Every single time we attempt to spread and engage non-leftist communities, we encounter the very same problem: the standard narrative against Socialism is so strong and has been so internalized by normies that it's like talking to a wall. Nothing we say crosses the ideological barrier. Narratives you and I may have learned to dismiss years ago are still strong in the average person's mind, and will protect them from considering anything that falls under the S-word. The other problem we have is that many young people who now believe themselves to be Socialists have a childish, dumb understanding of it where they basically want a happier capitalism.
The most important question, then, is how to challenge these standard narratives and spread our point of view. Spreading memes and organizing left-wing communities like this one work, but only to a certain point. IMO we need something more organized and persuasive than that, but I'm still not sure what it is.
Wait until they're firmly on your side, then start indoctrinating them with leftist positions, but don't use naughty words (socialism, anarchism, communism, capitalism, classism, exploitation, means of production, surplus value, revolution, etc.), and once they've internalized it sufficiently, REDpill them the rest of the way.
Best gateway drug is labor unions. In spite of decades of propaganda, even the average burgerlard is supportive, and would join a union if they could. Labor unions are uniquely well suited to socialists, since they are a very goal-oriented organization that's harder to derail with conciliatory classcuckery or idpol nonsense.
Depends how you want to open the door. Being openly against gun control is a way to get people on the other side to notice you, and being openly against free trade is enough to get most non-rich liberals listening.
All that matters is going outside and promoting it. Start a discussion/lobbying group and write a formal letter to your legislator every four months about how satisfied/unsatisfied you are with him. This is the basis of all lobbying.
Ian Powell
This, one of the first things you should do is start being supportive of things that are commonly associated to rightwingers (anti-gun control, anti-bueraucracy, or at least unnecessary buearaucracy) pro-freedom of speech and then slowly start plopping socialist concepts, you can start by how their bosses take their surplus value, how capitalism ruins culture and nations (therefore if you are a true patriot you must be against capitalism), shit like that. Take a leftwing concept and showcase it as an answer against capitalism, an answer that liberals can't give and something that will hook in rightwingers.
Jonathan Evans
We ruin our own reputation with radlib retardation. You can't exactly blame people for falling for some Jordan Peterson line of "identity politics is derived from Marxism" when most Marxists can't stop spouting feminist, BLM, anti-cop, Islam apologist etc. trash.
Hudson Cook
It makes plenty of sense to be anti-cop if you're Marxist. This isn't identity politics, it's just acknowledging how the state is structured.
Brayden Martin
Also something I don't think I've seen suggested from neither here nor leftypol is to start a psyop against rightwingers, more specifically against people like white nationalists, fascists and far-rightists of that sort. The reason for this is that these types of righties suspiciously never seem to talk about economics, which happens for many reasons, they either are retarded and know jackshit, purposefully leave them out cause they don't know what to go for or simply are populist cocksuckers that say shit like "no we'll have a mixed economy that incorporates socialist policies but bosses will still have control over their businesses and earn profits" or some other retarded shit like that. The way to take advantage of this shit is by making shit like flyers, posters or shit like that that reveals (not too obviously ofc) how all the rightwing shit about muh nation muh culture muh joooz is just a coverup for the elite to keep earning profits, keep their MoP and stay as the ruling class. Here's an example: a flyer that says something like "Kill all rich jews, replace them with rich whites". This also makes normie rightwingers would-be white nationalists want to dissasociate themselves from them if they see them as being this openly violent. Just some thoughts.
Aaron Price
Let's die on hills not worth defending then, and let the right get regular workers who don't want violent crime in their communities. Of course in your gated community it's not that much of a problem, I'm sure.
Colton Butler
what you gotta do is simple: do a reality check from time to time
majority of the working class is fat, not starving, they are free to own cars, houses, travel around etc actually as long as you have a marketable skill, you enjoy the market and i'd say 90% of the population enjoys the market all the doctors enjoy the market because people want to buy their services all the fighter pilots are pretty damn happy with what they do all the engineers are enjoying their 6 digits salaries even workers with less formal education, such as plumbers, welders, electricians, construction workers etc are pretty damn employable in the current economy im in my 20ies so the only people ive met in my whole life who are unhappy with the market are weird hair color people who went 6 digits into debt for a feminist basket weaving degrees, stupid people are stupid no matter if you have capitalism or socialism except that everyone owns an internet connection, everyone is quite literally already owning the means of production ive met a guy who learned how to fix washing machines on the internet, found a used 200$ toolbag with the tools on the internet and now makes a living fixing washing machines im studying math at uni so basically half of the students sells math lessons to highschoolers and other uni students like engineering and technology students while the other half does coding
basically none of the working class people you talk to needs any socialism, they are doing just fine in capitalism average working class man is more worried with a feral minority harming is family or feral unemployable leftist setting his car on fire instead of learning a marketable skill, than he is worried about big evil corp buying up a rug under his feet
Julian Reed
Regular workers don't like the pigs and the popo don't keep your neighborhood safe dumbass.
