I think this reply perfectly justifies Roderic’s position on seriousness. You just strawman his argument to mean “100% seriousness all the time, no fun allowed at all” and then proceed to write some nonsense against it.

Do you really think the western left is serious enough? What has it accomplished? Do you think others will take us seriously if we don’t take ourselves seriously, and how can we accomplish anything at all, let alone revolution, if we’re not serious about it?

It’s not hypocrisy at all, it’s a consistent position made to advance their imperial interests and white supremacy.

thought as we experience is not a property of the processes of the brain, but rather a consequence or a side product of neurobiological processes

So, in effect, you are saying that it is a property, only that it’s one you assume is irrelevant. Thinking is what our brains do. There isn’t some other “real” underlying function of our brains for thoughts to be some irrelevant side effect. I’ve already written about the contradictions in our perception of these processes in my previous comments.

Consciousness is neither explained by mechanical interactions nor dialectics, we can only guess at it.

You’ve gone into idealism here, painting consciousness as a Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself. Dialectical materialism is a consistently materialist worldview, and it can explain consciousness through proper study of it. I’ve given you a rough outline of a dialectical materialist explanation of consciousness in my previous replies.

it has to map onto some state of the brain (…) So there is a discreet neurological state that corresponds to a thought within our conscious experience. But conscious experience has to be a consequence of that state.

This is a false assumption and one that’s a result of your mechanist thinking. There is no need for there to be discreet states. Our thinking is a process, neuronal circuits are constantly firing, no steady state can encompass it. A similar example are protein conformations which are constantly moving around and changing. This is where dialectics would help you with accepting the fact that change is the “default” state and what we perceive as stable states are in fact also changing, just on different timescales.

It comes back to atoms just chugging along.

But it doesn’t. Yes, at the bottom, it’s atoms “chugging along”, but we’re not at a fundamental level, we’re talking about consciousness, behavior, and society. You cannot accurately study any phenomena of higher organization of matter only by studying fundamental particles. You keep clinging onto this model of abstract reductionism, but it will not give you an accurate understanding of most phenomena. You seemingly admit that we are active parts of the universe, and then you swerve into calling us “just atoms”, which on an atomic level, we are, but there are other levels to us, all still material. We have properties which arise from the specific organization and motion of those atoms as I’ve demonstrated in my previous reply. A similar error would be calling any molecules “just bunches of atoms” as a way to paint their specific properties or interactions as irrelevant.

However the counterpart thought we experience within consciousness is simply a consequent phenomenon, some kind of representation of this activation pattern. The conscious (experience of) thought has no power and is predetermined, simply representing a state of brain activation. And thus no actual control is to be found. Theres is simply a set of circumstances, a neurobiological calculation and a set output.

You call our thoughts “some kind of representation of this activation pattern” which is wrong. The movement of the matter of our neurons and supporting cells that contribute to our cognitive processes are our thoughts. Our thoughts are properties of that matter that arise from those specific interactions. In your model, again, there is a dualism present, where “we” aren’t material and are just somehow observing this from the outside.

You are also making assumptions you shouldn’t make and you’re abstracting these things in a mechanist way again. These phenomena don’t function as simple calculations with a set output, a computer analogy of biological organisms is woefully inaccurate in general and especially in this particular example. There are higher order interactions happening at every step and the only way to make sense of them is through dialectics. Again, you’re painting only our consciousness as “powerless” while you’re retaining the “power” of other things. Here, you’ve come to the position that our subconscious thoughts do have “power”, but our conscious ones don’t. Our consciousness and subconsciousness are not some separate, non-interacting entities, they are both parts of our material mind. They’re both “us”, it’s entirely irrelevant here whether we’re talking about conscious or subconscious thought, they function together, and they function rationally. Not to mention that you’re contradicting yourself again when you said before (correctly) that “consciousness isn’t explained by mechanical interactions”, and now you’re using exactly mechanical interactions to “explain” consciousness.

We only have control in the sense that we create change in the universe, but then we are simply microscopic a part of an ever-changing universe, it is simply that the universe is changing. This is predicted simply by thermodynamics, there is no need to involve more complex theories to explain this at a fundamental level.

The universe is changing, and so are we and our consciousness. We and everything else around us are parts of the universe. You seem to think that by pointing out the whole, you can simply ignore all the constitutive parts. Saying “it’s simply a person that’s sick” isn’t a substitute for a description of pathophysiological processes happening in the body. The scale of our activity in relation to the universe doesn’t matter, we’re discussing the quality here, not the quantity. You’ve gone from the abstraction of parts (“it’s all just atoms”) to an abstraction of the whole (“it’s simply the whole universe that’s changing”). This, again, doesn’t explain anything. We are looking for explanations of how particular parts of the universe function which we can only gain from studying those parts of the universe, not by abstracting to either extreme.

