Antithesis: Reversal of dogma and ideology isn’t a tiny bit of education, it’s downright impossible for most people. Especially when the “common sense” produced by commodity fetishism is the default.
Paternalistic education by a vanguard party is not what will bring a revolution. Class consciousness is learned through experience, not a textbook. And unfortunately I don’t see a path for the average person to learn how capitalism works except by being crushed and excluded by it. Revolution is like jumping from a burning building. It doesn’t happen until jumping is less scary than not jumping. For the average Western worker, whose lifestyle is propped up by international exploitation of cheaper labor, it is simply not bad enough yet.
Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding thing about China's 600 million people is that they are "poor and blank". This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing. Poverty gives rise to the desire for changes the desire for action and the desire for revolution. On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written; the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted.
I've said it before: it's good news that capitalists don't understand what capitalism is.
This guy thinks we live in a labour society, doesn't understand that capitalism is defined by capital.
This is good news because it means people just need a tiny bit of education. They don't support capitalism; they don't know what it is.
Antithesis: Reversal of dogma and ideology isn’t a tiny bit of education, it’s downright impossible for most people. Especially when the “common sense” produced by commodity fetishism is the default.
Paternalistic education by a vanguard party is not what will bring a revolution. Class consciousness is learned through experience, not a textbook. And unfortunately I don’t see a path for the average person to learn how capitalism works except by being crushed and excluded by it. Revolution is like jumping from a burning building. It doesn’t happen until jumping is less scary than not jumping. For the average Western worker, whose lifestyle is propped up by international exploitation of cheaper labor, it is simply not bad enough yet.
Today’s proletarian and petty-bourgeois workers are hardly the blank slates whom Mao helped liberate from semi-feudal imperialists.