There’s this red sails article that pops up every once in a while. Don’t get me wrong it’s a fine article, but there’s a bit that goes “something something don’t think people are brainwashed and just need to be exposed to uncomfortable truths.”
And like, I get it. But…that’s exactly what happened to me. I mean, I’m not going to say it was exactly one thing that caused it. However, genuinely when i learned about the Iraq War in detail*, that was basically what flipped the switch in my head. Obviously I wasn’t as theoretically developed as I am today, but thats what made me genuinely want to read Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc. It was exactly that process of being exposed to information like that that made me want to be a communist, and want to fight for it.
This isn’t some debunking thing. I think what I’m trying to explain is that my story seems to be very different from other people’s, and applying my own experiences might not really work if it’s not how things commonly work.
And, as much as it is important, I do want something more in depth than just “organize and educate.” Don’t get me wrong, that’s good advice. What I’m trying to ask moreso is, what is the actually psychology going on behind these decisions here? Obviously there’s no cookie cutter/one size fits all strategy here, but some direction would be helpful in actually attempting to convince people.
*To elaborate, I always heard of Iraq as just “the war.” Kinda like how Vietnam was. But no one ever explained to me what it was and school didn’t really neither. So when I learned it was basically the US invading Iraq almost explicitly for oil and no one got punished for it and basically everyone got rich off of it besides normal people while hundreds of thousands Iraqis died, it really shook me.
Most working class people are not at all happy with the status quo, if we can present them with answers and solutions, show them what capitalism and their government is (nationally and internationally), what their own position is within society, that can push them more and more left so to speak.
I don’t think there is a straightforward broad strategy to make people aware like this, I think every communist needs to understand their own local people and plan in accordance to that, or in other words, the political conversion process is subjective not objective.
For me, the failure of Labour to do really anything to change the circumstances of living in the UK made me move away from the mainstream moderate left western views. In simple terms I just recognised, this is not working. I was never gonna go to the right or the enlightened centre and so it was either political nihilism or investigate more throughly ‘this socialism stuff’.
Once I became some Green Party, tax the rich, SocDem type of guy, I recognised I could still remain open-minded rather than merely, naïvely assume this is what is needed to fix my country.
So I checked out anarchism and Marxism-Leninism - it’s worth mentioning I had a lot of propaganda deprogramming to do, and that is hard to push through, I think it’s a major barrier for many people who have been told all their life how supposedly evil these movements are - but here I am, now an M-L communist (I found it more logical, moral and factual than anarchism), still learning but knowing enough that I can’t see myself committing to any other political movement. I wanted the truth, I wanted a solution, I wanted hope, and I believe I have found it.