When you say socialism, you think of a land of plenty in everlasting harmony, an enlightenment cockaigne. When a mormon says mormonism (a word that they actually avoid when proselytizing for this very reason) he thinks of getting his own planet and a harem of angels. When other people hear those words, they hear a sucker who got swindled by promises of golden mountains that none of those who went before them (apart from the leadership) ever received.
While the immortal science of marxist materialism might prove objectively and irrefutably that socialism is the real deal, that's not how it comes across, and to the people who have time nor need to make a study out of every faith that's peddled to them, that's where their interest in whatever you might have to say ends.
Jackson Scott
Imo if we're talking about the US this is debatable but in the case of my country it's very true. Even if it's reactionary workers they still dislike cops, at the very least some amounts of suspicion towards them.
Thomas Rodriguez
In burgerland too, if we're talking the people who actually work and not boomers or "middle class" fags.
Charles Cooper
It's not debatable. Look up the stats. It only seems like cops are popular with burgers because the bootlickers are so loud and have an active culture. Most burgers personally know someone who got mistreated by the cops in some way. Most Americans tense up when they see a cop car or hear sirens, including "middle class" white people. The ones who like pigs are either pigs and their families or boomers who think the media is out to make us hate cops.
I don't know why that's relevant, but yeah. The poor ones are. A lot are technically petty bourgeois living off stock-based retirement funds though.
Thomas Gray
Yes, the lady who lives across the street from my parents drives an uber because she lost her job and doesn't have anyone to help her out so she's teetering on starvation. But most of them had a much more positive experience with capitalism as they came up before the stagnation of wages and the virtual requirement of a college degree for menial jobs and the massive rise in housing costs fucked millennials and zoomers.
Jace Torres
I mention it because you said boomers are one out of the two types of people that like cops and that no workers like cops so I implied that as in you think no boomers are workers.
Aaron Hughes
still your basic premise is that your feelings are supposed to feel good, as if there is a law of nature saying that you are guaranteed or entitled to feel nice about things that is just wrong, i mean i am not going to say any mean things here but that is just very basically wrong, you arent exactly entitled to feel like a pretty princess, just trust me on this one thing: life can be faaaaaaar more brutal than anyone with the internet access is living
and now onto the other thing: bad living conditions for the unskilled and uneducated (by educated i mean technically literate, people who know engineering, medicine, useful things in general not useless higher education) is because of overcrowding, or more specifically competition unskilled and uneducated face a lot of competition because there is too many of them, and too little physical resources in existence there is a reason chiefs of surgery remain unaffected by the ever increasing amount of unskilled, uneducated, technically illiterate workforce, there is a reason chiefs of surgery get paid 6 digit salaries in this market and some unskilled cab driver doesnt
and its not because of evil capitalism or whatever, useless people are simply useless while useful people are simply useful, no even need for any moralisms in the analysis, people vote with their wallets and they vote for chiefs of surgery more than they vote for cabbies
Luke Campbell
Cute little anecdotes but the actual data show that you're completely wrong.
Anthony Gutierrez
"actual data" as provided and parsed by the same pigs it's about
Elijah Reed
I don't know whether to be more depressed by your blatant reliance on unfalsifiable claims or your alarming paranoia, but in any case I feel like shit - again - for believing in leftists. Shit like this is why we might never win.
Noah Gomez
All these "uhh accomodate yourself to mainstream sensibilities?" answers are stupid. Obviously we have to try and be popular and pragmatic, but destroying the intellectual foundations of said sensibilities is literally one of our main tasks. You will never, in any point of history, find the oppressed class automatically ready for revolutionary ideas, because they were raised, educated and informed by the class enemy their entire lives, in order to get them with the proper mindset to work with the status quo. You can't dodge their wrong assumptions because it's convenient to do so, you have to confront them directly.
