Which one are you?
- To what degree is it ok to lie to fellow workers in order to make socialism more appealing to them?
- What are the benefits and risks of doing so?
- How much theoretical knowledge do you have?
- Can you convey it without using wanky words like "class", "state", "proletariat" and "capital"?
>>2361670>To what degree is it ok to lie to fellow workers in order to make socialism more appealing to them?Lie to them about what? That socialist govs and figures make/made mistakes? Those are nothing compared to the damage caused by capitalism. The idea isn't to just present a reality- it's to sell them on an idea. If a worker starts saying uninformed stuff, come prepared to ask him questions via socratic reasoning- i.e question him and then follow through by backing your statement with facts.
>What are the benefits and risks of doing so?Depends on the workers and where they are. If you're talking to a bunch of MAGA-loving working class people, a good chunk of them have already been lost to the cult. The best you can do is just challenge them in front of their friends and co-workers and show them for the snake-oil purchasers/ salesmen they are.
>How much theoretical knowledge do you have?We can talk Marx, Lenin, Malatesta, Mao, Fanon, Kropotkin, Bookchin, Ocalan, Makhno or even fuckin' Stirner. Arguing academics with workers- particularly in america who on average have a 6th grade reading level- is often a folly. Probe them on how much they know or don't before discussing theory. Again, lead with the idea, and the analysis.
While theory is great, I often find that using data, actual facts, is what often emboldens folks to understand how fucked the situation is. Thing is, most workers know they're getting fucked over so you're preaching to the choir, the problem is they think that by vootin' in the right person will lessen their woes.
>Can you convey it without using wanky words like "class", "state", "proletariat" and "capital"?>ClassSure just use words like workers, bosses, ceos etc.
>StateState's fine, you could use government and add a prefix before it i.e to take a page out of friendly jordies book "the liberal government"
>ProleteriatWorkers
>Capital While we can't necessarily define this as money, you can still talk about how workers don't have a say in our jobs. If we put it together, You can often say "our bosses control our work lives and wages, they own the tools despite us using them and even though we do more work, we get sweet nothing of wages while he gets it all despite doing little of the work."
>The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.This was written before a time of massive COINTELPRO, cold war propaganda, nazism, McCarthyism and well before the creation of the Paris Commune. Sometimes, you have to be subtle with your aims lest you get into stamping and shouting slogans which no one understands. Even popular socialist parties have arguably been reduced to watering down their rhetoric and demands- prime example is the response of the violent riots and killing of Israeli ambassadors. I get they don't want to be cracked down and saying such stuff is dumb, but there is a time and place for this rhetoric, and it isn't 24/7.
>we must lie to the stupid workers to make them believe in something against their interestsself-report?
>>2362000>the stupid workers must be lied to so that us intellectuals may rule over them in order that they dont actually achieve what is in their class interest<marx must be discarded since he preferred the truth to manipulative liesMLs on a normal one today lol
>>2361670Slide thread. Belongs on /siberia/ at best.
Sage and report.
>>2362133><marx must be discarded since he preferred the truth to manipulative liesThis but unironically. If someone manages to develop and lead a communist revolution by oversimplifying Marx to the point of being inaccurate, in order to successfully appeal to the workers of a state, then they have changed the world more than Marx did in their lifetime. And, as Marx would say, that's the fuckin point of it all.
If being correct was good enough, we'd have already won.
>>2362174Having talked at the pub with many construction workers last May Day, I suspect that communism
is in their class interest.
>>2362175A major section of the masses must trust the vanguard party, if that's your way forward. You don't just seize the state and flip the islamic gommunism switch either.
If anything, OP pic is agreeing: the masses don't need to be convinced of communism. They just need to tolerate it.
>>2362172i doubt you have ever successful organised a pissup in a wetherspoons.
You can go back wherever you came from instead of spamming here pretending to be a organised leftist now.
>>2362163you are imsgining that most "marxists" have even read marx. the pretension of superiority begins pre-theoretically thus. it is contradictory in the same way, since you are apparently championing workers by betraying their honesty. and as far as it concerns reading capital, marx says that it is his biggest concern that workers read it directly:
>I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of “Das Kapital” as a serial. In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p2.htmand according to engels, capital is a working class book:
>“Das Kapital” is often called, on the Continent, “the Bible of the working class.”https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p6.htmso is marx too smart for the dumb proles?
>>2362165socialism is never on the ballot, so you are judging workers for bourgeois frivolity. again, you are just a narcissist divorced from the worker's struggle.
>>2362215>so is marx too smart for the dumb proles?Well, you assert that most "marxists" have never read Marx, and those are the people who care enough about Marx to sexually identify as a Marxist. I don't know about "too smart", but certainly too much detail for most.
