for me it’s a two-step process. the first step is fomenting anti-americanism - recognizing that the US is consistently the aggressor and engages constantly in imperialism and coups and sanctions and wars for profit. talk to her about whatever war crime of the week the Biden administration ends up doing in Iran or Venezuela.
the second step is recognizing that establishing a successful socialist project in such a hostile environment necessarily requires a workers state that oppresses the bourgeoisie.
one last thing, i think the “class reductionism” you mentioned is arguably just as big of a problem. like a lot of people, she seems to have internalized a lot of racist US propaganda, about other countries and her own. help her address that too or she’s not a fucking comrade
As for the last part, it sucks too cause she's not White, but still is leaning towards the idea that class always overrides other things like race, sexuality, gender, etc or that people overrely on identifying with those other labels. It's something that I have found hard to debate with her cause to me it seems so innate that those things do matter, but it makes it hard to word why I think that way when it's just cause it's what... makes sense to me.
They're intertwined. Assuming you're American, our race relations are part and parcel interlocked with race - white settlers slaughtered indigenous because it let the settlers become petty-bourgeois landowners, and suppressed black people because it meant they didn't have to be capitalism's biggest losers. But one must remember that the superstructure also feeds the base - if we transition into socialism without addressing these issues, they will reemerge there and we will fail because we will create a racial underclass again.
for me it’s a two-step process. the first step is fomenting anti-americanism - recognizing that the US is consistently the aggressor and engages constantly in imperialism and coups and sanctions and wars for profit. talk to her about whatever war crime of the week the Biden administration ends up doing in Iran or Venezuela.
the second step is recognizing that establishing a successful socialist project in such a hostile environment necessarily requires a workers state that oppresses the bourgeoisie.
i’d recommend Blackshirts and Reds or Parenti’s yellow video as easily digestible theory that drills those two key points
one last thing, i think the “class reductionism” you mentioned is arguably just as big of a problem. like a lot of people, she seems to have internalized a lot of racist US propaganda, about other countries and her own. help her address that too or she’s not a fucking comrade
Thank you, these are all great ideas!!
As for the last part, it sucks too cause she's not White, but still is leaning towards the idea that class always overrides other things like race, sexuality, gender, etc or that people overrely on identifying with those other labels. It's something that I have found hard to debate with her cause to me it seems so innate that those things do matter, but it makes it hard to word why I think that way when it's just cause it's what... makes sense to me.
They're intertwined. Assuming you're American, our race relations are part and parcel interlocked with race - white settlers slaughtered indigenous because it let the settlers become petty-bourgeois landowners, and suppressed black people because it meant they didn't have to be capitalism's biggest losers. But one must remember that the superstructure also feeds the base - if we transition into socialism without addressing these issues, they will reemerge there and we will fail because we will create a racial underclass again.