If the theory is that the apolitical crowd is apolitical because no one ever promises them material improvements, Bernie did that pretty directly and it didn't work. If the theory is that they're disillusioned with electoralism, how are you going to get folks that apathetic to do harder non-electoral stuff if they won't even go to the polls for a candidate who offers something material?
Maybe the answer is that a big chunk of the population will always be more focused on their individual problems than on nationwide political problems. Maybe you'll never be able to build a socialist movement around people who just want to grill. Maybe some people who are already politically active and aren't proud reactionaries could be comrades if we talk to them a bit.
What is the ideological inclination of pretty much all media on the "left"? We've got CNN and Bloomberg on the far-right flank, MSNBC is solidly neoliberal, Vox and Vice might be more progressive toward individual issues but Comcast and NBC own Vox while Vice's is split between the creator with a minority stake, Disney, a hedge fund, and both George Soros and the son of Rupert Murdoch. Newspapers, if you can get past the paywall, are universally very neoliberal while we've only really got Jacobin as a mass media outlet. Maybe bread tube if you want to consider that wing of liberalism the ally wing even though their project is recuperating socialist ideas and language into things that reinforce capitalism, but they certainly fell in line as quickly as Bernie did.
You can have a great message. Eugene V. Debs appealed directly to the working class with "If I'm president you will not be blown up by weeks of artillery barrages in the War of the Large Cousins", but if that message does not have the same reach and same institutional acceptance as the things which benefit those institutions then it doesn't matter if Bernie promises healthcare during a pandemic because every other voice people are inundated with is paid to say otherwise.
Again I'm not discouraging you. Feel free to get out there and convince the democrats this time. I guess neither a decade of Reagan nor the Iraq War convinced democrats because they're ideologically tied to those things, but you're the one with a vision for the socialist future of the party and I have faith that you can achieve it. Those neoliberals are going to televise your revolution so good on you. Meanwhile I'm going to start a nonprofit that raises money from the rich to fight the problems of the rich in ways that shield them from taxes that could benefit public services ending that problem. I can abolish capitalism if I beg capital for scraps.
I'm not seeing any plan for how to get tens of millions more leftists. Again, we will get nothing done if we can't do that.
If your argument is that we need more left media, we do, but who is the target audience? Who do you think we're going to convince to become leftists if we write off all the libs?
I'm saying they're not allies. You can run a Bernie but he'll be opposed by every structure of that party. You can elect a Bernie but he'll be opposed by the entirety of the imperial structures. You can elect a caucus of socialists but they're cogs in a machine that hates them at every level. I bring up media because one of the most important ideas to really know about the hyperreality of this country is Spectacle. Every facet of the Spectacle governing the social relationships people have to state and capital is hostile to even the mildest meaningful reform. If something threatens class dynamics during an era of ruling class consolidation, whoever you elect is a temporary aberration. Some bug in the code that the party will work out in the next cycle or hotfix internally. Whatever faction they form will be advocating for redistributing 5% of what the boys o'er there bring home for the empire. The forces governing the Spectacle that governs voters, and especially those with enough of a sense of ideology to consider themselves liberal or god forbid work for a liberal cause, are the forces that ratfucked the person they sent to ratfuck Bernie. That pay everybody who isn't him.
He was right to try to convince lumpens. He was right to build a power bloc independent of the party. In trying to coopt the party by then working within it, even his goals of policy reform meant nothing to the powers threatened by them. It was that independence that gave him strength and the biggest threat he posed to the party was withholding his base, all of us having many reasons to hate Biden. Because he was bound to those structures, he had to surrender to them when the time came to surrender and now the cabinet is full of executives debating which crumb is small enough to feed you. The people who would support him would turn to the television channels and newspapers and subreddits that they know of, and all of the ones large enough to have any influence are very hostile to socialism. The structures he'd have political influence over are already owned by the things he's attacking.
Creating more left media is a part of that. I think Rev Left Radio is important and am here because the left had a prominent podcast. That's happening and it will pay off. Our best path isn't trying to work within the system any more than it's the best path for an anti-racist to become a pig or a goodhearted person a philanthropist. It's parallel structures which we see in all of the other left-wing efforts from the unions to the militias to the mutual aid orgs. There's still a need for parties, I voted PSL on every ballot, but democrats and liberals in general are right-wingers whose entire underlying philosophy is incompatible with ours on multiple irreconcilable levels. You're convincing lions to try Meatless Mondays and the bourgeoisie to lend us rope.
You're bringing up some good points, but we're ships passing in the night here. I'm not promoting electoralism. I'm not saying anything about working through the Democratic Party.
