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How does the average person not know?
When speaking to co-workers I am baffled at how little they know about certain things I expected were common sense by now. I just got through talking to a co-worker of mine who did not believe that the CIA has toppled democratically elected leaders and installed client dictators. This was too wild an assertion for him. I asked him if he plays any video games like Call of Duty or watched any movies like Zero Dark Thirty, and he said yes of course. Yet, even after all that he did not think it was real or based on any reality.Yes even ZDT. Time and time again I confront people who are totally baffled by the slightest hint that about the US government role during the Cold War or the the role of the certain institutes like the IMF and their role in depleting the national wealth.
I know that some of it might not peak their interests but at this point now with so much information on the subjects out there even in popular culture that they would know something but its still just Hollywood fiction or uninteresting stuff to them.
I also want to note that being buried in books and documentaries day in and day out, we underestimate ourselves and what we have learned. A lot of people do not even have a basic foundation for half the stuff we talk about.
I do not mean to sound like a right winger but the left has no excuse to get out there and do something.
COD and ZDT aren't really based on reality though.
Unless mindless running and shooting and an extremely romanticized version of an actual event, as in we take an event and make it so over the top it has nothing to do with reality anymore, realistic.
This also has very little to do with common sense as it is just about knowing little facts.
Is this resistance or a costume party?
Either way I think black with bandanas is a boring theme.
fka Creep
It baffles me how the left have failed to grasp the nature of the culture industry and what Chomsky called "manufacturing consent". It starts in school, where obedience is taught. The rest of life is work-consume-die etc.
We are still suffering for the fallout of the Cold War and its propaganda-fueled hatred. Any communist or left-wing anarchist is automatically associated rather ignorantly with Stalin and Marxist-Leninism, when this board shows that not only is there is a vast area of grey areas with regards to Marxist-Leninism, but also the left does not begin and end with Marxist-Leninist thought.
Who to blame? The right-wing media? The bourgeoisie-run education system? Or maybe its ourselves, for blindly supporting Stalinism in parts of the 20th century and not being critical of our own ideology the way some of the best liberals are, which makes them far more credible.
I think the fact is we are still stuck in a world where people simply do not want to question the system the way Marx did. They are too busy focusing on themselves, as they've been taught by birth, without realizing the contradictions and paradoxes emerging in our society. Ignorance? A form of it, but an understandable ignorance. I think most people are disgruntled with capitalism, but just reject any alternative after the failure of the Leninist model. Its time we reinvented ourselves instead of clinging on to past glories. That is something I would rather leave to reactionaries...
Well, the majority of people don't really care whether the US government engages in subterfuge, installs puppet governments, etc. most people just want to get on with their lives. It can be annoying but its sort of fair enough in a certain sense.
I'm not saying its right, but for a lot of people, they're getting up early, working long days, by the time they get home they just want a beer and some food, then just to relax, or they want to go out and party, or whatever it is they do that makes their free hours enjoyable.
If we all had a better work life balance, a lot more people would care more about that kind of stuff, IMO. But then, that's capitalism for you.
It just has to do with the brainwashing of the population, which takes place everywhere from schools to news channels.
Also, the US is filled with nationalism, to the point where no one really gives a shit about people in other countries.
I'm not sure what you mean by that.
by the same token, there are many leftist activists who'll be shit hot on all the stuff you bemoan the "average person" for not understanding, whilst having no concept or awareness of the less glamorous struggles taking place in their backyards, or the fact their is anything other than imperialism to struggle against at all.
Until now, the left has only managed capital in various ways; the point, however, is to destroy it.
I think it's a combination of apathy and misinformation. For the general population, if it does not affect them directly, they usually don't care about it that much. They don't want to take the time to actually understand politics, they just vote for the same party their parents did. The other day some of my friends saw me reading about Anarcho-syndicalism, so I tried to explain it to them. I ended up getting blank stares and one of them said "So you want to be a dictator or something?"
No one is denying great stuff happening on behalf of workers struggles. So this isn't a workers are stupid thread either. I just think in that we radically (no pun intended) underestimate our cultural capital. There have been some rather good attempts to break into the mainstream by transcending new mediums. Brendan M Cooney comes to mind and he is straight theory. Went from a youtube star to being on panels at major universities. His videos are highly informative and entertaining.
At one time Bertolt Brecht was the best living playwright of the 20th Century. That's another way of transcending boundaries.
The right wing was able to disseminate their libertarian and conservative junk out in various forms because they obviously have much more capital, but their ideology is too transparent, their creativity highly lacking and their philosophy utterly abhorent. Their only hope is the fact that they have strong financial backers that keep shoving this shit in to the fore front.
