this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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I actually agree with this, and this was my experience growing up in USSR as well. People in the west love to talk about how much propaganda there was in USSR, but the reality was that the government was absolutely terrible at actually selling the system to the people. Nobody cared about politics, nobody really understood what it meant to be communist, why we did things the way we did them, and what the alternative was like. The country was just driving on auto pilot where people simply accepted the system as just being there without really thinking about it.
I've often wondered what things might've been like if political education was part of the curriculum in school from early on. It wouldn't even have to be done in form of reading books. For example, you could create a whole bunch of games, like monopoly, that kids could play and learn from. Then you could have class discussion, and talk about why monopoly always ends up the same way. Have games illustrating how communist approach works, etc. That could've created an intuition for why our system was desirable. In the same vein, the government could have been far more transparent about governance, encouraging worker organization, and bottom up governance. We really should've gone back to the way things worked in 1930s, but there was utter lack of imagination in the political class.
I do get the impression that China has a similar problem where majority of the population isn't really invested in politics and doesn't really care to be engaged. The system gets support because the economy is doing well, but what you really need is for people to be able to support the system in times of crisis. And to do that, you really need people to feel engaged, to have a measure of understanding of how things work, and that they're directly participating in the system.
Precisely. This is exactly my worry. History makes it very clear that nothing stays the same forever. Sooner or later any system runs into issues, whether internally or externally caused, and in order to survive a system needs to be robust and enjoy not just opportunistic but principled support. Capitalist societies unfortunately have gotten very good at ideologically priming their populations for accepting that the system cannot be changed no matter how bad their crises (which they inevitably and regularly run into) get. "There is no alternative" and all that. They invest heavily in ideological indoctrination and in justifying the system to the people, even if they have to constantly lie to achieve this. We are surrounded by it, we are drowned in pro-capitalist propaganda almost 24/7 from the moment we begin as children to learn how the world works until we die, through advertising, the media, the educational system, our social and work environment, etc.
Socialists could have such a great advantage in this regard because we don't need to lie, all we need to do is properly present the truth to the people. Reality is on our side. Yet we see so many socialist states that have failed or are failing to do that. The only one that seems to have done a better job on this than most is the DPRK (though i strongly emphasize the "seems" here because frankly i just don't have a very clear understanding of how things in the DPRK work or exactly how the people there are taught to think about their system... forming an opinion based solely on what defectors say, even ones who have since seen the ugly reality of capitalism and regret their decision, is not reliable), and perhaps to some extent Cuba, though i think it can be hard to distinguish between what is support for the social and economic system, and what is patriotism or the desire to protect national independence against imperialism. Not that the latter isn't also useful but it's not a reliable safeguard against counter-revolution.
I very much agree, a certain level of ideological indoctrination is necessary and it should not be seen as a negative. People need to have a basic understanding of how and why their society is structured the way it is. I also think it's crucial for people to see themselves are active participants in the workings of the system, as opposed to being passive recipients of rules handed down from high up.
Good news is that China does have a lot of grassroots organization. This was a surprisingly decent western article discussing it https://www.noemamag.com/what-the-west-misunderstands-about-power-in-china/
And this infographic shows how embedded CPC is in the communities https://news.cgtn.com/event/2021/who-runs-the-cpc/index.html
I definitely do think they're doing a much better job than USSR did in that regard.
So do i. But there is definitely room for improvement.
Indeed, I also wish China would put more effort into moving away from consumerism. It would be great to see stuff like sports, art, and other creative activity encouraged. I know China has community centres in cities, but a lot more could be done there. Imagine having community forums setup online that make it easy for people to meet up over shared interests, organize competitions, etc. Actually encourage people to spend time together and pursue hobbies.