I plan on spearheading an underground revolutionary propaganda campaign when I turn 24 (I’m 16 as of writing) so I need a bit of advice regarding how they work.
I plan on spearheading an underground revolutionary propaganda campaign when I turn 24 (I’m 16 as of writing) so I need a bit of advice regarding how they work.
Your plan is fairly specific for something 8 years away, so presumably there is some factor that leads you to it. A talent for oratry or rhetorical writing maybe? Youshould be warned that life is going to throw a fucktonne of shit your way between now and 2030. The world will look completely different. You will be completely different.
I don’t want to discourage you at all but don’t call it a plan yet. Call it a vision or ambition. Make it a plan when you have more knowledge of the material conditions that you’ll be in 8 years from now, when your knowledge is more expansive.
First, Liberal culture puts a huge amount of pressure on us to make something of ourselves and be the hero of the story. But that’s just a shiny way of promoting rat race mentality and making us compete against each other, making us all more concerned with who’s leading the charge rather than what we’re charging towards. It’s why humanity is destroying itself and the planet. Reject it. And reject the idea of any prestige being attached to leadership.
Why is that previous paragraph relevant? Because if you want to prepare, don’t prepare to specifically be a spearhead. I don’t recall which communist first said it, but paraphrasing: “the movement makes the leader, not the other way”. Maybe you will be leading the charge. Or maybe someone else will. And maybe the CIA will get them and you’ll have to step in. So be flexible. Liberals and Fascists have leaders for heroes. We have comrades. You’re already a hero, and you’re among people that know that. Don’t worry about provong it to anyone.
Also don’t delve too deep into specific techniques for being ‘underground’. How to avoid surveillance changes constantly. Learn about it, but don’t waste time learning specifics that will be obsolete in a few years. Save learning specifics for later.
What’s left? As a Marxist propagandist, you have a unique advantage in that truth/reality is on your side. All you have to do is educate.
Basically, educate yourself and learn how to educate as you do. Start with dialectical materialism as it is at the heart of everything.
And live your life. Spend time with people. Be around people. Understand them. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Guevara, Ho… they all understood people, and loved people.
My country (Philippines) is deeply conservative so I may be in big trouble.
Half of my family is there too.
Don’t wait 8 years, comrade. Don’t go off and establish an ‘underground network’ right now but there is so much work to be done. Especially with the fucking Americans opening up bases again.
Educate. Those vile fucks are going to be propagandizing so hard. Push back. Educate the people around you. Tell them about how the yankees would toss change in the river because it amused them to make starving Filipino kids dive in for it. Tell them about the removedmongering, and how it so often progressed into rape with no consequences. Of how they called us “LBFMs” - little brown fucking machines.
There’s a whole generation above yours who have been convinced that Bongbong is good for the country and ‘different’ from his dad. But the even older generations know what life was like under Marcos Sr… Get knowledge from them. Ask them for stories. A whole generation has been brainwashed into being willing to forget. Get those memories from the elders and share them with your generation. Show them the parallels that will definitely emerge. Educate yourself with theory and teach people how to see that bigger picture.
Learn about what happened in the Philippine-American War if you don’t already know. About how the US pretended to be our allies and then betrayed us right at the end. Literally ‘bought’ our islands off the Spanish for a bag of silver.
You’re not alone. Don’t endanger yourself thinking you have to do it all by yourself. But your struggle is now, not in 8 years. Educate yourself. Educate others. Don’t let the yankees rewrite our history.
Noted 🫡
W8, another Filipino?
Half, yeah. There’s a lot of Pinoy commies out there!
Aside from the NPA?
Yeah, in the Philippine diaspora. We’re all over the world, and a lot of Filipinos who work overseas and see how it is with the way other countries exploit us end up on the left.
Speaking of which, the Philippines is probably the largest legal exporter of slaves in Southeast Asia.
Alongside Indonesia yeah. The whole Malay Archipelago is kept underdeveloped to act as a cheap labour pool, both for exploitation and to undermine the bargaining power of the domestic workforces in the nations that partake. Be highly skeptical of any influences that seek to drive a wedge between Indonesians and Pinoys. The borders through the region are entirely colonial in nature and the fact that both nations are exploited in a similar manner means that the material concerns of the working class in both nations is deeply aligned.