open to our ideas¶

If 1% of attendees are "open to our ideas," you are putting yourself into an environment where you are actively fighting against the overwhelming tide crafted by the other 99%. In the eyes of that 1%, you are an aberration. They are socially primed to reject you. https://t.co/kVJ2FLWiIm The Democratic Party has 45 million members. I would hope revolutionaries don't need convincing that those numbers alone do not suddenly make the Democrats a viable avenue for "converting" people to the cause of revolution. We are not missionaries. Marxism is not a faith to which we convert the undiscerning masses. They are not blank slates, waiting around for us to imbue them with the holy light of class consciousness. They exist in a social context.

https://t.co/WAjtcvsFfu That context is complex and dynamic. People move in various political directions throughout their lives, but overwhelmingly, the political force driving most people's movement under bourgeois hegemony is liberalism. This force is applied both passively and actively. "Passively" in the form of acculturation with other liberals. "Actively" in the form of political spaces explicitly constructed to regiment its constituents deeper into liberal ideology. These protests, much like the DNC, are very much the latter. It's often easy to mistake explicitly liberal environments as being "open" and "disorganized," to view those who find themselves in these spaces as shopping around for a more "coherent" ideology. It's easy to mistake political energy for "radicalism." But liberalism is not weak. Liberalism bares its teeth when revolutionaries try to work our way into the lion's den. Challenges to the liberal status quo are met with immediate backlash. "Free and open debate" stops at the first whiff of "authoritarian" notions. Our ideas are not welcome in liberal spaces. Entryism has never worked in its long history of fruitless attempts. The dominant ideology holds preeminence in the considerations made by even the most "open-minded" people, and can only be counteracted in spaces designed for radicalization. Not spaces designed against it.