Getting people from casual left “content consumer” to a true “revolutionary”

If you are a disaffected liberal, it’s easy to believe that the world is ending… a worldview/ideology which assumes a coming apocalypse asks nothing of you. By comparison, a political project that offers a positive vison for the future but requires direct action is a heavy lift. It takes more than agit prop to inspire and move someone from the former to the latter imo.

I read like half your post, but I think the key is finding ways to engage with people offline. It feels like algos have changed in recent years to bury leftist comments and posts.

IRL I’ve had success talking about torrenting, copyright abolition, and Monsanto’s practice of distributing seed destroying cultivars.

I think intellectual property is the tip of the spear to getting people to understand that private property in general needs to be abolished

Not to poo poo your good effortpost here, but I feel like I’ve read 1001 takes on how western leftist propaganda needs to improve, and every time I feel like I can find examples of people who already doing the exact things the take is calling for and still are barely a 1/3 as popular as some random CHUD streamer called like “kek lord” or something.

I think the real problem is that it doesn’t matter how good your propaganda is, if your audience isn’t receptive to it they aren’t receptive to it. And vice versa you can have dogshit propaganda, but if the audience is receptive to it they’ll gobble up the slop. Look how shit Israel’s propaganda is, but settlers be settlers so they eat it up.

Got to the counties shown here and organize the local communites into the vanguard party infrastructure.

anyone who’s worked in marketing knows that all these buzzwords like AWARENESS ans THE FUNNEL are basically a huge pile of BS and very far removed from whatever passes for an exact science these days. I would not take seriously any arguments that are based on these bizarre concepts.

I’m with you on the general idea.

Creating a pipeline, so Americans actually know what the basic words for left ideologies mean, is important.

I think channels like Hakim and Halim Alrah are efforts to bridge the watch videos-> read theory gap. And I think they work but they get a lot less engagement than “breadtube” does.

Although I’m also learning that maybe I’m a weird outlier who should not be using my experiences to figure out effective steps, I was raised conservative and moved towards liberalism through the Obama years, but then abruptly moved to “Bernie is the compromise” and then into full blown communism in very rapid succession, mostly because Shaun videos did a better job addressing the things I was noticing and uncomfortable with than anybody else was.

And I’m just a kkkraker from a comfortable conservative background with a pretty high degree of education. My life has gotten more shitty since I radicalized, not the other way around. I’m getting the impression this must be very uncommon, although it’s the story of the lefties in my life. Probably just because of the community I was in I guess.

“comfortable class”

I think the already established term is “labor aristocracy”

Life may be somewhat comfortable, but it is not good. It’s not good for anyone. Maybe I’m just projecting here, but I don’t see anyone around me that’s actually happy.

Comforts allotted through super exploitation are enough of an incentive to passively or actively keep capitalism going, even without happiness. these people certainly won’t be any happier without their comforts, and in order to overthrow capitalism we would also end imperialism, and thus those comforts. This contradiction is pretty glaring, and leaves everyone who would fall under the labor aristocracy or who would hope to enter that sub-class as necessarily enabling capitalism. Even if there is a part of them that would want the type of better world that is only achievable by socialism, these types of people will not do the work required to actually understand and internalize that reality, instead resigning to the mantra that “we can’t change anything” and thus ensuring that at least their comforts remain. These are the “settlers” mentioned so often in our circles, not only because they are settlers in the sense of Sakai, but also because they have totally settled on doing nothing for anyone but themselves!

I agree with you that it is random circumstance that creates a leftist in the imperial core. It is some combination of factors out of someone’s control that brings them that way: being queer, being abused, being from certain national backgrounds or disabled or in some other marginalized group; some combination of these things forces the people who experience them to recognize that the indoctrination that works on most people isn’t enough for them to explain their lived experience. Unfortunately this is not an easily replicable experience, and the only thing we can do as already “funneled” communists is keep being visible and extending the reach of our practice and perspectives through public work, education, and relationship building. Even still, people have been doing this for a long time here, and it has proven that it is not enough to truly awaken the class consciousness of people in the imperial core.

I think your analysis is lacking the primary contradiction in the American context, that of settler colonialism. The people most primed to be radicalized are not the labor aristocracy - even if some from that group will be radicalized because of their aforementioned randomly generated circumstances. The people who need to be prioritized in outreach are colonized people, people with national interest that are inherently at odds with the colonial project, New Afrikans, Indigenous peoples, diaspora communities, trans people, sex workers, prisoners; the groups of people who have not and will not ever have real access to the levers of power; the human sacrifices at the altar of capital.

The reality is that the only way to be a socialist is to organize in the world you live in. It takes work and sacrifice. It is not easy. It was not easy for anyone we look to for guidance on how to actually do it, and it is not easy now. The people who are willing to do that are the ones who “have nothing to lose but their chains,” and in the US that isn’t as many people as most here seem to think. People have a lot of comfort to lose, a lot of treats, and a lot of self-identity. Spending whatever free time people have on doing anything beyond the level of a hobbyist is unlikely until being a hobbyist of any kind is unaffordable. There is a reason no one in the imperial core has ever managed to be successful at organizing revolution despite dozens of groups outside the core being able to do so, and it is not because the propaganda wasn’t good enough, or the marketing funnel wasn’t lubed enough.

I recommend to you We Are Our Own Liberators by Jalil Muntaqim, which contains the “FROLINAN Handbook,” a guide for revolutionary nationalist cadre organizations. I know, more reading. Comrade Muntaqim offers a great distillation of the US specific revolutionary theoretical tradition, and how we can apply what has been learned through the last century of practice, today. This is the work that we must undertake now instead of doing what liberals do and resigning the work for the future. It is both true that most people in the US will not do shit until the material conditions get worse and communists must get organized now before that happens to be ready to integrate those people into our formations when that time comes. Again, it will most likely not be middle class people, suburbanites, or whoever watches Hasan that are first in line, it will be undocumented monolingual Spanish speaking Indigenous peoples, colonized and diaspora groups who are not “upwardly mobile,” queer and disabled people who live in poverty, etc. These are the communities we must build relationships with now and support now so that when things get worse, they will know that we are already trustworthy, well organized, and sincere.

There are tons of short pamphlets and accessible materials for newer leftists that span the gap between Hasan and Grundrisse, hundreds surely. You could compile all these and make new ones and spread them around but it is not a lack of propaganda which keeps people who benefit from imperialism from developing politically.

Read this post from a non-voter in NC. There are a lot more potential revolutionaries from this group than from the place I came from!

God the comments section is depressing. It’s all white people saying “I understand life as black man is bad but why don’t you just vote?”

I want to focus my efforts next year on creating effective propaganda

1. Leave that wall of text in a file on your desktop.

2. “Guillotine Party”. We should adopt the most visible tool of the French Revolution as a symbol of purpose and resolve.

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