I work a shit dead end job and a lot of my co-workers are already lefty-ish. (I don't know where this meme of the working class is all right wing retards come from).
Most agree with me on the merits of co-ops, unions, people before profit, anti-war etc. However, they simply will never go farther than that. They won't get involved, won't do anything with any more pages than the ABCs of socialism
I'm secretly beginning to think I'm the chump here for believing I can fight for socialism
Took you long enough to realize you're just a tiny ant in a huge hive. You'll never make a difference.
You can do what I did. Get fired by throwing yourself at a brick wall and trying to get people who just don't give a single fuck to start a union.
Or you can sell yourself into wage slavery and slowly die. Welcome to global capitalism.
It's pure Holla Forums cointelpro tbh
Delet pls
I know full well that I'm destined to be a broke wagecuck. Socialism is the only future I can afford to live in
It's like the conditions aren't shit enough to make them wake up from their lethargy.
Trust in the natural degeneration of the material living conditions of the proletariat as a whole under capitalism, comrade.
Keep pushing people to raise class consciousness. Talk to to them about their personal struggles, their tuition, their health care costs, their rent, their pay, etc. Most people hate their bosses, even people that consider themselves right wing.
idealism was a mistake
It's not that the conditions aren't bad enough, it's that people are so beaten down that they don't feel it's possible to even fight back anymore. Just look at countries in absolute poverty and you'll see the same hopeless despair and apathy about their situation. The west isn't special and we'll be back to feudalism soon enough.
Literally that and sports is the only thing I talk to co-workers about. I'm just not getting what I'm supposed to do AFTER. Leftypol said to spread class concousness at work. That's what I'm doing. But to what end?
i think rightwing views are evenly spread among economic classes.
at least in 'murrican.
No end, it's dumb idealism. You're not going to get people to rise up against a system which is still providing them with the necessities of life. No one is going to risk their job or even their life when chances are much higher for things to get worse than better as a result of their actions. Even in Russia, a horribly impoverished dictatorship where most people lived in misery, the people only started revolting en masse after millions of deaths and mass starvation.
I don't really know much about organizing, but maybe the reason you feel useless and hopeless, is because you're not really pushing towards any specific short-term goals. As the defeatists in this thread are saying, you're obviously not gonna take down the whole system in a day. But at the same time, you can push for stuff that helps bring relief to workers' lives, and boosts morale. Like benefits, higher wages, health care, more rights, free shit, etc.
The solution is not to follow what the proletariat wants, but to abolish the proletariat-bourgeoisie system
Are you sure? India has Mautist revolts, Africa is in the state of constant political unstability, with fundies in the north, Arabs have constant civil unrest and so on.
No one said it would be easy comrade, the seeds you sow will probably be reaped by your own children or grand children.
Kautsky please go and stay go.
Fuck off theory fag
Not all of us are able afford sitting in the armchair
If theyre already sympathetic sometimes that's the best you can do. Dont think of them as people to be converted, think of and treat them as comrades youre in solidarity with, becase they are, regardless of how ignorant or spooked they are.
As for political alignment I've found the service industry is so alienating and unfulfilling on every level that those workers dont believe in classcuck mythology as easily as the manuel labors and specialists Ive worked with, who at the very least see new people and places and create/fix useful things.
Just be a SocDem then. Striving for improvement in the short term under capitalism will only make socialism more unlikely.
I know it probably wont come about in my lifetime but im not going to push for reformism when the planet probably wont survive another 100 years of capitalism.
And yeah I will support socdem reform because I dont want to be able to afford my meds
Join the dark side, learn to invest and screw over those brain dead peasants.
ugh
Find a larger organization you can be part of (for now the DSA wil do), join them and start studying on your free time. Once you know the nuts and bolts of organization and political theory, select a few people from your work that you consider to be politically-minded and smart and try approaching them.
It will be easier for them to go past this vague, uninspired leftism you're describing if they 1. feel like they're part of a broader movement and 2. have confidence in you and your hability to convey that Socialism is now something serious again, that as a movement it can provide them with some tangible improvements right now, and as an ideal it can provide them with a better future laterlater.
Short term goals aren't the answer. You have to push hard from the left. New Deal policies were won begrudgingly because the capitalist class was scared of the socialists and the labor movement. They threw a bone to working people because they thought they'd be overthrown if they didn't do something to appease them.
not saying reading theory makes you a theory fag
im saying advising people to do nothing except read theory when theyre miserable makes you a theory fag
Question. Why convince them to get involved? Why not just recruit them for a complicated yet untraceable money laundering scheme?
I mean later*
Well, if you already know their grievances it's up to you to learn more about how they're related to wider questions of political economy, and to gradually raise their awareness towards those questions. You start from what they already know, and then explain the less visible, less tangible structures and forces that shape it.
For example, if they complain about something mundane like lack of healthcare, you can attribute the root of this particular problem to neoliberalism. Once you convey that, you can talk to them about how it came to be and how the post-war social-democratic state was dismantled. Then you talk about how this was only possible after left-wing grassroots movements had died and left-wing radicalism gave way to reformism, like said. Then you move on to class warfare, the origin of capitalism, to Marxism.
Everyone can identify problems in society and in their lives, but to properly analyse it and know the forces behind them is a lot harder, and it's up to the most class-conscious of proles to do that and help the others see it as well. But you have to know your shit, and that's the hard part.