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- They have the support of the biggest media companies in history.
- You can't compete on their terms.
- Debates are for nerds.
Sounds dangerously close to socialism with country club failson characteristics. Or maybe even socialism with masc 4 masc characteristics. The path forward is not a bunch of presentable fit dudes with nice haircuts looking clean cut. The left, by design, doesn't and shouldn't care about aesthetic pretensions. Communism is about fighting for improvements to people's material conditions, not about being a conventionally attractive person that fits into society's definitions of looking nice.
23 minute old account
certified federal takes
:farquaad-point: WRECKER
I don't think it would hurt, but just the "look like you've got your shit together" part. Don't apologize for explicitly associating communism with the improvements people see in their lives.
Literally the 101 of looking presentable and being a public speaker: Don't look like a crust punk, know your audience, and speak confidently.
I don't get how people keep reinventing the wheel when it comes to this shit. Like we can literally look to past figures of our movement and see that the most successful members, be they Z Forester, Debs, Hall, Newton, and so forth, all dressed and spoke the part of "professional Revolutionary".
And I think there's a happy medium between "look like you've got your shit together" and "everyone should dress like country club failsons." There are many different styles people can put forward that will help them get taken seriously.
Yep your average joe will get sketched if you go around in a fitted suit, but will be more amiable if you're in a similar but a bit nicer clothes style as him. Rural folks tend to appreciate more rustic style work clothes, don't want them too clean or dirty though. clean means you don't got soil under your nails, dirty means you're just a crust punk
That only works because they're given power and prestige on purpose. Why do people on here keep thinking liberals hate fascists like they hate communists!?
You want socialists to go full Richard Spencer to not scare the moderate nazis instead of uuhhhh delivering results which help the working class?
I want you to understand something that fundamentally separates socialism from bog-standard reactionary politics of everyone from unironic fascists to your ordinary centrist neolib: fascists do not have a coherent ideology or any meaningful results to strive towards; all they have is the maintenance of the status quo, or a revanchist attitiude towards the past when they were in charge and things were great. This is why they have to rely on superficial aesthetics like wearing a nice suit and looking smug and clever for the cameras instead of actually doing anything beyond optics and intimidatory rhetoric.
Rebranding, etc has been and always will be a complete failure as it presents inherent contradictions. Communists do not hide their ambitions or mask their goals behind presentability so as to not scare :porky-happy: too much.
In short, read theory, punch nazis on sight and anyone who thinks you should be nice to them
I don’t get how people keep reinventing the wheel when it comes to this shit. Like we can literally look to past figures of our movement and see that the most successful members, be they Z Forester, Debs, Hall, Newton, and so forth, all dressed and spoke the part of “professional Revolutionary”.
This is it
Lenin wore a fucking suit
"Comrade Crime (1984-2079) was known for having a suit for every occasion, even for activities such as guerilla combat, weightlifting, presiding over human rights abuses trials, swimming, and sexual relations" [Wikipedia]
hell yeah, can't wait to reply to hexbear threads with my very own :crime-drip:
it would be nice to see antifa marching with tiki torches in khakis and polo shirts then just beating the shit out of the nazis in khakis and polo shirts. but the thing is, the police will identify every leftist and sentence them to years in prison. they will never do that to the right. so the aesthetics of antifa are determined by police oppression.
yes the left should look less "alternative" in general though. but you can't exactly enforce this idea without a party structure.
"our own casapound" is literally the proud boys in the US i think. the left does not need one of those for itself, it is a toxic consooomer identity club for fascists, and 'leftists' attracted to that will be the worst people who should have no power.
Obviously you're not gonna go do direct-to-face action in a fucking suit lol
it's very important for my identity as a rebel to explicitly look like i don't want normies to like the things i like, such as leftism. that's why i wear a 'DIE LIB SCUM' shirt everywhere i go; i'm building community.
Great point. A bunch of tiny groups all trying to be more-leftist-than-thou aren't getting anything done (and historically haven't gotten much done). What we need is a mass movement, and that's incompatible with doing exclusive/hipster/gatekeeping stuff. We want to get big, not stay small.
