There aren't very many of us. There are always going to be weirdos and outliers and mystics who have stared in to the eye of the demiurge.
There,s like a billion people in the West. Hexbear has 1k active users. And most other self identified leftists think we're evil tankies because we don't love NATO.
How about "there's like 200 million people in the West and 800 soulless crackers"?
I will also add, because the original quote could come off smug. But, I think it boils down to there always being people that fall through the cracks of every complex operation or policy. And the more the propaganda has to stretch from reality, the more cracks and people falling through them.
It's different for different people. For me it was a combination of working a shit job for shit pay and the lies about the Iraq War.
That was just the start of my radicalization. I would still be a listless liberal if I had never stumbled into /r/COMPLETEANARCHY, which led me to /r/cth.
No, it's because I managed to get a proper political education. If you want more communists, go out there and teach people about communism. Find out what's wrong in their lives and show them how it's capitalism's fault.
Some people will disagree with me here, but I think being a western leftist, especially an American leftist, is more or less random. The material conditions for an influential leftist organization do not yet exist. People joke about treats, but getting the average American on board with communism is a tough sell while they still have decent quality of life.
My personal belief is that either climate change will upset material conditions enough for the political setting to change, or that America will slowly slide into irrelevance while clinging to neoliberalism.
Probably a bit of both tbh, both those conditions are rapidly developing.
My hometown is quite prominent in the nation's history for things like labor movements and women's rights. Also I grew up on a lot of older counterculture, so a lot of the people I looked up to were giving me the tools to see beyond what the media was (and still is) telling us.
I mean, on the individual level things are chaotic and complex enough that you can't always point to a specific person and say "this is why they believe what they believe that". But the predominant reasons I see with people is that they have enough awareness and interactions with the negative outcomes of the status-quo that they do not buy into the propaganda, by some reason like rebelliousness or curiosity read theory and get a better paradigm to understand the world, or they actually have some proximity to struggle explained in a socialist/leftist lens.
What makes you think you are not get fooled? Maybe you are getting fooled in a different way.
there's a difference between us and some K-Hive weirdo or Hamilton fan
Pretty sure most of us did. Hell, most of us still are. Just to varying degrees. How many people here are still masking?
i still wear a mask when i go out
even outside of covid, i haven't got a cold or a stomach bug since the pandemic startedSame. Given some of the struggle sessions, I'm pretty sure we're not in the majority though.
If people are not masking indoors with n95s in public, they are not comrades.
Tbh not as much as I should but when I judge it necessary (public transit, crowded places, especially indoors, etc.), probably a bit more so since the wastewater numbers have been indicating a spike here (actually I just checked and they seem to have shot back down but they were up a lot the last couple week so best to be safe)
And you don't need to do it, fool a critical portion of the population and is as good as fooling everyone.
the mistake the eastern bloc made with regards to propaganda is that they'd perceive a small, ineffectual, minority opposition paper as a problem, and try to stamp it out.
turns out, letting people see but at the same time discrediting and undermining the opposition really sells the illusion of a free society. never relinquish the power to crack down, to disappear and assassinate these people, but as long as they're fringe, and the majority of people think they're freaks--let em' be.
I wish that were possible for communists, but without a large world-scale united movement with similar power to the capitalist structures, this is just wishful thinking. I think China is legitimately the best possible in this regard at this moment. And with Cuba being very close behind. It was an impossible task to allow the propaganda with such recent fascist movements still influencing people in the eastern block. They were never just "freaks " in many of these places. How do you contend with them then? I think China is doing well
So like are we special or something?
No.
Also raises the question, if we're able to get over this BS, wtf is everyone else's excuse for falling hook-line-and-sinker for it?
Contingent, random biographical facts led most of us here, but the vast majority of paths don't lead here.
Contingent, random biographical facts led most of us here, but the vast majority of paths don't lead here.
Completely agree and also we need to ignore half of those biological paths to protect the revolution.
did you misread "biographical" (relating to the story of one's life) as "biological" (relating to biology)?
Hell yeah but also no because I did self crit and found I did nothing wrong so we're chill don't worry about it
Propaganda works the best when people want to believe the propaganda
Posting this famous essay which addresses your question with class based analysis (essentially, Westerners overwhelmingly believe propaganda because they overall benefit from the current global capitalist system)
https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
Thank you! Those of us in the West absolutely benefit from the global order! The fact that labor costs are lower in the periphery reduces the cost of living in the core. The proletariat in the core is therefore given a choice between cooperation with capital which brings it's own benefits, or it could risk joining with the people in far away countries with whome they can't speak the same language, to gain an uncertain benefit.
