Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing”
redsails.org
I’ve become very skeptical of the concept of “brainwashing.” Over the past few months this skepticism has boiled over into open and explicit disagreement with even well-meaning pushers within the Marxist-Leninist corner. I often find it difficult to explain concisely why it is…

So I’ve heard of a previous post from which reminded me of this article from Red Sails…

So far, only a few people have mentioned Red Sails in that previous post, though with a different, but relevant article, but none have mentioned there its most famous article “Masses, Elites, and Rebels”

(Note: this has been posted a bunch of times on this community, you better read it, it’s a short one)

I will let a few excerpts speak for themselves

“Brainwashing” as a political theory breaks society down into three mutually-exclusive camps: 1) a group of elite manipulators, 2) vast masses under their control, 3) a rebellious group of enlightened critics (to which the person launching the accusation of “brainwashing” implicitly always belongs, since they are neither unaware of it nor abetting it). An unstated premise of this political theory is that what determines which of these camps any individual belongs to is a mixture of intellectual enlightenment and moral purity.

{…}

I am going to argue that this narrative is nonsense. It tries to pass off as universal and eternal something that in reality is particular and ephemeral. In short: Westerners aren’t helpless innocents whose minds are injected with atrocity propaganda, science fiction-style; they’re generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on.

{…}

The prevailing populist narrative grants the People (of the West) moral innocence by attributing to them utter stupidity and naivety; I invert the equation and demand a Marxist narrative instead: Westerners are willingly complicit in crimes because they instinctively and correctly understand that they benefit as a class (as a global bourgeois proletariat) from the exploitation enabled by their military and their propaganda — organs of coercion and consent. [6] We’re not as stupid as we’re made out to be. This means that we can be reasoned with, that there is a way out.

Admittedly I am smuglord about this…

But pls, make this a primer on the side bar of this comm, many ppl need to see this

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]English
    31•2 months ago

    I think people vastly underestimate how impactful formal education is in ideological formation. People don’t believe in a bunch of anti-communist bullshit due to anti-communist movies or “material conditions” or some vague sense of propaganda. People believe in anti-communist bullshit because they were taught anti-communist bullshit by anti-communist teachers using anti-communist curriculums set by anti-communist administrations. If you’re taught anti-communist bullshit during school and hear more anti-communist bullshit on Sundays from an anti-communist preacher, of course you’re going to be primed to believe in any anti-communist lie.

    What everyone was missing is that it requires conscious effort by the state to teach anti-communism to its inhabitants. The state is not going to coast on its inhabitants materially benefiting from unequal exchange or rely on a bunch of movies made by reactionary directors. No, the anti-communism is going to be force fed, and anyone who doesn’t toe the anti-communism line, be it student or teacher, will be punished and made an example of. Of course, while the anti-communism is a very conscious effort, the fact that it’s a conscious effort is a tacit admittance that the state has to be ruthless in its ideological formation and any lapse of effort on part of the state or a greater-than-anticipated degree of ideological resistance on part of the student means an ideological crack that the person can escape from.

    Or in more simple terms:

    1. if your teachers sucked at peddling anti-communist bullshit, whether it’s because they’re secret comrades or they’re just incompetent, you’re probably less primed towards believing in anti-communist bullshit.

    2. if you, for whatever reason (marginalized member in a school system completely hostile to your marginalized identity), put less faith in the school system relative to your peers, you’re probably going to either completely check out mentally or be more skeptical of what gets taught there.

    This explains why some people can resist their programming while other people act like NPCs. You don’t have to be smartTM in order to be resistant against propaganda. Your teachers might just have been shitty propagandists. Or your school might have been full of ableist assholes who shit on you for being autistic. Or your immediate family is poor who gets treated like shit by your rich extended family. Or you had a cryptocommunist teacher who made you read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. The list goes on and on.

    • showmustgo [he/him, comrade/them]English
      31•2 months ago

      And so we have to set up a special classroom for the poor, to teach the poor some bloody lessons from the past—all the crimes committed by the violent rebels, the followers of Marx. Shove the lessons of history down their throats. History, history. The crimes. The oppression. The famines. The disasters. Teach the poor that they must never try to seize power for themselves, because the rule of the poor will always be incompetent, and it will always be cruel. The poor are bloodthirsty. Uneducated. They don’t have the skills. For their own sake, it must never happen. And they must understand that the dreamers, the idealists, the ones who say that they love the poor, will all become vicious killers in the end, and the ones who claim they can create something better will always end up by creating something worse. The poor must understand these essential lessons, chapters from history. And if they don’t understand them, they must all be taken out and shot. Inattention or lack of comprehension cannot be allowed.

