Across the Canadian left, politics is increasingly reduced to a familiar routine: open Canva, draft a statement on the issue of the day, post, and repeat. Yet these statements share a defining feature: they offer no plausible path to changing the conditions they describe. It feels like meaningful political action, but it isn’t.
The really big problem we have is with the lack of education.
Nah, education can’t compete with organized propaganda. There are powerful people paying good money to contaminate the public discourse. More education is not enough, because there’s a power imbalance: we’d need to invest a thousand dollars in education to counter each dollar of propaganda; because you need to prepare an average citizen with higher-education-level critical thinking skills and even then it might not be enough. On the other hand, a few bucks of ads on Meta and some astro-turfing can push an otherwise reasonable voter into paranoia.
The really big problem we have is the 0.1% having the budget and leeway to poison the well.
Sure, there is a ton of propaganda, but it’s not hopeless either. People managed to organize in far harsher conditions in the past. While the rich have the media and the propaganda, people have their lived experience. And even starting small, going door to door, and talking to people to build a consensus on what the problems are can go a long way. The big problem of the oligarchs owning everything here cannot be solved until people start to understand how and why things work the way they do here.
Count me in, while I still have the energy I try to get organized as well. I just tend to pushback on the idea that education is the solution to our problem, or the root cause of the state of things; on the contrary I believe that education is a reflection of politics more than politics is a reflection of education. Minor differences in practice come from this though, just a bit of a worldview nitpick I guess.
I mean political education in the context of organizing, not in a general sense. I think organizers have to spend the time to explain the mechanics of our capitalist system, and why we need structural changes. People need to understand what the problems are, and on general approach to solving them. We need a unified labour movement that’s rooted in strong unions, community organizations, and mutual aid. The working majority has to start building its own power structures that answer to the workers.
Nah, education can’t compete with organized propaganda. There are powerful people paying good money to contaminate the public discourse. More education is not enough, because there’s a power imbalance: we’d need to invest a thousand dollars in education to counter each dollar of propaganda; because you need to prepare an average citizen with higher-education-level critical thinking skills and even then it might not be enough. On the other hand, a few bucks of ads on Meta and some astro-turfing can push an otherwise reasonable voter into paranoia.
The really big problem we have is the 0.1% having the budget and leeway to poison the well.
Sure, there is a ton of propaganda, but it’s not hopeless either. People managed to organize in far harsher conditions in the past. While the rich have the media and the propaganda, people have their lived experience. And even starting small, going door to door, and talking to people to build a consensus on what the problems are can go a long way. The big problem of the oligarchs owning everything here cannot be solved until people start to understand how and why things work the way they do here.
Count me in, while I still have the energy I try to get organized as well. I just tend to pushback on the idea that education is the solution to our problem, or the root cause of the state of things; on the contrary I believe that education is a reflection of politics more than politics is a reflection of education. Minor differences in practice come from this though, just a bit of a worldview nitpick I guess.
I mean political education in the context of organizing, not in a general sense. I think organizers have to spend the time to explain the mechanics of our capitalist system, and why we need structural changes. People need to understand what the problems are, and on general approach to solving them. We need a unified labour movement that’s rooted in strong unions, community organizations, and mutual aid. The working majority has to start building its own power structures that answer to the workers.
Ah I see, makes sense.