He talks to the working man as if they were an academic who had the time to study leftist ideologies

This makes me cringe every time. What words do you use when talking to non leftists? Even explaining the difference between private and personal prosperity sounds off putting in my option let alone some autismo starting a sentence with "the bourgeoisie."

...

get out you college kid larper piece of shit. Leftism isn't some super sekrit obscure death cult. Use your fucking head

...

I use the same words I use with everyone else, including technical terms like "means of production," "proletariat," and "bourgeoisie."

Also, you first explain the basics "bourgies are those that have the means of production, factories, corporations and so on. Proletariat is you, who has to work to live and you make more than you are paid for and so on".

It's not that hard you know.

1: I don't or have ever been to college
2: That is my fucking point, people who use terms like bourgeoisie to non leftists alienate them and make it seem like some secret club
3: Learn to fucking read you double nigger

not really no

Bourgies isn't an alienating term.

Nomenklatura, surplus value, labor theory of value, spectacle and so on, sure. they are.

If workers 100 years ago could understand what the Socialists told them, why shouldn't today's workers be able to do the same?

Personally I would still not use that term even when explaining due to negative connotations of "oh your an evil communist who wants me to agree with you so you can be a dictator."

I've seen people walk away from anarchists when they say propriety is theft.


t. collage kid


*if SOME workers

The ragged trousered philanthropist has a good show of what happens when you try to introduce radical ideas at first, starting someone off with words Bourgeoisie gives bad connotation right off the bat even if disagrees on this part.

Most people I talk to are very careful when discussing politics unless they are a close friend, to the point they get mad at someone voting for conservative over labour or vice versa but never actually engaging in discussion with them just back talking.

I guess I just feel that people are very on edge when talking about politics and using uncommon words that need explaining that already have connotations with death camps and dictatorships is not the best way to start talking about leftist stuff.

Use the language of self determination, localism direct democracy ect. Show how many local problems could be fixed if people could just come together and do it(the destroyed busstation, the broken street, the leaking school roof, the lack of bike stands..)

Explain how workers would never outsource themselves, how power is based on economic power, how the manager would never mistreat the other workers when he would be a member of the same community.

Adress the issues that they can relate to, to few cheap flats and houses? Workers building it for themselves without the need for speculation, not getting thrown out because people never throw themselves out of the places they own collectivly.

Fear of automation? Workers would make their own lives easier, and maybe transition to other jobs.

Most poorer people are constanly worried about their economic wellbeing. Show them how now having to worry about their ecomic wellbeing will grant the the greatest freedom.

Most people are stil scarred by the crisis, promising no crisis like that ever again is a great approach.

And never mention socialism, communism. You can use everything else; worker/community owned means of production/businesses/production places and other slogans.

I use ruling class instead of capitalist class
Worker instead of proletarian
Democratic control of the workplace instead of socialism (so that people don't get it confused with social democracy)
Small business owner instead of petit-bourgeoisie
Stuff like that

Cause back then, they were the union leaders and they were part of the workers.

Today it's either academics, or people that eirther in college or in the reserve army of labor, and unions are pretty much corrupted and shit.

See I like all of those but democratic controlled I need to figure out how to say it better, since whenever I say it people seem to get iffy about feeling they would have to do extra work and there would be a bigger risk of failure thinking that the CEOs are needed to keep it running despite the manger is enough to keep a store running.


Given me things to think about thanks.

That's a very correct thing to do, actually!

...

Even if it isn't, I still don't use it because a lot of people just assume it means "upper class" and thus leads to misunderstandings

...

You shouldn't be allowed to talk at all. You should be hanging from a tree. You will, in time.

...

I thought epic helicopter memes were the hot topic on Holla Forums right now
This is way more boring

she was too perfect

Woo I love rope day! :DDDD

if he lets go will he die?

It's hard, because the average person in my country (greece) is extremely uneducated about theory, and many ppl are adhd kiddos whose attention span you cannot keep more than 15s without hand gestures and tone changes.

what i try to do when im serious about discussing socialism and the status quo in general with something is to take the dialectic approach by starting from what they believe is true. if they are apolitical its pretty easy to go from a general sense of "somethings wrong" and "the rich get richer the poor get poorer" to explaining radical left politics. if they're a conservative it means they're generally spooked and have some issues about sex usually, as they are also most likely homophobes etc. There I also try the same approach. The hardest ones are the liberals, since they lack the "something is wrong" feeling and usually support the status quo. They are usually stout institutionalists, and there is no convincing them otherwise since most of them are vested into party politics as well.

