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.
Step one: no more announcing in public that you’re going to spearhead a revolution! :D
this!
I forgot to mention this i got so caught up in writing my recommendations
Three letter agencies hate this one trick.
This is true.
One question I have is where the line is drawn, though. There comes a point where you need to have some level of openness about your intentions. I’m not necessarily asking for an answer, I don’t know either. Something I think an organization should determine with multiple heads.
Theory and documentaries, young comrade
Let me see if I can pull up a reading list but I’m gonna say some off the top of my head: Dialectical and historical materialism - Stalin Revolutionary suicide - Newton Mao’s little red book
Documentary: The upright man - About Thomas Sankara Fidel: the untold story
I have more but i value these because it’s important to acknowledge history in line with theory. I feel like with so many COINTELPRO tactics it’s important to be well versed enough so you can snuff out any infiltrators
J Sakai’s little book on security is an interesting read to that end.
Thank you for that
Another I can suggest that’s indispensable for revolutionary strategy: Lenin - Left-wing communism, an infantile disorder.
That’s one of the books I’m reading now and damn it’s so good
Why that specific age? You do realize how much dedication and effort a revolution takes correct? It’s never to early to start, especially to lay the ground work. Stalin was 38 and Lenin was 47 at the time of the revolution and they had been working since their late teens on the movement. They also got extremely lucky with the outbreak of WW1, and the entry of Russia into the war. A revolution is not something that you can just plan out with deadlines and dates. It requires time, effort, dedication, and honestly, quite a bit of luck.
Also it’s not very underground if you’ve already stated on the open internet that you’re going to do it.
Like I said to a different comrade, I’m still a bit inexperienced in Marxism right now.
thats all right of course. Theory reading is important, and make sure to avoid reactionary politics, as they detract from the movement.
With patience. Not deadlines.
How come you want to wait until 24 specifically?
I’m still a bit inexperienced in Marxism right now.
For now just focus on reading and learning, when you are out of school maybe get involved with a union or something and see if organizing is for you.
No offense, but allow me to be blatantly honest. At age 16, planning to spearhead an underground revolutionary propaganda campaign 8 years from now, it comes across as teenage grandeur. I know I said some of this type of shit a decade ago that still makes me cringe at night.
Now I’m not saying any of that to discourage you, really I’m not. But you are 16, for now just focus on your education and growing into the person you want to be. Get your feet under yourself and a couple years of adulthood down and then make plans from there.
Noted. Thanks for the feedback.
spoiler
I would definitely check out some of the resources that our cadre (theory experts) comrades are recommending. There is a wealth of information throughout human history, many cultures and time periods that form a solid basis of understanding everything you need to know, from how capitalism operates naturally to asymmetrical warfare to psychology and everything in between.
There are definitely many overlapping features of successful socialist revolutions. For just one example, many use a system of “democratic centralism,” where all members put forward ideas on an even playing field and vote on decisions but where all agree to strictly adhere to the outcome unanimously and remain loyal to the final decisions. Many also had to build a strong base that was very in touch with average people very slowly for many years, with a core comprised of cadres, that exploded in popularity when they managed to exploit very sudden and unpredictable crises within capitalism.
There are definitely similarities between successful revolutions, and there is much wisdom to be gained from the many wins and loses that everything from ragtag rebels to giant civilizational superpowers have experienced over the last few centuries.
However, one key secret sauce of Marxism-Leninism? Is the understanding that the conditions and context of your exact time, place, history and material circumstances are CRITICAL. No two revolutions have been exactly the same, they had to tweak and adjust their methodology to meet the demands of their very specific problems and resources at their disposal.
