Children are outside resisting fascism by non-lethally assaulting reactionary senators with eggs, Children have shown up in record-shattering numbers to protest the lack of political action against Climate change.
And yet, the left is nowhere to be found outside of "showing solidarity", pursuing useless liberal electoralism and making epic posts on social media.
Radicalizing the working class to our side when the right-wing fascists are massacring people should be easy, radicalizing children and young people to join our side in the fight against the bourgeoisie's apathy and destruction of the climate should be easy, yet our gains are negligible.
How do we effectively gain momentum right now? What do we as leftists need to do make working class policies/movements popular with the working class?
Children are outside resisting fascism by non-lethally assaulting reactionary senators with eggs...
Tell everyone you'll give them free shit!
You make it out to sound like "the left" is some hive-mind conscious being that just makes decisions. Only you can control what you do, and what you should be doing is showing solidarity, agitating and conversing theory with your fellow workers. You do that, and you're doing your job.
Because the strike was a purely reactionary answer to an obvious issue contains no political meaning whatsoever. Most people in there call for individual action and not for a solution to a broken system.
i dont know how it is where you live, but in germany these protests focus heavily on policy and the qestion why global warming is not combated enough in democracies even tho the majority pf the people support such meassures.
ive yet to see coverage of at least one protest were there WERENT at least socdems supporting them
Bitch we can't be everywhere and anytime. And politicizing these kids' movements could backfire. Better to show them that they are already on board with our project.
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Support eggboi in his antifascist struggle!!!
Well, yeah, that's the obvious answer. Liberals can't acknowledge it though, and so the masses will become angrier and angrier as their demands fail to become policy. Call it opportunism, but it's important for us to seize on this.
because there is no overreaching global "left" at this time
plus a ton of those kids are just protesting for memes like the green new deal and don't understand how completely fucked we are
I'm going to be brutally honest here. It should be, but it isn't because the left sucks at both spreading its ideas as well as inculturating people into them.
I think the left has adapted to dealing with idpol slowly. Very slowly, but at least it's making a necessary change. However, I was a Zig Forumslack myself only a few months ago, and the contrast between being on the left and the right is great enough that I feel the left ultimately hasn't learned enough important lessons from the right.
First and foremost, there's the matter of spreading your ideas. Now I'm sure everyone on here has heard the phrase "the left can't meme", they've probably rolled their eyes at it or said that the left can't meme because it's ideology isn't "simple" enough to work in a meme format. Well the fact is, as someone who studied marketing, memes are just advertisements, the idea that something is "too complex" to be advertised is just fucking stupid.
Think about, and I mean really think about, the mechanics of a vacuum cleaner. If you emptied your mind of all that you know about vacuum cleaners beforehand, why it seems like some "complex" wonder product. It sucks up dust and dirt and stores it so you can dispose of it all later, why it will make a broom and dustpan obsolete!
Notice that not a single person around you probably has any idea of the actual "mechanics" of a vacuum cleaner. It's arcane to them. You never see vacuum cleaners advertised with a full explanation of its components, but rather a few scattered features are used to imply that it's the best vacuum cleaner you can buy.
Marketing in the 21st century has evolved past a mere statement of features. If you look at those old timey advertisements from the last century, say the 20's or so, you'll see these posters with paragraph after paragraph explaining just why this particular product is the best and just how it works.
Gradually one can notice that in the realm of advertising the actual written word faded, until dialogue itself is entirely optional in a few fields. Everyone remembers those very minimalist ipod ads right? What stands out more, what they said about the product, or the image of the product–the sleak contrast between the silhouette of the people dancing and the little white ipod?
If one were to try and become a leftist today, they'll inevitably hear the words "Read Marx". This is stupid. This is probably the worst way to advertise anything I've ever seen. Marx wrote something like 28 books, Capital itself is divided into three volumes, each something like a thousand pages long, and it's boring. It's a dry theoretical book.
Sure, being aware of theory is a great way to win debates, but not every member of the communist movement is going to be involved in a debate. Hell, most probably wont. If you had to read 3000 pages just to assemble a computer you purchased I guarantee there'd be a lot less computers in use today.