Again, this is not a "why are workers so dumb" thread, Ed. I appologize if that's the message you got from my intitial post but it was more a point to say that we highly underestimate ourselves as a movement and do not see the cultural impact through new mediums we could have. There is no reason not to dominate especially in this economic climate. We keep ourselves in discussions and books and watch countless documentarie and lectures but we do not see just how powerful the stuff is that we are actually learning. People do not even have a base foundation from which to begin to debate this stuff. It's not because they're dumb but it's because of years of misdirection. I mean many are still highly religious or super idealist.
Modern life can be pretty fucking unbearable. Dealing with the boss and getting the bills paid is more than enough trouble for a person, it's not surprising that they aren't desperate to add the miseries of the rest of the world to their own.
Man is but a goat in the hands of butchers
I kind of agree and disagree with the OP. On the one hand, it does seem like a lot of people don't know about the full scope of the USA's involvement in the affairs of other nations. Often when commentators on TV here mention phenomenons like "blowback" & the USA's conduct during the Cold War, they speak of it like they're tapping into some well of extremely esoteric, previously unknown knowledge.
But, on the other hand, I think that most people do think of the USA as somewhat of an imperial force, even if they don't have a clear idea of the exact scope of the USA's present & past influence. Those are just my impressions, however.
"Win, lose or draw...long as you squabble and you get down, that's gangsta."
I'm not sure how much good it would actually do even if people read Naomi Klein and Chomsky all day long, though.
"Win, lose or draw...long as you squabble and you get down, that's gangsta."
The average Joe knows how many people went to gulag, but not how many putsch CIA attempted during the Cold War. It is pathetic.
This is what i always argue with liberals and conservatives about and they still don't get it. So it's not just a left thing. From the cradle to the grave we are told that in order to be good upstanding citizens we must want the wife you hardly ever see or talk to cause you spend your days slaving away at some job you hate, the house in the burbs, the 2.5 cars, the 2.5 car garage, the 2.5 kids that you never see because of that job you hate and to work, be a good citizen and most of all be a good consumer by buying all that shit you will never have a need for.
The sad thing is that people accept this cycle of misery as how life is supposed to be. I have done everything i can to stay out of the suburban, get a wife you hate, have brats you hate, get a house and cars working at a job you hate 9-5 everyday of every week type of life. If i lived that kind of life i would fucking blow my head off!
So people not only need to wake up to the fact that they are little more then tools to be used up till the day they are no longer useful to the Capitalist machine and are thrown away into nursing homes and hospital beds to be tossed out like last weeks trash but they also need to be discontented enough with the social contract to actually make some changes to the system. Fortunately during the recent recession there has been alot of discontent but unfortunately there is not enough focused anger yet to do anything with it. All we have gotten out of it so far is occupy wall street which did exactly fuck all except perhaps wake a few of the on the fence people up to the fact that Capitalism did not need fixing as it was not broken Capitalism itself was/is the problem.
Unless people get pissed off enough that they are willing to fight, die and kill for their rights as opposed to begging for them nothing will change.
One word about the "they don't know anything/they don't think" thing: PROPAGANDA.
It might not be their fault... but it is their fault too.
Anyway, I have been saying for a long time that if the left wants to actually start a revolution they need people. LOTS OF PEOPLE. So I wonder how the hell they are going to turn so many unaware people of capitalism, communism etc to revolutionaries?
When I was younger I couldn't tell from communists that they were right, because I had absolutely no idea of what the hell they were talking about. They didn't use simple words.
My father (nationalist to the maximum god knows why) was telling me: "The nation must be first. You should give your life for the greek nation" and blah blah blah.
So when I was younger I was a nationalist and a racist. Why? Because my father was using simple words that made even the unlogical things seem logical, while on the other hand communists were using words like "revisionist", "proletarians" and some other words with 3000 syllables.
In conclusion the left must start realising that it needs some people that talk about difficult things in a very nice and understandable way because our future allies might be among the nationionalist and capitalist people that we despise. So let's all start talking slowly and without using difficult words and get some people to understand our ideas
I don't know about ya'll but I am in awe of Brendan M Cooney's introductory course on Capitalism. It is brilliant, entertaining and easily understandable. He breaks it down like no other and tells it through the medium of comedy, cartoons and even music. I mean imagine if people like him and others had more of a budget. The fact that he could transcend Marx's Kapital like that gives me hope that future generations can get it.
Another youtube little video that picked up steam was the Communist Manifestoon. Brilliant little montage of different Looney Tunes cartoos to the reading of the Communist Manifesto.
I mean as of now to most people Communists, Socialists and even left wing progressives look almost like a cult or something. They think who the hell is going to believe in communism in this day and age or socialism which is akin to fascism.
I mean we cannot see it, I know I cannot see it but that is because I have been buried in books, docs and lectures for the past five years and it's practically common sense to me. But to others it's like learning an entirely different language. Most people think I am talking about looking at the world this way as though I am talking religion or some new age eastern way of thinking.
