Them go off, king. Spread the red seed all over them.
I guess I'm a bit sensitive about how to approach people with leftism because I'm from a place that has a bit of a leftist baggage (not the USA) and a lot of people have at least some formed leftist concepts, but it makes my skin crawl just how much people will try to talk to less informed citizens and shower them with academic stuff that matters zero percent for them, effectively turning them away from the concepts and the left as a whole. That plus trying to reduce the whole situation to just "Marx said this" "Gramsci said that" "that's capitalism for you" without acknowledging the present contradiction or material situation in any way.
I found that a good way to talk about this stuff is to just point them towards the major contradiction - the interests of the elite in question vs the interests of the workers in question - and kind of suggest what the thought should look like*. What difference could it make that I don't slap Marx's name or a hammer and sickle on it if the thought itself is marxist? I also think that people are way more receptive if the idea is something that seems to be the conclusions of a person in the same setting and the same situation as they are, like a fellow worker in some retail store. Saying phrases by some foreign guy they barely ever heard about, save for shitty internet fights, can be quite alienating in this regard, I think.
*It's interesting to note that people that I've talked to tend to arrive at either defeatism or capitalist realism. I think that having a general idea about how to organize would reel in a lot of people, by showing them that there IS something we can do, actually
Them go off, king. Spread the red seed all over them.
I guess I'm a bit sensitive about how to approach people with leftism because I'm from a place that has a bit of a leftist baggage (not the USA) and a lot of people have at least some formed leftist concepts, but it makes my skin crawl just how much people will try to talk to less informed citizens and shower them with academic stuff that matters zero percent for them, effectively turning them away from the concepts and the left as a whole. That plus trying to reduce the whole situation to just "Marx said this" "Gramsci said that" "that's capitalism for you" without acknowledging the present contradiction or material situation in any way.
I found that a good way to talk about this stuff is to just point them towards the major contradiction - the interests of the elite in question vs the interests of the workers in question - and kind of suggest what the thought should look like*. What difference could it make that I don't slap Marx's name or a hammer and sickle on it if the thought itself is marxist? I also think that people are way more receptive if the idea is something that seems to be the conclusions of a person in the same setting and the same situation as they are, like a fellow worker in some retail store. Saying phrases by some foreign guy they barely ever heard about, save for shitty internet fights, can be quite alienating in this regard, I think.
*It's interesting to note that people that I've talked to tend to arrive at either defeatism or capitalist realism. I think that having a general idea about how to organize would reel in a lot of people, by showing them that there IS something we can do, actually