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.
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.
Educating people sounds like it sucks, really badly. Does it?
Edit: I realise this probably reads like a threadcrap but holy fuck, the incredible stuff you've described sounds absolutely exhausting and at times kind of infuriating. Like it's bad enough that you have to gently lead people by the nose through various hoops until they reach the logical conclusion, but also talking to people at all is like pulling healthy teeth. Big sigh
I think it takes a certain type of person and attitude to be a good educator.
The approach of using questions to more or less lead a person through until they arrive at the "correct" conclusion is basically the Socratic Method and as a mode of pedagogy it's really one of my least favourite ones that I actually use. But the thing is that it's much easier to apply and to describe in a comment than other modes that I prefer to use.
To use an analogy, trying to describe a good pedagogical method in a comment is a lot like asking a skilled chess player what moves they would make in a game - they might be able to provide you the gist of the overall strategy but without the input from the other player each turn, you can't say what piece to move in response, let alone where and when. (Not that pedagogy is a competition between opposing sides to achieve victory over the other, of course. But I'm sure you get what I mean.)
The act of educating is a really good example of the difference between a process and a procedure - anyone can write down the steps of a procedure, but a process doesn't have clearly defined, linear steps; to use the really big example here - you can give anyone the steps for the procedure of putting on a bike helmet and they'll (probably) get it right but you can't give someone the process for riding a bike because riding a bike uses a different type of knowledge. I'm going off on a tangent here but there's a good book on this by Harry Collins titled Tacit & Explicit Knowledge.
I find educating to be really rewarding because you get to provide guidance to the other person and you see them start putting things together themselves in a way they couldn't before, and oftentimes in a way that's their very own especially if you strike the right balance of contributing just enough that you evoke development but not so much that you stifle their development or you stray into becoming directive. (Or, to use the precise term, didactic.)
I also find it really fun and engaging to predict how a person will respond to my input and to see what I'm right about and what I'm wrong about. On a practical level this helps you to understand what the other person responds best to in every respect - wording, analogies, points of reference, the amount of context and the degree of detail, whether they prefer more in the way of positive feedback or if they prefer stuff that is a bit more oppositional by using gentle challenges (think stuff like posing riddles or having someone poke holes in your argument), right down to things like your use of tone and inflection and body language - but on a more abstract level you also start to develop an understanding of how someone else's mind works by seeing it in action which is really cool, completely fascinating, and honestly I see it as a kind of privilege as well.
I think it takes a lot of courage, and often quite a lot of trust, for a person to open up to a learning process when someone else is leading it. I feel honoured when someone chooses to share that journey with me.
It's something even more special when you take a person who has been beaten down by experiences in their past - whether it's bullies, terrible experiences with teachers, a lack of belief in themselves, being forced to learn when they don't want to, learning without reward but only ever increasing demands and expectations, having learning difficulties/disabilities, etc. - who suddenly connects with the experience of genuinely enjoying learning, maybe for the first time ever or maybe for the first time in a very long time. It's a bit like when someone first learns to read and suddenly this whole world opens which was closed off to them before because it connects them with an aspect of their humanity that they didn't have before that moment.
[Insert obligatory Michael Parenti quote here]
Educating is to knowledge what jazz is to sheet music. Or something.
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:
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 😖)
spoiler
GOOD post! Thanks for the book recommendation as well
deleted by creator
Educating people sounds like it sucks, really badly. Does it?
Edit: I realise this probably reads like a threadcrap but holy fuck, the incredible stuff you've described sounds absolutely exhausting and at times kind of infuriating. Like it's bad enough that you have to gently lead people by the nose through various hoops until they reach the logical conclusion, but also talking to people at all is like pulling healthy teeth. Big sigh
I think it takes a certain type of person and attitude to be a good educator.
The approach of using questions to more or less lead a person through until they arrive at the "correct" conclusion is basically the Socratic Method and as a mode of pedagogy it's really one of my least favourite ones that I actually use. But the thing is that it's much easier to apply and to describe in a comment than other modes that I prefer to use.
To use an analogy, trying to describe a good pedagogical method in a comment is a lot like asking a skilled chess player what moves they would make in a game - they might be able to provide you the gist of the overall strategy but without the input from the other player each turn, you can't say what piece to move in response, let alone where and when. (Not that pedagogy is a competition between opposing sides to achieve victory over the other, of course. But I'm sure you get what I mean.)
The act of educating is a really good example of the difference between a process and a procedure - anyone can write down the steps of a procedure, but a process doesn't have clearly defined, linear steps; to use the really big example here - you can give anyone the steps for the procedure of putting on a bike helmet and they'll (probably) get it right but you can't give someone the process for riding a bike because riding a bike uses a different type of knowledge. I'm going off on a tangent here but there's a good book on this by Harry Collins titled Tacit & Explicit Knowledge.
I find educating to be really rewarding because you get to provide guidance to the other person and you see them start putting things together themselves in a way they couldn't before, and oftentimes in a way that's their very own especially if you strike the right balance of contributing just enough that you evoke development but not so much that you stifle their development or you stray into becoming directive. (Or, to use the precise term, didactic.)
I also find it really fun and engaging to predict how a person will respond to my input and to see what I'm right about and what I'm wrong about. On a practical level this helps you to understand what the other person responds best to in every respect - wording, analogies, points of reference, the amount of context and the degree of detail, whether they prefer more in the way of positive feedback or if they prefer stuff that is a bit more oppositional by using gentle challenges (think stuff like posing riddles or having someone poke holes in your argument), right down to things like your use of tone and inflection and body language - but on a more abstract level you also start to develop an understanding of how someone else's mind works by seeing it in action which is really cool, completely fascinating, and honestly I see it as a kind of privilege as well.
I think it takes a lot of courage, and often quite a lot of trust, for a person to open up to a learning process when someone else is leading it. I feel honoured when someone chooses to share that journey with me.
It's something even more special when you take a person who has been beaten down by experiences in their past - whether it's bullies, terrible experiences with teachers, a lack of belief in themselves, being forced to learn when they don't want to, learning without reward but only ever increasing demands and expectations, having learning difficulties/disabilities, etc. - who suddenly connects with the experience of genuinely enjoying learning, maybe for the first time ever or maybe for the first time in a very long time. It's a bit like when someone first learns to read and suddenly this whole world opens which was closed off to them before because it connects them with an aspect of their humanity that they didn't have before that moment.
[Insert obligatory Michael Parenti quote here]
Educating is to knowledge what jazz is to sheet music. Or something.