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?
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.