Getting on board with the right is so easy it's quite possible to honestly accidentally become right wing. Associating with the left is like pulling teeth. In the right you could be harassed by some "SJW" and lovebombed by a few right wingers afterwards that will leave you breadcrumbs to their websites. Or maybe it's the election and you find yourself laughing at a few pepe memes, at which point you start sharing more of them, associating with people who share them, and ending up inculturated into the right THAT way.
If you wanted to "join" the left, what the heck do you do? You actively seek them out. Online this may mean going to subreddits or forums. In person this may mean seeking out a party. These things exist only to attract people who incidentally become leftist, because they surely don't actively recruit or convince people as to the left's noble goals. While there you'll be given a long body of literature to read. If you ask a question that sounds like it was phrased the wrong way you'll be attacked. You'll meet a whole host of people who are such joyless, stony faced puritans as to suffocate a person with their seriousness, or strange zealots fighting for obscure, hyper-individualist causes.
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Assuming you make it through the marathon of readings on top of readings that one's supposed to study for like a college course, and you don't get isolated by the hordes of deathly serious and strange people, you'll spend a few months attending one protest after another, meeting after meeting, never truly feeling like you're accomplishing anything. Or you end up in web spaces such as this one, with an ideology so obscure and extreme as to never conceivably reach and fully indoctrinated in some cultish micro-sect.
The left needs to learn real emotional appeals. It wasn't that the left in yesteryear had some ease in recruiting just because of how shitty capitalism was then, it's still shitty now. It's due in no small part because of writers such as Dickins and Zola could paint such an astoundingly bleak picture of Capitalism, they were great at emotionally appealing to people.
Just look at "The Jungle" by Sinclair, while he may have regarded it as a failure because it didn't move Americans towards Socialism, an entire department of the government was created because the novel DID inspire public outcry: namely disgust and horror at the standards of the meat-packing industry. It worked, just not as he intended.
And before someone tries to argue that there's these deep structural problems in the world and proper marketing of ideas can only help so much: look at ISIS. This group came out of the fucking blue but took the world by storm. It motivated a ton of young men to go on "Jihad" because of it's sleek marketing campaign. Never, not once, did it ever try to appeal to people with "Well the Islamic state will be more fair and equitable than modern western states" or "Fighting for ISIS will include a great benefits package and decent wages", it woo'd alienated youths with images of powerful holy warriors striking a blow against their christian oppressors.
I guarantee you that if any other faith, such as the Mormons, were running a similar ad campaign you would see not only a few more violent Mormons out there, but a great deal of people becoming Mormons out of interest.
Islam, more than any other religion, is stereotyped heavily as being a "terrorist" religion, but it's growing the fastest of all faiths in the world. Now while this is mostly due to population growth in the Islamic world, Islam can still convert and retain enough people that you will still see the occasional documentary done on "White Muslims" and the like.
Zig Forums and Islam both share an overlap among "converts" in that the people who come to associate with these things have felt broken by the modern world. They fundamentally have a problem with the order that Capitalism has established, in many ways they came to their associations via existentialist longing rather than empiricist questioning. In the case of Zig Forumslacks the blatant hypocrisy of the liberal order has caused them to be skeptical of all ideas promoted by liberalism and it's mere accident that the racists snatch them up rather than the left does. In the case of newly converted Muslims, it's because they want a religion free from the drab "materialism" of the world and something that promotes an internal discipline and cleanliness in a world they see filled with excess and consumption.
There's nothing inherent in these people that keeps them from becoming left wing. It's merely the failure of left wing ideas to market themselves.
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I keep saying this,
Bring back tar and feathering.
Humiliation is the best tool you have sometimes.
Just look at the #yanggang. Literal nobody got THE spiciest memes in 2 months, meanwhile what does this board have to show for 2 years besides nazbol gang?
Thank you for the effort post.
