How is the left supposed to appeal to workers today, and why has it failed so miserably? Every time I talk to the sort of prole who would benefit most from revolution or even left-leaning reform, it's made clear they've been heavily indoctrinated via both education and society. People equate communism with fascism, and take no interest in organizing or any sort of praxis. The entire leftist narrative has shifted from solving all issues by taking out the foundation that supports them to one of violently screaming until the state puts band-aids over social problems, which obviously fails to appeal to those we need to. The right is attracting more and more people who would benefit only from socialism because of our failures and nothing else.
How do we appeal to workers to create a unified and powerful left again? What is to be done?
How do we appeal to workers?
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JUST MAKE THEM ANGRY.
THAT'S IT.
MAKE THEM ANGRY AND APPEAL TO THEIR HATRED.
MADE BY RAGEBOL GANG
when the left starts advocating for the destruction of jewish people, it will be undefeatable
you're not going to appeal to workers by using marxist vocabulary. You literally just have to radicalise the liberals and elect left-leaning leaders.
workers are actually not very good people to radicalize, they have families to feed and mortages or rents to pay, they dont want to take the risk
you need to get the homeless, the jobless ect
if you are dead set on the workers, dont call yourself left or socialist or anything like that, everyone they hate has called themselves that, and all of those people regularly shit on them
Rotating impetus. Do the big new thing repeatedly and do it at a price workers can participate in. Break down objectives and rewards until individuals can take part. Advance your projects regionally in ways that make them the thing to do here and there rather than trying to change everything at once. If your workers can’t ever participate in the project you’re contemplating, it’s either too big (infrastructure is SEP), too early (worker poverty), or the wrong project.
Energize people in the specific and expect high drop-off; if false joiners can drag your project to the dirt you screwed up in the design step. Having false joiners is generally the right problem to have - remember that, and resist all temptation to love or hate them.
this. workers have been compromised by traditional culture. seems like zoomers are heading out of that territory though.
class consciousness is pretty strong in UK
but so is nationalism
use them both.
Because leftists keep importing 3rd/2nd-world-mindset labor groups. These groups define themselves by job only and base their friendships off of where they work. These groups have lower social lives and don't value 'free time', instead wishing to fill free time with more work to make more money.
One of my coworkers told me how he went from his current job straight to another job and was awake for 30+ hours to do so. He just shrugged it off to me and said, "I can work as much as I want and get paid, what more could I ask for?"
English nationalism usually means "kicking out the pakis". I completely detest this attitude.
pretty sure porky owns 1st world borders, Zig Forums
Minimum wage, free healthcare/education, employee ownership, lower/abolishing rent, guaranteed jobs; I.e. solutions that pertain to the material struggles of the working classes.
Don't come to people people with utopian nonsense. And don't bother them with issues that don't immediately pertain to their material (self) interests. That goes for both idpol and autistic pedantry (I.e. whether the USSR was socialist or not, etc.).
Same goes for all anti-imperialism that isn't rooted in 'war is paid out of your pocket'.
People that belief this need to stop being idealist utopian ultra-leftoid trots
...
Still doesn't stop the fact that with people coming over from countries destroyed by economic strife are not going to be too keen on you trying to take on the financial elite just because you want a little more of the pie.
Okay Zig Forums
They're especially suited to just that because they end up more destitute than most.
what are you talking about? as a proletarian, I literally have no control over immigration. I have no strategy to utilise some form of population control for my personal benefit.
hes right though
sure
As someone who came from the far-right to the far-left, you're far closer than you think when you say people equate communism with fascism.
The most common repudiations of fascism, the reason people detest them, is entirely because of their ideology taken to its natural end. In fact that seems to be the case of most ideologies: Fascists are bad "because war and genocide", Liberals are bad because "irresponsible spending and immature social causes", Conservatives are bad because "bigotry and social stagnation", and so on and so on.
Communists are unique in that Communists are bad "because social divide" or "because dictatorship" or "because hierarchy".
It's particularly silly, at times infuriating. A few personal anecdotes: on the comments of some Red Alert Trailer, there was a throwaway comment that "The EA logo superimposed over the hammer and sickle is really fitting", they weren't lamenting the loss of communist iconography–that much was clear–but equating corporate greed and control with communism.
I was talking about the state of the world with a right wing friend of mine, and said that I felt Capitalism was on the way out. My friend, unaware of my political stance, said that he felt it was *really* Socialism that was on the way out. That socialism "failed in Europe and Asia" and so the present decay and social tension we experience is the result of Socialists "freaking out" and trying to appeal to identity politics to get people to institute a socialist state.
He said in an unrelated conversation once that "What these leftists don't understand is that at the end of the day, people don't care about race–the only thing that matters is money. I'm sure black people care more about what they're taking home than the next Black Panther."
Hell even in stuff that has even remotely positive connotations for the working class, such as this little song from Warframe:
youtube.com
One of the upvoted comments I saw said something along the lines of "I wish Communism was about good stuff like people working together."
He *wished* Communism was about *people working towards a collective good*.
Honestly the greatest obstacle that the left has to overcome is the left itself. It isn't the propaganda–even Zig Forums deals with propaganda just fine. The left is the biggest enemy of the left. It's bad enough that you have people insisting that communism is the exact opposite of what it really is, or that they WISH communism is about people working together as though it were something else!
