askchapo

I'm going to keep this reply short so apologies if I'm being glib but what you're describing is generally a product of a failure to understand the way that capitalism functions on a holistic, systemic level or a failure to really internalise the nature of the system.

This is where you get the people who are still sold on voting or tweaking the dials of liberal democracy in order to restore it to its True Glory™.

It might be like, ending qualified immunity for cops or it might be "getting lobbying out of congress" (lol) or it might be a quixotic aspiration to turn back the clock to the 1950s when things were alright (for white men in the so-called middle class) or it might be trying to convince everyone to get on board with a particular flavour of ethical consumption or it might be about starting the Truth & Transparency Party to do a politics "But not in the corrupt way that every other party does it!!". That sort of shit.

If you haven't fully realised the nature and function of capitalism through connecting these smaller issues and systematising them, you're going to be fundamentally resistant to overthrowing the system and you'll find any excuse for why we should maintain the status quo.

The antidote to this idealism, like all forms of idealism, is materialism and the readiness to become a revolutionary sprouts from the renunciation of hope for change under the prevailing system.

After that has been achieved the next stage has the pitfalls of doomerism, abandoning the critique and turning inwards to spirituality or pursuing ego-death trips or mindless consumption or attempting to become a capitalist Übermensch (in the Nietzschean sense), weird reactionary stuff like monarchism and obviously the various styles of fascism and proto-fascism etc. But if they aren't at that stage then they either do not understand liberalism fully or they have pet issues that they've identified as problems within liberalism but not as products of liberalism because they haven't connected the dots yet, at least in the majority of cases.

Edit: I didn't operationalise this. Sorry.

So my general strategy would be to continue working on developing their awareness of how fucked things are in other ways, usually using their current pet issues as gateways into awareness-raising on adjacent issues (e.g. their pet issue is slave labour and conflict mining -> the net zero carbon target is built upon the backs of slave and conflict mining with things like lithium, coltan and other rare earth minerals. You can abolish slavery or you can have a [somewhat] hospitable climate under the current system, but you can't have both.)

I would also work to locate their awareness especially within a historical context. This means on a personal level, like keeping the score and checking in on how well Biden is doing with his concentration camps at the borders or in improving the conditions of labour etc. But this also means in the broader context of history, so if they have a narrow belief in achieving a general strike as the be-all and end-all of fixing the system (or overthrowing it) for example then you talk about things like the Battle of Blair Mountain, the events surrounding the Bonus Army, and the wider historical context like what happened to Allende and why. Part of this necessarily means connecting it to other issues like the CIA, the Monroe Doctrine, The Business Plot, the nature of fascism proper as capitalism when it closes ranks, that sort of stuff.

This leads into the other angle I'd take and that would be to get them to really think through their solutions in a dialectical way rather than in the static, liberal, armchair quarterback sort of way.

Say they achieved their goal of abolishing slavery. This completely disrupts the basis of first world economies, plunging them headlong into a depression of an unfathomable depth because suddenly the nature of unequal exchange has shifted significantly more towards being equal. Now people at home are destitute and desperate for any kind of work. As we have seen in situations where there has been catastrophic and precipitous economic declines (the dismantling of the USSR etc.) people, including children, end up in sex work and in the human trafficking and drug mule spaces.

And this is assuming a very high level of governmental and societal stability under these conditions, which is extremely optimistic to the point of being Pollyanna about it.

But anyway, the economy goes to absolute shit and children are forced into informal labour and people end up being slaves of a variety of sorts.

Congratulations, you just reached the logical conclusion of why anti-slavery activism within the confines of liberal democracy will always be woefully inadequate at best and, at worst, will have massive blowback if these goals are ever achieved somehow.

Or you follow the goal of getting lobbying out of congress to its logical, dialectical conclusion. Now lobbying happens under the table as bribery, it's much more difficult to identify, and the interests of capital will become more coercive in the ways that it exerts influence - instead of paying politicians off, capital will threaten to flee or it will simply take off and pinball from state to state or country to country, playing every side off in a race to the bottom.

You don't really need lobbying power when you command so much economic power directly because you are able to bend politics to your will.

What you're doing is developing a critical awareness in them of what Marx describes here in Grundrisse, in a very tangible and contemporaneous and personally relevant way:

[Capitalism's] production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production. In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces. But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited.

Basically you want to take them on a guided tour of how capitalism will circumvent any attempts to hem it in and to illustrate how it moves in contradictions, steamrolling through these contradictions without ever actually resolving them; just keep on exploring their solutions through to their logical political and economic ends until they eventually internalise the fact that there is no reforming our way out of our current mess.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paolo Freire is a major influence for how I approach the deeper and more thorough style of agitation and education, and if you've read it then you're probably seeing that shining through in my comment. I'd strongly recommend the book if you want to make a habit of doing this sort of work.

(Looks like I failed at being glib 😖)