Personally, I was a liberal before moving to the left. I was brought to the left through a mixture of my religion Christianity and an insightful documentary about Marx. I came to Zig Forums and got banned about a hundred 30 day bans before I knew why. After listening, reading more theory (Lenin, Marx, Engels, Mao, even ancom like Koroptkin) I began to see the patterns which made lefty anons critical of liberalism. Being an ex-liberal myself I've become probably more critical of liberal tendencies than a lot of socialists. Sometimes it's easy to miss the forest for the trees. I see where opposition to the right wing in it's entirety is useful against the right wing which I would like to see marginalized (i.e. demsocs, liberals, libertarians), and I hate to see them get so misguided in electoral politics to what seems like a rising tide of right wing reactionaries. Of course, it's better these groups become misguided in one sense.. That is I don't want to see a repeat of the Obama cult which believes that the end of history is achieved and liberal capitalism is utopia (or even a new kind of Backstabbin' Bernie cult that believes it's repairing capitalism). I do see heuristics in their vehement opposition to folks like Ben Shapiro and Lauren Southern. But, I forget that what I can control is my own response and actions.
Addendum: I also wanted to say that "massacring people" and other things that should be objectively bad actually are… complex.
Listen this isn't a call to massacre people. You're fucking stupid if you do this. However Zig Forums at times celebrates shit like this because they see it as a victory. They subscribe to this notion that if people see something "weak" in contrast to something "strong" they'll go with the strong option. Their argument for why people may join terrorist groups is that when you have a west that is as "weak" or "permissive" as the one we have today, it's natural that such permissiveness is exploited.
Beyond that, I highly recommend everyone here read this short article called "The Dead End of The Left", it's a conservative magazine, but it makes a pretty cogent argument that–removed from any sense of a worldview established by moral norms, the left becomes paralyzed. It can argue that exploitation is "bad" but that criticism doesn't have bite.
The sad fact of the world is that, as with climate change, you can present people with "scary" data and they can ultimately ignore it. Climate change IS bad, it WILL be bad for everyone. You can spend years proving it will be bad for everyone, and in spite of how terrifying the prospect is, people will either ignore it in favor of focusing on the "here and now" rather than the "abstract future" or continue to insist that it isn't real. Even worse, attempts at "proving" climate change can be met with a backlash of people ignored by what they would see as the "smug" attitude of climate change believers or whatever other bullshit is used as an excuse.
To be frank, you have to learn a lesson from the right: convince the masses to be terrified of climate change, to actually have some legitimate fear of it, but also convince them that it can be easily beaten. The contradiction but also the power of right-populist movements, is that it convinces people that they face an enemy that is simultaneously all powerful and terrifying, but also extraordinarily weak. If this power is mastered for yourself, when combined with a coherent economic theory, it can lead to great results.
As an aside I will also say, bare in mind conservative criticism and incorporate it. You can convince people of the evils of exploitation if you have a stable and coherent definition of what "justice is", and can argue unironically that the society we live in is a very unjust society. It's why I think religious socialism may become a major thing in the future.
tbh you sound like your only exposure to left politics is on facebook or whatever, what u described is astoundingly insulated, irl leftists are like…completely normal for the most part
I think the main thing is that the left simply can't expect the masses to absorb class consciousness from complex theories, and that packaging bite size messaging is important. The left, in my opinion, is much more altruistic than the right. Desiring economic freedom from capitalist slavery isn't something that only helps the whyte race. Senseless violence is a feature of the right wing. People attracted to the left are more attracted to their ability to call bullshit on the right, their courage and wit against fascism, their desire to go after porky and the fact that they profess the only ideology which places working class conditions fully (and I mean fully) above capitalism. The left does these things with fully fleshed arguments and scientific theories. I think venting about giving right wingers the wall provides catharsis for some people of course, but ultimately even the rich are just the headmaster slaves to a system which devours them too. The leftists I know, and talk to daily, aren't into genocide. I've not really encountered genocidal leftists tbh. That's a right wing thing, and something that attracts a lot of their base. Backhanded accusations of leftist genocidal behavior are a tool that liberals and conservatives use to strengthen capitalism and control their constituents. It's just fucking frustrating trying to deprogram the masses from all of the strawmen, scapegoats and counter causes like this which permeate the average political identity. The capitalist class have been careful to plant a million poisonous landmines in conservative and liberal discourse.
