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I live in a fairly conservative area that’s working class.
People intuitively understand when you describe how much capitalism sucks because they’re living it.
If you say “capitalism sucks”, you are going to get reactionary thought and action. You have to say things in a way to engage their experience and understanding without tripping the propagandized brain worms.
If you can do that, you’ll find that they’re primed to reject capitalism, they just don’t know it yet.
“These rich fuckers don’t give a shit about us, but they have no problems helping each other out.”
“Everybody’s boss is the same, they want you to work harder, more hours, and do it all for less money. They want us to be able to barely survive.”
“The only way we can make them change is to all work together. They’ll screw over each one of us individually, but if we’re together they’ll know it’s actually them who needs us.”
To my endless frustration leftwing thought and policy is popular until someone knows it’s left wing.
I spend so much time talking to people and skirting around terminology/avoiding describing things in clear terms because they set off alarm bells.
As you say everyone gets that we’re screwed and pitted against each other while dipshits up top have their snouts in the trough. There is a spectrum on how far we ought to go to address this but it’s also really hard to get any action out of people because they’ll nod along until you try point them at a union or something and then the propaganda kicks in.
You have to say things in a way to engage their experience and understanding
This! You can’t teach someone without appealing to their lived experiences and current understanding of the material conditions.
If you say “capitalism sucks”, you are going to get reactionary thought and action. You have to say things in a way to engage their experience and understanding without tripping the propagandized brain worms.
Extending your metaphor, this is what your average American’s brain looks like. There is a lot of propaganda and social conditioning working against you here.
I know the gif isn’t from Entrament, but it reminded me of this.
Extending even farther, there’s nothing especially different about the American brain. Propaganda and social conditioning are natural to human cognitive bias and on the other side of the coin is our ability to learn.
Now the environment of conditioning and propaganda may be another story.
Shame is also important. Laugh at these people. Call them idiots and treat them like children when they start talking about politics. Shame is a great motivator and was a big part of my transition to anti-capitalism. Not joking.
That’s close, but not quite correct
Guilt helps people change. Shame gets them to more deeply entrench themselves into their current behaviors because they’re going to seek out ways to alleviate that shame through social connections that alleviate the pain of shame. The thing to understand is that guilt is a feeling of wrong doing, and shame is a feeling of lacking social value. When deprogramming someone from their previously held propagandized views, you have to give them an avenue to travel from their current position to where they are going. They need the opportunity to apologize and make amends. This is the process for atonement.
All that said, you also have to not give out too many chances. That just lets people continue to perpetuate their harm. If someone shows no sign of being willing to go through the atonement process you have to find ways to keep your community safe from the things that they do. How to do that is a discussion for another forum. Mostly in person discussions in mutual aid or community defense space, as this process is also context dependent.
In my experience belittling and shaming disenfranchised people results in them harboring deeper resentment.
Obviously mileage varies. It worked for you, but not everyone is willing or able to do self crit in response to their beliefs being attacked.
Many times people need to come to the shameful realization themselves.
To all the Americans waiting for Trump to leave and things to go back to normal…
The world is never going to trust you while the half of the country who voted for him is still alive
By “the world” you probably mean US allies so like 8% of the world by population. The real world didn’t trust the US well before Trump.
That’s one of my main worries with the current situation. That Trump will leave office or die and everything will go back to ‘normal’, because all the issues supposedly disappeared with him. All the while the USA will continue terrorizing the EU, bombing civilians and mass murdering their own citizens.
Trump or no Trump, the current USA needs to go. Abolish the federal government, return sovereignty to all individual states, pay reparations to all countries harmed by American imperialism, prosecute all oligarchs to the fullest extent of the law.
your political system is the problem
capitalism
Forgive my ignorance: isn’t capitalism an economic system?
From a classical economics (1700s) perspective, yes. However in the 1800s economists, political scientists, and philosophers started seeing the division in how we as a society study economics and politics as separate entities as a mistake and started analyzing groups of people through the lens of how their economy and politics effected eachother. It is to the benefit, however, to the capital holding class to sustain the divide and to never engage with the idea that the structure of civilization as we know it fundamentally exists to create a tier-based class system in which a small number of people own everything and produce nothing, and a large class of people own nothing and produce everything
That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation!
Humans are the problem
Do you not think you’re able to improve and do better by others? If you do, don’t you think others are human as well and can also do so? If you don’t, don’t you think you should be more ashamed about it?
This kind of misanthropy is either pointless doomerism or telling on yourself.
Nope. Marx already covered this. People are a product of their material reality. When people get desperate their morals can be warped. You give people what they need and want, crime drops. 99.9% of people just want to live their life in peace when given the option.
Google dialectical materialism.
Oligarchs are the problem. They are creating the system, where small group of people have all the power.
If you look in to the history, it was always like that. They would change the name of the system, but it works the same way. From monarchy to religious regimes, from capitalism to other authoritarian regimes. From time to time they will use left wing slogans i.e. Nazis was pretending to be socialists.
Look where’s the power. Who has it. If it’s in a hands of a small group, you’re fucked.
Socialism solves all of that.
How we can get there? How we can create true socialist country, without oligarchs, state capitalism or authoritarian emperor?
Authoritarianism of the proletariat is required. It sucks and would be cool if it could be done peacefully, but that is how you deal with oligarchs. Re-education centers for the reactionary masses, and the chopping block for the oligarchs.
Keep waiting for your perfect moral socialism while they slowly kill us all…
How you want to choose your new leaders, how do you want to make decisions? There’s not a lot of freedom in authoritarian.
If through the democracy, voting, discussions, then you system is opposite of authoritarian, it’s a direct democracy and it’s somewhere in the anarchy, syndicalism area (I like that idea).
If power will be given to group of people, how you want to choose them, how you want to take power from them after some time. Power corrupt people, and this is leading to authoritarian state.
And giving a lot of power to group of people creates new rulling class. How do you want to prevent it?
All forms of government and all forms of state are inherently authoritarian. You live under authoritarianism right now…
What matters is who is doing the authoritarianism. China has figured this out and I find their political model to be favourable.
China well known for state capitalism. Lack of basic human rights, genocides, and so on?
Dude. You know that in china regular person have almost sero power of what’s going on?
You cannot call a country free and rulled by the people, when there are laogai, hundreds or more of them.
Also china is closed ally of north Korea, totalitarian regime, with small rulling class and starving people.
China is just better in capitalism than neoliberal countries, but this is not make it great.
lol genocide? Don’t tell me you fell for Uyghur “genocide” propaganda in 2026… You got some work to do still my friend.
Lack of human rights, where everyone gets a home, free healthcare, education, affordable healthy food, and nobody dies in the street. Even “vagrants” that are unemployed are taken care of.
Compared to America…
You will literally never see the above image in China. I bet if told you this was China and these were Uyghur Muslims you would outraged.
People of China absolutely have power. Corporations are required to have 5 year plans that provably better the country and its citizens. Corporations even have credit scores to keep them in check, while America only subjects its citizens to a similar system.
In America you are free to die. That’s it.