My only question is: where are the tens of millions of future leftists we need going to come from if we write off all the libs?
By "all of the libs" I don't mean the leadership of the Democratic Party. I'm taking about the actual people; the party's individual supporters. If we aren't going to try and convince them to be leftists, where are we going to get more leftists from?
Those individual supporters are invested enough in the spectacle of their politics that they're not the ones to be convincing. If someone just kind of says "I guess I'm a liberal" because they know it's the nice person word instead of the mean person word or the city word instead of the rural word, that's someone who can be reached. They're the same lumpens as the old roommate I had whose political identity was vegetarian. If someone is actually stanning liberalism as an ideology they participate in or benefit from, radicalisation is only something they're willing to pursue until it violates any of their conditions for political reality. They wrote us off as quickly as Bernie did because we were mean to the other nice candidate that the party sent to undermine him. Every stage of the primary was dragging them kicking and screaming into hopefully admitting that people need healthcare, something they went back on as quickly as they did any notion of environmentalism. And that was the individual voters because they gave consent to the politicians and don't offer resistance while shutting down those who do. All the books we've read and all the same ideas that are basic common sense to us are just as free and available to any of them but if you want to test your theory please go into r/politics and quote Marx or say negative things about Joe Biden or neoliberalism. Call him a rapist because there was a credible accusation of rape against him and a basic principle of ours is standing with women. The ones who understand politics well enough to know their place in it historically have never been on the table. When they are, the result is watered down to the point that it no longer resembles socialism.
The people Bernie was going after. My point is that there are enough barriers toward reaching them through that avenue that it may as well be off the table. In the best case scenarios for it happening, you just get variations of what happened to Bernie. That's all a massive investment of money and manpower which tied itself to one specific thing happening from the demographic that becomes socialists if you explain what socialism is to them and the demographic that hates socialists. They're a big group sure, but they don't believe in punching fascists or owning guns by and large. They don't support the people or policies or underlying theories that the left brings to the table. Building a coalition with them just gets you liberalism with a rehabilitated image while turning them into socialists opposed to the party is something with so many institutional barriers to it that the reward doesn't match the investment. It's Push Him Left but for countless individuals who usually have something to lose under socialism and whose every other source of information is reinforcing the views they already have.
Do tell.
If the theory is that the apolitical crowd is apolitical because no one ever promises them material improvements, Bernie did that pretty directly and it didn't work. If the theory is that they're disillusioned with electoralism, how are you going to get folks that apathetic to do harder non-electoral stuff if they won't even go to the polls for a candidate who offers something material?
Maybe the answer is that a big chunk of the population will always be more focused on their individual problems than on nationwide political problems. Maybe you'll never be able to build a socialist movement around people who just want to grill. Maybe some people who are already politically active and aren't proud reactionaries could be comrades if we talk to them a bit.
What is the ideological inclination of pretty much all media on the "left"? We've got CNN and Bloomberg on the far-right flank, MSNBC is solidly neoliberal, Vox and Vice might be more progressive toward individual issues but Comcast and NBC own Vox while Vice's is split between the creator with a minority stake, Disney, a hedge fund, and both George Soros and the son of Rupert Murdoch. Newspapers, if you can get past the paywall, are universally very neoliberal while we've only really got Jacobin as a mass media outlet. Maybe bread tube if you want to consider that wing of liberalism the ally wing even though their project is recuperating socialist ideas and language into things that reinforce capitalism, but they certainly fell in line as quickly as Bernie did.
You can have a great message. Eugene V. Debs appealed directly to the working class with "If I'm president you will not be blown up by weeks of artillery barrages in the War of the Large Cousins", but if that message does not have the same reach and same institutional acceptance as the things which benefit those institutions then it doesn't matter if Bernie promises healthcare during a pandemic because every other voice people are inundated with is paid to say otherwise.
Again I'm not discouraging you. Feel free to get out there and convince the democrats this time. I guess neither a decade of Reagan nor the Iraq War convinced democrats because they're ideologically tied to those things, but you're the one with a vision for the socialist future of the party and I have faith that you can achieve it. Those neoliberals are going to televise your revolution so good on you. Meanwhile I'm going to start a nonprofit that raises money from the rich to fight the problems of the rich in ways that shield them from taxes that could benefit public services ending that problem. I can abolish capitalism if I beg capital for scraps.
I'm not seeing any plan for how to get tens of millions more leftists. Again, we will get nothing done if we can't do that.
If your argument is that we need more left media, we do, but who is the target audience? Who do you think we're going to convince to become leftists if we write off all the libs?