Maybe I am man, but I think my critique addresses a real problem in the left. I mean I've attended a few groups like the Democrat Cops of America and the PSL and I think my criticisms are mostly on point. But I'd love to be proven wrong.
You don't have to deprogram them and you don't even really have to address criticism. The most Zig Forums does to address Nazi war crimes is pretend they don't happen or pretend the nazis actually were these really nice people slandered by propaganda.
I think the best thing hte left can do is figure out how to create socialism or psuedo-socialism on the smallest scale. Run for seats in neighborhood councils and devote themselves entirely to addressing local issues.
I mean, in my town we have a pothole problem. We also have an issue with parking. No one we've elected solved these problems. If it were possible to implement psuedo-socialism on the local level, or even provide "socialist " solutions to these little annoyances, you'd gain a lot more trust from people.
The issues with third parties here in the U.S., and a lot of leftist parties in general, is that they think really big. Their kind of lead by idealists, so they would have these great big plans to "save the planet" or "rescue the economy" when they can't even prove to people that they can get the roads fixed.
Just my own two cents. A grassroots movement dedicated to solving local problems while eventually moving onto national ones–once they have a strong bedrock of support–could possibly succeed here.
Mentioning Dickens, I’ve been thinking there should be more accessible socialist fiction recently. Not future communism, I don’t think Star Trek or The Culture is practically appealing because it is projecting this utopian technical future we haven’t reached yet because we are physically incapable, we don’t have the tech. But SOCIALIST literature about living in a socialist society, or something that can help people envision it, may be helpful. You can have a story filled with pathos in this setting that emotionally resonates, and you divert fanboyism and media obsession to some kind of knowledge of, some concept or desire for, socialism. The novels themselves could be anything. Espionage or whodunnits, some sci-fi flair, urban fantasy set in a convincing socialist society, etc. You can also have novels about post-climate change, semi dystopian socialism. Like, the worst case scenario happened, things got worse, millions died, but a socialist society arose in parts of the world that maintains a better vision of the future than the retreating, jingoistic societies of capitalism building fortresses and still threatening the planet with nuclear war.
I’d say historical fiction but while I will defend the Soviet Union to liberals, I don’t think it’s useful in this context over creating a new thing to be engrossed in or desire as a possibility. And it shouldn’t be too utopian, it can represent normal social conflict that will always exist of course. That can largely be the conflict for new stories with more idealized setting for global socialism or whatever.
I must say I stand with the Zig Forumsack comrade, the mainstream left has utterly lost on all ends , it's up to us to create a new cultural revolution (in order to facilitate the real revolution)
"removed from any sense of a worldview established by moral norms"? holy shit is that not the most quintessential right-wing hack terminology you've ever heard? it's funny you would raise that jargon in the context of talking about arguments which work. i would feel very comfortable arguing against that asshole if he wants to throw around phrases like that. maybe you aren't summarizing him correctly but it sounds like the classic response that evangelical conservatives give to atheists: "how can you live a life without any kind of moral bedrock?", etc.
all you have to do is completely reject the notion that conservatives (or whatever pet label a person wants to substitute here) have more of a solid or consistent worldview - even in just a moral sense. they're all over the fucking map and they get tied up in moral contradictions when you ask them a few basic questions
it's strange that you would put quotes around the word "bad" when you're speaking of criticism to exploitation. and then you assert that the criticism "doesn't have bite". very vague - is this some kind of reductionist, moral philosophy argument? i'd imagine that right-wingers are very willing to argue that exploitation is bad, they'll just confuse all the facts around corporations and how they function
and if you're a left-winger who is at a complete loss as how to argue to the public over the issue of exploitation… then you're simply not a preacher or a leader (in the normal sense, not the cult of personality way)
such instances have occurred - time and time again. but you don't really hear about it when it happens. that's the problem - how to create messaging on a massive scale that casts socialism in a positive light
this should be saved for one of those infopic threads that sometimes gets started