:fedposting: boy howdy they don't train em like they used to in langley
There's "having your shit together/looking like you should be taken seriously" and then there's "Edwardian LARP"
Conservatives & Fascists formally control culture, we can't do that.
Fwiw in most countries very very significant art & cultural currents were started by comrades. its by no means an italian thing. steinbeck, twain, and hemmingway for US authors, and they're in good company.
Formally, sure, but top-down culture control is ineffective
In the US, jazz and rock music and rap were first seen as removed art, then became mainstream and commercialized--but the commodification came AFTER the cultural defenders tried to destroy them
When did this site become so interested in being the fashion police? First everyone defends China banning femboys, then everyone's hand-wringing over campy outfits at the MET, and now everyone's trying to put me in a business suit of all things, like goddamn. Y'all nerds can pry my blue hair from my cold, dead follicles.
"Everyone in power walks around with a big sign that says, "I love capitalism," maybe the thing that's holding back anti-capitalism is that we're not wearing big signs that say that."
I remember you for also having a terrible take on the femboy ban. Not surprised you're being a tool here as well.
Do what you want, but realise that a movement of people that look and dress like you isn’t going to attract people who don’t already look and dress like you.
At the Amazon warehouse I used to work at about a third of the workers had abnormally colored hair. I guess in your mind the biggest an organization could ever get there is 2/3 of that because you can only ever appeal to people who present the same way as you. But wait! There were also people of different races and different genders there! Since it's impossible to appeal to people who look different than you, I guess we've got to bring that number down to like, 1/10. What absolute nonsense.
Hey here's a crazy idea: what if let people dress however they like to demonstrate that we want to accept everyone, regardless of what you look like? Nah, better to be weirdly exclusionary in order to best appeal to straight white men.
Again, the point isn’t the specifics of the aesthetic here or its meaning or who it should appeal to, just that aesthetic is something that should be conciously managed rather than left to the whims of individuals.
Nonsense. The specific aesthetic is what's relevant. If you can show that a particular aesthetic is worth adopting for an org, then of course I will not object to an org mandating it for it's members. I agree with you example with the Black Panthers, but the fact that they adopted an aesthetic that rejected colonial norms is not some trivial detail that can be dismissed, to make a broader point about how orgs controlling how people dress is an inherent good. It's the entire point. Do you think it would've been just as good of a policy if they'd mandated business suits?
I'm not saying "Aesthetics aren't important," what I'm saying is that "a ragtag bunch of misfits" is a better aesthetic than a bunch of business suits.
The specific aesthetic is what’s relevant. If you can show that a particular aesthetic is worth adopting, then of course I will not object to an org mandating it for it’s members.
The aesthetic: when representing the organization, dress and groom like a responsible and capable adult that can be taken seriously in mainstream society
Not like a Renaissance fair reenactor, not like a New Age witch, not like a hippie, not like a D&D nerd
It’s the entire point.
The entire point in the American situation is that leftism is viewed as a complete and utter joke. All experienced organization has been gutted by the FBI and McCarthyism and establishment politcians. Thanks to that, its popular perception is whatever conservatives say it is: the make-believe of Hollywood and SJWs and bitter people on welfare and illegal immigrants or whatever they come up with next
So yeah, when it comes time you're in a courtroom fighting a legal battle or at a press conference, comb your blue hair all nice, re-dye it for max color vibrancy, and put on the suit (that matches well with the hair, obviously), because presentation matters
what I’m saying is that “a ragtag bunch of misfits” is a better aesthetic than a bunch of business suits.
You're not wearing a suit 24/7, Jesus Christ, you're wearing it when social norms demand it of you, and as much as you want to say "fuck social norms," if the entire population is beholden to those norms, you aren't going to get anywhere. You're in the imperial core, you aren't playing on even ground, you're playing at complete disadvantage
Let me give you an example: you're a public defender, you're defending a young black man who's wrongfully accused but you know the jury's primed to dislike him. Do you say, "wear a t-shirt and sweatpants" or do you say "wear a suit?"