The best way to do this, and to win the information war, is simple: organize and spread information systematically. Information is the foundation of ideas, and we just have to circulate as much information that contradicts the official narrative as possible. For example, if every nasty shit the FBI and the CIA did during the Cold War became common knowledge, people would inevitably have to re-arrange some of their ideas and perceptions to assimilate this new information. There may not be some huge automatic shift in political ideology, but they won't believe in the Good vs Evil narrative that many people project into the Cold War, which would make them a lot more receptive to our ideas.
The goal is to accumulate, organize, catalog and source the information to be spread, and to both spread it ourselves as much as we can and give our support to people who spread it by creating their own platforms like youtube channels, podcasts, websites, radio, books, etc. But remember, just saying "CIA bad america imperialist" won't get anybody on your side, you'll just come off as an idiot. There needs to be specific cases to bring up and sources to give. This is why the information has to be *organized*, you can't just vaguely remember things you've read and then give people your personal impressions of it later. We need to train ourselves to be walking encyclopedias, because people's natural reaction will always be skepticism.
Jason Moore
MSM will only allow permitted ideas, the internet is the only solution. Reactionaries figured this out and insert themselves into every face of online interaction. By constant exposure and putting out a simple message, they normalize their ideas. Leftists should do the same and be willing to challenge others.
I was going to effort post but if people can't understand the above statement then shit's hopeless. There are people who think blocking someone on twitter counts as praxis.
Jeremiah Rogers
The approval rating for the police is only 54%, with poorer and younger people tending to view them less favorably in most surveys. Given the porky protector role the police take in labor disputes, as can be evidenced by protecting scabs and filming strikers in the recent LA teacher strikes, it's safe to guess the workers pissed off enough to take direct action are more likely to be in the 46% of people who got problems with the popo than the general population. Seeing as it's this radical labor that has always been the backbone of socialist movements worth a damn, I see no reason to throw the workers actually willing to go on strike under the bus to appeal to a "working class" that only exists in the rhetoric of social democrats and liberals on internet forums.
Repetition is key. Creating a boogeyman out of jews only took the happy merchant meme. All autists had to do is spam an image of a scheming, hook nosed jewish person. Any time greed or deception is brought up, just spam the caricature, and eventually people start blaming said caricature. When arguing with an online reactionary, remember that you are arguing against the happy merchant meme. To them, you are trying to disprove the happy merchant's maliciousness, the happy merchant's deceit. This is an impossible battle to win, because the caricature is a guilty strawman already.
Why don't we just do the same? Any time a retard defends capitalism, just spam porky and mock what they're saying.
People never stopped hating on the Jews though. It was impolite to talk about and no one in the right mind would tell you the Jews weren't put through hell in the '40s, but there has been a fair amount of grumbling all along that "they had it coming" and other such things. It didn't come back just because people decided to larp as Nazis again, but rather because, hey, here's some assholes who finally let you say what you've wanted to say all along, and the echo chamber grows. CNN played on this during the primary phase of 2016, where they called shitlords like Trump and Christie "people who tell it like it is", which should tell you that the libs are perfectly fine with cultivating this sort of thing. It's not just a matter of some shitlords on pol trying to be edgy.
Reactionaries intentionally avoid meaningful discourse. They want to screech and yell about le happy merchant and their retarded race-theory, and attempts to debunk them just reinforces their retreat into autism (and I mean that literally, their behavior is classical autistic thinking and symptoms). I don't think there is much to gain from engagement with reactionaries; their whole point is either that they're weak-minded fools who need a daddy figure, or they know exactly what they're doing and don't care if they're right or wrong. Truth doesn't matter to them, only power does, and there's not much more empowering that saying a bald faced lie and forcing your opponent to accept it publically. This is, consciously, what most of the shitlords on the right do, the ones that know what they're really after.
As for the rest of the masses, it's not like they're too stupid to realize they're getting screwed. They're always going to get screwed, and I don't think you can even make an argument that they're going to be less screwed under socialism when you ask yourself, realistically, how a post-capitalist political economy would function. Done badly, if people don't buy into the notion that socialism is when the government does stuff, they come away thinking it's some hyper-obsessive meritocracy where everyones' behavior and consumption are closely monitored by some vaguely defined entity, which may or may not be called a state but most certainly shows the characteristics of a state. In order to really make your case clearly you would need some familiarity both with Marxism and some common sense about how political economy would work in the modern era, in the conditions of the first world. In a lot of ways, the old capitalism did die in the 1930s, and what you're up against is a somewhat different beast. Trying to repeat Lenin or Mao isn't going to work.
