this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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tl;dr I believe we are failing to "bridge the gap" between disaffected libs and baby leftists. I want to help fix this.
I want to focus my efforts next year on creating effective propaganda, learning how to make better propaganda, and sharing this with comrades as much as possible.
The Comfortable Class
I live what American politicians would call a "middle class" lifestyle. I live in a suburban area surrounded by other people who seem to have the same broad level of comfort to me. While in Marxist terms we would all be Proletarians or "working class", I'd prefer to add a sub-class to this that I'm calling the "comfortable class". We're not owners of Capital nor small business owners so Bourgeois or Petit-Bourgeois doesn't apply here. However, we're also not a paycheck away from homelessness, nor are we reliant on food stamps or other direct aid to live. We're probably working one main full-time job with a steady schedule. Maybe we have a "side hustle" but it's not necessary to keep it going to pay bills. I think you get the point.
Life may be somewhat comfortable, but it is not good. It's not good for anyone. Maybe I'm just projecting here, but I don't see anyone around me that's actually happy. Everyone seems pissed off, more aggressive, and on shorter tempers than I've seen ever before.
How I joined the Left
Without doxxing myself too much... Based on my identity and class position I should be a Republican. Or at least a centrist Democrat. But I'm not. I am part of the LGBT community, have a diagnosis for Autism, and never quite fit in with "normal" people.
I started my political life phonebanking for Obama, then did some Democratic Party politics for a while, fell in love with Bernie Sanders and resonated with everything he was saying, fell out of love with Democrats, and slowly drifted farther left until I became who I am today.
I believe I got here because of my non-typical identity plus a lot of patient reading, listening, and debating politics. Politics is one of my "hyper focus" subjects, which means I tend to consume way too much of it as I get fixated on learning as much as I can. I can't expect others like me to follow this path.
I feel like a lot of us have similar backgrounds or similar back stories. A lot of us are neurodiverse, disabled, or some form of queer. I'm glad we're able to come together and help each other under this banner of Marxism.
We can't wait for material conditions to get worse
It's something I see a lot as I try to reason with what to do as a Leftist. I've been told several times that we have to wait until the material conditions deteriorate enough for people to see our side of things. I don't want to wait... A lot of people are suffering NOW! And I'm not just talking about the peripheral nations; life sucks in the U.S. too! It's just easier to ignore than in a place like the Philippines.
Reaching the frustrated "normies"
We can't build a revolution with the numbers we have. We must grow!
There has to be a way to reach people who are beginning to see the cracks in the current system, but are struggling to find real solutions. People who are disenfranchised by our current electoral system, that don't vote because they see no point, that are checked out of following which person is President because nothing ever changes. People that aren't going to naturally drift towards the left because of their life circumstances. "Normies"
Read this post from a non-voter in NC. There are a lot more potential revolutionaries from this group than from the place I came from!
How do people become leftists today?
There's a common Marketing concept known as a "engagement funnel" or "sales funnel". What this funnel model shows is the path a potential buyer of a product or service falls through to get from zero ("I don't even know you exist") to a sale ("I bought your thing and am becoming an evangelist for your brand").
What does the Left "funnel" look like?
You start with the general public. Take out everyone who is a committed Fascist, Conservative, and die-hard Democrat. That's one part of the funnel.
The people who get to the next stage are potential Leftists, but now they need to know that Marxism exists. That takes another huge chunk of people out of the equation. With the sorry state of education in the U.S. this is a huge gap we have to overcome. How can someone become a Socialist if they've never even heard of that word?
Next we have people who have at least heard the S-word, but now they are turned away for some reason. Maybe it's propaganda claiming we killed 100 million people with a giant spoon, or Uyghurs, iPhone vuvuzela, or one of a hundred other talking points that keeps people from looking at what we have to offer. Lots of people fall out of the funnel here. I believe there's enough material out there to debunk all of these tired attacks at this point. Maybe they're not in the most accessible format but the content is definitely out there for people to find.
What's left? We are now looking at people who know Socialism exists and are curious enough to learn more about it beyond the mainstream smears. Great! This is our potential base of recruits! What do we have for these people? Maybe some of them are watching Second Thought or streaming Hasan, or maybe they're listening to Chapo (that's how I started)? If they're lucky, they know about these things and eventually want to learn more about this whole Socialism thing.
This is where the easiest-to-patch gap in our funnel is.
If people somehow get enough knowledge or inspiration to get past "I like the occasional LeftTok video" what do they have to welcome them? Read theory. Read Settlers. Read Marx. Read Lenin. Read Blackshirts and Reds. etc.
A lot of reading, and not easy reading either.
I believe everyone on this forum is at this point. We're all through the funnel. I have these books and more on my reading list, I'm doing study groups, etc. But most people, even those who would be comrades, aren't going to get to this step. They're going to fall out of the funnel because learning about Socialism is too hard! It's Hasan and then BAM here's a mountain of books to read!
Summary
In the marketing "funnel" that is converting people to leftism, we are falling short in two places:
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There's a major gap in the funnel where people would find out Socialism exists at all.
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Getting people from casual left "content consumer" to a true "revolutionary"
We need agit prop to cover both these gaps. What do you think?
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I think the already established term is "labor aristocracy"
Comforts allotted through super exploitation are enough of an incentive to passively or actively keep capitalism going, even without happiness. these people certainly won't be any happier without their comforts, and in order to overthrow capitalism we would also end imperialism, and thus those comforts. This contradiction is pretty glaring, and leaves everyone who would fall under the labor aristocracy or who would hope to enter that sub-class as necessarily enabling capitalism. Even if there is a part of them that would want the type of better world that is only achievable by socialism, these types of people will not do the work required to actually understand and internalize that reality, instead resigning to the mantra that "we can't change anything" and thus ensuring that at least their comforts remain. These are the "settlers" mentioned so often in our circles, not only because they are settlers in the sense of Sakai, but also because they have totally settled on doing nothing for anyone but themselves!
I agree with you that it is random circumstance that creates a leftist in the imperial core. It is some combination of factors out of someone's control that brings them that way: being queer, being abused, being from certain national backgrounds or disabled or in some other marginalized group; some combination of these things forces the people who experience them to recognize that the indoctrination that works on most people isn't enough for them to explain their lived experience. Unfortunately this is not an easily replicable experience, and the only thing we can do as already "funneled" communists is keep being visible and extending the reach of our practice and perspectives through public work, education, and relationship building. Even still, people have been doing this for a long time here, and it has proven that it is not enough to truly awaken the class consciousness of people in the imperial core.
I think your analysis is lacking the primary contradiction in the American context, that of settler colonialism. The people most primed to be radicalized are not the labor aristocracy - even if some from that group will be radicalized because of their aforementioned randomly generated circumstances. The people who need to be prioritized in outreach are colonized people, people with national interest that are inherently at odds with the colonial project, New Afrikans, Indigenous peoples, diaspora communities, trans people, sex workers, prisoners; the groups of people who have not and will not ever have real access to the levers of power; the human sacrifices at the altar of capital.
The reality is that the only way to be a socialist is to organize in the world you live in. It takes work and sacrifice. It is not easy. It was not easy for anyone we look to for guidance on how to actually do it, and it is not easy now. The people who are willing to do that are the ones who "have nothing to lose but their chains," and in the US that isn't as many people as most here seem to think. People have a lot of comfort to lose, a lot of treats, and a lot of self-identity. Spending whatever free time people have on doing anything beyond the level of a hobbyist is unlikely until being a hobbyist of any kind is unaffordable. There is a reason no one in the imperial core has ever managed to be successful at organizing revolution despite dozens of groups outside the core being able to do so, and it is not because the propaganda wasn't good enough, or the marketing funnel wasn't lubed enough.
I recommend to you We Are Our Own Liberators by Jalil Muntaqim, which contains the "FROLINAN Handbook," a guide for revolutionary nationalist cadre organizations. I know, more reading. Comrade Muntaqim offers a great distillation of the US specific revolutionary theoretical tradition, and how we can apply what has been learned through the last century of practice, today. This is the work that we must undertake now instead of doing what liberals do and resigning the work for the future. It is both true that most people in the US will not do shit until the material conditions get worse and communists must get organized now before that happens to be ready to integrate those people into our formations when that time comes. Again, it will most likely not be middle class people, suburbanites, or whoever watches Hasan that are first in line, it will be undocumented monolingual Spanish speaking Indigenous peoples, colonized and diaspora groups who are not "upwardly mobile," queer and disabled people who live in poverty, etc. These are the communities we must build relationships with now and support now so that when things get worse, they will know that we are already trustworthy, well organized, and sincere.
There are tons of short pamphlets and accessible materials for newer leftists that span the gap between Hasan and Grundrisse, hundreds surely. You could compile all these and make new ones and spread them around but it is not a lack of propaganda which keeps people who benefit from imperialism from developing politically.
We talk about comforts and treats a lot but lately I’ve been wondering about that. What are we talking about when we talk about treats? Is it just exotic fruits, chocolate, coffee, video games and televisions? Or are we including in that other material benefits that a first worlder enjoys that the global south might be cut off from like cheap insulin, access to dialysis machines and chemotherapy? If that’s the case, why shouldn’t a person with a chronically ill loved one not resist tooth and nail an economic change that would result in their death, and what could we possibly say to them to get them on our side? “Stop being such a treat-brained baby loser and make your sister die in pain?”
Honestly, the system is so elaborate and complex that I would hold that each person has their own niche combo of "treats" which allows them to have some elements go away and not be up in arms about it because the other elements remain and keep them yoked. There are many different forms of treats: material luxury treats that you mentioned, like coffee and video games and tv; there are social group things like sports, religion, bar culture, comedy, games, cars, etc which are things people identify as which also extends into brand culture in general, things that unite people around a company or as a marketing demographic but otherwise have no real solidarity with each other and often people enjoy these things alone despite identifying with the greater culture; ideological treats like racism, sexism, transmisogyny , etc which allow people to feel superior and harbor a twisted joy in the destruction of the people who's labor they benefit from; there is time itself as a treat and being able to have time to enjoy treats in the first place. I could go on, but the main point is that it is a multifaceted treat-ment which means that you could look something terrible that you hate in the eye such as your example of an ill loved one not getting healthcare access and still find ways to cope.
Importantly, there are also people who DO resist as much as they can as individuals and their loved one dies anyway and then their life goes on, often with way more debt and bills. When you are juggling debt and loved ones having severe medical issues, even if you are totally sober in your understanding of how flawed the system is, overthrowing it isn't really one of the options on the table with the few hours you have to do anything in a week. Fighting with insurance and lawyers and administrative bureaucracy and depression and debt collectors and your boss is multiple full time jobs.
Okay but I guess my central question is whether access to life-saving medication is a treat. Because outside of South Korea and thebUS that is a first-world benefit.
Again, I think for some people it is and for some it isn't, everyone has different things that turn them on. I am sure there are a lot of people in the US who 100% think their access to healthcare is worth keeping this system going, even when so many other people here don't have access.
Okay forget about American healthcare, just pretend the United States doesn’t exist for a second. Imagine there is a person whose sister needs special medicine to live. They live in the imperial core and they get their medicine from a imperial core hospital. Is that medicine a treat? What would make that medicine a treat? If it’s not a treat, what is it?
If access to a thing enables, in whole or in part, someone to be okay with maintaining the status quo, I would say it is operating as a treat for them, particularly if that thing is not necessary for immediate survival. Treats are inherently things we do just for the sake of themselves being enjoyable, and not because we need them to survive. Things that are survival needs can be turned into treats, like how we all need food to survive but we don't need to eat out at restaurants, we all need housing but we don't need mansions, some people need life saving medicine because of a tragic illness and others because their BBL didn't go as planned.
Would there be any literature about this phenomenon other than this dissertation level text itself which you have written and J. Sakai's "Settlers"?
As far as directly speaking to the phenomena of the labor aristocracy and comprador classes I would say Lenin's Imperialism, and Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, but in general applying dialectical materialist reasoning to our material conditions will simply result in these conclusions. If you have earnestly studied the work of our revolutionary predecessors and tried to organize in the US yourself, this perspective becomes self-evident.
Frantz Fanon for sure
thnx, which works of his in particular?
The Wretched of the Earth is a classic starting point for good reason, that’s where I started. Highly recommend!
tysm chief time to break my no theory streak
Great post. I'll need some time to process. Def have more to learn!
you are doing well and your energy and spirit is in the right place, keep it up!
Well the blackpill that was working it’s way out over the past few days just got jammed back down my throat.
Why...?
It's not trying to discourage you, it's an honest criticism and a lot to be gleamed from if you didn't already consider the points.
I don't know what that means