Gorman doesn’t only worry about her own personal appearance ― she also wants to make sure her clients are prepared for court. Gorman and her colleagues ask their clients to wear a suit; sometimes family members provide them, but not everyone can afford a suit. To help their clients, Gorman’s office has a closet full of shoes, shirts, jackets, ties and other clothes in a mix of sizes and styles. Public defenders want to avoid having their client appear in court wearing their prison uniform or nonprofessional attire that may impact how the jury hears the case.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/public-defender-what-i-wear-to-work_l_5e2f56f6c5b6ce51a4ea5232
You wear the suit. The entire United States is the jury. Your "VOLCEL POLICE" t-shirt won't help you.
Holy shit lmao chill. Obviously if I were a public defender I'd wear a suit. Jfc. I'd also wear a big sign saying, "I love capitalism" if that was the norm and that's what it took. Obviously.
But I'm not just going to go around wearing that shit by choice, which is what you're suggesting.
The question this thread is asking is whether or not aesthetic should be utilised at all, not what the specific aesthetic should be.
I'm not just reacting to the OP, but also to what I saw in the comments, which is why I referred to "everybody."
The point I'm trying to make is that suits suck. If we're going to start having orgs require suits we might as well go all the way and require powdered wigs.
"The aesthetics should be tailored to the specific conditions," while true, also needlessly sidelines discussions of how they should be tailored to the current conditions, which would need to be resolved for this to matter. It doesn't do us any good if we all agree that the aesthetics should be tailored to the conditions if we disagree wildly on what they should be and who they should be appealing to and so on.
Two appearances for the public: look like a pragmatic worker (on weekends, Fred Hampton), and look like someone to take seriously (MLK, Malcolm X)
The whole "I wanna look however I want!" thing is straight up idealism when it comes to rhetoric and politics, do you think you're going to command respect from people working two manual labor jobs looking like you woke up at 1PM hungover and wearing an oversized videogame shirt
"But dirtbag left!" That shit was never for organizing or actually acquiring power, that was just a coping mechanism for disaffected American almost-leftists, doing coke and having edgy humor isn't enough
crust-punk/hippie/edgy-middle-class-student thing we’ve got going on now
A bit murkier, but related: I've felt for a while that the witch/satanist stuff that I occasionally see grafted onto left-wing aesthetics would be off-putting to most people.
Although at the same time I'm not sure what "worker-core" is supposed to be. Like, there isn't really a unified worker aesthetic given how many kinds of people comprise the working class. I think the main thing is probably just looking approachable?
It's rightfully off-putting because it's childish, it was childish in the 80s/90s and it's childish now
It's contrarianism against American Protestantism and mainstream culture, there's no deeper framework of norms and behavior and tradition, all modern 'witch/pagan' stuff was streamlined if not entirely made up from the 1800s onwards by the equivalent of fantasy authors, and the rest of it is orientalist bullshit of chakras and karma with no real relation to Hinduism or Buddhism, add in some New Age anti-medicine bullshit to complete the picture
If religion is the opiate of the masses, why the fuck should leftists tolerate magical thinking of hexes and astrology?
It's the more passive, lib version of evangelicals and their "prayer warrior" bullshit
If religion is the opiate of the masses
Not that I disagree with the rest of the comment, but this is constantly misquoted - it's not so direct in the non-truncated version.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
It's more talking about how religion is a reflection of material conditions.
Don't Unions already do this? For example, a nurse strike will likely have everyone in scrubs, or construction workers protesting will have them wearing their high vis vests.
No that should explicitly be the opposite of what we do. Aesthetics as politics should be shot with a gun
Aesthetics in politics does not equal aesthetics as politics.
See the Black Panther Party.
I mean liberals have people unironically doing BPP larps at protests for photo ops. I don't see how this is a W for socialism
The left has been doing aesthetics for decades to no avail. Please show me the W
