One of the most common questions we get is whether or not we should “hide our power level” when it comes to our political positions. In this video, we look at the words and practice of Karl Marx, Fred Hampton, Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, and Harvey Milk to tackle the question: should we hide our true positions as we build our movement?
In a way you need to “ease yourself into it”. If you’re on here arguing with people about the finer points of the Iranian response to Israeli aggression or Chinese economic policy, it’s hard to shift gears to defusing liberal brainworms when you go offline. In this case it can be easier to just put your succdem hat on since you’ll at least be in some proximity to one another ideologically.
I’d almost say you can still call yourself a communist and argue from a socdem perspective, but that’s probably just confusing to people in the long term so actually don’t.
Yeah, I guess easing myself in/getting practice is the only way I can get better, like after the fact I can think of so many things that would be more productive to say. I have one friend in particular that I really want to work in who could be good practice. I wrote a 15 page paper on the history of Palestine starting back in the days of Canaan, basically. He read it not knowing I wrote it and I think it really framed his position from the outstart of Al-Aqsa Flood, he owns a keffiyeh now. So I should maybe pull out that card when we talk next time “hey I completely convinced you on paper, listen to me dammit”
Well you’ve probably noticed it takes a long time, you end up dropping knowledge over the course of months till it starts to “click” for people. I wouldn’t stress having all the right things to say all at once cause they can’t internalize all that anyway.
I think once thing that sets socialists apart from liberals on the ideological conversation front is that liberals retreat and want everything to be “a personal belief” etc (like religion and such). They don’t like to be wrong about anything ever, so everything needs to have studies and committees (especially when legislating) to ensure no wrong decision is made, even though the result is a hollow, ineffective, too-late decision at the end of the process.
Socialists will say and do a lot of things, and when we are 80-90% correct it’s not bad at all (just gotta clean up after anything that went wrong along the way). To the common liberal it shows. That trust is built quickly and people who have a materialist intuition can quickly rise to be leaders of their community or organization (in whatever form that may be). We tend to be “correct too early”, so we need to give the world time to catch up, but people do notice.
…just a few more thoughts, hope it’s useful to you…
That is useful, gotta remember that turning the tides is a protracted process and I gotta be patient!