Just because thermodynamics describes change in general in the universe, doesn’t mean that it alone explains all the particularities of all the different phenomena occurring at all levels of organization of matter. Yes, it’s always present, but more things are added on as complexity increases. You cannot accurately explain human behavior just by studying abstract fundamental particles. There is a reason we have many scientific disciplines and not just particle physics. Yes, they’re all inseparably connected, but particle physics or thermodynamics alone aren’t enough.

I’m not even sure how dialectical materialsm ties in here all that well, the articles mostly just make slight off-handed remarks about consciousness and overall the theory seems to mostly deal with social organisation. I have to say it reads to me like a bunch of truisms thrown together. Maybe my reading is too brief, but I fail to see where it offers much of meaning.

I’ve been explaining how dialectical materialism “ties in” all throughout this thread. Furthermore, dialectical materialism isn’t just a patch that you can “tie in” to bolster some other theory or understanding, it’s a consistent and all-encompassing worldview which recognizes the reality of dialectics in our material reality. The articles I linked aren’t supposed to give you an answer specifically about consciousness, they are supposed to explain dialectics and dialectical materialism in general and on some common examples. Once you have a good understanding, you can apply it yourself. The articles do mostly deal with social organization because that’s what Marxism is primarily about, however, the Marxist method is dialectical materialism which is universally applicable. Take a look at the chapter of ‘The Dialectical Biologist’ I mentioned if you want a greater focus on natural science.

If all you see are a “bunch of truisms” then I don’t really know what you read, because that’s certainly not the case in any of the articles or books I mentioned. You admit that you’re unfamiliar with dialectical materialism and yet, instead of trying to educate yourself, you just keep going along with your mechanist worldview (that’s rife with contradictions, as I’ve been pointing out) while complaining that you don’t understand dialectics without even really trying. You don’t respond to any points I make, and you just move on to “new” points which are mostly just your old points recycled, but slightly changed in an attempt to get around my critique which you never specifically address. You keep retreating into “it’s just some atoms chugging along” as if it’s some profound wisdom, but it’s just a cover for your model’s inability to accurately explain human thought, behavior, or society (and plenty of other natural phenomena). It seems like I’m just repeating myself at this point, so I won’t be continuing this discussion any further.

You are correct that there are still contradictions. What I meant was that the intractable contradictions specific to idealist thought disappear when we fully embrace materialist dialectics. Like you said, we can easily deal with contradictions, but liberals can’t.

But why do people think there is some sort of contradiction?

There are different definitions of “free will”, but the common one is purely idealist in a sense that our thoughts aren’t guided by our material conditions. It’s also often a religious position that god gave humans a soul and therefore only we have “free will”. If you drill down to the fundamentals of that position you reach a position that says our thoughts don’t (need to) obey the laws of physics and similar universal laws. It’s a position of idealist dualism that states our “mind” is not material and is separated from the material reality we exist in. It very often follows that material reality itself doesn’t really exist, except in our “mind” and then you reach a purely solipsistic position. That’s why there is a contradiction. If the definition you’re using for “free will” is basically just our material will, our thoughts, then the contradiction disappears, but I wouldn’t call that “free will”, as it will cause more confusion due to the definitions.

Here’s Lenin from ‘Materialism and Empirio-criticism’:

The materialist elimination of the “dualism of mind and body” (i.e., materialist monism) consists in the assertion that the mind does not exist independently of the body, that mind is secondary, a function of the brain, a reflection of the external world. The idealist elimination of the “dualism of mind and body” (i.e., idealist monism) consists in the assertion that mind is not a function of the body, that, consequently, mind is primary, that the “environment” and the “self” exist only in an inseparable connection of one and the same “complexes of elements.” Apart from these two diametrically opposed methods of eliminating “the dualism of mind and body,” there can be no third method, unless it be eclecticism, which is a senseless jumble of materialism and idealism.

Note that the “complexes of elements” used here basically mean our sensations of reality, but it’s a confusing term introduced by empirio-criticists to “smuggle in” idealism into materialist philosophy which is what Lenin is critiquing.

intent seem like post-hoc rationalisation

Intent doesn’t have to be post-hoc. If you intend to do something, and then do it, what’s wrong with that? There’s no metaphysics there, your intent is a material part of you. It’s not free will in any sense.

I do reject the notion of dialectical materialist

You can, but dialectical materialism is the philosophy of Marxism and the most advanced worldview we currently have. If you want to read more about dialectical materialism here are some articles (article 1, article 2, article 3) or some books such as Lenin’s ‘Materialism and Empirio-criticism’ or maybe ‘The Dialectical Biologist’ by Levins & Lewontin (specifically the last chapter ‘Conclusion: Dialectics’ which you can read as a standalone article).

