Reform UK is clearly winning over the minds of class unconscious workers. One of them is a young relative of mine. I’d love to have a talk in future, in a good setting, to help the lad out of this reactionary path he’s headed now.
It’s the typical stuff: immigrants committing sexual violence, stealing jobs, out breeding the “whites”, coming into the country illegally, given all the money, not working, benefit exploiting, being uncivilised savages etc.
I’ve heard the co-workers are enforcing this reactionary world view. Obviously I cannot barge in to the workplace, and change the environment, so I’m expecting this will take quite a bit longer than one afternoon tea lasts.
I believe he’ll be a fine lad, if he doesn’t fall any further, and finds a way out. I just feel I shouldn’t let him to dive deeper. There is already plenty of fascist propaganda to dispel.
How would you, dear online comrades, go about setting a young lumpen lad on the path to gain class consciousness?
PS. Title in the tune of Drunken Sailor.
“Perceived” is doing some work there.
Making people perceive benefits that aren’t real can also be called a form of brainwashing.
And that perception is rooted in reality. Western labour collaborate against the global south because they materially benefit from this exploitation.
We are talking about this in the context of attempting to convince someone off their fascist sympathies. I offered a mutually acceptable pragmatism in the context of persuasion with a focus on class analysis, which I would like to stress was my original point, but you want to double down on idealist concepts of indoctrination. I am not going to entertain Western Apologism.
If your paradigm of persuasion does not evolve past what a liberal can offer then it is not my burden to bear to rob the oppressor and his class collaborators of their agency.
Do you just… not believe false consciousness exists?
To choose to engage in such idealism warrants an insulation from the consequences that only orientialism could afford. The prejudice that allows the oppressor and his collaborator this leeway derives from a material privilege to accomodate such an apologism.
There are people who kill themselves and their families by refusing to mask. They don’t seem insulated from consequences to me?
They live in the privilege that COVID disproportionately affect people of colour due to inequal access to healthcare and comorbidities reflecting wealth distrubutions.
I wonder why that escaped you.
I wonder what the differences in lived experiences and demographics who read that Redsails article and say yeah that better reflects their reality versus those who feel they feel better served still by liberal concepts of indoctrination and brainwashing putting the ideal before the material.