I live in greece, the CP here has a steady 5-7% of the vote but most young people turn to anarchism which uses far less theory in it's rhetoric. The CP gets accused many times of what people call "wooden speech", which is actually nothing more than discourse. Problem is that capitalism has rendered the worker very non-susceptible to discourse, since everyone and their mother has some opinion now which is usually a mix of nationalism and conspiracy theories, at least that's the situation in greece with most of the working force. funny thing is that even though i don't support the tankie cp, i have been to their rallies and their speeches are as dumbed down as possible, with no mentions to marxist terms. for example bourgeoisie (which in greek is the same word as urban resident) is often replaces with plutocrat, which while sounding more complex to you, is actually considered a simple word in greek since the roots are greek (πλούτος = wealth κρατώ = hold).

and of course, i don't ever associate with fascist murderers

It would be extremely painful

Because Porky has made a very deliberate and concerted effort to scrap public education, debase political discourse and drown the collective consciousness in white noise.

Well, syntrofe, that's because the KKE is stuck up in the 50s and any alternative can not be taken seriously, as, again, people don't want to actually deal with the problem that is capitalism.

Oh, and KKE is the worse example of not being able to connect with the worker, because you don't want to abandon your fancy words.

for you, pussy

yet the left in greece, despite all the sectarianism that has historically plagued it (google Ο.Π.Λ.Α. , tankie death squads that hunted trots during ww2) and still plagues it, is pretty united when it comes to shit like unions and strikes.

KKE is really an amazing phenomena. They are ideologically jaded in the 50s, yet this is what has preserved it at that 5% throughout the years and kept it ideologically marxist without syriza tier revisionism and eventual reformism. The problem with kke is that most of its members, especially it's youth, don't understand theory at all and just parrot the party line while the upper strata is composed of professional ideologists and all ideological discussion (from what i know at least) happens behind closed doors. This it self is an omen to the kind of socialism kke would instate if it came in power. This, combined with their stalinistic views on many things like gay marriage, nationalism and religion, turned me off from joining them.
The trots are cool though, and the youth (however small) is ideologically educated and run marxist libraries etc. But at 0.00000001%, all they can do is support kke in strikes etc while shouting bout trotsky at people that don't even understand or care about the trot-stalin split. hell even most kke youth don't, when there were local elections for the representatives of my uni's dormitory residing students and a girl stopped me with a flier for the kke i told her i don't support stalinists and she looked at me with a blank stare as if i had spoken chinese

Yes, especialy when all other unions have strike starting in X and PAME (KKEs Union) starts in Y.

Cause only the party is right, everyone else is wrong. KKE.

Just use words and sentences that any person would understand, and simultaneously gauge their level of understanding as you talk.

Start simple, and you might find you can get more complicated. Still stick to normal terminology and phraseology, but you can begin with things like:

"CEOs and people at the top of the biggest industries" instead of "capitalists". Then if that strikes a chord, and they seem to be understanding the points you are making, slip into phrases like "owners of large-scale capital" instead when describing these people, soon you can use the word "capitalists" and they won't bat an eyelid.

Talk about "working people" but frequently interchange it with "working class people" and then "the working class". Always discuss real-world political and social situations in such a way as that a clear class picture is put forward.

Start with phrases like "economic crisis", and slowly introduce "capitalist economic crisis" until you can just call it "capitalist crisis". Explain the causes for capitalist crisis; educate yourself economically if you cannot. And learn to explain it in layman's terms. Don't just read Marx and repeat it, but relate it to current events and current economic issues.

It isn't difficult. Democracy in the workplace is something that is obviously good. You don't need any big words to exaplain it

speaking of, RD Wolfe does a great job of this.

CEOs aren't capitalists. This is one of the most irksome things about liberal and leftist rhetoric. We're not against "the rich", that would be missing the forest for the trees, we're against the institution of private property and the exploitation and inequality that it perpetrates.