To me it seems like some form of compatibilism (…) I do not think thought has influence on the material.

It’s not compatibilist. It’s firmly materialist. That materialism, however, is not mechanical, and that’s what makes it more consistently materialist than mechanist thought. It doesn’t posit that our thought has an idealist influence on the material as free will posits. Our thought is firmly material, a property of the matter that makes up our brains and us as a whole. Our thoughts are specific motion of that matter. Therefore, our thoughts do exist and they can influence the material world, again, not in an idealist way, but through our actions. Neither our thoughts nor our actions are free in a free will sense; they are products of our environment, but they do influence the environment back. It’s not just a one-sided relationship.

Our “self” exists, but not in an idealist way. If it’s a construct, it doesn’t make it any less real or any less material. Our choices are not free, but we still do make them. It’s always our brain doing the thinking and choosing.

If you view the universe developing as the motion of matter guided by fundamental laws. That movement extends to us as well, as we are parts of the universe. Our thoughts result from that movement. We process information from our environment through our thoughts (or mind in general), then our thoughts influence our actions which influence the environment back. This is a dialectical relationship similar to the base-superstructure relationship in Marxist analysis of society. We have to be here and act to make our history, but our thoughts are material parts of us and thus parts of that whole dialectic. Our thoughts are determined by our material conditions, but we, along with our thoughts, are part of determining the world back. We are active parts of the whole and our mode of action is dependent on our thoughts. We interpret those material conditions through our thoughts which then model our future actions. All these interactions are multi-sided and dialectical, and often full of contradictions, especially if we’re not fully conscious of these interactions.

whether or not it comes to be is out of our control, things will happen the way they happen

We and “our control” (whatever it encompasses materially) are parts of the universe just as much as the things and the happening, we aren’t in a uniquely subordinate or passive role to other events or things. This doesn’t mean we can influence certain things as much as they influence us, but that, through our mutual interactions with the whole that is the universe, we can also influence the universe and its parts just like any other thing or event can (in terms of quality, not quantity). We are material just as everything else is. Our influence here is not subjective or idealist. Our perception of our influence is often false and exaggerated (when we think in terms of free will and idealism), but we still do have an influence just as any inanimate object or force might influence something else through the motion of matter, and it’s not correct to think of ourselves as uniquely without the ability to influence when everything in the universe has it.

It is all just atoms chugging along without emotion or thought behind it, intent is just a story we tell ourselves.

You are correct that atoms don’t move by thought, but thought does come from the motion of the atoms; it’s a material phenomenon that does exist. Don’t you see how your sentence here assumes that our thought is not material and therefore is apart from the rest of the world. The same goes for your sentence before about “thought not having influence on the material”. If something cannot have any influence on the material, it cannot also be material itself; our thought, however, is material, and as such can have an influence (even not counting our thoughts guiding our actions, which they do, they have an influence on a micro-scale of the molecules moving and bumping around in our brains that form our thoughts), but, again, not a free influence. In your model, our consciousness would just be a one-way “dead end” that the material world only interacts with while it doesn’t interact back in any way. How would we then even be aware of our thoughts at all?

For example, if you burn yourself on a fire, you will learn from it, and the next time you see a fire, you will think about burning yourself last time and avoid doing so again. All of this is purely material. You want to call it “all just atoms chugging along without emotion or thought behind it”, but thought is there in the process, it’s made from the motion of the specific atoms in our brains, and it has an influence. If matter organized in a specific manner to form us didn’t have these properties, we would get burned every time. Our thoughts (conscious and subconscious) are not a separate thing from us or our actions, the relationships between these are also dialectical.

From your model follows that we are just observing from outside the universe through the viewpoint of our bodies and commentating on events we see instead of us (us entirely, our thoughts, which are also just material parts of our bodies, included) being parts of the whole that is our universe. We “tell ourselves” many “stories”, which we might call social constructs, but we can see daily the influence these have on us, still without any sort of free will, metaphysics, or departures from materialism.

You do not need intent to explain our actions, in fact it seems less complicated to do so.

A priori disregarding intent as a factor in human behavior is a mistake. This doesn’t mean that our intent is a primary factor in our behavior or that we should specially focus on it in general, but our intent does exist. That intent isn’t anything metaphysical, it’s a material thing that’s part of us. You will find it impossible to explain human societies and behavior accurately without a dialectical materialist perspective. It was only through this perspective that the laws of social and economic development were (and in general, can be) accurately discerned.

It is specifically because we are not separate from the material that we do not have control. Control implies volition/intent, which matter does not possess. It is precisely ascribing control to us that would set us apart from it.

