The world is burning and everyone knows it. The far right is co-opting it and the liberals don’t know what to do. The conspiratorial fascists are the only ones claiming to be pro-working class, against corporations, anti-establishment, anti-MSM, and so on. They can pull radicalizing people in a terrible direction. This is what Naomi Klein calls the doppelganger effect, but it seems Lemmygrad doesn’t like podcasts. Most people can see they are evil, so the establishment liberals can say the only way to want change is to be them and neutralize many people.
Those that actually want to do something about the many crises are fragmented and co-opted. The liberal ideology leads to this. A key part of metaphysics is believing everything is separate and atomized, alienated. This leads liberals to see politics as a buffet of issues where they don’t know which to pick. I heard a liberal podcast a while ago which stuck with me because they were talking about how all the different causes seem paralyzing. Should one fight for abortion rights? Against book bans? For the environment? They know democrats won’t do shit, but they gotta keep voting because the GOP baddies are worse. They concluded everyone should just pick an issue and start doing something and hope things work out.
This is where Marxism comes in. We understand the interconnected nature of these problems and what we need to do to overcome them. We can show conspiracy minded people what the real problems are and what they’re really covering up. We can explain to the liberals how they can try to influence all their issues at once.
My question is should we do this in an organized fashion and infiltrate liberal groups to try to pull “converts?” These are the politically active people after all. Should we try to do a CPC working inside the KMT thing? Are groups already doing anything like this? Should we just try to organize a vocal alternative and get noticed by people who want change on social media and in communities?
Start a social club where you do some sort of activity and they are all not liberals.
Find a local liberal or nonliberal activist group working on some sort of project. Join them in good faith and work circles around them along with your club.
Recruit members of the group into your social club also in good faith.
You now have a small activism group and an established ally.
That just sounds like using organizing to get friends (not a bad thing). Unless you mean the social club is to be around people to convince them more, and you intend to radicalize that group from the inside.
Think of it as a labor pool for your projects. They should be people who are willing to do work for you, not necessarilly ones who agree with you.
Work such as - canvas this neighborhood, clean up trash for these homeless people, drive this homeless person to their hometown to get their birth certificate, go to this picket line, or anything else you can think of.
You repeat the phrase ‘in good faith’ several times here but what you’re describing is still just entryism
Yeah I think entryism is a good strategy when you are doing activism at a small level in your local town and community. I use “in good faith” to mean that your intention is to openly become friends with the members as opposed to causing a split or undermining the organization. Additionally, as a small group of activists it can be a challenge to find something to do that isn’t just book meetings. I’m not against the idea of a therory reading social club, but to me thats only the first step.
I support the social club then entryism followed by being your own independant thing. Additionally, this is within the context of a rural area where there isn’t already some kind of Communist party. So the organization you are practicing entryism with is going to more than likely be a church or the local fire department.
Soberana (https://soberana.tv/), a Marxist-Leninist Brazilian collective of content creators organised to occupy social media.
They are now called by the liberals to their podcasts to show “both sides”, and the audience is ridiculously high.
The main contrast I see is in this one: https://youtube.com/@KritikePodcast From their top 7 podcasts, 4 are communists, and 1 is a developmentist economist. But there’s other examples.
There’s also https://icl.com.br/, which isn’t explicitly ML, but is more revolutionary each day. Founded by ex banking person, they’re going into hard news, courses and documentary. Pretty professional structure.
We believe organising works, right? Those are examples of organising, to offer general public an alternative explanation to stuff that’s usually covered by right wing. One from grassroots no financing pure volunteering work, another for how good financing can work.
Theres a lot of content from smart people already. But they are very long format. Are we and our content on tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, telegram, YouTube shorts? I don’t know those places, I couldn’t say. But a systematic approach to fill those places with our content is likely to work and get some attention to lift our content producers to be invited to bigger venues in English language too.
That’s cool, we need more English speaking stuff like that.
I like some podcasts. I think for audio form, minute-for-minute, it’s hard to beat audiobooks. I have a ton of them I found by accident at a huge discount (🏴☠️🌊) and having works whose value I can be sorta sure of is great.
If you happen to have some maps for where the audiobooks happened to spontaneously multiply, would you please flick them over to my dm inbox?
DM’d
One issue I have with many leftist podcasts I’ve found is that they’re more like round-table talk shows than educative/entertainment. @nephs@lemmygrad.ml mentioned soberana.tv, that has something like that with their “Revolushow” one that picks a specific subject per episode to delve into, and I think Hexbear’s Deprogram is kinda like that too, but I don’t think they’re enough.
One of the most radicalising works I’ve found in my life was Mike Duncan’s Revolutions Podcasts, even if the author is a socdem. It was very entertaining and binge-worthy, but also helped a lot normalise the idea of revolution and desmistify a bunch of propaganda. I think we could only stand to win from building similar projects that mix entertaining narratives and educational value.
In order to agitate we have to be where the workers get their info. In Russia it was the newspapers, in Cuba it was the radio, nowadays a lot of it is in internet audiovisual media.
Brazilians here please consider a “Revoltas” podcast that’s similar to Mike Duncan’s one but for Brazilian insurgencies, revolts and attempted revolutionsRevleftradio is incredibly informative on all marxist subjects. He also hosts Guerilla radio and another podcast Red Menace. All are madsive sources of information. He once did a 3hour podcast on Stalin from an ML perspective. It’s still the most informative thing on Stalin I’ve ever heard.
It’s really amazing.
In this one they discuss their strategy behind their shows: https://pca.st/episode/ef399d6a-8fbd-47dc-95b3-813d755cb753
I somehow missed this. Thanks.
One issue I have with many leftist podcasts I’ve found is that they’re more like round-table talk shows than educative/entertainment.
? I’ve found shows like TurnLeftist and Trash Future rather informative and entertainment. The Deprogram which is not affiliated with hexbear is very educational, diving into different subjects each episode.
I’ll check out the podcast you mention.
If First Thought got big enough it could serve the purpose you mention.
Check out revleftmedia. Incredibly informative and in depth. I like it even better than the deprogram. Bhret had been on the deprogram though.
They’re so good. The Deprogram is funny, but I agree revleft is better.
