It just feels so hard. People constantly complain about their material conditions, yet when someone comes to them with Marx-Engels, they immediately brush it off. They are more keen on falling to mysticism and far-right ideology, in regards to “solutions”. I know you cannot convince people by debating them, you can only make yourself feel good when you “win”, but otherwise you are likely only making them less likely to latch on to socialism. Still, I don’t know how to approach this. How do I convince them? Do I constantly, in every conversation about how the grocery prices are too high, mention the theories of Marx? Do I just sit around until they, on their own accord, pick up Capital or even just the Manifesto?
Whaddoido?
Others covered details well. I just wanted to add a reminder on the perspective of being the one trying to do it, to remember that none of us are above mistakes or hold all of the correct knowledge and experience in our singular hands, and that trying to do it piecemeal, without a program, is always going to be harder and especially in the context of individualism, is going to be more susceptible to falling into traps of arrogance that others should be listening because “we know better.” To attempt an analogy, you could imagine it’s something like that people in our circles are teachers and/or experienced in the field, but the institutions of the status quo (assuming living under a dictatorship of capital, etc.) do not recognize that knowledge and experience as meaning anything and don’t give credentials for it, and so most people don’t take it seriously at the offset. Instead, they will tend to view you as being an equal in the subject matter, if not lesser depending on if they start to hear you say certain things they have been conditioned to associate with crackpots and extremists. So it’s important to remember that not only is your personal knowledge and experience limited, and vulnerable to mistakes, but that other people often won’t even be viewing you as having knowledge and experience in the subject that has more relevance, importance, or academic authority than their own.
And to be fair, why should they? If you have not struggled with them, seen what they deal with in the day to day and worked to make improvements with them, built some level of trust that you have their best interests at heart and vice-versa. Without that, it may look like you are asking for them to question and reject a lot of pre-existing notions for no apparent gain, introducing more chaos into their life rather than stability. Individualism and its consequences in general has done a lot of damage, and I think it’s very easy to lose track of what it’s doing if immersed in it. This part kinda goes beyond the topic alone, but individualism is something I think needs being more broadly understood in the western “left”, as its own form of consciousness to have. So far, it is something where either I’m missing important perspectives people are already regularly sharing on it, or it would seem it’s under-represented in the part it plays in how difficult it can be to organize and move people ideologically.