At least when the target is generally regarded as evil by 90% of people. Just look at the front page of reddit, it's wall to wall shitting on UHC and being oddly supportive of violence for civility liberals (i'm assuming the astroturfers don't have a coherent line yet)

  • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]
    ·
    17 days ago

    I said propaganda is propaganda. It's not useless. But it will not win the class war alone. The working class is propagandized, but it's held down primarily by the state - economic coercion and actual organized violence - and not ideas that somebody has put in our head. Most people don't kill CEOs not because they believe the ads they see on TV, but because they don't want to be jailed or killed and there is no movement to prevent that outcome. Propaganda is a useful tool that can help us organize our class, and the organized class is what will carry out a revolution. I think what this guy did was great. But until there's a mass movement to go alongside adventurism - which can't be built by lone wolves - we're just gonna have narodniks.

    If posters on this website aren't doing adventurism we should be doing mass organizing to create a climate where violence will be more effective. We should use this to call for public healthcare, tell everybody about social murder, etc. Build a huge public force for M4A so that a healthcare CEO killed makes you think "right, M4A" instead of speculation about it being a mob hit or whatever. Calls for more assassinations - although they'd be good news! - are "easier" versions of Twitter leftists calling for strikes. It'd be nice but it won't work unless we make it possible.

    • AmericaDelendaEst [comrade/them]
      ·
      17 days ago

      But it will not win the class war alone.

      I never said it would, but things like yesterday are part of what causes revolutions to happen, people need to be radicalized, they need to be exposed to new viewpoints and ideas, and that's what happens when you have half of reddit circle jerking over the evils of the health insurance system while lauding the assassin as a hero. It's not nothing, and the people telling me it's nothing are really fucking annoying me honestly.

      Especially when, like that one dude, they want "hundreds of copycats" to be satisfied that the adventurism "did anything." They're literally arguing against those copycats taking action! It's incoherent! Do you want mass copycats or do you want to tell people it's useless, stay home? Ugh

      • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]
        ·
        17 days ago

        this site tends to be on the vulgar materialist side. But I really do think our spectacular society makes us tend to overestimate the effect of propaganda. The left loves marches, flyering, stickering, blocking a highway for an hour to get on the news, and we reach for these things before collective action aimed at material conditions. Multiple people burned themselves alive to protest Israel's genocide of Gaza and it did not slow the bombs at all.

        Propaganda of the deed is a little different, you're supposed to actually do something, but the problem is that killing a CEO actually doesn't improve anyone's insurance coverage. There's no material effect, it all depends on invigorating a mass movement. If it was during the height of Bernie's M4A campaign I bet it would have done something material. But what's today's call to mass action, go kill a CEO? That won't be heeded by more than a handful of people, and if that's all that happens there won't be material change. I would love for this to ignite a popular uprising against private health insurance but that only works in movies and color revolutions. I think that deeds aimed at high-value capital targets, oil pipelines and bomb factories (shout out Palestine Action), are better because if there's no accompanying movement at least they do get a smidge done on their own. They also lend themselves to propaganda about systemic change, not individual greedy CEOs.