I’ve realized that the local org I’m in is filled with theory heads. That’s not a bad thing in itself but when these people do nothing except endless bureaucracy and theory study it gets old fast! It just feels like the org is COINTELPRO-ing itself by making itself useless by having so much procedure to the point where I can’t anyone to even agree to run a newspaper ad for the org without going through five layers of approvals.
Sorry for the mini rant sigh
So what I really want to do, and what I think the left needs, is some sort of mass communication and propaganda outlet. I’d like to create counter-propaganda and set it up so others can easily add their contact info. Kind of like templates, but in more of a structured way vs. The very decentralized way agit prop is made now.
Does something like this exist? PSL near me just does protests. There was one ultra Maoist but that turned into a drama meltdown with DSA. There was a CPUSA chapter here that was basically 4 people who hated their national org and I haven’t seen them in over a year.
Maybe I just need to go off on my own and make my own stuff. I wanna be a good comrade but ironically the people are hard to deal with. It’s hard to be serving the people when I don’t do well with people 🙃
Soberana is a collective in Brazil that is doing exactly that. They are targeting specifically online spaces though. Still, pretty successful these last few years since covid.
Good agitprop always connects theory to local conditions. You can’t really mass produce it
There’s a lot of local conditions that everybody shares right now. Tying war spending to lack of funds for housing/healthcare/education/etc for example.
I was thinking of remixing those army ads to describe what you are really doing if you sign up.
There are lots of sorta left-wing news outlets. There’s always blogging if that’s your thing. It would be nice if there was one website that was a syndication of lots of outlets, but that doesn’t necessarily need to exist. I guess what you’re describing that you’re looking for is somewhat vague.
I just feel politically homeless. Nothing I do seems to change anything
What’s wrong with protests?
99.9% of them are useless toothless performance to make the participants feel good. I want to see people disrupting Republican party meetings, protesting executives at their homes, and other things that can’t be discussed online. But instead PSL prints off a bunch of signs and chants for two hours in a park far away from the bad guys. It’s a waste of time
Have you talked to the organizers about the goals they’re trying to achieve with these protests?
PSL prints off a bunch of signs and chants for two hours in a park far away from the bad guys
Different question: who do you think the protests are for? Cause it kind of sounds like you think that the protests need to be in the face of the bad people, like getting stunted on is gonna change them.
I think it’s much more useful to think of protests as radical networking events. Obviously they have to lead to further action to be useful, but at least there’s a practical outcome there, whereas yelling at the bad people isn’t going to change them in any meaningful way. Maybe it could be cathartic, but that’s about as useful as your framing of the PSL protests here. Catharsis isn’t a political action.
It’s hard to have these discussions because I don’t just mean yelling at the people who cause these problems. We both know what I mean. I just can’t say that on public internet.
At the very least we could make it impossible for executives at companies like Raytheon to ever be out in public in peace. Suddenly working for the people literally building the bombs used to kill kids is less attractive if you can never have a night out, you never get a peaceful night of sleep, etc.
Hey as long as you’re following up with attendees to build networks and worker power any kind of protest is beneficial to the movement.
Why can’t these nerds do something practical, like publishing a newspaper in 2026?
What if the newspaper was mass mailed to people… stop trying to sell it 🤔
I feel you. I’m looking for good agitprop for wheatpasting.