So the question is a bit weird and for the sake of not sounding like a complete edgelord I will try to explain what I mean
I used to be pretty active inside the hooligan scene (lol) when I was younger. I still follow lots of football ultras accounts and the occasional hooligan thing gets posted there as well. It should be no surprise that some hooligan groups are pretty right wing or out right fascist. One of the Dutch accounts posted a Feyenoord hooligan picture in which some of their members posed in front of a ‘anti antifa’ banner, with the purpose of looking cool of course, flexing their muscles and whatnot.
I decided to call them out on it, saying it’s messed up since Rotterdam was bombed to pieces by the Nazis even. They deleted the post afterwards.
I rarely see people do this, not even leftist accounts I follow. Which made me think, should we be less afraid about calling shit like this out? To send some sort of message that we are not afraid of losers like them? Or do you think it is counter productive to do so?
I don’t mean we should start doing ‘come fight me bruh’ things, but I feel like the left is sometimes missing a link between neanderthal fighting and your average debate me bro intellectual leftist that speaks to the people.
There’s this interesting debate going on in our party for example about how we should make ourselves clear to the world. On the one hand we want to reach your average worker but on the other hand we don’t want to do it by adopting often times reactionary talk like far right parties do. But we also don’t want to become an elitist left wing party of which many exist already.
Why I want to focus on the online sphere is because over here, right wing parties by far spend the most on online advertising, and even studies seem to point out that social media is a key factor in radicalizing young people wrt right wing ideologies. I feel like the left needs to find a new way to reach these same people, or at least be at the places the right wing reaches them to call out the bullshit, without necessarily spending more than the right does right now.
I don’t think we can succeed on platforms owned by the right wing, and that defeats the entire point. The problem is that the right can do and say almost whatever they want, but if the left starts to talk the same way we get banned. Building up alternative platforms helps, somewhat, but I have no idea if there’s actually any way to succeed on platforms like Twitter or Reddit.
Would shouldnt illusion ourselves into making that our prime ideological battleground, but we gotta try a bit. Genzedong worked for a while, we can do similar things without getting too attached to it not being banned eventually. Revolutionary propaganda should be spread as wide as we can.
We don’t just get banned eventually, it’s not random. We get banned once we’ve actually started to have an impact on discourse.
This necessarily means that we will always be banned before accomplishing anything. At best what this can do is help other leftists on the internet find each other, and that’s not nothing, but these platforms are not a terrain of struggle any more than consumerism.
I’m sure there’s a decent amount of people that wouldn’t have been radicalized or organizing without gzd or Chapo. Isn’t a moment of impact better than none at all?
True, maybe in the final moments of a lefty community it manages to radicalize enough people to be a worthwhile use of time?
I’m skeptical it’s the most efficient use of time, but maybe online matters more than I’m giving credit. Still skeptical, though.
We might not be able to succeed long term, but these platforms can be subverted to our cause in the mean time. Of course that while we are irrelevant these platforms don’t care about us and in fact transform us into yet another product to sell. Capitalism subsuming all critics into itself and all that.
Having the content over at multiple platforms help, but if you can start gathering people online in a mainstream platform, once you have enough people you can start to move into decentralized spaces like here and/or matrix for when we are not accepted anymore.
I can even give a concrete example of this. There’s a growing number of communist content creation channels here in Brazil (in fact they are the reason I became a communist, lol). Quite a few of the biggest names of these comrades in youtube and twitch are part of a collective, which have a discord server of 60k+ people right now, and previously there was mention of they studying alternative platforms and open source in general to move into, since they are getting big enough to the point where if either youtube or discord wants, most of their work online will get lost. I don’t think there have been any more updates on this yet, but it’s something they are aware about.
I haven’t seen this before. From what I saw it just doesn’t work to use their tactics. If we lie like them we can’t build trust, so it’s not a luxury we can have. If we make “photo of capitalism country bad, photo of communist country good” memes, it doesn’t work because we are not the dominant ideology, when they do the opposite, the majority of people already agrees with the message from years and years of propaganda and it just reinforces their views.
It’s a difficult situation where we need to get creative and must go with the hype and latest trends to try and subvert the narrative whenever possible. Having more communist content creators that cover different topics and spheres is always good tho. Class conscience needs to be disputed in the nerd online spaces, just likes it needs in the programming, gaming, development, fitness, and other spaces, on all platforms in as many languages as possible.
I feel like this was being talked about 5 and 10 years ago about how the right wing radicalization pipeline through youtube existed and was outperforming anything the collective left was doing-- which is to say yeah, I’d be VERY INCLINED TO AGREE that in lieu of having ready-made infrastructure we could worm a counter-pipeline through, we need different methods in the same domain of conflict.