Forgive me if I’m just overthinking or thinking about nothing, I’m just wondering how educated should a worker be to be class conscious?
How I came to thinking was just pondering on people who are gullible to other people’s opinions, and the ethics of ethical education? Maybe just nonsense meta stuff, but what exactly can people do, and how can we teach people to be self-aware enough to listen to what they truly believe in. Especially when it comes to adolescents who are surrounded by information dumping news sources and ideas from all sides, and any one source just has to be charismatic/bold enough for it to stick in someone’s head for long term
That’s right. To put it briefly, according to the Marxist world outlook, there is no such thing as universal human nature; the way that humans act is historically contingent. If there is such a thing as human nature, it has class characteristics, as well. People in one epoch will tend to act in one way, while people in a different epoch will act in another way. People in capitalism appear to be universally greedy in capitalism but why wouldn’t they be greedy? The system is set up in such a way that if you’re not greedy, you might starve and become homeless.
At the same time, the greediest people are the capitalists and they do two things particularly well: 1. projecting their own personalities onto everyone else, and 2. using news and entertainment media to convince the rest of us that they’re right. Movies like 1900 and I, Daniel Blake raise a challenge to this narrative.
Whatever else all this means, I’m well on board with ‘empathy/love and solidarity’. They certainly make organising easier. And appealing to these traits in most people can make it easier to erode some reactionary views.