Yesterday had a long conversation with a labor aristrocratic family member, age millenial and working in tech.

He announced things like: -China is a horrible Orvellian surveillance state, you (talks to me) have no idea how horrible it is there. Haven’t you seen the videos?

I try to cautiously reply that surveillance capitalism is pretty intense in the West as well and that we don’t really get good or balanced information from China. He goes:

-So you sayig something like Zero Covid was the right choice?

I am hesitant to reply with a yes as this person is clearly already very fired up and confrontational. But I try to point out things about how nobody in 2020 knew how bad it might and how many will die, how people in the West are still dying, how the virus isn’t in any way bening even now and how it’s pretty dystopian too that here we are just sacrificing people for capitalism now and choose to ignore it.

I did say I think it was better to save people to which he said that I am a nihilist.

I also tried to explain the State outside the capitalist project and protecting multitudes not individuals, individualism and such, but he was not receiving it.

He then told me how bad the country is as he saw in the Grand Tour how they have built a highway over a rainforest that nobody uses.

I asked him where does he think all the roads and buildings in the West are built if not on top of nature. The argument as critizism of China made no sense to me whatsoever.

Later this same person said to me that we as a society have no hope and there is no point in protesting, no point in doing anything but riding out the rest of our time to climate disaster. I tried to point out to him that a socialist state can be born from capitalism, but only if we the people develop initiative for it and understand our current condition.

Same guy also did admit that voting no longer works, the EU was a mistake and it’s grim how all our state systems have been privatized and are now in the hands of corpotations like Microsoft.

Now, I don’t even know where to start with this one. He very much represents his part of the population here and the deep apathy and negative thought that they harbor.

He still understands and thinks that the regulated capitalism of the 70-80s here (keynesian) was the best part of our history, but when I told him that it still was always going to lead to fascism and monopolies (told him to read Marx) he ignored this. Very much the “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” mindset.

And my question is, how do we as communists reach these people? These people actually have power (capital), but the petty bourge status has made them like this. However climate chance does not discriminate so I feel this part of society is facing a new conflict from a historical standpoint where nature says no to exploitation. And this seems to lead to apathy.

  • GucciMane [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    From an article on Maoist organizing techniques, specifically the Mass Line:

    We go to the masses, conducting mass meetings, discussing situations and problems with them at bus stops, demonstrations, classrooms, workplaces, bars, homes, churches, and wherever else they can be found. Consider the mass line a sort of factory except instead of products, we make revolution. The ideas, correct ones, from the masses, represent the raw materials. Everywhere we go, our task is to ask people what’s going on in their communities and on their jobs. The police are killing people. There is struggle with landlords. The houseless are being suppressed. Alright. What are we going to do about it? This is another thing we must ask ourselves, and the masses. Prating and whining are not revolutionary solutions, neither is begging the power structure that keeps us in these atrocious situations in the first place for some warmed over solution. Maoists understand that the only way to develop a revolutionary movement is to actually go among the people, do research, talk to everybody and collect both correct and incorrect ideas, and develop ourselves theoretically to ensure that we are able to tell the difference between the two.

    And the most important part:

    Maoists seek to unite the advanced, win over the intermediate (most people are intermediate), and isolate the worst of the backward.

    Every person you encounter falls into 1 of these 3 groups. Usually, like in this case you’re explaining, class relations and material interests come first in deciding where they are (so it’s typical that a petty bourgeoisie will trend towards backward, proletariats may be more intermediate etc). Your job is to ignore the backward, and conduct political education among the intermediate and advanced sections of the masses. So that means really listening to and getting to know people, and more specifically their concerns and the things they care about the most. Then, the goal is to connect these things that they care about to socialism (or depending on where the person is, connecting what they care about to prerequisite ideas like anti-capitalism, with the goal of building up to revolutionary socialism).

