I disagree. Slogans have worked in the past, but when it comes to leftist theory and the materialist reality of 2021, capitalist propaganda has done too good of a job of brainwashing people.
With only the most basic concept of these things and all context stripped out, people fill in the rest with the nonstop propaganda they constantly absorb, and boom - you come out the other side with Gommunism killed billions and Gulags were exactly the same as Nazi concentration camps.
Last year when I was being radicalized, I sent my wife what I thought was relatively harmless positive info on the USSR (it was really mostly just pastoral images that were meant to combat the "in communist Russia, everything was gray and everyone wore the same clothes" narrative) and she had a breakdown because she knew I was a good person and didn’t understand why I was sympathetic to the USSR. It scared her because she thought Stalin killed millions and the Gulags were death camps. And that’s from a (at the time) progressive DemSoc liberal.
It took a couple long phone calls (I was away with my family because a family member had terminal cancer) to give her the context and talk through some of the propaganda and systems in place to uphold capitalism and multiple long articles being sent to her (including the CIA reports) about the Gulags being mostly full of ordinary criminals, the amount of food they got, the expectations of work in them, etc. before she was able to wrap her head around it all, and even then she was still shook.
A Koan wouldn't have changed her mind. Long-form discussion and writing did.
That's not to say you need to jump to throwing every volume of Das Kapital at people on the street. You can start from a basic place of anti-capitalism, and slogans and whatever else might get people to agree but without taking the time to go beyond that, there will be a limit to their class consciousness and revolutionary participation.
There's a reason that literacy is always one of the first things emphasized and achieved in communist societies.
I disagree. Slogans have worked in the past, but when it comes to leftist theory and the materialist reality of 2021, capitalist propaganda has done too good of a job of brainwashing people.
With only the most basic concept of these things and all context stripped out, people fill in the rest with the nonstop propaganda they constantly absorb, and boom - you come out the other side with Gommunism killed billions and Gulags were exactly the same as Nazi concentration camps.
Last year when I was being radicalized, I sent my wife what I thought was relatively harmless positive info on the USSR (it was really mostly just pastoral images that were meant to combat the "in communist Russia, everything was gray and everyone wore the same clothes" narrative) and she had a breakdown because she knew I was a good person and didn’t understand why I was sympathetic to the USSR. It scared her because she thought Stalin killed millions and the Gulags were death camps. And that’s from a (at the time) progressive DemSoc liberal.
It took a couple long phone calls (I was away with my family because a family member had terminal cancer) to give her the context and talk through some of the propaganda and systems in place to uphold capitalism and multiple long articles being sent to her (including the CIA reports) about the Gulags being mostly full of ordinary criminals, the amount of food they got, the expectations of work in them, etc. before she was able to wrap her head around it all, and even then she was still shook.
A Koan wouldn't have changed her mind. Long-form discussion and writing did.
That's not to say you need to jump to throwing every volume of Das Kapital at people on the street. You can start from a basic place of anti-capitalism, and slogans and whatever else might get people to agree but without taking the time to go beyond that, there will be a limit to their class consciousness and revolutionary participation.
There's a reason that literacy is always one of the first things emphasized and achieved in communist societies.
(inb4 I get hit with the TL;DR)
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:wat: