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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 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.
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.