      The Fever, Wallace Shawn

      • Water Bowl SlimeEnglish
        17•2 months ago

        This quote convinced me to read the play and damn, it’s fucking incredible. I’ve seen the part about commodity fetishism get quoted and I think this part just before your quote deserves attention too:

        And so in our frozen world, our silent world, we have to talk to the poor. Talk, listen, clarify, explain. They want things to be different. They want change. And so we say, Yes. Change. But not violent change. Not theft, not revolt, no revenge. Instead, listen to the idea of gradual change. Change that will help you, but that won’t hurt us. Morality. Law. Gradual change. We explain it all: a two-sided contract: we’ll give you things, many things, but in exchange you must accept that you don’t have the right just to take what you want. We’re going to give you wonderful things. Sit down, wait, don’t try to grab— The most important thing is patience, waiting. We’re going to give you much much more than you’re getting now, but there are certain things that must happen first—these are the things for which we must wait. First, we have to make more than we gave to grow more, so more will be available for us to give. Otherwise, if we give you more, we’ll have less. When we make more and we grow more, we can all have more—some of the increase can go to you. But the other thing is, once there is more, we have to make sure that morality prevails. Morality is the key. Last year, we made more and we grew more, but we didn’t give you more. All of the increase was kept for ourselves. That was wrong. The same thing happened the year before, and the year before that. We have to convince everyone to accept morality and next year give some of the increase to you.

        Here’s a link if anyone wants to read the whole thing

    • queermunist she/herEnglish
      17•2 months ago

      if you, for whatever reason (marginalized member in a school system completely hostile to your marginalized identity), put less faith in the school system relative to your peers, you’re probably going to either completely check out mentally or be more skeptical of what gets taught there.

      You’re contradicting yourself. Here you’re saying that people who don’t believe the anti-communist bullshit are lead to that conclusion by their material conditions, but you already said that material conditions have nothing to do with whether people fall for propaganda or not.

      Our material conditions directly shape how vulnerable we are to propaganda and indoctrination (i.e. formal education). When their bullshit contradicted my actual lived experiences, I started looking for other answers. It’s not because I’m smartTM, but it is because my family was poor and my dad was disabled from a workplace injury and I didn’t fit into my assigned gender role etc etc my material conditions.

      Speaking of books like A People’s History!

      I highly recommend checking out Lies My Teacher Told Me to get a sense for the level of indoctrination we’re talking about in school curriculums and textbooks. The scope of the propaganda mission is deep and vast, from Native American genocide to labor struggle to women’s rights to Black liberation, everything taught to students has been carefully shaped to fool children into believing bullshit lies about the US.

      • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]English
        11•2 months ago

        You’re contradicting yourself. Here you’re saying that people who don’t believe the anti-communist bullshit are lead to that conclusion by their material conditions, but you already said that material conditions have nothing to do with whether people fall for propaganda or not.

        No, I said “probably.” There’s plenty of people coming from marginalized communities who completely internalize the views of their oppressors. This is where the phenomenon of the self-hating minority comes from. As I stated earlier, an ideological crack forms, but it’s still on the person to actually investigate the crack itself.

        Our material conditions directly shape how vulnerable we are to propaganda and indoctrination (i.e. formal education). When their bullshit contradicted my actual lived experiences, I started looking for other answers. It’s not because I’m smartTM, but it is because my family was poor and my dad was disabled from a workplace injury and I didn’t fit into my assigned gender role etc etc my material conditions.

        Material conditions is insufficient. If material conditions were the only thing that mattered, then there’s pretty much no point of propaganda. Or the propaganda is basically a “how the sausage is made” lecture on how the current economic order which necessitates kids in the Congo mining cobalt or Bangladeshi women crammed in sweatshops is how people in the imperial core can afford cheap electronics and clothes. The propaganda would be nothing more than a realpolitiks lecture on how Gazans have to be ethnically cleansed by the IOF so the Zionist entity can continue to destabilize WANA on behalf of the US, meaning that the petrodollar continues to reign supreme and the US can compete with BRICS+ and its geopolitical rival China. This might work for the ghouls at /r/neoliberal or Destiny’s discord, but this won’t work for normal people.

        If material conditions were the dominant factor, then pretty much everyone in the imperial core would be equally brainwashed, with people in the US maybe a little bit less brainwashed due to lower standards of living (lower life expectancy, shittier infrastructure, trash tier health care system, no public transportation). But observed reality paints a very different picture where people in the US simultaneously have shittier living standards and are more brainwashed than people within the imperial core or even other Anglo countries.

        I would never subscribe a single reason for an extremely complicated social phenomenon, but I stand by my original comment. People vastly underestimate formal education where people are explicitly taught the ruling ideology and explicitly punished if they step out of line.

  • JohnBrownNote [comrade/them, des/pair]English
    24•2 months ago

    i take issue with

    they instinctively and correctly understand that they benefit as a class

    saying anyone instinctively understands anything about geopolitics seems incredibly sus

    • @DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      22•2 months ago

      It’s a poor choice of words, but it’s them reacting to their material conditions, it’s not sus, on some level they understand that the imperialism is the thing that gives them their treats.

    • RedWizard [he/him]English
      17•2 months ago

      I have had conversations within my friends group where more then one person says or agrees with this statement “If there is a new global conflict I’ll be rooting for America, because America has been good to me.”