I'm saying they're not allies. You can run a Bernie but he'll be opposed by every structure of that party. You can elect a Bernie but he'll be opposed by the entirety of the imperial structures. You can elect a caucus of socialists but they're cogs in a machine that hates them at every level. I bring up media because one of the most important ideas to really know about the hyperreality of this country is Spectacle. Every facet of the Spectacle governing the social relationships people have to state and capital is hostile to even the mildest meaningful reform. If something threatens class dynamics during an era of ruling class consolidation, whoever you elect is a temporary aberration. Some bug in the code that the party will work out in the next cycle or hotfix internally. Whatever faction they form will be advocating for redistributing 5% of what the boys o'er there bring home for the empire. The forces governing the Spectacle that governs voters, and especially those with enough of a sense of ideology to consider themselves liberal or god forbid work for a liberal cause, are the forces that ratfucked the person they sent to ratfuck Bernie. That pay everybody who isn't him.
He was right to try to convince lumpens. He was right to build a power bloc independent of the party. In trying to coopt the party by then working within it, even his goals of policy reform meant nothing to the powers threatened by them. It was that independence that gave him strength and the biggest threat he posed to the party was withholding his base, all of us having many reasons to hate Biden. Because he was bound to those structures, he had to surrender to them when the time came to surrender and now the cabinet is full of executives debating which crumb is small enough to feed you. The people who would support him would turn to the television channels and newspapers and subreddits that they know of, and all of the ones large enough to have any influence are very hostile to socialism. The structures he'd have political influence over are already owned by the things he's attacking.
Creating more left media is a part of that. I think Rev Left Radio is important and am here because the left had a prominent podcast. That's happening and it will pay off. Our best path isn't trying to work within the system any more than it's the best path for an anti-racist to become a pig or a goodhearted person a philanthropist. It's parallel structures which we see in all of the other left-wing efforts from the unions to the militias to the mutual aid orgs. There's still a need for parties, I voted PSL on every ballot, but democrats and liberals in general are right-wingers whose entire underlying philosophy is incompatible with ours on multiple irreconcilable levels. You're convincing lions to try Meatless Mondays and the bourgeoisie to lend us rope.
You're bringing up some good points, but we're ships passing in the night here. I'm not promoting electoralism. I'm not saying anything about working through the Democratic Party.
My only question is: where are the tens of millions of future leftists we need going to come from if we write off all the libs?
By "all of the libs" I don't mean the leadership of the Democratic Party. I'm taking about the actual people; the party's individual supporters. If we aren't going to try and convince them to be leftists, where are we going to get more leftists from?
Those individual supporters are invested enough in the spectacle of their politics that they're not the ones to be convincing. If someone just kind of says "I guess I'm a liberal" because they know it's the nice person word instead of the mean person word or the city word instead of the rural word, that's someone who can be reached. They're the same lumpens as the old roommate I had whose political identity was vegetarian. If someone is actually stanning liberalism as an ideology they participate in or benefit from, radicalisation is only something they're willing to pursue until it violates any of their conditions for political reality. They wrote us off as quickly as Bernie did because we were mean to the other nice candidate that the party sent to undermine him. Every stage of the primary was dragging them kicking and screaming into hopefully admitting that people need healthcare, something they went back on as quickly as they did any notion of environmentalism. And that was the individual voters because they gave consent to the politicians and don't offer resistance while shutting down those who do. All the books we've read and all the same ideas that are basic common sense to us are just as free and available to any of them but if you want to test your theory please go into r/politics and quote Marx or say negative things about Joe Biden or neoliberalism. Call him a rapist because there was a credible accusation of rape against him and a basic principle of ours is standing with women. The ones who understand politics well enough to know their place in it historically have never been on the table. When they are, the result is watered down to the point that it no longer resembles socialism.
OK, then who are we convincing?
The people Bernie was going after. My point is that there are enough barriers toward reaching them through that avenue that it may as well be off the table. In the best case scenarios for it happening, you just get variations of what happened to Bernie. That's all a massive investment of money and manpower which tied itself to one specific thing happening from the demographic that becomes socialists if you explain what socialism is to them and the demographic that hates socialists. They're a big group sure, but they don't believe in punching fascists or owning guns by and large. They don't support the people or policies or underlying theories that the left brings to the table. Building a coalition with them just gets you liberalism with a rehabilitated image while turning them into socialists opposed to the party is something with so many institutional barriers to it that the reward doesn't match the investment. It's Push Him Left but for countless individuals who usually have something to lose under socialism and whose every other source of information is reinforcing the views they already have.