I’m frankly surprised several chapos can’t tell the difference. I was a brainwormed lib for almost the first decade of my adult life (with a couple brief conservative phases in there) before I fully radicalized and started drawing revolutionary conclusions. Most of the working-class people we’re trying to reach have probably been liberals-by-default for at least a few years and will have at least a little ideological baggage to work through, even the young workers most receptive to radical politics.
If you’re still in high school/undergrad and already a hardened Marxist because you paid attention and learned from the mistakes of the millennial left (Occupy, DSA/Bernie Dem-entryism, etc.) then that’s great! But most people aren’t going to reach the same correct conclusions so quickly even with additional life experience under capitalism, because they have a lot of shit to unlearn before a Marxist message even begins to make sense. Our job is to reach those who’ve made mistakes and are willing to self-correct, listen, and learn once they realize they’ve been had, and to plant seeds in the minds of people who might not be willing to hear us until life happens to them several years later.
Exactly. I didn’t consider myself a communist until I was 25 I think, so 2014, and that was because a friend on Tumblr who was himself a former Obama defender started openly calling himself one and normalized it for me. I had been a soft socdem before that, even supporting Dennis Kucinich halfheartedly in 2008, but pretty unquestionably supported Obama after that (naively believing he supported my values). My post-2016 existential crisis lead to a brief revert into liberalism (due to being exposed to enoughsandersspam garbage) and honestly I’m still learning new shit and revising my ideology to this day such that I find it hard to really consider myself to have been genuinely a Marxist even a couple years ago. My own experience as a former liberal who essentially just needed permission to call himself a communist/socialist/Marxist makes the people who say shit like “liberals cant be radicalized” extremely perplexing to me.
