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I was talking to a friend, and he was complaining about his job. He had this whole thing about how he’s so divorced from the work that he does, so disconnected from anything tangible, estranged from the products that he felt only tangentially involved in making. He has a boring office job and dicks around a lot, I guess. And this feeling was something that he’d been carrying with him for a long time, and he felt like no one talks about it, and it was, to him, one of the chief ills of society, the way that we have no connection to the work that we do. And he wished so much that we had a word for it, that people would talk about it.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Marx called that alienation of labor.”
“What?” he asked.
“You can google that phrase, ‘alienation of labor’ and you’ll get a ton of people talking about it,” I said. “It’s been a talking point for like, almost two hundred years.”
“They’re Marxists though?” he asked.
“Most of them, yeah,” I said.
He looked off into the distance, thinking about that. I was waiting for him to ask some questions, or for him to talk more about what he was feeling. “Well,” he said. “I guess I’ll get over it.”
This is the type of person who thinks books can brainwash you
Anyone working in counter-propaganda can testify to a curious experience: we’ll put in hours of careful research collecting an impeccable set of resources that undermines some warmongering narrative, and we’ll eagerly share it with someone who claims to despise racism in all its forms — say, an outspoken opponent of the West’s so-called “War on Terror.” Unexpectedly, we are met with a response that is somewhere between chilly reticence and downright hostility. What’s going on?
From our perspective, we’re offering water to a person who’s self-identified as thirsty, and yet they react as if we were trying to poison them! They turn on a dime to defend the same institutions whose lies they were denouncing just moments before. At this point the sense of pride and accomplishment that comes from seeing through propaganda and putting puzzle pieces together into a satisfying historical account gets brutally transformed into its exact opposite: a sense of crushing defeat. In response to this bitter experience, many researchers — serious people, with plenty of experience reading and writing, and sometimes even of being published! — lash out. They decide that people have been “brainwashed” beyond the point where they can be reached by words or rational appeal. They “realize” that the masters of propaganda have been far more successful than we first imagined: it turns out we’re not David fighting Goliath, we’re more like an ant facing an asteroid.
Oh God this is my experience talking to the lib I used to work with
ppl just don’t wanna admit to themselves and other ppl they fell for some bullshit “u mean i’ve been fed dogshit by the state for years and it made my brain pudding?” ya fam it did the same to me and that realization isn’t exactly fun at first it’s why all the chumps in plato’s cave hid when the light burnt their eyes
read da essay then
Damn, Roderic and Nia had a pulse on the most important, recurring topics of our time really well. Every time I see a post of Redsails, it’s genuinely as relevant and perfectly touching the point as the best of them have done.
Reading Really Existing Fascism between classes (I think I read it like 3 times total) in college had me feeling like I had just unlocked Marxism 2.
Definitely top 5 best, most applicable piece of theory of the past 10 years, if you ask me. Short, to the point, powerful, Marxist critique is hard to find
There is no such thing as brainwashing
There very much is, it’s a technique Koreans used on American GI’s wherein they cleansed the brains of their captives of all the programming America had installed in them, by exposing them to the truth of matters. It was so powerful, these GI’s would defect and fight on the side of Korea! Their brains were as close to literally being washed as one could possibly imagine
Agreed, but I think many go too far in rejecting the extreme idea of brainwashing so as to also ignore that there genuinely are structural seams - not defects - in how our conscious self is generated from our brain processes.
I think most of that is a pernicious shadow of dualism, thinking that the Mind isn’t a system of physical relations that necessarily interacts with its environment and that had adapted social functions needed to exist long before it attained a level of awareness of itself. We have instincts and mental reflexes we don’t recognise as nonconscious and that are autonomous of our intentionality. Even when they get called “animal instincts”, it assumes our True Human Self was still somehow superior to them and not itself a part of the whole that needs to speak for, and mediate with, the parts that cannot.
