I’m willing to bet most of these left-leaning liberals are ultimately in that position because they’re not struggling enough to have anywhere near enough motivations to organize or investigate further. They understand they’re being fucked but the path of least resistance is still to dredge along within whatever system they’re in, work some job, live a normal apolitical life with their friends and family, and eventually buy some small condo

If they genuinely felt like they were starting to be backed into a corner where the only way they can envision a good future is through fighting for it, they would most likely be open to some sort of political activism, even if they’re not receptive to AES. It’s probably why American Arabs and Muslims are so massively disproportionately organizing and attending Palestine protests relative to how many non-Arabs support Palestine

Any amount of logical reasoning would likely not get to them. Best to just move on and find better targets to agitate. Not saying it’s impossible, but your efforts and time would be better rewarded elsewhere. Like yea, you’ll get some “class traitors” here and there but if you’re in the core, there’s very little motivation for a lot of workers to spend all that time, energy, and risk exposure to organize

I used to be like that for a while and the only thing that gave me the final push was things that debunk all the anticommunist lies/propaganda, and also debunking capitalist realism (the “human nature” thing). For me it started when I read real history instead of the shit they teach you in school. For an American radlib, “Lies My Teacher Told Me” is an excellent start. Zinn’s history of the US is also extremely revealing. You have to get to the point where it’s like, “Wow, everything I know about the world/history is apparently the opposite of what actually happened.” That’s when I got genuinely curious about reading theory, then realizing it makes soooo much more sense than the liberal capitalist realist mythology that everybody is taught and just accepts.

It’s also important to note that it’s hard to shove books in somebody’s face and hope they read, given everybody’s attention span these days. This person has to be genuinely motivated and curious to hear you out. Emotionally I was in a state of deep despair over the bleak liberal reality that I was living in. The contradictions were undeniable but I literally could not see a way out other than total oblivion for all, since that’s the logical conclusion to that ideology. With my way of thinking, it was impossible to continue that way. Something had to change. Sorry to say, but that’s what it took for me to finally make the leap. Now with what I know, I’m embarrassed it took me this long. So when you’re trying to reach these people, make sure they’re actually willing to change their mind in some way. For an American this can be emotionally difficult stuff, so if they have a big fragile ego you might not get very far.

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I’m going to keep this reply short so apologies if I’m being glib but what you’re describing is generally a product of a failure to understand the way that capitalism functions on a holistic, systemic level or a failure to really internalise the nature of the system.

This is where you get the people who are still sold on voting or tweaking the dials of liberal democracy in order to restore it to its True Glory™.

It might be like, ending qualified immunity for cops or it might be “getting lobbying out of congress” (lol) or it might be a quixotic aspiration to turn back the clock to the 1950s when things were alright (for white men in the so-called middle class) or it might be trying to convince everyone to get on board with a particular flavour of ethical consumption or it might be about starting the Truth & Transparency Party to do a politics “But not in the corrupt way that every other party does it!!”. That sort of shit.

If you haven’t fully realised the nature and function of capitalism through connecting these smaller issues and systematising them, you’re going to be fundamentally resistant to overthrowing the system and you’ll find any excuse for why we should maintain the status quo.

The antidote to this idealism, like all forms of idealism, is materialism and the readiness to become a revolutionary sprouts from the renunciation of hope for change under the prevailing system.

After that has been achieved the next stage has the pitfalls of doomerism, abandoning the critique and turning inwards to spirituality or pursuing ego-death trips or mindless consumption or attempting to become a capitalist Übermensch (in the Nietzschean sense), weird reactionary stuff like monarchism and obviously the various styles of fascism and proto-fascism etc. But if they aren’t at that stage then they either do not understand liberalism fully or they have pet issues that they’ve identified as problems within liberalism but not as products of liberalism because they haven’t connected the dots yet, at least in the majority of cases.

Edit: I didn’t operationalise this. Sorry.

So my general strategy would be to continue working on developing their awareness of how fucked things are in other ways, usually using their current pet issues as gateways into awareness-raising on adjacent issues (e.g. their pet issue is slave labour and conflict mining -> the net zero carbon target is built upon the backs of slave and conflict mining with things like lithium, coltan and other rare earth minerals. You can abolish slavery or you can have a [somewhat] hospitable climate under the current system, but you can’t have both.)