      It’s not only an acknowledgment that their position in life is afforded to them by the work of the empire but also them projecting the notion that “our adversaries are so much worse.”

      It’s clear that they understand that American imperialism is bad and it’s the only way they maintain their material conditions. To stand against the empire is to attack ones own well being. That’s how they see it.

      When the only take on Gaza, from one of them, is “let them fight” it’s because the alternative, Palestinian liberation, comes with it further delegitimation of the America Empire, weakening it’s global position, and thus impacting their material conditions.

      It’s not lost on any of them and the levels of apathy are generally high. Accusations of brainwashing are not uncommon. Their willingness perform self critique is nonexistent.

      Obviously this is anecdotal but I can’t help but see this display being performed within my own circles.

    • commiewithoutorgans [he/him, comrade/them]English
      4•2 months ago

      I agree with what was said that this is just a poor choice of words for speaking about material conditions and seeing the pattern almost passively of Western benefit from imperialism. But I’d encourage you to just email or DM Roderic about this critique of the phrasing. I can almost guarantee he’d change it to improve it or add context/a footnote

  • Smeagolicious [they/them]English
    16•2 months ago
    An incoherent rant, pls ignore

    Yes! Fuck, I’m tired of this pseudo deterministic outlook some people seem to have about propaganda! I’m not going to excuse the piece of shit racist, homophobic, transphobic, greedy rat fucks of america, white america especially, because of some vague attribution to material conditions as if that succinctly and neatly justifies every single human interaction down to the individual. It’s engineered yes, but so many of these fucks know better - I’ve lived with them, I’ve worked with them, deep down they know it. They’ll seek out their reinforcing propaganda because they know the system benefits them, even if they’re just one rung up from the bottom and kicking down. It’s not a matter of the people who buy in having “harder lives” or less privilege, because countless bougie fucks buy into it, god damn. I saw the idea floated that not falling for the propaganda likely indicated that you’re privileged like, fuck off entirely with this. Say that to the black, indigenous, all the radicals who’ve been stomped on and shit on and given nothing for their entire lives and didn’t buy in.

  • silent_water [she/her]English
    15•2 months ago

    to add to this, how many of us living in the west remember our “aww shit” moment where the justifications for liberalism fell apart in our own minds and we had to contend with reality and the consequences of ideological rationalization? I think we overcorrect and assume that what held us to such flimsy dissonance must have been powerful, when the reality is that people simply hate to confront dissonance when doing so means taking a stand against all the power in the world. it’s just fear, at least with most of the honest radlibs. (this is a larger group than people realize. the capitalists have noticed this and began marketing to them - cf the sudden proliferation of “anticapitalist” big budget productions).

    the wider class… false consciousness and short-term self-interest prevail and it’s why any base of power of power for the western left begins and ends with the dispossessed.

    • Lemmygradwontallowme [he/him, comrade/them]OPEnglish
      24•2 months ago

      Actually, yeah, that can be a good supporting article for clarification. I guess False Witnesses is to this essay in Red Sails, like Engels was to Marx in Marxism.

      Though I think at least “Masses” is clear in its goal for its purpose being for us anti-western progressives…

      As Emizeko once took note of this excerpt of the article before:

      What are the strategic consequences of decisively rejecting the tripartite social theory advanced by Orwell, and adopting Marx’s all-encompassing one instead? The basic call to action looks something like this:

      • Stop accusing the masses of being “brainwashed.” Stop treating them as cattle, stop attempting to rouse them into action by scolding them with exposure to “unpleasant truths.”
      • Accept instead that they have been avoiding those truths for a reason. You were able to break through the propaganda barrier, and so could they if they really wanted to. Many of these people see you as the fool, and in many cases not without reason.
      • Understanding people as morally flawed but essentially intelligent beings, craft a political strategy that convincingly makes the case for why they and their lot are very likely to benefit from joining your political project. Not in some utopian infinite timescale, but soon.
      • If you cannot make this case, then forget about convincing the person in question. Focus instead on finding other people to whom such a case can be made. This will lead you directly to class analysis.

      With that in mind, it’s quite cathartic to hear this…

    • tripartitegraph [comrade/them]English
      9•2 months ago

      I like this line from that one a lot; really shifted my perspective (the context being commenters on a news site loudly denouncing people who are pro-kitten burning):

      The kitten-burners seem to fulfill some urgent need. They give us someone we can clearly and correctly say we’re better than. Their extravagant cruelty makes us feel better about ourselves because we know that we would never do what they have done. They thus function as signposts of depravity, reassuring the rest of us that we’re Not As Bad As them, and thus letting us tell ourselves that this is the same thing as us being good.

      Nearly identical to the way the average American discusses China, Russia, Iran, DPRK…

  • Mokey [none/use name]English
    7•2 months ago

    Maybe you guys should just be built more different like me, poor people are poor because theyre not smart enough or dont have enough grit to be not poor.