Besides 💰and 👁️ *
Why doesn’t the left do a propaganda like the Barbie movie or those two White-Supremist country songs?
Imagine Barbie but with class-consciousness. With all the basically free high-production tools and talent on the left, is it not possible?
*Or is it that simple?
There is a decent amount of left-leaning media out there. Bong Joon-ho won an Oscar for ‘Parasite’. It’s completely fine and even fashionable to take swipes at rich people. You can get that stuff made, and it has broad appeal, but my guess is that it’s an issue of who ends up in the position to make films. The WGA strike is highlighting how bad the industry has gotten as far as letting people make a living, and so more and more creatives are from the upper class, including a growing number of nepotism hires. Most of them more than likely wouldn’t even know how to make something about class consciousness, and even fewer would have any reason to do so.
There’s no grand 👁️ conspiracy to keep left-leaning media down, it’s just that the 💰 mostly goes to people who don’t make that kind of thing. I doubt it’s that much more complicated than that, although that’s not nothing.
Trevor Moore dying is clearly proof that whoever 👁️ is, they really hate funny people. Not sure how that extends to anything else though.
Good reminder about Parasite.
My post was prompted by the absolutely blowout mass lib appeal of Barbie and how effective it is. I see such an opportunity to give them their slop while pumping in class consciousness and sowing some seeds of materialist analysis.
Why doesn’t the left do a propaganda like the Barbie movie or those two White-Supremist country songs?
money
we dont have the money and resources, they do. Soviets used to be the agitprop capital, now they're gone, and I don't see them picking up the torch.
Why is China specifically so bad at projecting propaganda to the anglosphere? They're getting outposted by the dang falun gong. Sad! It's pathetic, folks.
Is it a skill issue? Are they not even trying?
A lot of their intelligentsia and media class are neoclassical liberals who studied in western universities
The only person remotely successful doing "high-production" leftist movies/shows is Boots Riley, and he hasn't done a lot. Money and support is the biggest issues for these kind of projects.
Communists had great propaganda during the Cold War. So good that liberals still get upset when you simply show them their own problems when they want to waste resources "combating injustice" elsewhere. If you're referring to modern day leftists, then it's because no one even wants to hear the word "capitalism" because their knee jerk reaction is to rabidly defend it and bring up the sins of communism even if all you're doing is literally repeating what capitalist scholars, journalists, and economists have written.
Imagine Barbie but with class-consciousness. With all the basically free high-production tools and talent on the left, is it not possible?
You must not be familiar with Bong Joon ho, squibgam, Oliver Stone, or Costa Gavras. However, even when you're staunchly leftist, most of the game you'll have to reach out to a big distributor to show your movie. If it's not a genuine threat to capital, they'll happily show it to everyone. "The film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.
Besides being adequately well-made, Barbie had an enormous marketing budget. Low-budget indie films can be well-made, but you can't get them into theaters, unless you manage to first get them into the right film festivals and glowingly reviewed by the right people and so on, and it's all swimming upstream.
Even when liberalism (commonly) shows things being terrible and shitty in fiction, the takeaway message is "at least it isn't that bad for you watching at home now is it?" or even "this could be worse if someone actually tried to improve it somewhat."
Its possible but how will it get "out" there?
If you don't have name recognition, connections, and a load of personal wealth (or favors) anything made will be stuck in small scale distribution and a slow roll out.
Hard to say much besides ownership and censorship by capital. But I can give it a shot.
I was listening to this Plastic Pills podcast about the political mythologies of the left vs right, based on the book Mythologies by Barthes. Mythology being an extension of ideology essentially, where symbols that represent ideas in an ideology become entities themselves in a system of symbols to perpetuate the narrative eg. the character of Captain America symbolizes the US but takes on a role within the Marvel mythos which people handle as a symbol in itself, like maybe dressing up as Captain America at a rally
Anyway what they say is, the right has it easy, since all they need to do is continue the narrative or intensify it. But for the left, we are not stuck in some fantasy realm but must live in the material world: we need to actually work to survive before we can start creating political mythology. Also, our goals also lie in the material world -- ultimately revolution can only happen due to material conditions, not people being convinced by a real nice book or movie
There was another interesting point that revolution is the only "anti-myth" ie a myth which actually ends up changing material conditions. I guess they mean The Revolution in the vague sense that leftists refer to, as if it's the eschaton. It does seem mythological, yet if it really does happen, it is entirely material, unlike any other myth. But this also means that everything leading up to the Revolution and everything after it is not part of the anti-myth
I think since this is more postmodernism and post-structuralism, from the French schools, there is a bit of intellectualism about communism here, that leftists aren't being real leftists when "working towards" a revolution or once they took achieve control (eg. the USSR, which they mostly critiqued) they do a revisionism. So take that with a grain of salt
To answer your question, it seems like it's too much work, and it's not really up our alley as materialists. But I still wonder if it's worth it as an artist to make leftist art. Not just a disruptive kind of art that pulls you out of the current capitalist, consumerist worldview that most people seem to bring up for the topic, but a more constructive (?) type of art with grander vision or ability to change and create genres. Something like a Lord of the Rings which birthed fantasy, or maybe reaching further back to religious mythology, since I mentioned the eschaton earlier. I might even ask what a post-Revolution leftist mythology would look like...maybe similar to Soviet Realism?
You bring up some interesting points.
Did you know that the CIA funneled huge amounts of cash into making modern art as a response to Soviet realism?
Did you know that the CIA also had its hand in cultivating the post-Marxist left?
I'm going to respond to OP in a top-level comment soon with some reading recommendations about how modern art is a CIA op or, at the very least, the CIA pushed modern art into the mainstream via massive amounts of monetary support. You might be interested in reading some of the books that I mention.
Ooh I knew that modern art was an op but not about post-Marxism. I'll check for your comment to read up more. Thanks for sharing!
No worries.
Gabriel Rockhill is a dissident post-poststructuralist (i.e. he is schooled in post-structuralism [by big names such as Derrida, Iragary, Badiou and Balibar no less]) and he has arrived at a place where he is very critical of the movement and its origins.
While I never studied poststructuralism anywhere near as much as he did, I arrived at basically the same conclusions before discovering his stuff so naturally I find his arguments compelling.
You can find more articles by him here and he also has a YouTube channel here which has some good lectures in there if you want to learn more about his takes.
it does seem mythological, yet if it really does happen
Appreciate your thoughtful response
Yes, exactly what I was thinking! It would more be in the genre of scifi or science fantasy likely since it is future-oriented.
There are some subgenres like solarpunk and hopepunk I know of, but these are more about people post-Revolution rather than stories written by people who live in a post-Revolution society (unless the authors live in AES states). Somewhat of an anthropological interest of mine I guess
We need to separate shows and films that are marketed and written to appeal to leftists vs those that... are leftist.
One of the factors to consider is that the CIA funneled huge amounts of cash into the arts in order to present an alternative to Soviet propaganda.
https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/
The CIA also did this with the post-Marxist left at the same time.
If the CIA can do that, and it's within their budget too, then there's no reason why they couldn't be doing the same by propping up legit propaganda and signal-boosting it.
Here's a reading list in no particular order:
Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers by Joel Whitney
Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War
The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by by Hugh Wilford
Who Paid the Piper and The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders
Then of course there's the whole Orwell and Animal Farm deal where the IRD and I believe the CIA worked together to distribute the book in multiple languages across the world. The CIA and IRD had a direct hand in the works of Robert Conquest and Encounter Magazine too. I assume this is just the tip of the iceberg and it's stuff that they've allowed to be released under freedom of information.