I’m not ascribing any metaphysical aspects here. We have “control” because we are active parts of the universe and we do exert influence on it. These relationships aren’t just one-sided. This one-sided view is wrong in either direction (free will or mechanical materialism). These are dialectical part-whole interactions. That’s the point I’m trying to make and that’s also Plekhanov’s point in that quote. The introduction of this largely undefined “control” in the last reply just confused things further. I take “control” to mean our influence on the world, not some metaphysical free will which no one here has argued in favor of. To repeat, I agree with QueerCommie that the dominant mode of though assumes a metaphysical free will aspect to this which is not correct.

And again, there is no need to have metaphysics to describe our consciousness. We do have intent and we are matter. These are properties of matter organized in a specific manner. Look at the surface tension analogy I used above. I don’t see why you assume that intent and things like it have to be some metaphysical qualities. Intent doesn’t have to mean something above material reality and it certainly doesn’t have to give us any power to act above or against material reality as free will would.

To say that an individual could have acted differently given identical circumstances (i.e. rewinding to the time of decision) is, frankly, absurd.

Yes, and no one here is claiming anything of the sort. The point, again, is that both the circumstances and us are parts of the universe. We aren’t in a uniquely passive role here. To quote Marx again:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

Maybe it’s just a matter of language and not an actual philosophical difference, but I think there is still a philosophical difference.

There is no “self” beyond the material world as the dominant mode of thought assumes.

I agree, but I still think you’re making the mistake I’m trying to caution against in the sentence prior:

Yes, wills and consciousness exist, my point is that they are illusory in so far as “we” think we have “control.”

They are not illusory, they are material. And while the dominant mode of thought might assume we have more control than we actually do, it doesn’t mean we don’t have any control. We or our “self”, that is entirely part of the material world, does have a certain amount of control because it is a part of that same material world. This control isn’t separated from the material world, but a part of it. Your sentence here still sounds like only the material world has “control” and it exerts it upon us from outside, which would imply that we are different from the rest of matter, but in the opposite direction of the idealist free will notion.

I think that in your correct impulse to combat the idealist narratives prevalent today, you go too far in the opposite direction. Similar to how Plekhanov describes here:

No amount of patching was of any use, and one after another thinking people began to reject subjectivism as an obviously and utterly unsound doctrine. As always happens in such cases, however, the reaction against this doctrine caused some of its opponents to go to the opposite extreme. While some subjectivists, striving to ascribe the widest possible role to the “individual” in history, refused to recognise the historical progress of mankind as a process expressing laws, some of their later opponents, striving to bring out more sharply the coherent character of this progress, were evidently prepared to forget that men make history, and therefore, the activities of individuals cannot help being important in history. They have declared the individual to be a quantité négligeable. In theory, this extreme is as impermissible as the one reached by the more ardent subjectivists. It is as unsound to sacrifice the thesis to the antithesis as to forget the antithesis for the sake of the thesis. The correct point of view will be found only when we succeed in uniting the points of truth contained in them into a synthesis.

The point isn’t to disprove determinism, and definitely isn’t to do so in favor of free will. The point is to achieve a dialectical materialist understanding as opposed to a mechanical one.

In your previous thread you say this about “sentience”:

yeah, but what is it? how does it have free will? isn’t it just regular matter subject to conditions, not able to make decisions.

Firstly, I think there’s some confusion about free will and will. Free will is an idealist notion that essentially our minds can operate above or outside of the laws of physics. That is clearly false. Just will, on the other hand, doesn’t have idealist connotations. I think that’s an error your interlocutor made in that thread, or a general error of not defining the terms discussed. An error I think you’ve made here and in general is opposing the two positions of mechanical determinism and free will in a dichotomy as the only possibilities.

I’m partial to @[email protected]’s thought about there being a category error. I think your mistake is in thinking that everything is infinitely reducible into smaller parts, and also without loss of context. In more general terms, I don’t think you’ve fully grasped dialectics.

We know from dialectics that relational properties are very important, and abstracting things doesn’t let us analyze them properly. I think you’re missing a key concept of dialectics when you assume that the parts that make up the whole are ontologically primary and exist separately from the whole while still being the same parts that make it up. I mean this in the sense that different bits of matter make up us, so from their properties you assume it’s clear that no will exists because atoms aren’t sentient. Your mistake is in not recognizing that our sentience is a property of matter. Not of abstract matter in general, but of the specific organization of matter which results in us. You say “regular matter” as if some other kind of matter would need to exist for sentience to exist.

A simpler example can be made from the properties of water. A single molecule of water doesn’t have surface tension. Following your mechanical model, we cannot really explain how water, when organized in a larger body, does. This is in general a fault of the Cartesian reductionist model which predominates in science today instead of dialectics. The concept which is usually used here is that of emergent properties, but it doesn’t really explain anything by itself. Dialectics on the other hand doesn’t even see a problem here to explain because a water molecule on its own and a water molecule in a larger body of water are two different things. The parts of the whole don’t exist separately from that whole as its parts.

