askchapo

There is a decent amount of left-leaning media out there. Bong Joon-ho won an Oscar for ‘Parasite’. It’s completely fine and even fashionable to take swipes at rich people. You can get that stuff made, and it has broad appeal, but my guess is that it’s an issue of who ends up in the position to make films. The WGA strike is highlighting how bad the industry has gotten as far as letting people make a living, and so more and more creatives are from the upper class, including a growing number of nepotism hires. Most of them more than likely wouldn’t even know how to make something about class consciousness, and even fewer would have any reason to do so.

There’s no grand 👁️ conspiracy to keep left-leaning media down, it’s just that the 💰 mostly goes to people who don’t make that kind of thing. I doubt it’s that much more complicated than that, although that’s not nothing.

Why doesn’t the left do a propaganda like the Barbie movie or those two White-Supremist country songs?

money

we dont have the money and resources, they do. Soviets used to be the agitprop capital, now they're gone, and I don't see them picking up the torch.

The only person remotely successful doing "high-production" leftist movies/shows is Boots Riley, and he hasn't done a lot. Money and support is the biggest issues for these kind of projects.

Because Cartoon Network won't let Rebecca Sugar use her full power.

Communists had great propaganda during the Cold War. So good that liberals still get upset when you simply show them their own problems when they want to waste resources "combating injustice" elsewhere. If you're referring to modern day leftists, then it's because no one even wants to hear the word "capitalism" because their knee jerk reaction is to rabidly defend it and bring up the sins of communism even if all you're doing is literally repeating what capitalist scholars, journalists, and economists have written.

Imagine Barbie but with class-consciousness. With all the basically free high-production tools and talent on the left, is it not possible?

You must not be familiar with Bong Joon ho, squibgam, Oliver Stone, or Costa Gavras. However, even when you're staunchly leftist, most of the game you'll have to reach out to a big distributor to show your movie. If it's not a genuine threat to capital, they'll happily show it to everyone. "The film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.

Besides being adequately well-made, Barbie had an enormous marketing budget. Low-budget indie films can be well-made, but you can't get them into theaters, unless you manage to first get them into the right film festivals and glowingly reviewed by the right people and so on, and it's all swimming upstream.

Its possible but how will it get "out" there?

If you don't have name recognition, connections, and a load of personal wealth (or favors) anything made will be stuck in small scale distribution and a slow roll out.

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.

Hard to say much besides ownership and censorship by capital. But I can give it a shot.

I was listening to this Plastic Pills podcast about the political mythologies of the left vs right, based on the book Mythologies by Barthes. Mythology being an extension of ideology essentially, where symbols that represent ideas in an ideology become entities themselves in a system of symbols to perpetuate the narrative eg. the character of Captain America symbolizes the US but takes on a role within the Marvel mythos which people handle as a symbol in itself, like maybe dressing up as Captain America at a rally

Anyway what they say is, the right has it easy, since all they need to do is continue the narrative or intensify it. But for the left, we are not stuck in some fantasy realm but must live in the material world: we need to actually work to survive before we can start creating political mythology. Also, our goals also lie in the material world -- ultimately revolution can only happen due to material conditions, not people being convinced by a real nice book or movie

There was another interesting point that revolution is the only "anti-myth" ie a myth which actually ends up changing material conditions. I guess they mean The Revolution in the vague sense that leftists refer to, as if it's the eschaton. It does seem mythological, yet if it really does happen, it is entirely material, unlike any other myth. But this also means that everything leading up to the Revolution and everything after it is not part of the anti-myth

I think since this is more postmodernism and post-structuralism, from the French schools, there is a bit of intellectualism about communism here, that leftists aren't being real leftists when "working towards" a revolution or once they took achieve control (eg. the USSR, which they mostly critiqued) they do a revisionism. So take that with a grain of salt

To answer your question, it seems like it's too much work, and it's not really up our alley as materialists. But I still wonder if it's worth it as an artist to make leftist art. Not just a disruptive kind of art that pulls you out of the current capitalist, consumerist worldview that most people seem to bring up for the topic, but a more constructive (?) type of art with grander vision or ability to change and create genres. Something like a Lord of the Rings which birthed fantasy, or maybe reaching further back to religious mythology, since I mentioned the eschaton earlier. I might even ask what a post-Revolution leftist mythology would look like...maybe similar to Soviet Realism?

We need to separate shows and films that are marketed and written to appeal to leftists vs those that... are leftist.

We don't have money and the state can literally beat us up

One of the factors to consider is that the CIA funneled huge amounts of cash into the arts in order to present an alternative to Soviet propaganda.

https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/

The CIA also did this with the post-Marxist left at the same time.

If the CIA can do that, and it's within their budget too, then there's no reason why they couldn't be doing the same by propping up legit propaganda and signal-boosting it.

Here's a reading list in no particular order:

Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers by Joel Whitney

Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War

The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America by by Hugh Wilford

Who Paid the Piper and The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders

Then of course there's the whole Orwell and Animal Farm deal where the IRD and I believe the CIA worked together to distribute the book in multiple languages across the world. The CIA and IRD had a direct hand in the works of Robert Conquest and Encounter Magazine too. I assume this is just the tip of the iceberg and it's stuff that they've allowed to be released under freedom of information.

I dunno, I thought barbie was pretty much as left wing as a big budget comedic American licensed movie could be. (i admit i haven't watched a lot of movies) The entire movie was critiquing patriarchal society and through its themes and parallels between barbieland and the real world it talks a lot about how our society hurts people. Now it mostly doesn't go as far as to directly critique capitalism, but there is an exception with

As others have said on this thread generally leftists have less money, and the establishment will always try and reduce the amount of money that independent creatives who could be leftist have access to. Notably in Britain scrapping the UK Film Council (which was certainly not inherently leftist but did fund various films with good messages such as Threads) was one of the first things David Cameron did when he became PM - and then Boris Johnson went on a tirade about Britain not putting out any art worth watching, super cool!

Everyone here needs to see RRR