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The Left Needs to Change Our Social Media Use
(islamicsocialist.substack.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
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Communism
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That has been my position for a while: that we should settle our main accounts and activities on independent social media particularly the fediverse and use main-stream social medias as a way to reach out for more peoples.
I also think we should adjust our communication: debunking the propaganda about AES and historical communist theorists and leaders is good, but we do it so much that we barely talk about Marxist economic theory and philosophy. When trying to win over peoples in the process of getting radicalized, we should first talk about things like how the bourgeoisie is stealing the worker's surplus value and how that fact plus the competition and need for perpetual growth inevitably lead capitalism to fail, the rehabilitation of Stalin and Mao has to come after.
I have been saying this for a while and it's why I made Redline Media Institute. I'm not going to just wait for the Left to come around, I'm going to help build.
We need a wide range of different propaganda for different purposes. Our group has guides on social media strategy, psychological warfare, and memetic warfare.
We have and need more propaganda centered on left-wing communities - defending AES, talking about Marxist economics and philosophy, theory, etc.
We need propaganda for the progressives to move them left - micro-dosing ideology, challenging liberal notions, etc.
We need propaganda to influence normies to the left, usually a combination of the previous two but in smaller micro-doses and said as a passing piece in content that isn't even political.
Like I said "What makes a pipeline a pipeline is the many entry points into it that leads to specific political communities." We need to pull in people from anywhere.
I agree. That's basically how I and other leftists came in to the fold. First is some Sanders-style Democratic Socialism which mostly focuses on the problems of capitalism and raising class consciousness, then came the study of how these problems are part of capitalism's innate quality, then socialism could fix these problems, but then you run into the old propaganda against it (it sounds good, but it would never woke in theory, every state it's tried hasn't worked, etc). That's when you can focus on raising the consequences of imperialism and the good parts of those old states.
A lot of people are stuck between those first couple steps, knowing there's an issue with today's society and hating billionaires, but aren't ready to believe socialism can fix it because they have been trained to reflexively hate it. Many also don't believe these problems are intrinsic to capitalism, that it can still be saved, that our current period is an aberration of capitalism, and not inevitable for the system, and such. The nice period of the boom cycles, like the 50's or the 90's of their youth, are clearly the normal part of capitalism and the bust cycles are just the result of mismanagement. From this average frame of understanding coming from a lifetime of being raised in propaganda, you need to start with pretty base theory, not advanced stuff like navigating the complex legacies of Stalin or Mao, or even the Russia-Ukraine war (imo).
Not only that but we need to relate to the people's immediate material concerns, that's when our propaganda is at its strongest and liberal propaganda at its weakest. We need to remember that the strength of Marxism is that it can explain why things are so bad like no other ideology can.
Liberal economics is little more than gaslighting and lionizing that attempt to shift blame and responsibility on the average person and pretend that the system isn't broken, only mismanaged, meanwhile fascism is the laziest of victim blaming imaginable and such an ideological void that they have to tokenize leftist terminology to trick peoples into getting on board, only Marxism has an analysis of capitalism that makes sense with the average worker's lived experience.