The properties of the whole and the individual parts of that whole don’t exist separately from their interactions as parts of that whole. These properties only come into existence from the interactions of the parts and the whole. By simply studying individual water molecules, you would never discover surface tension. Parts interact with each other and with the whole, and the whole interacts with all the parts. A common example of this in Marxism are the base-superstructure relations. None of the components of either the base or the superstructure exist on their own, they are parts of the whole that is our society. The economic base tends to have a stronger influence on the superstructure, but the specific relations are constantly changing.

Here’s a quote from Sayers’ critique of mechanical materialism:

This is the dialectical account of history given by Marx, and it differs entirely from Cohen’s mechanical interpretation. The differences are clearly spelled out by Engels in the well known series of letters that he wrote towards the end of his life. In them he insists that the economic system and the superstructure are not simply the immediate and direct products of the prevailing form of production. Although their character is certainly conditioned predominantly by the development of the productive forces, it cannot be reduced to this factor alone. On the contrary, the economic system, for example, acquires its own distinctive character and its own inner dynamic. Through the division of labour, trade and commerce become areas of activity increasingly independent of production. They acquire, in short, a degree of “relative autonomy”.

Where there is division of labour on a social scale, there the different labour processes become independent of each other. In the last instance production is the decisive factor. But as soon as trade in products becomes independent of production proper, it follows a movement of its own, which, while it is governed as a whole by production, still in particular respects and within this general dependence follows laws of its own: this movement has phases of its own and in turn reacts on the movement of production.

The same is true, even more clearly, of political and legal institutions and of art, religion and philosophy. None is purely “functional” to the development of production. Each of these spheres, while in general being determined by the development of production and by economic forces, has its own relatively autonomous process of development, its own relative independence. Each affects the others and the material base.

Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development. But all of these react upon one another and also upon the economic basis. It is not that the economic condition is the cause and alone active, while everything else is only a passive effect. There is, rather, interaction on the basis of economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts itself.

Another way to put this is through the constancy of change in dialectics and the build up of quantitative change into qualitative leaps. You cannot simply “go down a level” of quality and look at the quantitative aspects of the lower level to understand everything in the higher. The surface tension example can again be used here.

Taking from all the points above, we are active parts of the whole, our societies, our history, and we have constant and mutual interactions with each other, with the other parts, and with the whole. Our wills and choices (still far from free) do matter here very much and we do make the choices. Our consciousness is a key part of the process of our history, as is also seen in the notion that freedom is the recognition of necessity. Therefore, to deny our conscious will (not free will, which is idealist) and its effects is a mistake, and akin to saying that water doesn’t have the property of surface tension because an individual water molecule doesn’t, or arguing that social constructs aren’t real.

This doesn’t “disprove determinism” in general, and it doesn’t seek to. It’s just a proper contextualization of phenomena and processes. It does highlight the limitations and mistakes of mechanical determinism. Out of the specific interactions of the organizations of matter that make up us, come the properties of consciousness, thought, will, etc. Our will is simply a property of matter organized in a specific manner. There is no need to assume any metaphysics or idealism to describe our wills.

Another quote form Sayers to hopefully round this out:

Even in the realm of purely inorganic, physical phenomena, the mechanical view is an abstract and metaphysical one. It portrays physical objects in an idealised fashion, as unaffected by their relations.

[…]

Of course, the mechanical outlook has played an extremely important role in the development of the scientific understanding of nature, and it is not my intention to reject such methods and assumptions altogether. The error comes when such methods and assumptions are made into a universal philosophy and emphasised in an exclusive and one-sided fashion. Their abstract character is forgotten and they are employed as though they alone formed an adequate basis for understanding reality. The result is an abstract and metaphysical view of the world.

I’m not saying we have free will, or that our choices aren’t materially and socially determined, I’m saying that we still do make those choices, and I’m cautioning against mechanical materialism that turns into pessimistic or nihilistic fatalism. We are parts of the whole, and we are conscious of it. We are active parts of the historical process and our history happens through our actions. Do you dispute Marx’s framing I quoted above?

Just to preface this, I’m not arguing against the critique of the reactionary position in this meme, but speaking more generally and trying to round out understanding of the whole philosophical argument. We clearly know that the idealist free will position is inaccurate, but the mechanical determinist position doesn’t give us the full picture either.

While our lives are shaped by our material conditions, we should always keep dialectical materialism in mind and not fall into a purely mechanical determinism that becomes a pessimistic or nihilistic fatalism.

From Gramsci:

We can observe how the determinist, fatalist mechanist element has been an immediate ideological “aroma” of Marxism, a form of religion and of stimulation (but like a drug necessitated and historically justified by the “subordinate” character of certain social strata).

