Someone else in the comments here described this as a bernie level radicalizer, not theory or accurate or something to strive for, but a great intro to radicalization
I don’t buy it. I’m having perfectly good success radicalising Americans with socialism, just socialism. A segue is not required.
My anger might be seriously increased because I’m actually from Europe, and perhaps when I engage with Americans that’s partially why they respond fine to socialist arguments instead of social democratic, but whatever it is this bothers me a lot. I do not have any problems convincing people to be socialists.
Breadtube are doing the whole social democratic routine and have you seen what awful fucking audiences it is creating? Radlibs. It creates radlibs. They haven’t moved anywhere in 3 fucking years and they’re only becoming more and more anti anything to the left of them. They’re not good. Trying to go the segue route is a bad idea.
Gravel are doing great pushing actual socialist arguments. They should just continue that. I will stop spreading them if they go down this route because it’s legitimately not the right path to go down.
I know what you’re saying, but I doubt you’re radicalizing those folks with premade speeches that you deliver over and over to each of them, but instead each radicalization is tailor made.
I agree that this is not up to par with individual praxis, but you can’t scale that up effectively without concessions. I think this video will do more good in it’s current state than if it were more hardline, more radical, and more acceptable to us. I’m sure there’s some way to make it work, but videos like this I can show to my parents and them supplement/ correct it myself, where harder stuff would put them off
I think I do pretty much the same routine every time. I typically start with teaching people that all socialists want communism. This blows their brains because they can’t believe it, then they learn more and realise it’s true. Every segment of socialism whether it’s communists, demsocs, syndacalists or anarchists wants to achieve a communist society, it’s just a matter of disagreement over how to get there.
From that point onwards I teach them what capitalism actually is. I teach them the marxist definitions of classes within capitalism. I teach them the basic function of exploitation under capitalism using landlording as a simple example of a capitalist exploiting a worker with property ownership then extrapolate that out into business owners too.
I send them on their way with the recommendation they get into several communities, they then learn more about it in their own time.
Repeated interactions and touching on international issues as often as possible lead them towards internationalist attitudes. They become proper comrades.
My experience has been that it’s easier to convert young people from conservative american families than young people from liberal families. Possibly because the conservative young people have had their parents calling the democrats bad the whole time so you don’t have to break that down at all. Their families also intuitively understand that something is fucky with the system but don’t understand what it is.
