It’s really just a progression of finding out how fucking evil the ruling class is right? Like learning how many people the US government has fucking murdered for bananas and shit really pushed me from rad lib soc dem to ML. Or is there more to it than that? Because if it is that simple we need a good way to agitate that better that doesn’t require a fuck ton of extracurricular reading.
There are several things I have discovered that are pre-requisites.
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They must learn what capitalism is from a class perspective. A system built on property relations where one class produces value for another.
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They must learn they are a prole and accept this.
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They must learn they are being oppressed and accept this.
This provides rudimentary class consciousness, it’s at its most basic level and is the starting point for the “baby leftist”. They can now learn basic uncontroversial marxist theory.
To go further:
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They must have their perceptions of the world challenged. Something must trigger or upset them and it must be about a topic they thought they understood. They must be brought to question what they know, and by extension they will then become open to re-learning everything they know about all topics in the world. This is the starting point that is necessary to start producing an ML.
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They must become anti-media.
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They must learn about figures that are the most controversial and they must actually engage with the theory they wrote. Mao, Stalin, etc.
Steps 4-6 are slow and take many months.
It is very important to instil in them a rabid appetite for learning early on. One of the phrases I often tell people is to “Never ever stop the journey, it does not end, there is ALWAYS more to learn. Your political journey should never reach any end point.”
There is also the Liberal PB Class-Traitor route, but that’s somewhat different (in that 1. and 3. are true but 2. isn’t, so 4. needs to be more jarring), and the HB Class-Traitor route is different again (in that they already know how the system works and who it’s for, they just have to stop thinking that’s good, or recognise it’s going to collapse.)
There are a lot of multipliers too, like being part of an ostracized group will make the progression a lot faster and often fulfill those first three prerequisites a lot quicker. Like being trans, or disabled, an immigrant, etc. Trans people in particular will come out of the gate already questioning implicit social norms and structures, already hitting point 4 sometimes before they even hit those first three. In my experience, things like having been arrested or having been homeless also make a person much more open to listening. Problem is it’s often an openness to listen to absolutely anyone who can provide an alternate explanation.
Also I don’t know how to address this one, but I’ve been around leftists online and in real life orgs and there’s a massive proclivity for the members to be kind of bookish, meek types. Maybe that’s just where we’re at culturally or that’s just the only avenue for learning and growth. Well ok, or more directly, leftists are a bunch of absolute nerds for the most part. I don’t know if that’s a problem that needs to be addressed or if it’s just how things go, but I don’t know how many favors it does for things like union/party/org recruitment. Like the things you described in steps 4-6 are things that I’ve only ever seen highly educated folk do, either self-educated or through academics. Not sure how to say what I’m thinking. Maybe it’s there needs to be a more universal way of getting our point across, but maybe we’re just not powerful enough yet to do that.
For me I think step 4 and 5 came first. I was always suspicious of the media and nearly fell into the CNN FAKE NEWS trump pipeline, but then someone introduced me to manufacturing consent and my view got flipped. Then my hatred for the media grew more and more. I went down the reading Chomsky route, and imperialism was my next big leftist talking point. Chomsky then turned into Parenti, and my journey was ready to begin.
Also, a bailiff came and kicked our door down over an unpaid parking ticket, and then I went to work at an Amazon warehouse. I’m sure that also did a lot for me.
Yeah certain things can probably happen in distinctly any order, this is just generally the approach I take with people because trying to start a lib out with distrust of the media is significantly harder than teaching them what capitalism is. Most people are actually very willing to learn the basic fundamentals of capitalism because literally nobody has ever taught them, not once. When you ask people “what is capitalism?” you get quizzical looks of confusion like “well obviously I know the answer to that… but why don’t you tell me anyway?”.
When they learn what capitalism is and it is put in the language of class it becomes the foundation of everything they know in society and they become incapable of criticising society without relating it back to the class relations of capitalism. It’s an incredibly easy starting point.
Would probably be made much harder if liberals ever even tried to teach people what capitalism is but they deliberately do not. The fact that they glaringly avoided teaching capitalism to people becomes the basis for distrust of liberals going forwards.