When one does not have the initiative in the struggle and the struggle itself is ultimately identified with a series of defeats, mechanical determinism becomes a formidable power of moral resistance, of patient and obstinate perseverance. “I am defeated for the moment but the nature of things is on my side over a long period,” etc. Real will is disguised as an act of faith, a sure rationality of history, a primitive and empirical form of impassioned finalism which appears as a substitute for the predestination, providence, etc., of the confessional religions. We must insist on the fact that even in such a case there exists in reality a strong active will, a direct influence on the “nature of things,” but it is certainly in an implicit and veiled form, ashamed of itself, and so the consciousness of it is contradictory, lacks critical unity, etc. But when the “subordinate” becomes the leader and is responsible for the economic activity of the mass, mechanicalism appears at a certain moment as an imminent danger, there occurs a revision of the whole mode of thinking because there has taken place a change in the social mode of being.

We should always keep in mind that, despite the limitations imposed on us by material conditions and history, we are parts of the whole and not just passive entities being directed by outside forces. Our actions and choices, especially collective ones, do matter and are what shapes our societies.

As Marx puts it:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

The claim that a triumphant will is all it takes to overcome it

No, the claim is that people have enough knowledge and access to information that they can debunk any piece of propaganda they see, but they make the rational choice not to and instead go along with it. This choice is not some free will idealistic choice, it happens due to the material conditions in which the people live and the social purpose of propaganda which lets them easily justify their dominant global position as a westerner. The point is that they don’t have an actual excuse for “believing” propaganda, but that they go along with it mostly because they want to keep their privilege (or see it as a way to get some), even though on some level they know it’s a bad thing.

I agree generally, especially in terms of material gain to these people and potential reparations, but I also think that personal guilt should be determined on a case by case basis. However, every racist white westerner screaming about Hamas terrorists right now, when plenty of people are sharing actual correct information, is definitely complicit and is purposefully ignoring the evidence he is being given. Similarly, the outrageous stories about the DPRK that are circulated by the various CIA outlets or Yeonmi Park are simply too ridiculous for anyone to actually believe and take seriously, yet until recently people mostly shared them with glee. People go along with them due to other reasons, not an actual belief. Stories about Xinjiang are also not shared because people actually care and tried to inform themselves about the situation, but only due to (real or perceived) material gain (or even just emotional satisfaction) that the people sharing them get.

that propaganda has zero effect on people exposed to it

That is not the claim, no one has ever claimed this. Propaganda definitely has an effect, but the way it works is different and specific, and it’s possible to fight against it. Have you read the article I linked?

Again, I didn’t talk about brainwashing nor do I believe in the brainwashing theory you keep attributing to me

But you did explicitly mention, in your second comment, this:

My point is that propaganda can influence us in subtle ways that don’t have to be complete “brainwashing,” and the belief that because you are (presumably) not “brainwashed” that you have completely escaped propaganda’s influence is dangerously presumptive.

implying that “brainwashing” can exist at least in some limited fashion. You framed your critique only in regard to brainwashing and not the actual theory I’m a proponent of (the article explicitly deals with such points and proposes how to fight them). The point is that the way propaganda works is not by some invisible ever-present influence, but by socially licensing us to go along with certain things. In the same manner marketing and advertising work as well (the ads that don’t simply reveal to us use-value of a necessary products, but those that attempt to create a specific brand image).

I said that the things we expose ourselves to have some influence over what we think and believe, and by extension our actions

This claim no one disagrees with, but that is not the same claim you made before. The point is that we rationally choose what we interact with and what we believe, and both of those things are underpinned by our material conditions, but it is possible to rationally make a choice against the prevailing default narrative in society.

You didn’t mention the term, but if your notion of propaganda is something that can just infect you without warning, then it’s not really in line with the scientific views of propaganda and it’s much closer to the brainwashing theory. If you just scrolled reddit or listened to a Jordan Peterson lecture every day, would you really be in danger of becoming an anti-communist because of it?

The point is to reject completely any “brainwashing” theories, even if in quotes, because they are unscientific and don’t really explain anything. It’s about recognizing that people buy into propaganda for specific reasons, exploring those reasons, and about formulating effective strategies to get them to “buy out” if possible. It’s about actively rejecting said propaganda and getting people to do the same.

I have thought about this and I think it’s beside the point. I think we need to take another step back because we’ve gotten lost in random hypothetical examples which don’t really matter here.

Dialectical materialism is not compatible with free will, but it’s also not compatible with a mechanical determinism where only outside forces act to direct us. We are parts of the dialectic of history and it makes us just as we make it. We take action against those who stand opposed to communism. We condemn and fight them, while trying to get as many people over to our cause as possible. The point here is that we are not subjects external to history and only directed by it, nor do we freely choose our path without the effect of our material conditions.

