I know blowback is amazing for that, but, does anyone know of any good books or articles that can contribute to coming to a truely international perspective?
I wrote an effort post a while back about nationalism that you might be interested in. It has a few academic sources as well.
Personally, I think a lot of leftists could benefit from reading more deeply into nationalism. There are a lot people, even here, who are staunch anticapitalists but still accept that nations are a natural phenomenon and the nation-state the natural basic political unit. This is a testament to the way in which nationalism, even more than capitalism, with which it is deeply intertwined, has made itself invisible as ideology.
This is from two years ago
I think one of the initial cracks for me was The Corporation documentary. It mentions "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" while talking about privatizing water rights (including rain water collections) in Bolivia. This directly connected the internationalism (learning about things) to the anti-capitalism that was starting to form in my mind. Once you start to realize the myths at the core of domestic propaganda, suddenly you start questioning a lot of things. The later part of this learning phase was understanding media literacy and cultural hegemony. Ways of Seeing was super useful at this point.
A big thing that influenced me was actually the topic of the other day's megathread about the 1953 Iranian coup, because from a lib perspective Mossadegh did everything right and it didn't matter. All the Shah's Men is a pretty good telling of events, I looked up the guy who wrote it and he's a former NYT correspondent but he was skeptical of the media blitz against Assad and is also critical of NATO's role in the war in Ukraine (Stephen Kinzer, if you're low key a Hexbear poster, I liked your book). I think if you genuinely try to study world history in a way that emphasizes the perspectives of people in countries outside of the imperial core, then it's almost inevitable to come to our conclusions. It doesn't have to be that book or that country, there's tons of countries that can serve as case studies in why the US is the great Satan. Luna Oi has some videos about Vietnam and the Vietnamese War that are pretty good too imo.
Naomi Wu's story also did a lot to influence how I looked at things. She got in hot water with the cops in China some but a lot of it was because Western journalists have done things like publically outing her as a lesbian and taking clips out of context and using them in anti-China stories without her consent, and generally treating her like dirt, and she's generally more critical towards them than toward's China's government.
As for more theoretical stuff, I've been meaning to post this bit about Revolutionary Defeatism but I think it'd probably be too much for the libs (Lenin is a tankie!!! 😡). Really I think they need to be introduced to the idea of critical support but I don't know any good resources about that.
Honestly the hard part is just getting people to read or listen to anything. They're all allergic to sources and some of them seem to think that using any historical reference is "whataboutism."
:::spoiler The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War, V.I. Lenin
To repudiate the defeat slogan means allowing one’s revolutionary ardour to deg----ate into an empty phrase, or sheer hypocrisy.
What is the substitute proposed for the defeat slogan? It is that of “neither victory nor defeat” (Semkovsky in Izvestia No. 2; also the entire Organising Committee in No. 1). This, however, is nothing but a paraphrase of the “defence of the fatherland” slogan. It means shifting the issue to the level of a war between governments (who, according to the content of this slogan, are to keep to their old stand, “retain their positions"), and not to the level of the struggle of the oppressed classes against their governments! It means justifying the chauvinism of all the imperialist nations, whose bourgeoisie are always ready to say—and do say to the people—that they are “only” fighting “against defeat”. “The significance of our August 4 vote was that we are not for war but against defeat," David, a leader of the opportunists, writes in his book. The Organising Committee, together with Bukvoyed and Trotsky, stand on fully the same ground as David when they defend the “neither-victory nor-defeat” slogan.
On closer examination, this slogan will be found to mean a “class truce”, the renunciation of the class struggle by the oppressed classes in all belligerent countries, since the class struggle is impossible without dealing blows at one’s “own” bourgeoisie, one’s “own” government, whereas dealing a blow at one’s own government in wartime is (for Bukvoyed’s information) high treason, means contributing to the defeat of one’s own country. Those who accept the “neither victory-nor-defeat” slogan can only be hypocritically in favour of the class struggle, of “disrupting the class truce”; in practice, such people are renouncing an independent proletarian policy because they subordinate the proletariat of all belligerent countries to the absolutely bourgeois task of safeguarding the imperialist governments against defeat. The only policy of actual, not verbal disruption of the “class truce”, of acceptance of the class struggle, is for the proletariat to take advantage of the difficulties experienced by its government and its bourgeoisie in order to overthrow them. This, however, cannot be achieved or striven for, without desiring the defeat of one’s own government and without contributing to that defeat.
When, before the war, the Italian Social-Democrats raised the question of a mass strike, the bourgeoisie replied, no doubt correctly from their own point of view, that this would be high treason, and that Social-Democrats would be dealt with as traitors. That is true, just as it is true that fraternisation in the trenches is high treason. Those who write against “high treason”, as Bukvoyed does, or against the “disintegration of Russia”, as Semkovsky does, are adopting the bourgeois, not the proletarian point of view. A proletarian cannot deal a class blow at his government or hold out (in fact) a hand to his brother, the proletarian of the “foreign” country which is at war with “our side”, without committing “high treason”, without contributing to the defeat, to the disintegration of his “own”, imperialist “Great” Power.
