Propaganda doesn't totally rob people of agency free will (more accurate term), if it did this site wouldn't exist. People do have the capacity to develop critical thinking, skepticism, and a basic curiosity about the world that allow them to develop some resistance to propaganda.
You can hold people accountable for failing to even attempt to do this.
I mean if you're a Marxist then I'd expect you to think other Marxists have a better understanding of politics and propaganda than the average layperson, liberal judgements about virtue aside.
There's a plethora of false consciousnesses and libidinal traps people can find themselves in, cultural hegemony is a powerful superstructural reinforcement of base dynamics.
I know too many people who embrace ignorant escapism rather than examine the system they find themselves in, so aggressively complacent in their incuriosity that they never develop any sort of coherent epistemological method. They're the people who find themselves caught up in hedonistic nihilism or fascist co-optations.
I'm confident in my opinion that the average Marxist is "better" than the average Joe Rogan listener. Someone who's read 10,000 books has undoubtedly expressed and developed a degree of wisdom/knowledge/virtue that people who've read two Wikipedia pages don't possess. Innate or otherwise is immaterial as far as I'm concerned, the result is a different way of engaging with information and the world, a better ability to identify propaganda (a developed "immunity" to it).
“Better” is not the same thing as “more competent in some respect”. “Better” implies inherent worth, that someone for some reason, possibly even a literal physical disability, who cannot access the same level of knowledge as us but still desires to and is a leftist, would not be worth as much as people as people who are able to access more knowledge are.
That's just semantics, in which case the word better can signify either concept and anything in between.
No it’s not semantics, it’s what the person you responded to meant.
That's fair, my prior response didn't fully take into account the context of the discussion, sorry
But I disagree, because the top comment (my interpretation of it at least) seems to be making the common vulgar determinist reduction of all choices and actions to simple results of material circumstances. I don't think this is a particularly useful or accurate reduction, especially in the context of this post.
If the comment is more pushing back on a general trend of liberal exceptionalism I don't have as much of a problem. But the post itself isn't an example of this exceptionalism, nor are value judgements as to a given person's ability to critically engage with things.
I believe people who study Marxism-Leninism seriously tend to have a more accurate understanding of politics and propaganda than the average liberal because history has demonstrated Marxism-Leninism's explanatory power in describing the relationship between past conditions and current conditions to accurately predict future conditions. That's very different than the OP's suggestion that humans have an innate hierarchy of value that expresses itself in the form of better people espousing better ideas, which is the same self-justifying vanity that led colonial powers throughout history to make the same claim to justify stealing land from "barbarous" natives who demonstrated their inferiority through their "failure to develop civilization".
I really don't think that's the concept the OP is invoking-- consider the choice of the word develop rather than something like innately possess
I don't disagree with your criticism of the concept itself, that sort of exceptionalism as well as the view of oneself as a static, immutable essence (or defined by static, immutable characteristics) are both dangerous