I was going to post this article and decided to scroll the comments in the thread first because I figured there was a good chance somebody already did. @SunriseParabellum@hexbear.net , I’m seconding this, the article that Gave Up linked is, I think, probably the best answer to your question and definitely helped me to wrap my head around the same question when I first read it.
Something doesn't have to be 100% effective to be very effective.
We're the exception, mostly, if that.
I can't speak for everyone, but I would guess most people here broke through the propaganda by finding information online and thinking it through. That requires literacy, critical thinking, and access to non-propaganda information on the internet. The US educational system is actively trying to stamp out the first two. Corporate news demonizes critical thinking by dismissing any attempt at it as being a Russian bot. Abusive working conditions limit free time and energy enough that the seeking information becomes a problem even before any efforts to censor or astroturf the internet.
This plus capitalism fucked you so hard it became impossible to ignore or excuse. You started asking questions and were fortunate enough to find people telling you to read theory and do praxis.
Believe it or not, by pure chance, we all have precisely the optimal combination of brain damage and blood micro plastic levels to give us superhuman powers of perception.
People think Communism was some crazy idea that had its comeuppance 40 years ago. A fever that shook the world, never to return again. They were right. Until he woke up today – a spiritual corpse responsive only to the call of Commodore Red, prostitutes, and Kras Mazov. For him, Communism is still a thing. He will single-handedly raise the Commune of '02 from the oceanic trench where it has been resting, covered in ghosts and seaweed! He is the Big Communism Builder. Come, witness his attempt to rebuild Communism in the year '51!
0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.
-1 Visual Calculus: Reaction, reaction everywhere!
I would move away from the idea that we (whatever that means, hexbear) have something special about us that allows us to see past the propaganda. Why people think one thing over another isn't solved, and is definitely influenced by the social context people are in. This is especially true for things that take place far away. It may be a hard sell if the nation-state says "The sky is green", but it's a much easier sell to say "If the DPRK says the sky is green, North Koreans believe it".
I freely admit that if I had passed my initial degree (computer science and mathematics) and got a stable job 4 years after highschool, I'd be a vastly different person today (probably a technolibertarian logic-cultist). The poverty, homelessness, reliance on communities (and even the discovery of community) have all influenced me. This may just be one convoluted anecdote, but almost everyone is like this. And almost everyone is in a position where the people with the most power support the hegemonic narrative (e.g. bosses, managers, realtors, cops, landlords etc.), simply because it's in their best interest to do so. And even if your beliefs go against that, how frequently are you going to raise that in "polite company"? Like, if you became a publicly known communist or whatever, what would your job prospects be like? What's your rent situation going to be like if your landlords all know that your position is "kill all landlords"?
Perhaps if the libertarians in my life weren't such unbelievable chunkheads, my politics would have wound up different. But even with myself I find it hard to point to specific events that pushed me one way or another, let alone analysing someone else's politics, let alone trying to deliberately influence other people's politics.
For a lot of people, they're dimly aware that their country probably does "bad stuff". Lots of people like chocolate, I'm told, and are vaguely aware that the cocoa harvesting industry is pretty shady. But they like chocolate enough that they don't bother looking it up, and there's enough people like that if someone points out that the chocolate industry is reliant on slave labour, the critical person is seen as the bad guy, not the chocolate eaters. This vague awareness is explains some of the rapturous glee when a national enemy is shown to do something "beyond the pale". I may eat chocolate and be supporting slavers in Central America, but at least I'm not like the organ-harvesting inscrutable Chinese. Therefore I can continue to eat chocolate until the Chinese stop organ harvesting.
I would argue that propaganda is more about groups than individuals. Whether propaganda affects one individual or not is kinda pointless to analyse, there's a thousand things going on around someone. What if there was the ideal propaganda shown to a person, but they happened to be grouchy that morning and it didn't click? What it does do is establish a cultural narrative that can be considered the "default". Something people are expected to believe and usually do. If you meet a random person in the street, are they more or less likely to believe in this thing? Unless they've done the research (and don't believe their claims that they have, they often haven't, and realistically its a bit much to expect everyone to fully research every topic), what will they think? The answer is often, well, the ideas and culture of the ruling class. Perhaps a piece of propaganda has failed if it does not become the dominant cultural narrative in its sphere, whether or not it has captured every individual. Not even a majority, just the majority of talking heads, thought leaders, and "powerful respectable" people in the community.
