askchapo

I am one of those people who say that the problem with the left today is not propaganda. The idea that you need everyone to gain class consciousness before you can even start overthrowing the bourgeoisie is itself a bourgeois reductionist myth.

What the left needs to do today is to score a few major labor victories - that alone will bring more people (including people uninterested in left wing politics) to the left than any amount of media/online propaganda can bring you. And to do that, you need strategy, not so much propaganda.

What the left lacks today is strategy - they don’t know how to score victories (beyond a few disparate strikes), they don’t know how to take (actual) power, they are only good at releasing statements and talking but at the end of the day, you need to show the people what socialism actually can achieve and bring to the table (no offense to comrades organizing on the ground, you have my utmost respect but the truth is that the left today doesn’t know how to win). Compare this to the Bolsheviks and the Chinese communists (who at one point ranked no more than a few thousands) and how they punched way above their weights, the Western left today is a joke.

So, this is just a round-about way of saying that the left today lacks dialectical thinking, and has succumbed to bourgeois reductionist thinking. You don’t need more propaganda to convince more people, you need to score major labor victories to open up the spaces for your propaganda to become more effective.

The same for the “leftists” today who claim that a multipolar world cannot be anti-imperialist because they don’t like some of the reactionary countries, as if socialists can actually take power before transforming the material conditions first, and that the changing material conditions cannot open up spaces for more anti-imperialism and for the socialist movements to grow. Again, bourgeois reductionism.