We’re supposed to be policy 1st. And yet I don’t understand the obsession with being a honorable samurai that plays by tradition. Why can’t a sheep put on the wolf’s mane when they’re greatly outnumbered and bide their time?
It’s not like the liberals would notice. They only know ideas. They’re still propagandizing shit like recycling, even though the trash bin is all thrown in the same truck and the bins with 3/4 holes aren’t even separated, same as it was 20 years ago. They should be really easy to manipulate, especially when truth is on your side, but like at least make them paranoid and unable to sleep at night.
This is too bold of a claim to take at face value or incorporate into a strategy. I don’t think it’s very true either. Rights are already a liberal trap for those who want emancipation, liberation, or revolution to be re-colonized by the imperial state. Liberals believe in rights because it is a system that uses the ills of imperialism to justify said imperial system. If a socialist told me they were using this strategy with success, I would assume nothing beyond their labor being co-opted by empire.
IMO this is a fundamental problem, and it indeed rings true that communists need to be quite honest about everything we say about what we believe. Especially when engaging with things that are ostensibly agreeable between communists and liberals. We do not have an advantage on this terrain, and we must differentiate ourselves or else we will lose ourselves.
Deception is not our chief weapon against the ruling class either. Our weapon is realizing and actualizing that we don’t need to appeal to any power but our own, and with that power we can have our way with the world. I believe this power will not grow by trying to trick liberals into being communists.
You make a good point about rights. In particular, I think of the USian fetishizing of the constitution. There are plenty who believe in it to an almost religious degree yet are more reactionaries than they are something resembling communists. And they don’t need to be communist to believe in it because the liberal framework does have belief in individual liberties and rights to a degree; in fact, it tries to have this exist alongside capitalism, in spite of how contradictory this can end up getting.
I tend to think that in the US context, and possibly similar western contexts in other countries too, communists need to be wary of playing into “you believe in rights too? yeah, let’s go” and instead focus on teaching people about power and where it derives from. That the reason the so-called rights keep falling short of the seeming ideal on paper is not because “humans are imperfect” or “the system is corrupt”, but because the system of power, who controls the means of production and distribution, is intentionally oriented toward an exploitative ruling elite, not toward public good. And that liberalism is designed not for the purpose of the common public good, but for legitimizing and sanitizing this model of an exploitative ruling elite. “Trickle down economics,” in spite of being said by a member of the US republican party, is I think a good example of liberal philosophy. The idea is that the ruling elite are creating something of value, which is then passed down to the greater public; instead of the reality, which is that the greater public is creating something of value and the ruling elite is seizing the majority of gain from the greater public for personal use. So it is not trickle down, but rather siphon up. I know I’m preaching to the choir on that, but I wanted to go through the thought process of it and why the distinction is so important.