How can we possibly break through over a hundred years of propaganda and ML failure to get people to support a left wing solution to the failures of capitalist society over the right wing populism that's rising everywhere? Even with neo-nazis straight up committing murder I still see the "remember that the far left is violent extremists as well!" from people all the time.
How can we possibly break through over a hundred years of propaganda and ML failure to get people to support a left...
The propaganda will fade away when the economic circumstances force the workers into movement.
Look at Greece; they've been barraged with anti-socialist propaganda ever bit as much as any other country, but that has had no detrimental impact on the Greek workers' increasing radicalization.
that salt of yours, it's so delicious
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There has been a propaganda vacuum for the past three decades. The heavy-duty anti-commie propaganda went out with the Soviet Union. It's been slow and steady, but the number of people exploring Left wing ideas is growing.
The internet has been helping too. It's been developed to an extent far beyond what existed during the time the SU existed. The global proletariat has reached an unprecedented level of interconnectedness. We're starting to see the reaction to that in the media, as they try to establish approved news outlets as opposed to fake news. Just recently Google shut sites like wsws and counterpunch out of their search results. Now for example, unless they're searched for explicitly, search terms related to those sites won't return any results.
It's taking the left longer than the right to organize for a few reasons. Some people still believe bourgeois parties like the Democrats might save them. I don't know if I agree with the entirety of WSWS's assessment, but Bernie's campaign did divert a great deal of attention and effort toward the Democrats. After a century of propaganda and concerted effort, the Left of the 20th century has basically ceased to exist. Everything has to be remade from scratch. Everything has to be relearned from scratch. The destruction of the 20th century Left suspended the direct transmission of all this information and context, and so it has to be painstakingly reintegrated. Compare this to the simplicity of The Right. Things were good, but then niggers ruined everything, so get rid of the niggers/kikes/wops/beaners/whatever and things'll be good again. There's no radical reshaping of society, just the eradication of certain sections of it. The only requirement is that you must be a violent asshole.
If by "we" you mean "leftypol," we should just keep doing what we've been doing, because it's been working. Holla Forums itself has grown enormously over the past couple of years, and the board's memes get spread all over the leftist spheres of the normalfag internet. The dialectical process is in motion, and as the system continues to break down, it's only going to empower the Left.
My personal take on the matter is that the class cucking will eventually reach a point where it doesn't matter how much propaganda exists, the workers will feel compelled to rise up. I do not know if we will see this in our life times though.
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When average people today are living better than most kings and queens of the past, you can't. You're trying to tell someone who is living in a surplus economy with an incredibly high standard of living that their system has failed them. It doesn't work without massive amounts of coginitive dissonance. You can try to guilt trip people about muh class war but people are able to be upwardly mobile in America so the idea of an oppressive caste-like-system was more attractive to easern euro peasants in 1917 than it is to smart-phone using fatties in 2017.
lmao, where did or does it fail? You're going to have a hard time convincing people that stuff like the Paris Commune or Revolutionary Catalonia is something that can be applied to a greater scaler in modern society.
Somewhere in between the Soviet gulags and Mao's great leap forward i believe
That's pretty much exactly where it didn't fail.
I guess if your idea of success is starving tens of millions of people to death, it was a smashing success.
This is partially true. You'll never convince middle class people, but you'd definitely have a shot at poor people. I'm poor and everyone I know is poor. They hate it, and feel betrayed and downtrodden even if they don't know the solution. But you're right about other classes. You will never convince some yuppie that lives in a gated community that goes to Starbucks every morning that Communism is a good thing. It'll just never happen.
There isn't the slightest shred of evidence or implication that within the attempted rapid industrialization food shortages where avoidable under any other proposed system or, an even more insane im, deliberately. If the Great Leap Forward and the Soviet collectivization did anything, it ended the previously reoccurring famines in the respective countries for good.
They had 2 years of anti Corbyn propaganda in the UK and the effect melted away in a month.
*even more insane claim
Oh good, another holocaust denier. Holla Forums is just down the hall to the right, scumbag.
And even you are inside on a computer with internet access. In America, poor people can get government issued cell phones. CELL PHONES. That's how high the standard of living is, even for the poor in America. It will never happen because it doesn't need to, capitalism has already won
And you go back to reddit, you brainwashed liberal.
Words basically taken straight from Hitler's mouth. And you reds wonder why even the rest of the left hates you?
