Two Notes on How Marxists Should Speak to Recruit
In order to recruit people to a communist organisation, we aim to extend their current awareness of reality beyond what is in their immediate grasp, but has an existing material basis nonetheless.
Because consciousness develops from the experiences of existing social relations, it is very hard to overcome the general bourgeois consciousness of capitalist society. The proletariat, as opposed to the peasantry, can unify as a class during a revolutionary period of struggle on account of their existing “hidden” economic co-operation, which is the basis for the continual decline of particularisms in capitalist society. The peasantry, on the other-hand, can sustain themselves independently, which is emphasised by the system of serfdom, where peasants were often bound to their land. The global division of labour is “hidden” not because it cannot be known to the worker, but because the competing interests of the bourgeoisie are passed down as the competing interests of the working class. It is only under a revolutionary situation where the dominant expression of consciousness is negated from being bourgeois consciousness — filled with idealist conceptions, formed from bourgeois social relations of exchange — to class consciousness, created by a materialist appreciation of reality. Though the proletariat can understand social relations by either materialist or idealist means, in their contradiction, one is subdued by the other.
When this contradiction is overcome, the socialisation of production would already be materially real, and the consciousness which emerges out of this relation would surely, itself also be socialised. Thus, although we can use dialectics to trace the direction and outcome of consciousness, we cannot know how the consciousness of people in a communist society would be experienced. I dare utter that everything comrades may regard as principly essential, biologically or otherwise, such as “foundational” emotional regulators, would change. In my opinion, it is not beyond consideration that experiences of sound, vision, time and distance may change in aspects that we have not even began to consider. Has the harmonic vocabulary of music not expanded through millenia, so that music which is beloved today would be rejected outright by the most open minds of civilisations past? Does the false impression of a shape not routinely weigh on our sights with constructive illusion? Might it be plausible that a greater purpose to this is buried, waiting to be rediscovered? Hasn’t the introduction of clocks, and calendars beforehand, had massive implications on the conditions of people, which impress on their experiences? Is the mathematical inversion of technical time, time raised to the power of -1, the rate, not a basic ingredient for wage labour? Is the experience of distance by carriage not different to horse-back because of the content of activity? Does it also not differ from the locomotive, and the locomotive from the airplane, due to differences in technology? Does this difference not shape our understanding of distances between places, their contents and how they are known? And for each of these examples, wouldn’t communist society bring an even greater change in consciousness than between what has been listed here, on account of the significance of the negation of private property, that millennia-old institution which spawned with civilisation itself?
Again, we anticipate the changes, they might even be known to us, but we cannot experience them until they happen, and it is the experiences of communist social relations which allows for the consciousness of a communist society to emerge. So whilst us Marxists do maintain the legitimacy of the negation of bourgeois consciousness, class consciousness, as derived through the careful criticism of political economy, lessons from history and participation of worker’s movements, we do not experience the elevated consciousness which resolves the contradiction between our own revolutionary consciousness and that of the non-revolutionary proletariat.
In order to recruit people to a communist organisation, we aim to extend their current awareness of reality beyond what is in their immediate grasp, but having an existing material basis nonetheless. And for their consciousness to develop, they need to adopt new ideas, so that their bourgeois ideas can contend with the new ones in the mind of the potential recruit in question. After all, when developing cadres, existing Marxists cannot understand Marxism for them. So, when recruiting, we should ask yourselves if it is necessary to fight in the domain of the recruit’s cloudy presuppositions, when the greater task seems to be the expansion of that domain — expansion into materialist and dialectical argument. That is my first suggestion and “note”. When attacking an individual belief, there will be a cluster of coherence around that belief in the mind of the potential recruit and it will be difficult to change their mind on that single issue. What seems to actually change people’s minds is the introduction of new ideas, which shifts previously existing beliefs in place, having them eventually fall in line with the rest of their thinking. Their existing ideas do not always vanish, they often have enough merit to be used by these recruits; in learning, they will sometimes discover the ways in which it is even more true than they’d realised. Having arguments against potential recruits does not seem to be the best way for Marxists to develop them. Instead, identifying a presupposition which appears to be a sticking point, Marxists should develop it into new territory. This isn’t to say Marxists shouldn’t reserve the right to be adversarial to a politically detached, neutral or split crowd. The best outcome from a discussion on the street, if someone doesn’t want to support the organisation, such as by purchasing material or attending a meeting, would be that the person leaves with a handful of exciting ideas to contemplate and measure up against in the experiences that follow, so that they may be prepared to have another discussion which develops these ideas further next time, or decide to support the organisation at a higher capacity, such as by attending a meeting.
This leads into my next note, which says that we should not lead the topics of conversation by speaking too much. Instead, the recruit will lead the conversation in the direction which is necessary for recruitment. In doing this, they’ll create puzzles for you to solve, not the other way around. In our mind, everything we cannot resist to say is a great example or development of an idea in the discussion. Because of the immense amount of preparation we have, these just flow and build upon each other. But, in the mind of the potential recruit, you may have mentioned something that they want to contemplate and think over. Perhaps they want to understand it more. By continuing to speak at length, you are trampling over this idea, whatever it may be, layering it up in a direction they do not care about. This leads to exhaustion, and whilst you may want to exhaust your comrades (in the voluntary pursuit of a time-sensitive, concrete goal, the completion of which will be an achievement), you definitely do not want to exhaust the people you’re trying to recruit. They should come out of the conversation elated. If you can give them that hit every time they interact with you, they will surely continue to listen to you until they can administer the richness of Marxist theory themselves.
This article serves as a note on some preliminary thoughts on how consciousness develops, which needs to be fully expanded upon and integrated into communist organisations.