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heated arguments with my dad (lemmygrad.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I had some pretty brutal discussions with my dad who is a hardcore liberal of the "the answer lies somewhere between the middle of left and right" type. He agrees with a lot of socialist stances and class war but refuses to acknowledge that a revolution is needed to achieve socialism, that killing people wouldn't make us better than the owning class and that violence is bad and that we should try to change the system by voting that voting will bring lasting change and not a revolution....all this kind of crap. He thinks that i got too "radicalized" and that im stuck in a bubble of propaganda and now he wants to have more control of the media i consume and that when he sees me watching or reading an article that i show him the sources of these articles. He really wants me to "keep an open-mind" which to him literally just means returning to being a liberal. The more of these discussions i have with my father the more i feel a distance between us and i would love if we just ignored our political opinions and kept living our lives how we always did but he insists that i am being groomed by some megalomaniac organization or a goofy ah evil person to join some kind of leftist jihad: "Yes you are entitled to have your opinion but you should also keep an open mind but the problem is that your opinion is not correct" that all i hear from him.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Sorry to hear this. It's difficult. Try not to fall out with your parents over it.

My main advice is to not talk politics with your parents. At the moment, it sounds like they can effectively prevent you from reading what you want to read. But even without that, if you fall out with them over politics, you may regret it if they're otherwise normies.

Especially don't try to propagandise your father. Maybe when you've read more you can talk again. IME the more theory you read, the more mellow you will become. But from the point at which you accept the conclusions of Marxism up until you mellow, you get more and more combative as you realise you disagree with everyone but you can't explain or articulate why they can't see that you're right; it's frustrating because it feels like people aren't listening to you. Eventually you learn why. That's when it gets easier. Until then, it's too likely to turn into the heated arguments that you describe.

Perhaps taking a step back in the agitprop at home will help your parents to relax more about what you're reading; giving you the space to develop without censorship. It is going to look like you're being radicalised by extremists if you've gone from ordinary liberal to bringing up Marxism at every meal. It's understandable that non-Marxists will be concerned about that.

If that doesn't work, read theory-theory by lesser known Marxists. Most liberals don't know, because they don't read Marxist theory, that Marxists, including Marx, develop arguments through a critique of facts and liberalism. So if you were to look at a list of the sources cited in the articles, you would mainly see a list of liberal texts. The fact that even Marx is mentioned isn't indicative of the work being Marxist, either, because anti-Marxist works will have to cite Marx to challenge him. And almost any Marxist text can be re-framed and explained as a critique of Marxism because almost every one identifies problems in other Marxist works.