    This is the concept of agitation. Agitation means to connect the interests of the people to socialism. An exploited worker who cannot pay rent, an immigrant who faces violence from the state, a minority who faces white supremacist or state violence, a person who has/is facing police violence and incarceration. Sometimes you find people who already care about something, like a person who already cares about climate change but doesn’t understand that capitalism is causing and profitting from it. These are all issues, caused by capitalism, that can be sharpened and connected to revolutionary ideas.

    If you have not already, you should check out The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats and What is to be done?, both by Lenin:

    “Our task is to merge our activities with the practical, everyday questions of working-class life, to help the workers understand these questions, to draw the workers’ attention to the most important abuses, to help them formulate their demands to the employers more precisely and practically, to develop among the workers consciousness of their solidarity, consciousness of the common interests and common cause of all the Russian workers as a united working class that is part of the international army of the proletariat.”

    Where to find unorganized people who are intermediate and advanced? You mentioned being poor, so you can readily encounter the masses in proletariat workplaces. 3 comrades I know began working at a restaurant, and through their efforts, it has become unionized, and they are more able to conduct political education and agitation among their co workers.

    I will give you 2 pieces of advice:

    1. Remember that agitation, education, and organizing should never be individual. It should be collective. Over the internet you’re usually seeing the thoughts of a bunch of faceless people you don’t know whose words usually don’t have anything directly to do with your material reality, or when you read theory you’re usually just individually consuming the knowledge within the pages, but organizing should be as opposite of this as possible. This makes sense from a Marxist perspective because we probably already understand that the masses make history, and not individuals. Every now and then you can have an individual agitational conversation with someone, but it’s difficult individually trying to bring an intermediate or semi-backwards person to a higher political awareness. Humans are very social, so having multiple people conducting agitation/education with you is very helpful, especially in socially atomized countries like America (not sure where you are tho). A strategy I use is inviting an intermediate person who I want to organize to a political event, either from my org or people we know, then allow them to get to know and make connections with comrades who are also present. From there, when there’s multiple friendly, trusted people telling you something, or offering their own perspectives on an issue, it’s easier to bring that person to higher politics. This is how we’re conducting further education among the unionized workers I was talking about earlier.

    2. Unless you’re talking about US imperialism and its devastating effects, generally avoid stuff like geopolitics and, more specifically, trying to convince people that China is a good country. You need to meet people where they are, starting what the material reality around them and their interests. Usually defending China isn’t where they’re at. But you did do a good job of deflecting it back to america.

    Feel free to ask questions, criticize, disagree, etc with anything I said.

    • Thank you for this response, it gave me a lot to think about. I am approaching this from Europe, the socdem north where the conflicts aren’t very clear to many and people are detached from the global struggle and also our part in it.

      This was a park bench discussion with someone who has already made genuine progress in thinking in my view so I would not probably leave it unagitated even though that would be easier for me.

      In the last year I have been able to secure work in the social sector with similar benefits as he has always had and I have been able to show by lived experience the difference in material conditions that happens when you become less poor. I always use words like class and remind him that we are all working class, this has stuck with him.

      He on average has left the cryptostuff and Musk stuff and many other things behind over the years because of our somewhat often occuring struggle sessions and this gives me hope. But it puzzles me how he tends to always opt for the most reactionary option first and ask questions later. This seems common in guys like him.

      What would you recommend as first reading of Marxist theory that relatively easily explains especially the cumulative nature of capital and class? I know he isn’t ever going to read something like Capital, it’s too much effort. I have thrown things like Secind Thought videos and the Deprogram and Blowback podcasts at him, but he enjoys living in the RadioLab bubble of social justice without class concsiousness. Not sure if he had ever really watched them.

      I have myself started from the progressive “voting is key” social democratic view and not even that long ago, but am neurodivergent and have always been an agitator and very political, so diving straight into this was never difficult for me, more like “where had this stuff been all my life”. And I was already seeing myself as socialist, just had the Soviet bad and other red scare brainworms like pretty much everyone here has. But this guy and a lot of people like him prefer to be “apolitical” and disengage from all the things they see as negative or ruining their vibes. How would we counter that?