Those elements that don’t require conscious oversight can be exploited to influence the rest of the organism, not by technomagic brainwashing, but through scientific study of behaviour - and it’s easier to do that on a population that isn’t thinking about themselves as a material system.
…hm, rambled on there, not sure it remained useful, but I spent so long that I’m gonna hit that damn reply button and walk the dog.
one of the most depressing posts I’ve ever read
This is my experience taking too my friends. We’re doomed
If it brings you any hope I had the opposite experience comrade. All of my closest friends are leftists because of my agitation (not to brag lmao). Before october 7th and before I was a communist they could have been described as democrats dissapointed in their party at best. What shocked me most is that when I first started discussing communism with them they weren’t reactive. They were deeply curious about the subject and found it explained a lot of the social ills they could recognize. It probably helped that I am in a highly reactionary part of the US and they were already disgusted by this but still. While people like in the post exist, there are less of them than there used to be.
It has taken me years of work on some of them but I have the same experience, I had a circle of liberal friends, almost every single person in that circle is now some form of soft marxist or explicitly a marxist-leninist. They may not all be loud about it but all of them will always be sympathetic to real left voices because they have learned to associate communist takes with a voice they trust who has always loudly and explicitly been communist.
What’s the best resource, strategy, or tip you suggest for becoming an effective deprogrammer?
Being a persistent blatantly openly revolutionary communist but in small enough bites that it’s never enough to drive people away. I do not and have never done any kind of crypto-communist thing, I do not hide that I am a communist.
It’s ok to have a reputation for “oh here they go again with the revolution shit” if there’s plenty of things you do with those people that has nothing to do with it, games, anime, partying, whatever. As long as your leftism is in small rants, you get a bit of it through here and there.
I fundamentally think teaching people what capitalism is does more than opposition to imperialism or arguing about the latest news stories or whatever. My capitalism 101 is basically teaching what capital is, private property, surplus value, and using landlords as an example to explain the difference between the bourgeoisie earning income via what they own vs the proletariat who earns by working. Once people have this fundamental understanding of the world their own analysis of everything becomes coloured leftwards, if they learn it properly it becomes impossible to unlearn it and will drag people leftwards by itself, it creates a class lens through which they do all their analysis, it is the very root of class consciousness. There is a reason nothing in education teaches how things really work.
Being valuable helps. Bring value to someone’s life and they’ll overlook your annoying marxist rants because you’re valuable for other reasons, like how well you organise the group’s regular movie get together or whatever.
Certain topics with certain people have to be very gentle. China was for a very long time a completely out of bounds topic that would have generated a kneejerk negative reaction that probably could have lost friends over, but is almost fine for me to talk about these days. I wouldn’t go around screaming my opinion of Assad or Gaddafi to all of them but with a gentle touch around the sidelines I could get a foot in the door on it now.
The point is that it’s ok for your Marxism to be a feature of your identity as long as your value is 95% not marxism.
Oh and a rule I try to follow as much as possible is to never speak too much more than the other person, or write, if it’s online speak. You need to match their input and not drop lectures on people except when they’ve got into the “deep convo” mood.
This is excellent advice, thank you
I just read this little newspaper article about Stalin, which focuses heavily on his organisational style, and definitely follows the point about not rambling on and on.
I think it came up in another thread about the Solid Snake approach to conversations.
when I first started discussing communism with them they weren’t reactive. They were deeply curious about the subject
Isn’t this the difference between people like this though? If they were curious and non-reactive, there was always hope. If they immediately shut off like this prick and decided it’s better to suffer for the rest of their working life than even consider a Marxist thought in the abstract, it’s hopeless.
Sure yes but the person I was meaning to reassure sayed we are doomed (assumedly as a whole) so I was hoping to express some hopecore
That is good to hear.
We do not love to see it folks
This is like that “I don’t want answers, I want to be mad” comic.
What can I say except “OK keep suffering then I guess lmao”?
