The left has a PR problem. No one wants us to be right, and having political views to the left of Hitler is a good way to be alienated by mainstream society. I'm not saying "sigh, we gotta get more racist." or saying "Look, I AM racist, but..." but what I am referring to is stealing right wing arguments and talking points, then using it in our favor. We already (kinda) defused based, and it was a little funny seeing some nazis claim that's cultural appropriation (never mind that Lil' B, a black guy, came up with the term first).
It sounds semi-promising to use demagoguery ourselves, but if this is a no go: I'd rather just learn that right now.
The left doesn't have a PR problem, it has a not controlling all major media outlets problem. It also has an everyone in the west cares more about shoving copious amounts of cheap corn syrup in their face than anything else problem.
Part of ORGANIZE! needs to be brigading. Exploiting the algorithms is the only hope we have. There's a reason every mainstream political entity has their own botnet and trollfarms. Thinking our ideas are gonna organically be able to compete with that is fantasy. We need more leftist content creators and we need more brigading to get their content in front of eyeballs.
no offense taken, the point of me saying that isn't an excuse, its just a response to a "PR problem" in the sense that any negative perception of the left is almost always because that's what the bourgeois media is saying.
I generally think that the decline of readership and literacy in the United States is the most precarious cultural shift. Having a political realm dominated by inflection and spectacle gives a lot of weight to unfounded ideologies and assertions.
this was one of the premises behind the "dirtbag left" phenomenon in 2016, but without a coherent, guiding set of principles and goals (much less an actual party) most of them have scattered to the winds or just become reactionary (like red scare). chapo's still doing it and i am usually a fan of theirs and i think they have made quite a few converts but you have to be really careful gazing into this abyss lest it gazes back into you.
It doesn't really work like that. There's no real co-opting to be done because their language is designed to disguise their vile aims.
We have no use for disguising our aims because our aims are positive and pretty hard to argue against point by point (providing for everyone's material needs).
We do not have a problem of rhetoric our challenge is to present solutions to people's material conditions and at the same time teach them how that is informed by communist theory and motivated by :soviet-heart:
People will always say something like this but offer no concrete or actionable proposals. How could what you propose possibly generate as much attention as quickly as the thousands of memes and soundbites the right floods the airwaves with daily?
What you're getting at is a different problem than the question of what the left's message should be. The reason the right is able to flood the airwaves is because they have billions of dollars in funding from rich chuds all around the world, while the closest the left has ever gotten to a media blitz in the west was the Bernie Sanders campaigns.
Hypothetically, if we wrote the best slogans in world history, we would still face the exact same problem of nobody seeing them.
What the right spends time and money on isn't just indiscriminately promoting any message, but the following:
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workshopping the most succinct and relatable messaging (i.e. focus grouping to label the "estate tax" as the "death tax")--which 4 Chan chuds already do for free, which was how they came up with "It's okay to be white." There are as many terminally online freaks on the left as the right who could do this same thing, but on the left any sort of sincere call for message orchestration is perceived as cringe or shady or futile before it's attempted. The detach
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finding people that are already going viral and signal boosting them. The Libs of Tik Tok account, Lauren Chen, Tim Pool, all these people legit made their own stuff and initially experienced organic growth. They didn't get any monetary boost until they built their own traction, and even then a lot of their boost was crowd-funded.
The "left" is not currently conducive to this, as any remotely successful online left personality gets derided by die-hards for attempting to make money, or will be dismissed entirely for one off-hand take that they made in a long ass video--usually because some other, aspiring leftist influencer wants clout.
The right wing influencers don't get "canceled" in this way, and among themselves they largely boost one another and say shit like "I don't agree with everything this person says, but you should check them out because...." And this is driven by money only insomuch as they know this unified stance and cross-promotion is good for their collective long term growth. Mind you, this is all BEFORE someone like Prager U or Don Jr. takes notice and throws their money and influence behind them.
It's good that the left sees through lame opportunists, but we need to be a bit more cynical like the right is, and acknowledge that
if they can amass strong followings and mainstream some leftist causes, then even craven opportunists serve a purpose in shifting discourse in our favor.Ultimately I am not saying that the right v left information warfare isn't asymmetrical, I am just saying that faced with overwhelming odds the left is not fighting as hard or as effectively as it could be.
The right wing influencers don’t get “canceled” in this way, and among themselves they largely boost one another and say shit like “I don’t agree with everything this person says, but you should check them out because…”
Yeah this is only true if you don’t follow radical right politics. The radical right says exactly the same thing about us. They lambast themselves for not having solidarity, and they regularly and viciously attempt to ‘cancel’ each other over not being sufficiently racist.
The left does fine with coming up with supporting people. I mean, hell, Parenti’s a go-to recommendation for us, and yet he took an anti line on modern China. I regularly see Manufacturing Consent recommended, despite it being by Chomsky. Pretty much everyone supported Corbyn and, to a degree, Sanders.
