They're too fuckin dumb to understand nuanced material critique, so all you're doing is giving them ammo to justify their own anticommunist biases from a left lens. There is no nuance in mainstream politics and the discussions therein, only extremes of black and white, with freedom countries on one and evil dictatorships on the other. Stop it.

  • MarxMadness [comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    we should all be learning from conservatives and particularly Roger Stone

    The issue I see here is that conservatives like Roger Stone are speaking to conservatives and people who lean conservative. "Attack attack attack" works well when your audience is already sympathetic to your position, but I don't think it works that well when your audience starts off hostile to your position. If they're predisposed to disagree with you they'll jump on any opportunity to write you off so they don't have to engage with the substance of your argument. "We're talking about communist countries, you're doing a whataboutism" is exactly that sort of opportunity.

    A better approach is to refute as concisely as possible, then attack, and -- most importantly -- finish with some tangible way a leftist policy would improve life right here, right now (i.e., not in some AES state that may not even exist anymore). For example, if someone trots out "communism killed 1,877,983 kabillion:"

    The type of wild guesses you see in the Black Book of Communism have been disavowed by their authors as politically motivated. They include Nazis killed in WWII, for example. And if you apply their methods for "preventable deaths" to capitalist countries, capitalism kills tens of millions every year due to preventable conditions like hunger, homelessness, and lack of basic medical care. Think of how many people in the U.S. can't get healthcare and die preventable deaths from a condition that should have been identified and treated early. Universal healthcare would save a bunch of lives, but we choose not to do it.

      • MarxMadness [comrade/them]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Good points on bullying. It has its place, but it's not a one-size-fits-all tool. It can definitely backfire (people often dig in out of spite) and we think too highly of it because we like doing it.

        As for winning people over in the imperial core, I think there are at least two promising strategies:

        • Short term: Find some egregious failing of capitalism, propose some tangible leftist solution, then beat that drum as loudly and as often as possible. This is the "Medicare for All" approach. You'll get a lot of people to listen to you because the leftist solution makes too damn much sense, and you can start them down the path to leftism from there.
        • Long term: Get people into media criticism in the Chomsky/Herman/Parenti vein. This is the "Citations Needed" approach. This is more for people who are less affected by the most egregious failings of capitalism, and who are therefore more insulated from the "Medicare for All" approach. If you can get them into media criticism from a more academic/wonky perspective, they might end up doing a lot of leftist education on their own.
    • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]M
      ·
      3 years ago

      If our main objective is class war, then we know how to identify our enemies. We should be absolutely unrelenting in attacking our enemies. The thing is though, Neoliberalism has absolutely fucked the class alignment of our political system, so to make progress we are going to be pissing of a lot of liberals as well as a lot of chuds. There is no way around this. It is a prerequisite of returning to class-aligned politics.

      To fart huffing liberals, they best way to attack our enemies is to indict them. Prove that they have committed a crime, and pin them on their tendencies towards institutional fetishism (rule of law, science). You cannot reconcile the idealistic liberal framework with the way capitalism materially functions. The entire state is an irreconcilable conflict of interest. A rat's nest of administrators plagued by their own personal conflicts of interest. They're all criminals. Chase those receipts and spread them as far as you can. Do some shoe-leather journalism if you must. Get them invested in seeing justice, and let the institutions radicalize them by failing completely. (Ironically, the Russiagate shit turned me from a turbo-lib to a constitutional abolitionist within two years. You mean to tell me this guy is an unprecedented threat to the republic, hype up this special prosecutor, then throw the report in the trash the minute you got it? The whole system is a fucking joke.)

      The reactionaries are another story. They don't give a shit about justice. You will never convince them to accept anything positive on the basis of a moral argument. We generally should assume their brains are melted, but their brains are melted in a few particular ways. The reactionary media inculcates them with intense hatred for many figures of the elite. Many of these figures are also our enemies. Especially now, since the Trump phenomenon has introduced new fissures into the right and the base is discarding figures like Rumsfeld like trash.

      The way to reach reactionaries is to eviscerate these lightning rod figures better than they could ever dream of, but to do it in such a way that the criticism cannot be co-opted. These people are crybabies who are convinced that the system is rigged against them in particular. In this way, they are the opposite of Liberals, who have such strong faith in the institutions that they would die on the cross for them.

      When the chuds not busy teeing off on homeless people or revolutionaries, we can push the narrative that yes, the system is rigged against you but point to the actual material ways this happens, doing our best to shut down the braindead structurally antisemetic and racist nonsense. These people are selfish bastards who only care about themselves, but if they are selfish proletarian bastards, we can show them how they in particular are being screwed over, and how the class struggle is the least of their worries.