Then there's also whether people are espousing their actual beliefs. A lot of people bullshit and come up with posthoc reasons why they believe something.
Lastly, would it be a "belief" in the injustice of rent if you still pay rent? A lot of subjects are like this, whether or not you believe in rent you know there's a bunch of angry racists with guns itching to serve notice at your landlord's beck and call.
I really appreciate the effort you put into writing this.
Thank you.
how the fuck did we get here?
For me, material conditions. I have spent my life under the poverty line and that shit sucks. I recognise that I and the people I love are being taken advantage of and that things clearly aren't right, so I started reading about that and seeking answers - I expect most communists have always been similar.
wtf is everyone else's excuse for falling hook-line-and-sinker for it?
Material conditions. A lot of people in the west (certainly anyone whose voice would be applified by media) are comfortable and understand that their quality of life and access to excess would decrease under communism, and people who aren't comfortable think that their quality of life would decrease under communism. As well as that, working class people, especially people in particularly bad situations who would otherwise be particularly sympathetic to leftism, are driven too hard to have time to research, too hard to have energy leftover to investigate the foundations of the world they have always lived in. The current system seems to more or less function and thats enough for now, because fuck they have a job to do and kids to deal with and etc etc.
Politics is not currently life or death for the vast majority of people in the west, but simultaneously we don't typically have the resources and leisure to investigate it just for the sake of being informed (and many of those who do are wealthy enough not to want to). Hence, until material conditions get markedly better or worse, a stalemate.
Material conditions.
I think that it's worth emphasising this point. In the Anglo West, most white people have been materially much better off than most of the world. This is probably declining a lot, but there's still a huge demographic of people who can focus on treats and avoid living stress, unlike much of the world for whom daily survival is still rather stressful. Amerika has been successful by moving much of the hardship onto its colonised non-white people. It's very telling that most of the revolutionary movements in the US came from non-white people. (Although I'm not going to discount that there were genuine white revolutionaries and revolutionary movements.)
Real problems in the US will happen when most of its white population becomes protelariatised. The upcoming fascist movements are reaction to the growing class consciousness of the average white Westerner.
How many hours of learning about socialism have you done vs the average person stuck in liberal brainworms hell?
Even if you haven't read a single page of theory from a book I'm willing to bet that baby leftists have engaged with dozens of hours and many of the people here are into hundreds if not thousands of hours engaged with the topic of socialism, either through viewing content, engaging with content, or listening to it.
Yeah if I hadn't been able to find a job where I could sit silently and not have to engage the language part of my brain, I would not have been able to listen to various podcasts and videos that added up to thousands of hours before I called myself a socialist.
Otherwise I would just, you know, dislike war, taxes, Republicans, fundamentalists, and various bosses, and that would be the extent of it
But the bigger thing was getting betrayed by liberal politics during the recession, in a way that literally broke up and scattered my family and started to make me starve. I went from a relatively well-off boomer household to scrounging for nickels to add up to a sandwich, and stressed to the point of literal catatonia in the mornings- I actually couldn't be woken at all, by any means, several times a week. I haven't figured out what that's even called.
In the 90's they drilled into us that if you fucked your life up, you'd have to surrender your dignity and prosperity by collecting your free job at McDonalds. When I applied to around 400 fast food restaurants and retail stores and got 2 interviews in 2 years with no callbacks, it obliterated all of that trust in the system
It turned out that every authority figure in my life was aggressively pushing me down a path to utter economic and personal destruction because they actually thought they were helping. I finally decided to do the opposite of all the advice I was getting, and started immediately and dramatically benefiting from that
Good to hear that you are at a somewhat better place currently. Good to have you here.