I would also work to locate their awareness especially within a historical context. This means on a personal level, like keeping the score and checking in on how well Biden is doing with his concentration camps at the borders or in improving the conditions of labour etc. But this also means in the broader context of history, so if they have a narrow belief in achieving a general strike as the be-all and end-all of fixing the system (or overthrowing it) for example then you talk about things like the Battle of Blair Mountain, the events surrounding the Bonus Army, and the wider historical context like what happened to Allende and why. Part of this necessarily means connecting it to other issues like the CIA, the Monroe Doctrine, The Business Plot, the nature of fascism proper as capitalism when it closes ranks, that sort of stuff.

This leads into the other angle I’d take and that would be to get them to really think through their solutions in a dialectical way rather than in the static, liberal, armchair quarterback sort of way.

Say they achieved their goal of abolishing slavery. This completely disrupts the basis of first world economies, plunging them headlong into a depression of an unfathomable depth because suddenly the nature of unequal exchange has shifted significantly more towards being equal. Now people at home are destitute and desperate for any kind of work. As we have seen in situations where there has been catastrophic and precipitous economic declines (the dismantling of the USSR etc.) people, including children, end up in sex work and in the human trafficking and drug mule spaces.

And this is assuming a very high level of governmental and societal stability under these conditions, which is extremely optimistic to the point of being Pollyanna about it.

But anyway, the economy goes to absolute shit and children are forced into informal labour and people end up being slaves of a variety of sorts.

Congratulations, you just reached the logical conclusion of why anti-slavery activism within the confines of liberal democracy will always be woefully inadequate at best and, at worst, will have massive blowback if these goals are ever achieved somehow.

Or you follow the goal of getting lobbying out of congress to its logical, dialectical conclusion. Now lobbying happens under the table as bribery, it’s much more difficult to identify, and the interests of capital will become more coercive in the ways that it exerts influence - instead of paying politicians off, capital will threaten to flee or it will simply take off and pinball from state to state or country to country, playing every side off in a race to the bottom.

You don’t really need lobbying power when you command so much economic power directly because you are able to bend politics to your will.

What you’re doing is developing a critical awareness in them of what Marx describes here in Grundrisse, in a very tangible and contemporaneous and personally relevant way:

[Capitalism’s] production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production. In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces. But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited.

Basically you want to take them on a guided tour of how capitalism will circumvent any attempts to hem it in and to illustrate how it moves in contradictions, steamrolling through these contradictions without ever actually resolving them; just keep on exploring their solutions through to their logical political and economic ends until they eventually internalise the fact that there is no reforming our way out of our current mess.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire is a major influence for how I approach the deeper and more thorough style of agitation and education, and if you’ve read it then you’re probably seeing that shining through in my comment. I’d strongly recommend the book if you want to make a habit of doing this sort of work.

(Looks like I failed at being glib 😖)

My path to communism was pretty weird, I was initially interested in FOSS and the open code movement in general. That led me to Lemmy, so I was looking into the code and found Dessalines, one of the two founders of Lemmy. He has made a collection of essays aiming to educate people about what Marxism and Communism is and clearing up lots of the western propaganda and talking points. This eventually led me here, and from there I have been steadily becoming more and more ML.

Before this I was a left leaning lib. I knew about communism but I believed the bullshit I was fed by the false history I was taught and media like 1984. I think most people would be relatively agreeable to the ideas of Marxist thought if they weren’t being mindwashed about it, and reading theory is important to get through the hard parts like why armed revolution is necessary and why the oppression of the bourgeois class is needed while the class war exists.

Keep agitating around how you can’t trust the media or the history books (or even half of science) when it’s under the control of capitalists.

Someone who’s been propagandized their whole life is going to need to understand the scale of the propaganda before they’ll willingly position themselves against it all.

Get them to take their very first step by attending an action or joining an org.

the US government killed 2 million with covid. just based on that alone, anybody who’s anti-AES on the post-covid era is unsalvageable

Death to America

I think the excellent “full spectrum resistance” has a very good chapter on what it takes for someone to be radicalized, breaking it down into three needs, personal galvanizing experiences(experiencing racism, getting bonked on the head by a cop, etc)

radical catalysts(time and space to ponder things, analytical tools to examine experiences, intrinsic optimism that things can get better)

and action needs,
A community of people to take action with. Models for action. A mental narrative of how social change happens (or an imminent danger that demands immediate response). A sense that winning is possible, or perhaps that they have nothing left to lose. Biographical availability.

If they dont have these things, they can become embittered, soured, “curdled idealists” and not active in their pursuits.

I think if you can help a given person find these “radical triad” , encourage them to read analytical marxist books, help attend protests with a friend or other models of action, etc. than that can be a powerful way to create an active radical.