This is just a vibe, so take it for what it’s worth.
But personally I feel like I’ve been experiencing, witnessing, or hearing less stories about people managing to “deprogram”/“convert”/“change” people in terms of their political ideology. Actually I’ve been hearing more of the opposite, accounts of people regressing: “A year ago I talked my racist uncle into being a Bernie bro but in the last 3 months he’s gone all the way back to QAnon.” That sort of thing.
It doesn’t seem to be just me, I’ve seen a lot of “Debate Bros” start to have increasingly strict rules about who they debate, or just abandon the whole protect of debating all together to just stream to their existing fans. Some (one in particular 
) openly say it’s because they fell like their opponents have consolidated their base and there’s nobody reachable anymore.
And that’s what it feels like, consolidation. Echo chambers have become more effective, it almost fells like people have scripted retorts to whatever talking point might get thrown at them. Fuck, “Israel” just straight up as academies on how to do this shit. It’s like the internet has just perfected rhetoric so much that once you pull someone in they’re just locked into it forever.
Idk, I just feel like everyone who is a Chud/turbo-lib/Succ/Tankie RN is probably gonna die one at this point. Every ideology is just a Skinner box now.
Edit: And another thought, it is a bit ironic, I recall us Commies were the first ones to be saying “one-on-one debate is a often worthless performance, and most people who get too deep into Far Right ideology are probably a lost cause and not worth wasting energy to reach,” and everyone giving us shit for it and acting all noble about how the market place of ideas could fix everything. Now post-Trump everyone seems to be realizing we were right and Libs and Chuds alike are abandoning the whole affair.
Edit 2: I wrote this while drinking box wine and listening to Post-Punk, sorry. What provoked this was learning that “Why should we bother to reply to Kautsky?” quote by Lenin we all love is probs fake. Made me think about what truth there may be in it even if it isn’t actually real.
Edit 3: just woke up and Jesus I made some big ass grammatical errors in this post. Fucking box wine!
Yeah I’ve been having similar thoughts.
2014-2020 or so was a period of significant ideological change & realignment in the US in a number of ways, but now things have kind of reached a new equilibrium, so the current ideological terrain is probably what we’re going to have for a while. I think this is mostly because the internet & social media reached maximum penetration around 2014, and the 2014-2020 period was just the US’s ideological terrain adjusting to that step change.
(Admittedly, I also might be biased because 2014-2020 is also basically the period when I was 18-25 years old, so of course it seemed to me like a lot of things were in flux)
Material conditions are changing. Individual ideology is derived from material conditions. Folks have been and will continue to be moving, just maybe not in the direction we all hope.
Some people are learning from the Gaza genocide right now who previously were either too young or too indoctrinated to have learned from the War on Terror like I did.
To build on this. I had a well-intentioned but but libbed up friend send me an apology recently for saying that she wasn’t comfortable talking to me anymore after I called Israel and ethno-nationalist colonial apartheid state in December. I’ve since been (seemingly successfully) tearing down her worldview with laying bare how awful the empire has been for years across so many fronts.
Are there people increasingly holding onto and doubling down on their worldview in the face of global geopolitical uncertainty? Absolutely, but there are also many, many people realizing for the first time in their privileged lives what America (and really more broadly speaking the West) really is and represents and those people are reachable.
For real, I’ve never seen such a huge mass radicalisation event occur in my lifetime. Correct me if I’m wrong but the Gaza solidarity protests seems like the biggest protest movement in human history.
What’s beautiful about it too is that - with the exception of Palestinean diaspora participants - very few of these protesters have any skin the the game. They do not benefit in any capacity from protesting, it’s all stemming from pure solidarity and love for humanity.
I hope they can successfully build a wider critique of capital and imperialism beyond the current crisis in Gaza. My fear is if this is not done, then the momentum for a broader push for justice will dissipate once the ongoing crisis ends.
Nothing will be done because there’s no organized left to turn radical sentiment into political actions.
Well, I wanted to say that too but, I didn’t know how to say it in a polite way.
The left is very disorganized and seems unable to break out of a cycle of repeating all the actions that contributed to its disorganization. And we reminisce about the past to take ourselves away from those failings. I’m as guilty of it as most people are.
Yes, this is unfortunately the reality. As long as the Western left has no intention of actually taking power, the capitalist ruling class will never have to cede to their demands.
I don’t believe in the inevitability of communism myself. I think barbarism is more than plausible as long as these important questions go unanswered.
The conditions for communism are likely made inevitable by changes in the material conditions, but it doesn’t mean it can spontaneously happen. It simply opens up the opportunity for political transformation to take place, but if nobody is there to seize that opportunity (which will also come with heavy resistance from the bourgeoisie), then communism will not happen.
In other words, unlike what many idealists believe, the masses won’t suddenly become socialists/communists just because things are getting worse, in fact they are more likely to become fascists in a everyone is out for themselves way as the conditions deteriorate.
I can’t predict the future, but things are going to get worse. That’s the only thing that’s almost certain. Some people might be able to carve out a piece of heaven in a dying world, but a lot more folks are going to suffer.
It’s the classic ‘liberals are against all wars except the current one’.
Yep. They’ll never learn.
Long post coming up.
I started my first full-time blue collar job a few months ago. I live in a purple state. I expected all the guys I worked with to be Trump guys. Only one I’ve encountered has been truly a fascist, though he said nothing about Trump. The rest are just kind of ideologically adrift. A different coworker I’ve mentioned here a few times I’ve been riding with for months. Seven hours a day, five days a week, talking. Personally I like him. I guess I would describe him as an ideologically malleable Berner. Sometimes I despair about changing him. This last week, though, he was really impressing me with some of the things he was saying. We talked about landback, ending America’s imperialist wars, China, Russia, and I’ve even started using the word “communism.” “Communism is about workers running society, what’s wrong with that?” I said. No pushback from him. I have not told him that I’m a communist. But how can he not suspect?
Then a few days ago I talked about the PNN guy on tiktok harassing dickheads on at the Capitol, and my coworker basically said that we should confine our efforts to peaceful protests. (I live in a very rural area and some of these guys are just living in a permanent fight-or-flight mode it seems, they really tense up when I talk about protestors, they all want to live in the middle of the woods, they say they hate people, and they and always empathize with whoever is being protested.) That was where our conversation ended since we had arrived at our job site.
He has little American flags at his house, which his girlfriend (fifteen years older than him) is apparently close to losing; he just bought a truck he cannot afford; he ran out of money and was unable to buy lunch once; he has several kids from two relationships (difficult to keep track) but two of them are trans; he grew up working on farms because he was unable to afford school supplies (he is white). He thinks the government is oppressing him (and has no awareness of which class constrols the government), but has spoken positively of the police. He was shocked when I mentioned that Ansarallah has claimed to have struck the USS Eisenhower multiple times, and said that the military would not lie about getting hit. (Admittedly it would help if we had some photographic evidence to prove this here.)
I’ve just been thinking that usually people do one hour a week of therapy. I’m doing about twenty hours a week of therapy with this guy. I’m not a qualified therapist (most therapists worship Mayo Pete), but I’ve been in therapy, I’ve read Freud and Lacan and Reich, I’m a Marxist (and have studied all kinds of texts for years), I have some organizing experience, and, most importantly, I post a lot on hexbear. Even with all this, I’m still up against this guy’s roughly thirty-five years of existence in a reactionary hellhole. I’m up against Facebook, which he is constantly browsing for treats he cannot afford. I’m up against everyone he talks with, everyone he knows, because there are at best only a handful of communists for a hundred miles in every direction. The hardest thing I’m up against, which my own therapist (a good guy) has told me, is the fact that my coworker doesn’t think he has a problem. The client, the patient, cannot change unless he wants to. Insert lightbulb joke. It’s okay, my coworker thinks, to be ideologically adrift in a raging ocean of fascism. I like him but don’t trust him and don’t consider him a friend. He would ditch me for his job in a heartbeat. There is no solidarity at this place. And while my coworkers might be ideologically adrift, they might not be interested in voting for Biden or Trump, they always come down on the side of white supremacy and helping the company’s owners get richer.
Think about hexbear’s demographics. I SUSPECT, but am not sure, that most of us here are radicalized labor aristocrats. Most of us are white with college degrees, which means, in this apartheid society, that most of the people we know are going to be the same. And let me tell you, the life of the labor aristocrat, even in this shithole, is a good one. I’ve seen so much fucked up shit in this job, heard so much fucked up shit you wouldn’t believe. It basically amounts to people working full-time but either being homeless or on the edge of homelessness, having no access (forgive the term) to necessities. The vast majority of labor aristocrats have no awareness of this. They, we live such pampered lives, it blows my mind. To get up, drive to work, spend all day sitting in an office doing unproductive labor, chatting about TV and restaurants and weekend nonsense at the air-conditioned water cooler, and then to come home and watch Netflix, the biggest worry being your impostor syndrome, ah, how easy that is. I used to do it until I moved back to the USA from overseas, and found that even as a qualified white liberal, I couldn’t get a good job. So I radicalized.
If you live this kind of life, why question it? Why change it? Come out as a communist, risk your career for Palestine, and you’re in for a world of pain, at least in the short term. Friends, family, and career will all abandon you. It’s always been easy for labor aristocrats, so why risk that ease? Things have always been the same, so how could they change?
this is a good post. Thank you
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I am not sure this is true. I just talked to a dude at a party who:
- thought elon musk had climate change under control in the US
- thought climate change was something our grandkids would have to worry about
- had no idea what sort of consequences climate change would actually have
Yeah we can shit on the idea of raising awareness but people who don’t know shit about fuck except whatever propaganda piece has paid thousands of dollars to be shoved in their faces are everywhere
that guy is libbed in
I only just became communist like 9 ish months ago, primarily because of this site
We’re glad to have you, sharkfucker420!
The George Floyd uprising in 2020 was the point of no return. If you didn’t come out of that espousing at least some kind of radlib or progressive politic, you’re locked-in to fascism as far as I’m concerned. If you see pigs in riot gear shooting rubber bullets at white soccer moms and not have second thoughts about your politics (assuming they previously weren’t progressive), then you’ll not have second thoughts if soldiers shoot protestors in the head and bury them all in a shallow mass grave.