It wasn't until I got my slightly liberal yet overall apathetic friend for watch Cooney's videos that he was like Holy Shit I live this!
I mean lets face it we live in a capitalist society and to adapt you gotta learn marketing, how to transcend the new media and get dare I say "innovative". We as Marxists have to learn the new media, the new language and the new aesthetics and become it.
In dialectical materialism or the leftist class analysis we have the tools to fashion some seriously good art, films, music, comics, videos, novels, etc. etc. etc. Tie the class analysis to something that is relevant, relatable and ground breaking entertainment and boom you have a movement. It happened once before, why can it not happen again?
Propaganda is definately important - getting out there are talking with people and having a say in more general political discussions going on around us in the class. But there's also a limit to this and I think the old IWW slogan of "Agitate, Educate (propaganda), Organize" is really a fuller picture of the tasks of working class radicals in relation to our co-workers and neighbors. Propaganda (PR) alone can only go so far because while our arguments may make some sense, in daily life people do experience the market not as a class but as competing induviduals - especially in the neoliberal era where we are basically pushed to do everything for ourselves. This is why even radicals are pulled back into capital's orbit IMO - it's just the daily reality. You don't have to like it, but you still have to pay rent and so this is going to compell people to work and do whatever they can induvidually to secure what they need to survive.
Movements and struggle can break people free of this in a general way. Of course where do movements and struggle come from subjectivly (objectivly they come from the conditions of capitalism)? That's where the trying to win arguments and win people to a revolutionary understanding comes in. You may only be able to convince a small number of people through one-on-one discssion and propagandizing, through media and internet memes. But a small number of class consious workers can have a bigger effect then in agitation (or in relating to and helping organize other "spontanious" uprisings) and sucessful struggles could then change people's perceptions of what is possible in a more general way feeding back into more agitation and organizing and sometimes this builds up into a movement.
People think movie films and video games are, well, fiction.When speaking to co-workers I am baffled at how little they know about certain things I expected were common sense by now. I just got through talking to a co-worker of mine who did not believe that the CIA has toppled democratically elected leaders and installed client dictators. This was too wild an assertion for him. I asked him if he plays any video games like Call of Duty or watched any movies like Zero Dark Thirty, and he said yes of course. Yet, even after all that he did not think it was real or based on any reality.
I know that some of it might not peak their interests but at this point now with so much information on the subjects out there even in popular culture that they would know something but its still just Hollywood fiction or uninteresting stuff to them.
I also want to note that being buried in books and documentaries day in and day out, we underestimate ourselves and what we have learned. A lot of people do not even have a basic foundation for half the stuff we talk about.
I do not mean to sound like a right winger but the left has no excuse to get out there and do something.
There is a thorough investigation of the involvement of US governamental agencies in the overthrowing of Allende, by the US Senate. Those are official US papers, signed by dangerous communists like Senator Barry Goldwater. They should be helpful in establishing that American intervention in Chile isn't a myth, and that, no, it wasn't an intervention against a crackpot dictator, but against a well established democratic regime. And given their official nature, they would be difficult to doubt or downplay, in the perspective of the average American patriot.
Luís Henrique
The point is that a lot of Americans don't even have a vase foundation t understand what you just said. They'll say politics isn't my thing when they really have no clue where to even begin discussing that.
That's a really sad situation. I mean they still talk in terms that are highly religious or idealist or conservative. It's just hard not to lose patience. I mean you have to make your way through several presuppositions before even making a point with them.
[FONT=Verdana]This isn't even just about history but a lot of things even basic scientific things. Americans are so skeptical they've become cynical and I've been questioned by many on facts I've read from scientific journals. For instance when citing a pediatricians findings on the behaviors of babies some co-worker began to challenge the notion that anyone could know what a baby was thinking based on it's behavior much less how anyone could know what he was even thinking and he could verbally explain it to you. I agree that it's good to have a healthy degree of skepticism but the overly individualist atomized way we see the world, Americans especially, we begin to question everything to death that it borders on an unhealthy cynicism. By his standards, I told him we might as well throw away zoology or what not. [/FONT]
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[FONT=Verdana]What I am trying to say is that regardless of the wealth of information out there many people do not even think scientifically or know how to analyze anything. They even rest a lot of their learning on very deeply held assumptions and the idea that they know best over experts (who have admittedly lied to them over the years too). [/FONT]
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[FONT=Verdana]Is this where the ML ideas about a vanguard began because I seriously do not know how to break through this barrier to speak to people to a certain point. It’s no wonder liberals are elitists and moderately intelligent libertarians think of themselves as God, and conservatives tend to be eugenics talking assholes that believe most people are just naturally born stooges. It’s a problem that would take years to fix. [/FONT]