Having a computer doesn't mean much, I feel like you don't really understand how people work. Poor people look around and see what they have versus what others have. You're not going to go to a guy and say "Hey, you have a phone and TV, you can't complain" as he works hard every day and struggles to feed his family and keep electricity on. He doesn't care that he lives better than some fuck in 1890. He cares that his life feels like shit. Even as I type this I don't have running water because the water company is trying to rip me off and get $500 from me. I still live better than some Russian serf but that doesn't mean a whole lot to me.
isn't the radical socialist government thoroughly unpopular
if it makes you feel any better I think you're all liberals
And an even harder one convincing people that Stalin didn't personally kill 50 billion kulaks and that the Stasi dindu nuffin.
This is the first logical fallacy. Someone else having more than me doesn't make me poorer. If I have $100 and you have $200, and then you get $50 more, that doesn't make me poorer. Unless you're the richest person on the planet, someone else will be living better than you. That's not a logical argument.
A phone, tvs, etc. are luxuries. If you're too poor to afford electricity and you have to feed a family, you definitely should not be working double shifts to cover your iphone.
You're supposed to not like things that suck. That's natures way of motivating you to change your environment.
Then sell your fucking computer dumbass.
You completely missed the point of my post. I'm not saying whether it's logical behavior or not, I'm simply saying it exists and this is how most people think. But by all means, go to some poor hillbilly and lecture him on fallacies and why he's wrong for feeling shat on. It changes nothing.
Protip: populations generally shrink if there are "tens of millions" starving. The population of the Soviet Union not only grew but it grew at a rate that rivaled first world powers, likewise the PRC.
Are you sure it's not yourself who is from Holla Forums?
Well, we sort of of have the facts on our side. Anarchist and Leftcom conceptions of socialism have proven itself to be only sustainable during the complete collapse of infrastructure or outright anomie, but show no vigilance to preserve itself past a peace treaty. Marxism-Leninism is the only tendency that has concerned itself with the day after.
Liberals had to kill millions in order to create their ideal societies as well. The America revolution alone killed about a fourth of the colonists for instance.
Even Adam Smith understood that relative inequality mattered, not just absolute poverty:
Point being that certain things are expected of people in society to be considered a respectable member, and this is relative for each different society. In Smith's time, one of those things was leather shoes. If you didn't have them, you were considered a filthy loser and maybe not fit for polite company, which limits your ability to associate with others in a productive way and earn money.
in the modern West, having something like a phone or a computer is not really a luxury. It's expected of a normal person. If an employer says he's going to call or email you for an interview and you say i don't have a phone or a computer to get calls or emails, he's going to wonder wtf is wrong with this guy and whether he wants to bother. Likewise with many other social interactions.
whew boi, that is some peak liberalism. One way is to stop believing capitalist propaganda. You don't need to be a tankie to defend the USSR. If you just put into perspective and demystify the USSR to normies many will then start to question the other communist propaganda they believe.
It is because it capitulated to the EU even after Greeks voted against it, and since then it's only been enforcing the demands of the central banks. I hope that isn't anyone's definition of "radical socialist government."
If poor people are apparently so stupid they just act like low-level reptiles, they won't be able to be swayed by communism, and if they are, they won't be useful enough to be worth the effort.
As a greek living outside of greece: SYRIZA are traitors, Golden Dawn is still somewhat shit on on the news, and the people are too spooked from the American military junta to bother considering socialism. Honestly they're radicalizing but I think that they might go fash before anything else since the only leftist push are the smashies in Exarcheia.
I don't think the junta matters to any significant portion of the population right now.
More likely spooked from the last, dying, dry spurts of the great socdem eurotit
ML being shit doesn't preclude other things from also being shit and / or failures. tbh, anarchism barely had any impact in the 20th century and isn't worth mentioning
Most people I've talked to down here in Texas know the whole "both sides" thing is garbage. Hell, I tell people I'm a socialist and people are surprised but willing to here me out on shit, and that's mostly because people want someone to talk about jobs, unions, the poor, and working conditions. Also, Charlottesville has made a lot of people concerned about the state of the country.
Do you think there's potential in the South? I've heard that a lot of people voted Trump because they thought he would bring back jobs and were angry about our fucked up establishment.
Maybe, it's mostly military/ex-military people who I find to be the most reactionary. If you talk to people who spend their time doing shitty full-time jobs that they hate or someone who knows how shit the poverty in your area is, you will probably find a potential comrade. Bonus points if they hated both candidates in the 2016 election.