Take the United States for example–I live here, of course I am terminally interested in a socialist revolution here. However, as much as I love to learn as much as I can from the wealth of information from the USSR, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and many many other places in the world, I must also recognize that there is no perfectly laid out strategy to win. The U.S. has some unique problems: for starters, there has NEVER been a successful socialist revolution in the “developed world,” in the imperial core, in the West; it is completely unprecedented. And let me tell you, the gig-economy anticommunist proletariat in America in the late 2020s is not going to respond to the same messaging as the peasants of China did in the 1950s. Whether we want to talk about the social media, or American anticommunism, or Wokeism, or declining attention spans, or Western fragility, or fentanyl, or climate change, or deindustrialization, or American descendants of slavery and white supremacy, or 3D printers, or post-modernism, or deepfakes, or A.I., or vaping or anything and everything in between, there are many circumstances that are VASTLY different than any other country, any other time period, and any other setup of the game board. What would Stalin have done if he had to deal with all his young men dealing with crippling social anxiety and porn addictions? What would Castro have done if his enemies had CCTVs on every corner and depleted uranium drone strikes? What would Sankara had done if every time he tried to speak everybody had already been trained to dismiss every word on the subject he had to say? Of course, these things can be boiled down to bad luck, overwhelming odds, enemy propaganda–none of these concepts are new. There ARE similarities between the Hundred Years’ War and World War Two. But if the generals of WW2 had looked back into the Middle Ages for all the answers of how to conduct themselves in the battlefield…they would have all died. They had to learn how to be in touch, to have their thumb on the pulse, to truly understand the situation, to have the ingenuity to come up with a new solution and the guts to try it even if it has never been tried before.
The idea of an underground propaganda campaign is a very cool one, in my opinion. It is not very dissimilar to what I want to do and am in the process of doing with my life. My grand strategy involves, among many other things, to bludgeon my way into the rap scene where I want to reach apathetic and impoverished American youth in a way that combines spiritualism and trendy liberal “self love” discourse with a principled and wholesome but pragmatic and sexy program. I have many ideas ranging from AR to mass graffiti to solicitation to an app to a book to shock value clout chasing. Right now I am nothing but a rapper who is trying to feed myself by learning how to tattoo and my girlfriend wanted to one day turn a piercing booth into a community center where she can provide counseling, and where we can do everything from art night to open mic to book clubs to [MEMBERS ONLY]; community is definitely something American capitalism has gutted and which will be absolutely a major component of any effective solution that the American masses will gravitate towards, if they aren’t made to be too irreversibly misanthropic.
Really, the sky is the limit. You can join an existing socialist organization and assimilate to their doctrine. You could try and form your own. Will it be organized more like a corporation, a paramilitary, a mutual aid network, a social club, a family, a cult, a mob, a soviet? The forces of American capital have made the board so convoluted that it will take an incredible amount of combined arms, a wide variety of tactics and strategies, to pull us out of this mess.
It is good you are giving yourself some time. Just know that there will never be the perfect day where it just “feels right,” where the epic music cues in and you start you save-the-world-in-one-swoop montage. A lot of the work that goes into a successful revolution is mundane and unsexy. I can’t tell you how many times I have failed not just as a socialist trying to fight for what I believe is right but as a person just trying to get by another day. I would begin not only learning from the vast pools of knowledge from the socialist tradition, but I would begin having your own private imagination of problems you can identify and how YOU think you should solve them. Don’t forget to ALWAYS talk to other people–put the “social” in “socialism.” Try out a few methods, maybe you will find what niches and methods within the revolution are not for you, and which ones are more your style. Above all, make sure to care for yourself, as if you are not a functioning decently well you will not be able to be as productive as you would like.
I think your attitude is badass. Don’t let this cynical society take it away from you, because the first thing the system will do when it detects you are deviating is it will try and neutralize you softly.
Also, just whatever you do, don’t be an anarchist, and don’t even shake hands with a Democrat. Don’t use the methodology of either decentralization nor electoralism unless you fully understand the failures of both and use them as but a small part of a grander M.O. and strategy. Be kind but be assertive, and be prepared to eat complete shit 99,999 times, because that 1 time it finally pays off is invaluable for the human race.
Absolute banger. Gonna save this. Great advice.