I’m all for workshopping slogans etc, but let’s be real, the left is effective as hell at slogans already. Medicare for all. Not me, us. Workers of the world, unite. People before profit. MeToo. BlackLivesMatter. Defund/abolish the police.
As an added bonus, we can actually say those out loud to people without them thinking we’re nut jobs. There’s no need to go full crypto, whereas the right is stuck with their 14s and 88s, and soon as a new thing becomes associated with them, it becomes taboo.
The right needs to workshop so much, because it needs to be deceptive. The left has it much easier. We can be open.
"The right needs to workshop so much, because it needs to be deceptive. The left has it much easier. We can be open"
How has this actually played out in reality?
Better than the post-90s period, where all the unions became ‘associations’, and everyone became afraid to even so much as mention class.
Alright, let's work with an example that I've seen recently on mastodon: https://transmom.love/@elilla/108170684453719319
Now I'm not holding this up as a case of someone with 'good marxist values', far from it. I think their personal antifascism is chaotic, and while well-meaning, I don't think her method should really be held up as the ideal form of activism.
BUT, what she is doing moreso than most actual marxists is working with people at their level by using practice to dialectically make adjustments to her theory of the world. In doing so, she gains a support network not just on the fedi but irl as well. This is what I mean in my other comment in this post when I say "we need to take on the language of the proletariat by working with them". The Pedagogy of the Oppressed doesn't work when it's one-sided. Leftist praxis furthers the cause by simultaneously decreasing both the alienation of the organizer and the alienation of the people they're organizing through direct contact and empathy. This is why Coal Mining Unions and Black Liberation movements were able to explode in popularity in the US before the govt started to catch up and design counter-strategies.
You're not going to get that from the detached cynicism of the fascist death drive that fuels right-wing meme strategies. Wholesale adoption of postmodern ideology without criticism is anti-marxist.
You’re not going to get that from the detached cynicism of the fascist death drive that fuels right-wing meme strategies. Wholesale adoption of postmodern ideology without criticism is anti-marxist.
:10000-com: %
What about the "It's okay to be white" example? It did not require money backed astroturfing for development or virality.
And from firsthand experience, there are people active in the DSA who have more money than the LibsofTikTok woman.
I feel the thrust of some people here is to start at "they will defeat us" and find ways to arrive at the conclusion to justify inaction.
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We need Praxis. Theory, education, and propaganda only does so much. This country is filled with politicians saying sweet words. A Socialist saying the sweetest of words is more of the same. Material Reality and Action must back the words we speak. Everything will eventually return to reality. Hopefully, that recalibration won't be the language matching the brutality of our reality, but out loving actions being the basis of the talking points.
Alright, gotta do this again on a new account:
Language shapes the psychology of its speakers as much as the psychology and sociology of its speakers changes the language.
Adopting the labor-aristocratic reactionary language of chuds would engender labor-aristocratic reactionary thought processes.
If we seek solidarity with the proletariat, we should instead seek to adopt the language of the lower rungs of the proletariat in our respective countries. This means the language of minority ethnic groups, the poor, and of lgbt intersectional feminists (not all of it is worded in academic terms) whose cultures already filter upward into the fashion world as the upper classes continue to have pastoral fantasies that appropriate the aesthetics of poverty. Being poor is already fashionable, to some extent, if you can have an eye for what makes the culture of the poor unique compared to the sanitized cultures of the middle and upper classes.
Western Leftists keep trying to appeal to the middle class even though Browder already demonstrated what happens when you do that. Mao, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, and Castro all succeeded by appealing to peasants and working alongside them on the same level.
Name the enemies, always be on the offense instead of defense, actually go and interact in places to gradually seed them with communist ideology like the right is constantly doing with nazi shit.
There's tactics that can be stolen without actually changing language.
I mean, you don't even need to reference right-wingers to steal these strategies. They're laid out by Mao, Lenin, Freire, etc. "Actually go and interact in places" is what leftists mean when we say "practice".
Oh yeah, that one specifically is just underused currently, not rightwing
How 30 hour work week, 25 bucks minimum wage is language dependent in america?
4 hours a day, 20 hours a week, 69 dollars an hour
the 4 20 69 plan
take a look at this before you consider any further thought about this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9tournement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recuperation_(politics)
there's a lot to consider when attempting to judo some culture war significations into a new role or meme
it's not impossible to do this fairly well, but you have to make certain the subversion reads clearly to at least a large percentage of people, otherwise you end up with memes that are easily re-coopted or in a superposition of meaning based on the observer
I think the furthest I’d go would be leftypol, and even then, it’s terminally online language.
I wouldn’t look to the right for talking points. A lot of their successful rhetoric is based on a co-opting of the left already, and neoliberals have spent the last twenty or so years trying to co-opt the right.
Far better to unapologetically raise our own flag high.
Bobby is glancing at your answers during the big test. Better steal some of Bobby's answers?
I was thinking about this because I saw someone call Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson "Right Wing SJW's". At first I was like :soviet-hmm: but now I'm like :soviet-playful:
