We’ve reached the second iteration. There isn’t a lot separating us from the third iteration. And the material conditions were bad enough, at the latest, sometime between the first and the second iterations.
People know socialism exists. People are experiencing sufficiently bad material conditions that they want change.
People have picked up neoliberal ideas from living in a neoliberal society. These ideas give people a framework to process their material conditions so that they do not rise up in sufficient numbers. People need to learn that these ideas are part of an ideology designed to enrich the owner class at the expense of the worker class. Things will continue to get worse unless people understand that everyone needs to own their work.
This education is work that still needs to be done after hypothetically defeating the current fascist dictatorships and is probably part of what will be needed to defeat them.
I keep having this conversation with people and seeing the accelerationist line of reasoning, so I wanted to address it with a visual.
It could be better yes, but most right wing parties are doing rather well because of old (read dying) people, while young people are overwhelmingly leftist.
I disagree heavily with this. That’s mostly a thing pushed by tankies, the ones we argue with. But then arguing with tankies isn’t productive either, it is a distraction at best.
What exactly do you propose if not outreach? You seem to criticize the idea of spreading awareness in general. Did you read the parts where I also said the same stuff about what you call information gatekeepers? I should note I am also heavily in favor of direct action and unionization, but doing those things also requires outreach. I think really the best thing to do is irl word of mouth, irl political participation, and establishing good leftist spaces online (without tankies).
It’s not just tankies, beyond Lemmie’s specific local rift.
It’s left leaning liberals with social democrats, social democrats with gramscian leftists, gramscian leftists and classic marxists, all of the above with tankies, or with whatever cosplay anarchists dwell in places like these. And much more, depending on the local political landscape.
Neofascists don’t even feel the need to agree with themselves, they’ll argue one thing and the opposite as long as they get to stir some stuff up online, “own the libs” and win some arguments. There is nowhere near that level of propaganda discipline and willingness to row in the same direction at any point of the left. They broke feminism in two (three or four, really, but a few of those chickens are still to get home) with the slightest of propaganda pressure. They didn’t even need that much to make most left and center-left political coalitions crumble. At this point I assume they’re trying to be gentle when making frustrated leftists stay home in elections because there’s no challenge in it.
My proposal? Take a page from their book. Prioritize wining arguments and mobilizing over practical policy, get to the policy once you’ve consolidated power. Complain that you’re not allowed to deploy the full policy because of the other guys and the establishment all the way up. Never disagree with anybody willing to agree with you on anything. Never agree with a political rival. Never own the failures of the system. Find a scapegoat that works and push it.
None of those things are ideological. But nobody on the left will suspend their purity tests to play in the playground we’ve built for ourselves.
I’m all for dismantling that playground. It’s toxic and grotesque. But you won’t do that with “outreach” and “spreading awareness”. You do that with hard, consolidated institutional power. They know. The left doesn’t.
Me oh my. Yeah no there are other ways than “consolidating power” and lying to people. You can engage people emotionally without being manipulative and still push good policies.
Also, that all sounds very US centric and honestly a bit wrong. It is usually the libs that deplatform and refuse to cooperate with socialists. That’s certainly the case within the democratic party. Same here in norway, with liberals not working with socialists (and rather the populists instead), and with the soc dems only ever reluctantly cooperating with us. It was announced, to my joy, a few days ago that LO (a big union) will finally give some money to the red party (a socialist party) because the reds getting enough votes is the only way the social democrats will win.
Edit: This is also my general understanding of politics everywhere. That centrists and right wingers (libs) have no interest in working with anyone left of them. It’s certainly how fascists have won elections all around the world.
I’m not in the US, let’s start there. I am in a territory that is generally left-leaning and has a left-leaning government, let’s set that next.
And no, there are no other ways than consolidating power because a leftist without a government position is not useful to me at all. A leftist without a seat does not push good policies. They don’t push any policies at all. Governments push policies. The only leftists who push good policies are in government.
There is no need to lie to be engaging, but you do need to convince people. You need to present arguments and you need to win those arguments in the eyes of the people. You need to show the alternatives are doing poorly and create an image that they are incompetent and the cause of the current set of issues. Which should be easy, because they are, by and large.
But that’s not being done. The perception is that the left is deluded, splintered and naive. Those are all perceptions pushed by the right onto the left that the left sucks at dispelling. The implication in your response that popular, effective campaigning and grassroots political action is inherently immoral or requires immoral behavior is itself part of that problem. Hell, we are doing the thing right now. If we were on the fascist spectrum we wouldn’t bother with this nitpicky argument and would just wait for whatever point of contention we can agree on and rally around it. We just suck at this.
Look, it’s ultimately a technical problem. The other side saw the communication tools had a flaw and exploited it. Not because they’re smart, but because they had a million monkeys on typewriters tucked away online and they randomly figured out they could influence real world events for a laugh. And then the nazis caught wind.
We missed that boat and then bought into their narrative that this was something they own that is evil and only they get to do, and so we’re laying out a red carpet for them to own mainstream culture. It’s excurciating to watch.
Well yeah. This we agree on, but it really did not sound like this is what you meant by what you wrote earlier.
No? You read me wrong then.
You were pushing this earlier on in the convo
Yeah, no, we suck at this, like I said.
This conversation is not winning the culture wars. This is the exact purity argument that keeps the left from power.
Find me a solution and I’ll take it. But the solution can’t be to keep doing what we’re doing.
This convo isn’t infighting, even if it isn’t very productive. Neither of us are denouncing any leftist ideologies and we won’t be voting against the left if I’m reading you correctly.
You are correct that something needs to change, and that thing is how we communicate with people. Deceit isn’t necessary. It’s the things you described that I had already described earlier that you for some reason then said was ineffectual before then suddenly supporting it when you were the one saying it?
I’m not sure I follow.
My concern is consistent: the way the left communicates, does propaganda and pushes issues is weak, fails to control the narrative and is further undermined by atomized, nuanced positions and infighting.
The right has learned to push a more cohesive narrative in a social media landscape, largely by allowing themselves to be inconsistent and focusing on winning small arguments at every opportunity until one sticks, at which point they all rally behind it.
The left sucks at that. Nobody will suspend their pet issues, nobody will poke at the mainstream to see what works, nobody will drop their short term goals to focus on the popular narratives for the chance of deploying impactful politics on those goals later.
I find this negligent in the current political landscape, and it’s letting the far right run away with converting dissatisfaction into votes, even on issues where the left clearly has the strongest argument.
You really seem to think that the left just needs to win and is skill issue failing by not being strong enough. As an American who is currently living with the consequences of thinking “we just need to get good and vote better,” pursuing that strategy is a dead end.
The right wing wins because that is its ONLY goal. You will always be at a disadvantage because of natural human disagreements that you can NEVER get rid of. You can’t beat them at their game because they have fully surrendered themselves to WINNING, WINNING, and more WINNING.
It’s clear that you’ll never accept this fact, because it’s much more convenient to think you can just work harder.
Here’s a party doing exactly what you suggest. Notice how the party isn’t exactly soaring in the statistics and is disliked by leftists as a result of all the bigotry.
No, see, there’s a difference between being good at using communication tools and being a bigot. That is part of the left’s issue, too. The goal isn’t to scapegoat the same people the right does, that typically does not work. The idea is to scapegoat the same people that are already being targeted (right wing politicians, large corporations, billionaires) effectively.
You keep using the word scapegoat ? I find the way you speak rather iffy in general
Aha. And that’s the left putting the aesthetics of progressivism over the ethics and the politics of progressivisim.
Again, I only care about talking like the good guys talk insofar it gets the good guys a position of political power. Not because we say the right things or we feel the right things or we have a consistent, morally homogeneous maximalist approach to improving the world, but because a butt in a chair can make the world marginally better for the rest.
I’d be more lenient and mushy about that if we weren’t in the process of the second rise of fascism. We’re kind of in panic mode now.
Scapegoating implies being deceitful. It’s not about aesthetics.
It is if the scapegoat is a rich guy without much actual influence but a flashy car. It is if it’s some rich weirdo’s kinks being paraded to make the moneyed class appear unethical or morally deranged.
Think about how bad one has to be at this to have lost the public argument regarding marginalized trans people being a moral risk while Trump and the British royalty were engaged in the whole Epstein fiasco. And that’s before the whole “lost in court to his pornstar lover” stuff went down.
And they still won, rallied religious leaders around them, won again and successfully convinced the populace that queer people will attack their kids in school.
It is political negligence of the highest order.
No, they just have more means and control the media. But again, your language use is bad. Scapegoating is inherently a word that describes a form of deceit.