Thank you Teezy 💜
I might be projecting at 16 year old me a little bit but I still stand by everything I said.
just to be clear: there’s no way of seriously discussing topics like these on the internet
long story short: join a party, slowly keep up with the work and ask your comrades in person. then you’ll start to develop a better understanding of how a possible revolution may play out
tactics and whatnot that are being planned should never be discussed in any public spaces
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.
Opinions differ on how to organise a socialist revolution. According to the Marxist-Leninist thesis, the organ that actually carries forward the revolution is the Proletarian vanguard; a clandestine revolutionary party comprised of the most advanced sections of the working class. This party is what organises and ultimately leads the workers as a class against their oppressors when the revolution moves into a phase of open class war.
Opinions are split as to what strategies and tactics are the most effective way of building the vanguard into a force capable of conquering political power from the bourgeoisie; It honestly varies depending on where you are and what the conditions are there.
Before anything else, it is necessary to sink deep roots into the community from which you intend to draw political support for the party. Winning popular support amongst the working class is an essential condition for the growth and success of a revolutionary vanguard. Take a look at your community and look at what you can do to win them to your side and build the local party organisation from there. Reach out to like-minded groups and establish ties so that sectarianism can be rooted out and class unity ensured. Talk to the workers in your community and figure out their grievances, then campaign on those issues to demonstrate that the party is the friend of the working class.
Propaganda is a huge part of this equation and takes on a variety of different forms and dimensions. Classical forms of propaganda such as party journalism, political education and leafletting campaigns are important as always, but can only be made possible so long as the party is active. In the 21st century, video is the dominant medium and as a result mastering it is an essential requirement if you want to spread the message of the party to the masses. This means recruiting, training and organising people with a wide variety of skills; from spokespeople who are capable orators, to filmmakers with the technical skills to create high quality video features, film editors with the necessary technical and creative expertise and flair to formulate video into effective propaganda content, graphic designers to create eye popping visual design, to writers to commentate on current political events and theorise to the masses and so on.
I’m not discouraging you, but I feel like this is a lot bigger of a project than it may seem like. First off, I’m in my 20s and things don’t exactly “unlock” during your 20s, organizing doesn’t become easier. Underground is also tough because it’s tougher to communicate with other like-minded lefties, which is essential to getting any movement off the ground. I’m no expert on this shit, but it seems like a huge campaign to be waging, you’d definitely need some more people, not only for communication but also for criticism. If one person runs a newspaper or publication or something, they can be too confident in their own position without applying self-crit. On top of that, sometimes you will self-crit and not critique the aspects that other people would criticize. Having a few comrades to be like “idk about that position, wouldn’t that devolve into xyz” or “this position is being bent and twisted in x way so we should clarify that we believe in y instead of x” or “this position we have actually is shared by x capitalist nation, let’s explain why they share this position and why we don’t agree with their analysis and why ours is based on DialMat” or even a basic “keep up the good work comrade”. Also, more of a curious question than a critique? Any particular reason for 24? Do you anticipate a large inheritance from family around then that would make this easier to fulfill or is it more of a maturity thing? Whatever the reason, keep patient and analyze the material conditions around you as they change
Read up on Lenin’s theory of Vanguardism. A communist party to lead the masses to revolution. I recommend dedication to reading as much theory as possible from lenin, engels, and stalin (Marx when you can, he is more confusing though).
Yes, but remember to avoid dogmatism, the revolution is different in every single place.
Noted
Depends on the time, place, amount of effort, and material circumstances. Though in a more general sense, join a communist party, try to radicalize people and deprogram them from liberal thought, aid your fellow party members and fellow non-party workers (cooperation is based), and talk about your plans for revolting (if getting in via the ballot box fails) against the capitalist state out of the public eye.
I’ve heard Luna Oi say on stream that some Chinese universities have programs for the study of Marxism. Have you thought about studying Marxism abroad?
No, not rn.
