole set of ideas associated with it has to be reworked as well. It’s easier to simply discard conflicting ideas than to go through the process of rethinking a bunch of things you’ve internalized over many years. This is why it’s typically very hard to change people’s ideas no matter how good your argument is. The cost of integrating this new information is just too high to bother in most cases.
What typically causes people to go through this process is when they start noticing a drift between their world model and the material reality they experience. For example, when mainstream liberals start experiencing a continued decline in their material conditions then it becomes difficult to continue believing that everything is getting better and that they’re living their best lives under the most enlightened system possible.
Hence why a lot of people started questioning things after 2008 crash, and as economic disasters continue, we see more and more people falling out of the liberal mainstream. Unfortunately, many of these people end up on the right because the right ideology is very close to liberal ideology, so it’s much easier for people to internalize those ideas. The right leans into the common tropes people have been indoctrinated into. They’ll talk about immigrants stealing jobs, or the government stifling innovation, etc. These slogans build directly on the capitalist propaganda people have already been indoctrinated into. This makes the ideology very accessible to people falling out of the mainstream.
The left has been systematically dismantled in the west. Most people can’t even define what communism is, all they know is that it’s bad and scary. That’s what been drilled into their heads their whole lives. Meanwhile, the right has a big and vibrant platform where they often discuss real issues that people experience. And this is precisely what hooks people in.
They’ve already come to realize that libs are gaslighting them, and that the system isn’t working on their interest because they see their standard of living collapsing while mainstream media keeps telling them they’re living in the best economy ever. So, when right wingers come out and point out that the economy sucks and that regular working class people are being screwed over, that resonates with the lived experience people have.
On the other hand, moving left requires restructuring your whole world view and rejecting everything you’ve been taught your whole life. Some people are able to make the intellectual leap required, but most are not.
I think that the left needs right now more than anything is to focus on packaging the ideas in a way that’s easily digestible for people who are falling out of the political mainstream. The pitch has to be at least as appealing as whatever the right is peddling.
You’re pretty close to what Roderic Day asserts in Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing.” People believe what they license themselves to, and reject that which shakes that frame due to the absolute cacophany of information available on the internet. Everyone says everything, so it’s easy to find information pointing to whatever you want it to, so this charade keeps going.
I think over time terms like “Socialism” and “Communism” are less scary in the West, but what those words mean is what’s at stake, as Socialism gets taken over by the Social Democrats and other apologists for Imperialism. Agitation should be tied to real experiences of the working class and speak to simple logical truths about why we should collectively plan the economy, rather than leaving it up to a decreasing number of powerful individuals. Combatting the overwhelming negativity of the modern era with revolutionary optimism seems quite potent.
That was a great essay, and I very much agree it’s the specific meaning for the terms we use that matters. We don’t want people to just learn empty slogans, we want them to understand the mechanics of the system.
100%. The good news is that this process seems to ease over time as conditions change.
Exactly, you don’t have to work hard to convince people when the things you’re saying match their lived experience.