This is the infuriating thing, a thousand of him turn their heads at something fundamental about their lives that bothers them because it’s Marxists offering a solution, and end up dooming us all.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it’s fucks like this that willfully choose ignorance that are the true enemies of change, and there are billions of them.
I was talking to a user of X the Everything App™, and he was complaining about his colleagues. He had this whole thing about how he’s so divorced from the culture of his co-workers, so disconnected from any other white people, estranged from more and more of the individuals that he was working with. He has a boring office job and has a lot of foreign colleagues, I guess. And this feeling was something that he’d been carrying with him for a long time, and he felt like no one talks about it, and it was, to him, one of the chief ills of society, the way that we white people are making up a smaller and smaller portion of the country’s demographics. And he wished so much that we had a word for it, that people would talk about it.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “Grok called that white genocide”
“What?” he asked.
“You can google that phrase, ‘white genocide,’ and you’ll get tons of people talking about it,” I said. “It’s been a talking point for like, almost two whole years.”
“They’re South Africans though?” he asked.
“Most of them, yeah,” I said.
He looked off into the distance, thinking about that. I was waiting for him to ask some questions, or for him to talk more about what he was feeling. “Well,” he said. “I guess I’ll get over it.”
So many people are fucking like this.
Every song in the Disco Elysium soundtrack played in my head simultaneously at the end of this post.
Click the tie, bratan.I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I think that Tumblr post is fake, it smells too much like something deliberately designed to trigger online marxists
Might also be structured odd since this guy is an author; I know some I’ve talked to tend to start portraying every anecdote like it’s a part of a story they’re in and makes things start feeling fake even if I know they occurred.
The people of the future will see us as tribalistic savages who made really good music. Same as it ever was.
On the flip side, this was so incredibly demoralising that I think it’s excellent propaganda. How do we make chuds feel like this?
I can see how this is demoralizing… though, that isn’t how I took it. People very seldom change their opinions in the middle of conversations. This guy thought he had a novel observation about modern working life, only to learn it’s two centuries old and shared by a group of people he’s been told are evil and stupid and responsible for nearly everything bad in the world. Of course he’s gonna recoil from that.
But in the same way a person doesn’t change opinions all at once, I don’t think he’s gonna just “get over it”. Gotta give people time to stew. Let em think on it in their own time. Maybe he papers over the contradiction, willfully stops thinking about it. Or maybe it nags at him. Only time will tell.
There’s no need to do anything. Chuds do this to themselves constantly. That’s why they’re chuds lmaoooo
75% of their time is spent being mad at things and the other 25% is making up things to be mad at.
Narrated Development Ron Howard narration: He never got over it
Is that the sequel to arrested development?
Yes
I’m optimistic in the sense that I do think you can get quite a few of these people, at least temporarily, on our side. They’re usually opportunistic and you can sort of convince them that it’s better to stick with you than it is with the big Kapital, because they don’t really have a school of thought.
You’re gonna wanna make sure to watch out for them tho’ because they are also the type of people, who will sell you out for a coin. I think they ultimately refuse to change their mind because it forces them to face discomforting truth. Which is why, even if you provide them with irrefutable evidence and they somehow accept the evidence you provided, instead of lashing out at you, they will still shift their mindset to “Well I can’t do anything about it. I shouldn’t feel bad about it.”
It’s a lack of discipline. It’s why people can do Slavery, even though they fully understood the cruelty and immorality of Slavery, they knew it was bad, they didn’t wanna be a slave, they didn’t want their people to become one. But they didn’t wanna plow the fields themselves either, better to have someone else do it. Then when it had already gone on for too long they started pondering about blowback, which made people even more scared to release their slaves.
We keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over again, but eventually we’ll become aware of this and build class consciousness, where the cycle is going to end.
Now explain why I shouldn’t feel contempt for the average person.
https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
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. 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. 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.
This is actually a great response that pivoted the hopelessness I felt from this post, thanks.
Its a really good essay