The CEO is technically a worker, albeit a grossly overpaid one, he does not own the means of production; he is not exploiting appropriating the surplus value of his workers labour.

You came here, we didn't come there

And absolutely nobody wants to argue for hours over politics neither party will change, no matter how much some dubious individuals here push it that we should

We should be working to improve conditions, that includes your conditions, not trying to convince people with dumb fuck memes and condescending appeal to Trump voters about how working class they are and how the left needs them. Same goes with liberal democrats.

CEOs are generally given equity as part of their compensation so wouldn't that make them capitalists?

Many CEOs are given shares in their company, and this makes them capitalists. But they are still (typically) otherwise paid a wage for their job.

Satraps aren't kings but that doesn't make them peasants either.

Stop being an edgy autist.

What I love is that there is no way to win. You're either seen as talking over the working man's head, or your talking down to them.

I'm 27, have a modest wage and little for future job prospects, as well as no completed post secondary. I'm not exactly ivory tower.

ughhh. excuse my terrible spacing please.

Bourgeoisie = Capitalist Class, Ruling Class, "The 1%", "The Elite"
Proletariat = Working Class, Workers, "The People"
Petite-Bourgeoisie = self-employed, small proprietors (avoid the words "middle class" or "small business owners", as most people incorrectly identify as "middle class" and "small business" conjures up romantic "mom and pop" imagery)
Socialism = socialism, there's no point in concealing this, even in the US the taboo is quickly disappearing, but talk of cooperatives is often appealing to the average person, so do it
Capitalism = capitalism, though for libertarians and liberals you may find it helpful to use the words "corporatism" or "corporatocracy"
Communism = there's no single phrase that can conjure up an accurate image and break through Cold War propaganda, but talking about automation, post-scarcity, reduction of labor hours, classlessness and statelessness should give people a more accurate idea

Double nigger is an age old meme, lad.

Rosa was so perfect. She was absolutely right. Socialism or barbarism. Even liberal ecologists recognize that the future is either one of a massive overhaul of the system or a collapse into neo-feudalism.

There was almost no public education back then though. Education, beyond literacy, is actually harmful if operated by the state under capitalism, since it will inevitably be used to simply indoctrinate students and make them servants of capital.

fugging gabbidalist maths

capitalist ecology and economics lies that the current system is sustainable

I mean, 1+1 is the same under communism as it is in capitalism. Economics is an application of math.

Some of this is right but at the same time the working man is not as dumb as you think he is as long as you explain terms. I wouldn't ever use bourgeois personally but if you say "capitalists, by which I mean those who own businesses that employ people beyond themselves" peoplewill understand fine.

Workplace democracy.

I am not implying they are dumb dumbs I am just saying they have no understanding of the term ASIDE from negative things.

Like labour value is new and to most is unknown of, but stating off with any known communist slang is going to send of red flags in most people.

There were people in this thread saying not to use the word "capitalists." That is not communist slang.

Stop being an edgy cumskin.

Ugh.


The Left does need the working class, and if you don't think so, you're a liberal.

More importantly, public universal education was one of those "class demands" of the bourgeoisie, which Napoleon fulfilled. Public education was very much an institution in Western Europe by the time WW1 rolled around.

A friend of mine once told me that the French keep in print everything their parliament discusses, and he saw one such volume where some 19th century fuck or other was openly calling for the government to dumb education down, because they didn't want proles getting too smart.

You do that by working around giving them the conditions to make persuasian possible in the face of an enormous amount of cold war propaganda that went on for, going on close to a century now. This does count America's interaction with the Soviet's pre WWII, it was always hostile.

Not to mention, Marxism's controversy before then or after.

You want to help the working class? Good, we need to. You don't want to help the working class? Argue with them over the internet.

you answered your own question

...

...

degenerates, degenerates you're turning into monkeys

No economics is not a simple application of math. There are certain entry points for every economic theory. The entry points for different theories often have different assumptions that said theories rest on. Those assumptions are generally theories on human nature (or lack of it)- hence they have a philosophical or psychological base. The maths may buttress a view of the social world but the base lies in philosophy.

Primary education is not the problem. Secondary is where they get you with all their ideology. You think your average worker was doing calculus or even algebra back then? Academia is a tool of the bourgeoisie.