this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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How to "deprogram" people? (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 2 weeks ago by borschtisgarbo@lemmygrad.ml to c/asklemmygrad@lemmygrad.ml
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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?

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[–] MarxMadness@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 2 weeks ago

Our comrades must understand that ideological remolding involves long-term, patient and painstaking work, and they must not attempt to change people’s ideology, which has been shaped over decades of life, by giving a few lectures or by holding a few meetings.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch13.htm

The key is that this stuff takes time. We're competing with not only "ideology which has been shaped over decades of life," but also the constant reinforcement of that ideology by every corporate media outlet and every U.S. public institution. There's going to be a lot of backsliding -- expecting it lessens the understandable frustration.

Preventing that backsliding is so important that, to me, the best entrypoint into leftist thinking is media criticism (Manufactured Consent, Inventing Reality, Citations Needed, etc.).