The problem is there's so many egos that the modern, cyber left is a dumpster fire. To actually become left wing is like pulling teeth, and the sad fact is that even Zig Forums, even unironic fucking Nazis are better at appealing to peoples' sympathies than most of the internet left.
If you're curious about the left you'll have a few wikis linked to you, you'll be unironically told to read thousands of pages of literature with no prevailing coherence or order, and the whole time any questions you might have if you even attempt to read the literature will be met with either a kind of condescension or anger for "badthink", and the slightest sign of hostility from the left is met with what amounts to a right wing hug squad of "You're so right" and "Well golly, they're treating you like garbage but WE care about you!"
Those anecdotes infuriate me because i relate to them all the time. Makes you feel hopeless, after your blood settles.
haha no. zoomers couldn't give less of a shit about politics, all they care about is memes
And now for the most controversial part of this post: any mass movement that expects people to read even a thousand pages of literature will never be a mass movement.
Capital is what amounts to a boring theoretical text for most people–and they probably know the communist manifesto better anyways, though it's undoubtedly one of the worst texts to introduce someone to Marxism with: overrated and under-informative.
How many conservatives do you think actually have read Reflections on The Revolution in France? Or liberals anything by Voltaire? Mein Kampf is garbage, and you wont get any real theoretical understanding of Fascism or Nazism other than "JEWS BAD" assuming you even bother to read it.
People don't read texts: they read blurbs. The conservative might buy the occasional Bill O'Reily book, the liberal might listen to a podcast on classical liberalism, the fascist might pick up Evola, but those serve to reinforce their current inculturation in their respective ideologies, not teach them it from scratch.
You don't need to read Capital to advance the cause of Marxism. For fuck's sake how many people who would later come to support the Bolsheviks were even literate?
Reading isn't useless, it'll advance your theoretical knowledge… but the way it works these days, especially in politics, is as a reinforcement tool and not a teaching one. No Jordan Peterson fan read Jung and then started following Peterson because of him, they followed Peterson and read Jung because of him. Information is filtered first from those who do read, who gain a reputation as a "smart" person or popular persona, and then their followers start reading in their stead.
Let me use this as an example: in The Social Network one of the early problems Facebook runs into, is how to monetize the company. It takes an experienced businessman to come in and say, essentially, that you shouldn't even bother looking for advertisers when your website is small, instead run at a loss and try to soak up as many accounts as you can while the website is "new" and "free", and then you can bring in the advertisements.
Similarly, stop trying to introduce people to Marxism by shoving capital in their face. Get them inculturated into leftist podcasts and websites and give them a rudimentary understanding of leftism on your own, then naturally they'll gravitate towards Capital as enough people mention it.
I find them more silly than infuriating, if only because I once repeated and believed such things myself. The problem at its core stems with the culture of left-wing movements.
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G’luck figuring that one out, “leftists”.
leftist meme magick is real
One of the major setbacks is that people have little time, especially those whose class interests align with communism, when you're working one or in some cases more full time jobs and you have children on the side you're unable to commit to politics generally.
I think in the case of America, the easiest way is getting someone like Bernie elected who supports raising minimum wage and is able to (albeit insufficiently) work for the class interests of the workers.
un grupo de personas abusivas que no estn dispuestas a disculparse por sus malas acciones me ensearon que la manera de acusar a otja persona de un dficit de empata eludir fras. ut lice esta informacin con buena salud.
You could try actually being one of them for a change.
I mean he’s not wrong
...
Lurk more tbh
The left is out of touch because it's run by right wing plutocrats treating everyone like useful idiots. Blatantly so.
The workers are siding with the right because they think it's in their interests. But good luck telling them that. Neither side is in your interest. Burn it all down. All of it.
why do fatalists always choose suicide over revolution?
You said suicide, not me.
Also there's the other issue. You give everything a derogatory label unless it's part of your übermensch. Didn't work for the nazis last time, isn't working for either brand of nazis this time. In fact it's making everyone in between sit back and watch the riots on TV.
You in particular should kill yourself though. It's for the cause.
Suicide isn't derogatory, it's an expression of hopelessness in the human condition. Saying "fuck everything" sounds like hopelessness rather than cynical radicalism.
why be so rude?
Fantastic post
Holy fuck this hurts. This isn't an uphill battle, it's a 45 degree angle battle.
the best thing that can be done is to purge the people keeping regular working class prols from leftists movements.
More liberal bashing is good
he's not a nazi anymore he's a dengist
This, basically. I used to hold the defeatist ultra-left view that any existing movement is bound to move right over time (and to be fair, there are a lot of cases that prove this) and thus you constantly need a new revolutionary group to take over from the ones that have become reformist. When in reality, revolutions have happened when an existing movement became increasingly radical as it gained traction. There's some validity to what Zizek said (keep in mind Zizek says a lot of dumb shit, and this is coming from someone who's paid to see him speak twice and bought multiple of his books before I'm accused of being a partisan) about how the demands of the GJ are impossible.
Their demands cannot be met within the framework of capitalism and definitely not in the short term, but the contradiction between their demands and the concessions that capitalists are able to give them is what pushes them to increasingly revolutionary action. The final demand then becomes to not pressure for concessions from those in power but instead take power so they can realize their demands themselves.
The mythos of revolution is way stronger than it was in reality, national liberation struggles only became communist over time (Ho Chi Minh asked the americans for help), the CCP and the KMT worked together against the japanese, the bolsheviks pursued electoralism etc.
that's even worse