Thank you, that means a lot. I'm in a much better place now, but my partner and I both agree that every part of our clawback into stability and moderate prosperity was predicated on random chance after random chance, all stacked on top of the fact that we're white. We didn't finally get jobs and start sneering downward like a lot of boomers did, because we were so comically precarious and got absolutely unbelievably lucky. And one of the critical steps turned out to be working under racist pieces of shit who would have discriminated against us. (We got out of there asap and spent years helping a ton of other people escape too lmao, even people we didn't like, just to hurt that company as much as possible)
Like I finally got my first job because my partner happened upon a fucking reddit comment from someone looking for an employee. That guy very nearly died the prior year and wouldn't have been around to hire me. Then I got a temp job because someone was on leave, which meant I barely didn't get evicted. Then for my next job, they were about to hire some guy way more qualified than me, but he said something towards the end of the interview about it being a good stepping stone, so they took offense and hired me instead. Just that one offhand comment from some guy I will never meet was literally the only way I got over the poverty line and into the "middle class". Even if I was a total idiot I would probably still understand this because of the bizarre sequence of my life. By pure accident I threaded the needle through a 1-2% chance at doing fine, and I see everybody who stayed completely fucked over as equally or more deserving than me
If I had just like, been born 20 years earlier and walked into a good job at 18 or 22 with no economic disasters happening, I could have easily thought it was just a natural result of being smart and moral, or something. That seems like the default position that got broken apart for a lot of people in 2008 and 2020-2023
Honestly its fucked up that I know I'm unbelievably lucky to be in a similar spot to my parents, although they had pensions and shit (oof), when our childhood conceptions of "unbelievably lucky" was some kind of fucking celebrity status
And really it's been like 15 years since I could see my parent and siblings regularly and that probably won't ever fully resolve, luckily I have inlaws now
That sounds as if you are reflected and aware how chance and structures play a role in the proletarians individual employment success. That is good, too.
If I had just like, been born 20 years earlier and walked into a good job at 18 or 22 with no economic disasters happening, I could have easily thought it was just a natural result of being smart and moral, or something. That seems like the default position that got broken apart for a lot of people in 2008 and 2020-2023
Word.
and I see everybody who stayed completely fucked over as equally deserving than me
Also true. Both can be true, that stuff was hard, that you had to endure and do a lot and still not being totally in control of what will happen.
Your story is a good one, feel free to share how it is. Shared plight is one of the strong motivators of solidarity and socialism in my opinion.
Don't forget that we have no power. That seems to me, to be a main reason why we exist.
This is basically it, why would the ruling class waste the resources to even try for 100% agreement? The moment the left gains, or has potential to gain, even the slightest sliver of power, watch the ruling class deploy their mass resources to squash us back to irrelevance. I only clearly realised this when the very popular Bernie/Corbyn campaigns were so deliberately choked despite major support of the base.
In some way the allowed existence of places like this has a useful propaganda value for the ruling class. It allows them to go maintain a facade of political pluralism and liberty and make their rule look consensual.
Because we put time and effort into critically examining our biases and seeking out other perspectives and sources. If we did the same with let's say baseball, then we'd have better baseball takes than people who didn't and we could all pat ourselves on the back and wonder how it is that we're so smart. Most people don't really care how accurate their impression of the DPRK is, because they have little reason to.
Yup. Time and effort. Time and effort. Then after that, some more time and effort. Fully escaping the propaganda mind prison is like learning a second language, except there isn't an app for it. And you can never be sure that you've fully reached escape velocity
because they have little reason to.
This is the entire issue and not the other part you wrote.
That makes no sense.
Because they have little reason to... do what? Care enough to critically examine their beliefs, the other part I wrote.
The answer for 99% of us is that we are losers -- in the sense of being on the losing side of our society, outcasts, etc. -- or are so deeply scarred from the memory of being losers that we still mainly identify with that group, and we view communism as being the best way to eventually stop losing -- though some of us believe that for flimsy reasons.
The people who disagree with us on Lemmy are, like us, simply supporting the side that they believe will ultimately benefit them the most, happily signing on to ridiculous fables to help their case rhetorically, but fundamentally being motivated more by wanting to feel secure in their coding job or whatever the fuck they are doing.
Do not trust the judgement of anyone who makes reference to you or themselves being "special" (even by implication) in connection to politics. This is not just idealist but fully and sincerely mythological thinking on par with the bullshit fascists imagine as their Master People's origin story.
if anything the history of communist and anarchist and other leftist movements has been eating shit, constantly.
now, in theory, we only need one good win to turn the tables and force the liberals to start eating shit instead. unfortunately we squandered the first one and ate shit yet again. so yeah, we're losers and shit-eaters, but goddamn atleast we understand this, unlike the libs who suck on the boot and refuse to even acknowledge this.
The goal of socialists is to stop eating shit, but that doesn't save them from the fact that they've personally been eating shit for more than a decade before they come around, and trying not to lose is very different from not losing.
Bootlicking libs are usually more comfortable and therefore not eating as much shit, however hard they rim the cops and oligarchs who couldn't care less if they lived or died.