Want to get depressed? Go to my city's May Day and ask workers why they're there. Most common answer among the biggest unions is "a free day off work", an absurd number of them couldn't even recognize the two main candidates in an upcoming federal election. So unless someone is showing real interest, and there are plenty who do, but unless they do then you have to oversimplify.
>>2362233and what are you, a non-worker? a superior being?
>>2362227>you assert that most "marxists" have never read Marxyes. even most academic marxists have never read marx. "marx" is a signifier without a signified; a semantic void that people project their desires onto. thats why people say to "read marx" yet they never give you a book or a chapter, since "marx" is supposed to sum everything up, yet in himself, he signifies nothing - unless you actually cite marx, at which point he can be given particularity, and thus either be agreed with or disagreed with.
> I don't know about "too smart", but certainly too much detail for most.yes, because marx often mistakes quantity for quality; quite ironic considering his dialectical approach.
>you have to oversimplify.whats wrong with that? more people would have read marx if he had an editor. simplifying concepts also shows one's comprehension, rather than any substitutory circumlocution, like i see on this site. big words are not acceptable replacements for big ideas.
>>2362428Off the top of my head
Wage Labour and Capital
Capital volumes 1, 2 and 3
The Critique of the Golgotha Program
The Grundwisse
Probably the required reading list.
>>2361670have any of you actually worked a public facing job with alotta interaction like a lot of service sectors jobs? Your just gonna have to handle that shit on a person by person basis, read the room,listen more than yap and meet people where there at. the answers to OPs question will greatly differ between different people and it's impossible to make a single answer for the entire working class(literally the vast majority of the global population). Also tbh the history of various socialist projects is far from boring and regaling the populace of tales showing the successes and failures of past projects isn't as boring to the general populace as one might think it is. I for one like explaining to people various left wing splits(like leninist vanguardism vs mahknovist horizontalism) to see what random ass workers with no exposure to chronically online left wing infighting have to say about the matter.
Not even to mention actions speak much louder than words you could say whatever the fuck but if your org is actually providing tangible results like social services(ex:free breakfasts) and special bodies of armed men(Red Guards) that will win ppl over more than a silver tongue.
>>2362830He certainly wasn't an ML because the fundamental arguments which are contained within the leftist apologetics of real socialism didn't exist yet (not necessarily talking about deaths counts, but rather, apologetics of real socialism's bourgeois economy and the wrong theoretical arguments of its doctrinaires regarding the heap of questions which got introduced retroactively with the death of Marx and Engels, such as the national question, peasant question, etc. etc.).
Nevertheless, he aided modern MLs in such a way that it would be hard to imagine whaz their doctrine would be like today, hadn't Lenin written some things.
one interesting article I recently read about this is Gegenstandpunkt's (or the MSZ's?) article on the national question:
https://ruthlesscriticism.com/nationalismworkersmovement.htm >>2362844This but unironiquely. Enter, abuse your powers to bolster the actual communist projects while pretending to be a harmless centrist, and weaken the state.
It's called "sabotage" and it's a proven technique.
>>2362995>have any of you actually worked a public facing job with alotta interaction like a lot of service sectors jobs?Personally, I worked warehouses and packing jobs until I finally got a foot in the programming door, so I've had the privilege of never dealing with more than a dozen people at a job. Your perspective is insightful and I'm glad you shared it with us comrade.
>I for one like explaining to people various left wing splits(like leninist vanguardism vs mahknovist horizontalism) to see what random ass workers with no exposure to chronically online left wing infighting have to say about the matter. lol what do they say? Even Lenin and many others in the 1903 RSDLP split were saying "bro this is a fukkin stupid split" for a while
>>2363728>>2362454The 1844 manuscripts are valuable but really hard to read if you're not already acquainted with Hegel, there's opaque jargon everywhere. I think the first chapter of the German Ideology which lays out the materialist conception of history is a better choice for someone that wants to read "Young Marx". I'd kick out the Grundrisse too, and honestly Capital Vols 2 and 3 until you've read Marx's other works.
There's a criminal lack of Engels in that list. I know certain academics like to claim he was an "Engelsist" falsifier of Marx, but they're full of crap.
Ludwig Feuerbach sums up Marx and Engels 1840s writings while being mercifully free of Hegelian jargon - follow that up with
Anti-Duhring, which starts by fully fleshing out their views on philosophy before entering into one of the most in-depth discussions of what a socialist society would look like (for real, I'm shocked everyone goes back to the Gotha Critique and ignores this one.)
@
>>2365232uhhh this you?
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