Whoever is in favour of the slogan of “neither victory nor defeat” is consciously or unconsciously a chauvinist; at best he is a conciliatory petty bourgeois but in any case he is an -enemy to proletarian policy, a partisan of the existing governments, of the present-day ruling classes.
I’ve had decent luck with recommending Citations Needed. It’s got NPR tone at first listen so people aren’t immediately on edge about the content.
The episodes on the ever-stumbling us empire and thought-terminating cliches come to mind for getting people to more critically examine how mainstream media orientalizes ‘bad countries’. I’m sure there are some other good starting points that other comrades here can recommend
It's been studied that being presented with contradictory facts don't change people's opinions or beliefs. Source
If you're going to try and make sense of Western chauvinism from a Marxist standpoint, then a plausible conclusion to arrive to is that it is only natural and in fact, intelligent for Westerners to hold the chauvinistic and racist attitudes that they hold. They materially benefit from imperialism, and the material conditions in the West are also nowhere near bad enough for many but the very worst off to develop any revolutionary character
Based off of what I've personally seen, trying to get hawkish Western leftists to empathize with the victims of the imperial core doesn't work because at their core, they genuinely don't care
Because let's be honest, 99.99% of communism sympathisers are only in it because it would improve their own life, including me and you. That's why Lenin had the theory of material conditions must be severely degraded before a nation's people can have revolutionary character
However, I have seen many accounts of Western leftists that have found international solidarity once they've discovered the success of what China has built and how in many aspects, they're much better to live in than the West. Unfortunately the USSR doesn't quite seem to have the same effect despite having similar incredible success since it's no longer here and the past achievements have all been surpassed by the West by now
It completely shatters their Western superiority to find out that an alternative governance and economic model actually works better. They get jealous and want to have that life at home. It gets a lot easier then to get them to understand why foreign country govern and have revolutions the way they do when they see the material benefits and results from it
Who do you think is easier to convert to international solidarity, the Bernie bro Redditor that regularly browses r/all, r/worldnews, the frontpage and truly internalizes all the propaganda they read there, or the Tiktoker that is in awe from constantly seeing Tiktoks of China's beautiful landscapes and futuristic looking cities
I think an important thing to focus is not just the way that you try to convert people, but also who you convert
The Cuban revolution started with 82 people and ended with 3000, Nazis got 30% of the vote, I think the Chinese revolution at one point had a couple dozen thousand but ended with 4 million, and the October Revolution started with 400,000 people
Not that I think the West will have any revolution in our lifetime
YOU DON'T NEED TO CONVERT EVERYBODY. You don't even need to convert most of the people. And realistically, there are many people that will be the enemy. Pick and choose carefully who you talk to. You only have a limited amount of time and energy to spend educating others. Use it wisely. For example I've personally given up on any highly educated office worker that makes >150k because theory, experience, and even scientific studies have shown me that this group of people are far more likely to be arrogant, xenophobic, and racist than other groups and it's largely a waste or time
Yes, exactly. Talking about people's beliefs as brainworms takes away their agency as actors capable of rational thought. Most people in the West are aware that radical critiques and thinkers exist. They don't pay attention to it because they know on some level that it's against their values and they don't think they benefit from it.
Unfortunately I think it doesn’t really matter what you put in front of people so long as capitalism/colonialism/imperialism/patriarchy is still working for them on some level. Some of us were born into anticapitalist families who had already been fucked relentlessly by this monster, but I spent the first three decades of my life believing in it until it came for me, too. Even then, it took time for me to figure things out (with the help of many other people) and I learn more every day. Communist propaganda just looks like gibberish to people who are doing alright under capitalism. I do think that having an online community that just continually dunks on liberals and fascists while telling people to read theory and history does go a long way toward helping people who have been fucked but who haven’t quite figured out why yet.
This doesn't break people out of national level thinking by itself. There are millions of people that know the basic LTV but are still solely focused on workers within their own borders, consuming news only about what's within their own borders, etc etc. These people become marxist sympathisers certainly but they're still national. They have no international solidarity in part because they have no international education. They don't know what other proletarian movements are doing and many do not care. They only care about their own conditions, or in some cases certain movements have managed to gain national success (free palestine) these are fringe cases though.
It’ll be different for a lot of people depending on which brain worms they internalized the most. Learning the truth about Cuba is what did it for me, finding out Fidel is one of the biggest chads to ever exist and that our country and its puppet state are the only votes that keep an ongoing genocide active really got to me.
Something like The Dawn of Everything. If you can break people out of thinking that the modern nation state - like capitalism - is not some eternally existing aspect of human nature, but rather something that is uniquely dependent on the material conditions of the time period in which it exists, then I think you can start breaking down walls.
A lot of how you reach folks in the global north is just breaking them out of thinking that a) everything that exists now is pretty much how it’s always been just with different clothes and haircuts, and b) “human nature” limits our potential. People who are willing to challenge their assumptions can turn pretty quick, actually.