I’m not attacking people that aren’t yet radicalized enough, or have been newly radicalized but haven’t yet organized and/or read theory. It’s important to attack liberalism itself, so that the radicalized liberals are freed from the shackles of that ideology. I’m more than aware of my liberal past, and I have to kill the liberal in my head every day.
It’s extremely common for people to combine their pre-existing biases from growing up and being educated in, working in, and living within the confines of bourgeois cultural hegemony with newly radicalized left-wing politics. Without going back and confronting our pre-existing stances, we actually end up warping our new radicalized beliefs to conform to our deeply instilled beliefs about existing socialism. This is how people that genuinely believe themselves to be socialists perpetuate liberal lines of logic and historical narratives.
Instead, we combat this through long periods of self-criticism and confrontation. We have to take our new knowledge, such as that of dialectical and historical materialism, and intentionally confront our pre-existing beliefs that came from liberalism. We all have this process to go through, and it’s never “complete,” either. It took me a long time to actually come around to supporting existing socialism, even after I began reading theory, because my frame of analysis was ultimately still liberal, and therefore my interpretations of theory were forced to fit in neatly with my existing world view, rather than uprooting the weeds and planting new seeds.
This process of dialectical growth and inward reflection is difficult and lengthy, which is why those that are in support of socialism tend to be far more knowledgable, well-read, and aren’t typically strangers to real political organizing. It takes tremendous energy to not only learn new information, but re-analyze existing conclusions that had faulty logic.
A handy analogy is looking at it through a computer program. If you have version 1 of a program spit out a bunch of outputs, and then fix a critical bug for version 2, you can’t just only rely on the new outputs, you have to confront the old outputs made with bad code and go through the new process. This is where people get tripped up ideologically.
We aren’t at all immune to this, though, we aren’t special people for having overcome it, and we aren’t ever fully free of liberalism. We have to fight it daily.
part of where i’m coming from is that i mostly or even wholly agree with this message, however my understanding of effective propaganda tells me that the context of a message matters almost as much as the message itself. i appreciate and respect your desire to kill not just your inner liberal, put to also help others kill theirs, but what i see in this meme, and what the threadstarter saw as well, is an attack on a self organized resistance movement with a lot of potential to grow new leftists, kill inner liberals, and create an overall movement towards existing socialism.
my critique of your first comment was that i think it actually undermines your stated aims in your second comment because it creates the impression that the protestors should not be supported because it should be assumed the protestors are liberals.
is an attack on a self organized resistance movement with a lot of potential to grow new leftists, kill inner liberals, and create an overall movement towards existing socialism.
My goal is to connect that promising movement to the existing movement already organizing, to fold them into our shared movement. I appreciate your critique, but sometimes it is important for liberals to be exposed to genuine leftist theory and organizing work, otherwise they usually end up going back to brunch. I don’t condemn the protestors, but instead those that protest and then let that be the end of their political journey.
I’m not attacking people that aren’t yet radicalized enough, or have been newly radicalized but haven’t yet organized and/or read theory. It’s important to attack liberalism itself, so that the radicalized liberals are freed from the shackles of that ideology. I’m more than aware of my liberal past, and I have to kill the liberal in my head every day.
It’s extremely common for people to combine their pre-existing biases from growing up and being educated in, working in, and living within the confines of bourgeois cultural hegemony with newly radicalized left-wing politics. Without going back and confronting our pre-existing stances, we actually end up warping our new radicalized beliefs to conform to our deeply instilled beliefs about existing socialism. This is how people that genuinely believe themselves to be socialists perpetuate liberal lines of logic and historical narratives.
Instead, we combat this through long periods of self-criticism and confrontation. We have to take our new knowledge, such as that of dialectical and historical materialism, and intentionally confront our pre-existing beliefs that came from liberalism. We all have this process to go through, and it’s never “complete,” either. It took me a long time to actually come around to supporting existing socialism, even after I began reading theory, because my frame of analysis was ultimately still liberal, and therefore my interpretations of theory were forced to fit in neatly with my existing world view, rather than uprooting the weeds and planting new seeds.
This process of dialectical growth and inward reflection is difficult and lengthy, which is why those that are in support of socialism tend to be far more knowledgable, well-read, and aren’t typically strangers to real political organizing. It takes tremendous energy to not only learn new information, but re-analyze existing conclusions that had faulty logic.
A handy analogy is looking at it through a computer program. If you have version 1 of a program spit out a bunch of outputs, and then fix a critical bug for version 2, you can’t just only rely on the new outputs, you have to confront the old outputs made with bad code and go through the new process. This is where people get tripped up ideologically.
We aren’t at all immune to this, though, we aren’t special people for having overcome it, and we aren’t ever fully free of liberalism. We have to fight it daily.
part of where i’m coming from is that i mostly or even wholly agree with this message, however my understanding of effective propaganda tells me that the context of a message matters almost as much as the message itself. i appreciate and respect your desire to kill not just your inner liberal, put to also help others kill theirs, but what i see in this meme, and what the threadstarter saw as well, is an attack on a self organized resistance movement with a lot of potential to grow new leftists, kill inner liberals, and create an overall movement towards existing socialism.
my critique of your first comment was that i think it actually undermines your stated aims in your second comment because it creates the impression that the protestors should not be supported because it should be assumed the protestors are liberals.
My goal is to connect that promising movement to the existing movement already organizing, to fold them into our shared movement. I appreciate your critique, but sometimes it is important for liberals to be exposed to genuine leftist theory and organizing work, otherwise they usually end up going back to brunch. I don’t condemn the protestors, but instead those that protest and then let that be the end of their political journey.