Thomas Rogers
The "information wars" are utterly irrelevant and unproductive.
'Converting' people to the socialist cause through Facebook memes and pop culture podcasts accomplishes basically nothing. Even if you do get people on your side (through half-assed simplifications of Marx and various anti-USA screeds) it doesn't matter, because those people are still deeply alienated individuals separated by thousands of miles of physical space who cannot practically unite anywhere except online. The same is true on the far Right: a decade of Stormfront astroturfing and Nazi memes have turned half the internet into retarded anime fascists, but aside from shitting up 4chan and Reddit it's completely irrelevant, because it's a bunch of anonymous suburban kids that have no real power or IRL organization.
If you just want a place to hang out online, then keep making memes and arguing on Facebook, but don't expect it to amount to anything IRL because it won't. If you actually want to build a socialist movement capable of uniting working people and wielding power, you need two things:
- An IRL organization capable of supporting/protecting its members and uniting them together in close proximity - A novel, persuasive vision of an anti-capitalist future that doesn't rely on tricking people or trying to directly resuscitate the failed experiments of the past
The few successful far-right parties in Europe have the first one, and that's why they're an actual threat. First worlders live in a weird combination of tremendous consumer affluence and dire poverty/repression, and if a left movement doesn't have some way to protect people from the latter once they reject the former, they're not going to make headway. Also, spontaneous protest movements today (Yellow Vests, etc.) are anti-political in nature, in that they reject the status quo bourgeois politics of both the Left and Right, but so far aren't really coming up with a clear alternative. No one is going to listen when the Trots, socdems and anarchists roll in and start demanding the same political formations and actions that have been tried and have failed for the past 150 years.
Kayden Mitchell
The irony being that the autism epidemic followed in tandem with the progressive epidemic. But I guess that falls outside what you mean with the meaning of your meaningful discourse.
Jack Morales
Then why are leftists, both real and fantastical, both actual politicians and internet talking heads, so utterly obsessed with them?
They're a bunch of awkward autistic losers just being angry that they can't get a gf and they're master seducers, they're fat basement dwellers, and they're a menace to be confronted on the streets, they're nobodies, and they're the white supremacist systemic institutionalized system of hierachic systemism that is intertwined with the fabric of WeLiveInA-society.
Joshua Williams
the way commodification and the working day has seeped into every aspect of our lives has made everyone more miserable.
Owning the means of production isn't a thing simply about justice. Private control of the means of production has lead to increasingly irrational and absurd economic coordination.
Michael Lewis
Compared to when?
Joshua Butler
Even fucking 50 years ago during the social democratic period
Jacob Evans
You mean when people had six day work weeks in monotonous industrial jobs and could hardly afford things that even people on welfare can afford today.
There's a reason communism was more popular with the workers back then.
Christian Jones
People actually work longer hours today, and struggle to pay for the basics of healthcare, education and housing.
Jonathan Young
Only in America.
Daniel Brown
Everywhere else growth is stalling, Europe is completely stagnating. Middle income countries besides China are also just swimming in place in terms of GDP per capita.
David Jackson
It's not a matter of growth.
Carson White
It is a matter of growth. Capitalism promised rising living standards for people. If it can't deliver, there will be trouble.
Nicholas Edwards
I dunno, I read some stuff about 1840's London and it seemed kinda crappy but they had double digit growth rates so I guess it was a better place to live than where we're now.
Ryder Foster
Literally who? Because they're inconsequential LARPers, too.
Hours and pay were better at the time
Brody Rodriguez
That's a convenient excuse to not butt heads with opposing viewpoints, literally ever. Your modern reactionaries aren't skinheads from yesteryear, they're seemingly normal people in society with alter egos online. Richard Spencer particularly, he dresses well, grooms well, and is well spoken. He also is well read, and showed as much in his debate with Jason Unruhe.
Is it pride that makes you shun the modern era?
Parker Williams
Of course it was crappy. But capatalism wasn't overthrown in 1840s london. Revolution isn't about absolute conditions, but relative changes in conditions.