At this point, propaganda is more about turning progressives into socialists or reaching out to really young zoomers and gen alpha who were too young to fully understand the scope of the uprising or possibly reaching out to diasporic communities who aren’t clued in on US politics. But if you have a reactionary opinion of what happened in 2020, you are a lost cause.
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Eventually I’m going to get my brother to stop listening to Jordan Peterson. I need to believe that.
i’m definitely locked in, belligerently so
Came here to say this
I’ve been called “conspiratorial” for espousing basic Marxist principles to a friend who is supposedly “leftist” recently. He literally couldn’t conceive of a way to change the system without just doing socdem “reform,” instead of I don’t know, a communist revolution.
People have been fully captured by capitalist propaganda, I’m honestly not sure what is to be done…
Well, I suppose one important thing Marxist scholarship can do is take stock of the situation you described and strategize forward from whatever analysis is produced.
I kind of feel at loss for an answer myself. Everybody is in their own digital tube of Pringles.
We really need china to fund a Marxism college and train up super marxists who are qualified to tell us what to do
there’s no vanguard coming with deliverance in their arms. we are not going to intellectualize our way out of the barbaric twilight of capital. the world has been systematically rendered incomprehensible to the mind, so we need to use our hands and feet.
hard to do anything with your hands and feet and no money and China got money
I’m going to use my hands and feet to move myself to China at this rate…
I wish there was a new international that had some sort of academic wing dedicated to continuing research on how political economy is changing. Plus it has a first rate translation department to disseminate its findings.
Personally, I’d say there’s still room for me to grow politically. Went from identifying as am anarchist, to anarcho-syndicalist and now I openly identify as a communist.
Soon I’ll ll have to start zeroing in on a more specific school of communism, though I don’t care much for the specific differences between say, a Maoist or ML socialist
Same.
I think there’s a distinction we can make between growing politically from our experiences and reading theory vs growing politically because of looking at posts and yelling about politics on the internet. If there ever was a time when the internet changed people’s politics that time has passed. We are now in an era where the internet can only reaffirm people’s politics.
Now I listen to audiobooks at work. Just got through a few of Fanon’s works, gonna check out “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” next
I also listen to communist audiobooks at work.
Without earbuds.
Needless to say I’m pretty openly communist.
I think, as an ML, the difference just comes down to: do you support AES? I support China, the DPRK, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos, plus the Maoist revolutionaries in the Philippines and India, among others, plus Russia, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansarallah. These last few are not, on the surface, AES, though their anti-imperialism basically makes them that way. So many Americans of many political stripes are ready to admit that the USA has problems. But to say that China is genuinely better and that Hamas deserves our support? I would guess that the number of westerners (even leftists) who think this way is very small.
I am also a former anarchist who is now a communist.
I will say there’s still a part of me that’s an anarchist. Overall, there’s not too much of a difference between a communist and an anarchist. It mostly just comes down to tactics. Our goals tend to be the same.
I could totally chug a spacebag while listening to Echo & The Bunnymen.
I’m more of a polish off half a bag while listening to Gang of Four myself, then pass out in my bed, but I guess that’s just me.
Gang of Four are underrated for sure.
Ever listen (or see) to the Urgh concert series soundtrack? So many bangers.
If you want a rationalization, I don’t see this as meaningful other than the modern social media context rewards dunking on each other more than any other interaction. It is a constant struggle between people who just love the self-validation from upvotes/karma/likes and those that have social anxiety over being wrong on the internet. Therefore coming out and converting often have significant personal cost(relationships/self-esteem) that is very hard to overcome unless you already have a support group.
That doesn’t mean people are not moving from one ideology to another or changing their minds, its just that, as you noticed anecdotally people are not sharing that experience anymore.
That uncle probably realized that even though being a sucdem is far better than anything else in the mainstream, it is not “fullfilling” i.e Bernie is completely onboard with Biden and at this point thinking about Bernie/Dems just funnels you into the current blue-red MAGA.
Some (one in particular ) openly say it’s because they fell like their opponents have consolidated their base and there’s nobody reachable anymore.
Yes that is a great change from 2016, there are definitely more people that are just some streamer/YTer fanboy with no ideology now. Don’t mistake those for real politics imo these people are in it for the parasocial relationship, if said random persona suddenly announced he converted to communism they would bring like half their fans along. But again, don’t mistake those for real communists either just because said persona pays lipservice to it. Hasan is a good example.
How many are “socialists” because of Hasan and how many would stay that way if he changed sides? Spoilers I remember he said he would be incredibly more popular if he embraced the right wing grift so there is that anecdote.
I do agree that as a means of actual movement building and social change this environment pretty much destroyed any hopes of a socialist movement. I don’t like the same doomer point over and over but at this point our only prospect is balkanization and climate change. I think the way COVID was handled showed all the bad signs leading to towards the bad ending.
I remember he said he would be incredibly more popular if he embraced the right wing grift so there is that anecdote.
I mean, isn’t he Cenk Uygur’s nephew or some shit? That heel-turn is absolutely in the mail.
i’m locked in the closet.
