https://twitter.com/ThoughtSlime/status/1627029198245359618
Twitter thread continued:
Sometimes people will say "You made me an anarchist" and like... buddy, I don't even think it matters that I myself am an anarchist.
And I regret that that sort of "we're fighting the good fight" mentality has allowed some of the worst grifters on the platform to flourish by manipulating people's passions for their own weird petty reasons.
I think what I do has a lot of value, I'm just saying that what I perceive that value to BE is a lot different than what I thought a few years ago.
Leaders are people like Chris Smalls, any media personality is just a freelance propagandist until they join a party
Yes, this exactly. Chris Smalls is attached to a political labor organization that has a voting constituency, terms and a concrete political aim. When he goes and talks to people and does propoganda, it constitutes praxis on his part not 'because' of the action in-of-itself, but because of the context of his actions.
The gray area is what to consider his actions 'prior' to the union actually forming. I think they can be considered 'activism' or 'approaching praxis', certainly more effective than any single podcast or YouTube channel, but he became someone 'doing praxis' when he had a labor organization the he was affiliated with outside of himself.
This wasn't meant to deride propagandists really. With the way our labor party system works in America, your only real options are DSA, IWW, or PSL. And many of these people are involved in at least one of those orgs. They also help spread the message of organization like ALU and even if they aren't directly members, which can definitely help you grow and strengthen those movements.
"Freelance" propagandists aren't totally useless, they just serve a role that's very different from leader. They are not elected, they are not appointed or even qualified to lead in most cases. What they can do though is help disseminate messages and amplify the voices of those who do serve as elected leaders of actual working class organizations.
You aren't Lenin, you aren't Stalin, you're just someone who works at the film studio. At best like a Sergei Einstein, not someone who leads political movements, but someone who supports them.
I guess that all kinda goes out the window with
:kim-il-young:
Of course! My irritation isn't with the fact that these people are doing 'freelance' propaganda.
My irritation is with the fact that they so very often refuse to take a step back, do some meta-analysis, read some actual theory, and because of that, do whiplash turns against their supposed online communities. They post and post and post and get burned out and then post more to complain about being burned out. It's like, 'Oh, you feel alienated from a revolutionary movement? Damn, if only there wasn't volumes of literature written about that by people who actually ended up doing revolutions' But they don't want to read, they want to post. Reading is for nerds. Nevermind that you can do both.
Agreed, is basically just a failure on their part to see their role. A symptom of not reading enough theory or not being in close enough proximity to real movements
Sure, freelance propagandists arent bad though if they are working to get people into socialist orgs. Chris Smalls isn't trying to do ideological work, he's being a leader. So of course they're different
As they should be, you just need to understand your role and position when you're the unaffiliated propagandist. It can feel like you're doing nothing if you are off the mind that you're some revolutionary leader and not just there as backup.