I agree that it’s not of our free will, but we are still parts of the whole, and it is through us that our history happens. We (social humans) live in our societies, we labour and produce, we interpret those relations of production into ideology, we struggle and fight for liberation. We organize and produce the propaganda and counter-propaganda - all shaped by our material conditions. In doing so we try to influence other people one way or the other. The theories that explain most accurately the actual laws that direct society and history, the ones that push forward the progress of history, these being class struggles and Marxism (dialectical materialism), we recognize as correct.

When our scientific understanding of propaganda informs our tactics which then most effectively get people over to our side, that is the correct theory of propaganda. The people choosing racist propaganda when plenty of the opposite is available are of course doing so due to their class position (and race, etc. and material conditions in general). It’s not a free choice, but it’s one they’re making rationally, they aren’t being brainwashed. That is the point of the article, and that is the point I interpreted from the original post. That people are not being manipulated insidiously by a propaganda machine that infects them as a virus infects a host, but that their ideology is influenced by their material conditions, and their beliefs are accordingly formulated rationally. This simply means that many westerners in particular are racist, but it’s a rational choice (not a free one) they made based on their conditions, it wasn’t imposed into them by brainwashing. Both their racism and the racist propaganda exist due to the same material conditions and social relations. For these same reasons, they are against us and everything we stand for, and we are against them in our political activity. For a variety of reasons, certain people make the opposite choice or even become communists, for whatever reason, people do choose not to buy into the propaganda.

The point of pointing this out is that we can rationally influence people if we approach them correctly, that the fight against propaganda is very winnable, and not a hopeless battle we are destined to lose because of some magical mode of operation of propaganda. This part is where the willing acceptance of propaganda comes into it. There are plenty of contradictions in the interests of each person - these are generalized to the level of classes (or other social groups in particular situations) - which in sum determine what that person is susceptible to buy into. The ones that most fervently cheer for genocide, we will never be able to convert because they will never make the choice, but there are plenty of others we can - those that are not buying into the racist propaganda, or are doing so only lightly, passively. Most of these people currently don’t really care one way or the other, but the point is that we can make a lot of them care if we approach them correctly - we can get them to choose our side. Many of these people are already making the choice to educate themselves more and are discovering communism and similar theories.

This article directly opposes your position.

It doesn’t. The passage you quoted here nicely explains. The point of the passage is why the average worker in the west rejects communism. It doesn’t provide cover for those actively spreading and positively engaging with racist propaganda. It illuminates the problem with our counter-propaganda and gives us a way forward.

From the same article:

1. Stop accusing the masses of being “brainwashed.” Stop treating them as cattle, stop attempting to rouse them into action by scolding them with exposure to “unpleasant truths.”
2. Accept instead that they have been avoiding those truths for a reason. You were able to break through the propaganda barrier, and so could they if they really wanted to. Many of these people see you as the fool, and in many cases not without reason.
3. Understanding people as intelligent beings, craft a political strategy that convincingly makes the case for why they and their lot are very likely to benefit from joining your political project. Not in some utopian infinite timescale, but soon.
4. If you cannot make this case, then forget about convincing the person in question. Focus instead on finding other people to whom such a case can be made. This will lead you directly to class analysis.

The key point for this discussion being number 4. The ones that are choosing to be racist will not be convinced by us, and a lot of the people in the west today simply live comfortable lives (especially relative to the Third World) that they don’t want to change. In part, the racism gives them justification for this. An example.

You cannot argue that people buy into propaganda willingly and list “Avoidance of state repression and social acceptance” as benefits.

Why not? Do we not “buy out” of propaganda willingly even though we risk state repression by being communists? It’s a choice we make. Not all of the ways apply to all the people, these relationships are complex for each individual, but they fall into clear patterns when looking at classes. But people do still make the choice to go counter to this. Plenty of people even in the west are not currently cheering on the genocide of Palestinians and making excuses for SS members. Plenty of people make sacrifices and help others even if it runs counter to their personal interests or societal expectations. They do this for a variety of reasons, but the point is that they do make the choice. People develop class consciousness and realize they have interests apart from the immediate ones.

You also go on to say that there is no positive alternative

I don’t say this. The positive alternatives do exists. I said a key point of our communist propaganda should be centered around the positive alternatives, and that is true. If we want any hope of achieving socialism out of anything but the worst desperation and the worst living standards, we have to have a vision that will entice people to join us and not stay with the status quo.

As for alternatives when it comes to the racist propaganda, people are aware they can be not racist, and many aren’t racist, but the people that you see cheering for genocide and making excuses for SS members have made the choice to do so. They aren’t the victims in this scenario. On every social media now you see both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel posts. You also see plenty of posts debunking the Israeli propaganda, but the racists just ignore or even attack this and continue to post their cheers for genocide.

Propaganda implicitly threatens state repression and social shunning for deviating from the imposed narrative, that is absolutely coercive.

Yes it does, but that doesn’t stop everyone from deviating. Plenty of people deviate and even go directly counter to it. Again, in your model of propaganda, why and how are any of us communists then? Being a communist runs directly counter to nearly all incentives and falls directly under state repression. I think you give too much credit to the propaganda machine of the west and too little to the actual people, whether they buy into it or not.

Nobody mentioned “brainwashing”.

If you don’t agree that people can willingly stop consuming racist propaganda, and consequently that they are currently willingly consuming racist propaganda, what alternative is there? Cheering on for genocide and colonialism is absolutely a personal failing on the part of the people doing it. They have no excuse with the amount of correct information available to them.

When a doctor gets a patient addicted to opioids because he was paid by the Sackler family, is it the patient’s fault when he eventually turns to heroin? When an woman moves back in with her abusive boyfriend after he half-assed an apology for hitting her for the 4th time in one week, is the woman not a victim?

These are not equivalent examples. Addiction is not the same as being abused. Addicts obviously need help and shouldn’t be punished for their addictions, but they do cause material harm to others. If a drunk driver kills someone, he is very much still at fault, despite the societal pressures that push him toward addiction. A certain level of individual responsibility does exist. Similarly, westerners that fund and cheer for genocide because they are racists are very much responsible for their own behavior. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work to build a society where we stop things like this.

The reason people buy into propaganda is not only as a coping mechanism (although that can be a factor). Many buy into it to justify their privileged lives that are only possible due to the oppression of the Third World and the internal colonies in the settler colonial states. Even with the declining standards of living, most people in the west live a lot better than the majority in the rest of the world. They want to believe all the racist propaganda about the rest of the world to justify their own ways of living.

Look at what Che said with regard to the liberation of Latin America in 1954 (source):

Given this background, with American reality being what it is, it’s not difficult to suppose what will be the attitude of the working class of the North American country when the problem of the abrupt loss of markets and sources of cheap raw materials is definitively posed.

This is, in my opinion, the stark reality facing Latin Americans. In the final analysis, the economic development of the United States and the need of its workers to maintain their standard of living means that our struggle for national liberation is not waged against a given social regime, but rather against the whole nation, bound as a bloc by the iron-clad supreme law of common interest, over their domination of the economic life of Latin America.

I am not trying to frame westerners as “innocents” here

Comparing this to victim-blaming, and comparing their situation, as you have above, with abuse victims would suggest otherwise. If they’re not innocent, but also aren’t guilty by your standards, what are they? If you say they cannot make the choice, wouldn’t that imply that they are innocent?

But how is each individual supposed to find out the truth?

How did any of us? How was the theory of Marxism developed in the first place? We all started researching due to a variety of reasons. We rejected the propaganda narratives and put in the time and effort to educate ourselves, we made a choice. No one did this for me, I did it by myself and for myself because I knew things had to change and went to search for answers. Coming to someone, asking questions, and learning from the answers in a choice we make. Communist propaganda and organizing also plays a big role here, of course, but there are already plenty of resources out there which any person in the west can access. We aren’t asking them all to be Marxists on their own, we are just asking them not to be actively racist.

The racist westerners in question are constantly exposed to many narratives that run counter to western propaganda and they actively ignore them or try to “debunk” them. How many people do you see every day on social media writing off any story that goes counter to their set position? They actively reject the truth because their interests run counter to it - look at the graph above. They don’t want these things to change, similar to this. There are still plenty of regular people in the west that do not cheer for genocide and do not make excuses for SS members, there are still plenty of people in the west that do support Palestinian liberation that aren’t communists. There are plenty of people that just aren’t informed who would listen to and accept the true facts when presented with them, but these are not the same people that cheer for and spread racist propaganda.

Of course, in the longer term, everyone would benefit from socialism, and we know that, but the average person doesn’t - that’s something for us to work on. Our methods cannot only be debunking propaganda, we have to offer a better alternative to the current system. But we cannot force people to listen to us. We have to entice them to join us, and not just through rhetoric, but also through action. Still, we cannot remove the responsibility from individuals that willingly go along with genocidal propaganda when there is so much counter-propaganda available (like the current situation with Gaza where a section of the west is cheering for genocide). We will most probably never be able to radicalize the ones cheering for genocide today.

It’s the same kind of self-deceiving smugness that eventually lead so many of Reddit’s self-styled New Atheists down a reactionary path, where feeling superior to the masses made them believe they were immune to being manipulated

It’s exactly the opposite. The “brainwashing” model of propaganda places us, who have seen the truth through it, as an enlightened elite above the brainwashed masses, but this is simply not the case and it’s not how propaganda actually works. Check out the sources in my other comment. The Red Sails article ‘Masses, Elites, and Rebels’ deals directly with your critiques of elitism here.