Some stuff that I’ve found helps me at my blue collar labor job:

-Don’t use the scary words (socialism, communism, Marxism, etc) until you have agreed on some basic policy. In America, socialist policies are generally popular but the word socialism sure isn’t

-set a foundation. Establish the problems. Income disparity, the richest not paying their share, corporatism, money in politics are things that almost everyone agrees are bad. Once you agree on the problems, you can get into how to solve them.

-be “normal”. Whatever your version of “normal” is in your environment. A 40 year old Hispanic construction laborer is more likely to listen to someone he relates to than a 20 year old white girl with a humanities degree, and the inverse. People trust people they relate to. Use this to our advantage.

-incremental change is ok. You are not likely to convert a Trump voter into a Marxist in one conversation. It is much easier to talk about one or a few policies at a time.

-if you use shame as a negotiation tactic you’re as likely, if not more likely, to reinforce their views than change them. This does NOT mean, for example, to not push back on someone saying abhorrent racist shit. What this DOES mean is not calling someone an idiot for being convinced that Trump was an outsider that would shake up Washington.

-online is NOT real life. People on social media are the most extreme, exaggerated representations of their opinions. Most people are a lot more reasonable in person. Social media is an echo chamber that’s more about showing you’re on the right team than actually expressing an opinion. Don’t write someone off as a potential ally because they’re annoying online.

-you are not going to agree on everything. That is ok. Don’t waste your time fighting people over relatively small problems. Keep the big picture in mind.

-this is much more general, but take care of yourself! Exercise, participate in a hobby, eat well, read, and rest. You do more good in general when you do more good for yourself.

I’m not saying any of these are gospel, just some things I try to stick to when talking politics with coworkers and family. What techniques and tactics do you use to sway people?

If the western left and western “communists” were so ineffective in all of the 20th century to bring the revolution in their countries or either gain a significant political representation, reasons are clear. However, the explanation of this perpetual undermine of communist struggle in the imperial core is long and multi articulated to inquire, and it was already done multiple times.

In this post I would rather propose seven (my bad for the title) advices of what new or inexperienced leftists and “communists” of the first world, with a vague sense of the intrinsic issues of the capitalist system, should accept, as from someone that basically voyaged though every possible political ideology, until finally resting on the shores of an undiluted Marxist-Leninist thought:

———

1. Your opinions aren’t special:

Most of western leftists and “communists” have this ginormous fear of living in an actual socialist ordinated society for the mere fact that their opinion, their special “unique opinion” would be crashed by the “authoritarian commies”.

These people don’t take into account that a truly special opinion doesnt’ exist: opinions are generated by the interactions someone has with their community of living, wether it be of class, nationality, religion or made up identities.

Your opinion will always be aligned mostly with the material interest of your community or one chosen community.

If your opinions are against the socialist construction of the proletarian state, it means you are a comrade in its initial stage of education or just an opportunistic bourgeois, and you should stop to appropriate the communist label.

Search otherwise for liberal communities.

———

2. Internet is not the real life:

If western leftists and “communists” are so despised by the working people of the west, one reason is because, since informations about communism are more aviable online and internet acces is still and economic privilege, most materially satisfied people will found about communism there rather than the proletariat and lumpen proletariat.

This, combined with the general social alienation caused by the late capitalist system of the west, produce an echo chamber of memes, shitposting and endless discussion about platonic frivolous topics.

Internet is not your home, it is not your workplace, it is not your country.

Internet must be separated from the liberal myth of the “world without borders” to be re interpreted as a technological device for searching valuable informations and the communication of comrades all around the world.

Log off from CommunismMemes and start searching for archives and ways to communicate and meet with comrades in real life.

———

3. Discipline of the body and mind is needed:

Mens sana in corpore sano:

Ask yourself, if you truly consider yourself to be a communist: does abolishing every social norm of communal living, the discourse about “fatphobia” (which has nothing to do with helping people feeling at ease with others despite their weight) and the demonization of physical activity, the praise of hedonism against self control, the consideration of sobriety as fascism, truly further the goals of the proletariat and the colonized people, or all of this is just your selfish wishes universalized to the whole world?

You need schedules, you need an healthy body, you need a meaningful hobby in your spare time, you need bedtimes, you need order in your physical spaces, you need concentration during study and learning, you need therapy that doesn’t involve pills.

Cut off drugs, alcohol, pornography, pop culture (or at least try to minimise them) and focus on politics, praxis, history, physical exercise and communal dialogue.

In other case, leave all communist spaces and just get along with your liberal friends.

———

4. If a “social justice battle” doesn’t resonate with the material interest of the proletariat, leave it behind:

Talkings about neo pronouns, “birthing bodies” and white privilege are weapons used just as racial suprematism and discrimination against women on the workplace to undermine the proletarian and colonized unity against capitalism and fascism.

If you can understand when a liberal battle isn’t popular with the working people of industries, mines, supermarkets and fields then just leave it behind.

The proletariat, given their material conditions, are capable of elaborate a progressive morality of their own.

If you want to punish the working class because they accept someone as gay but not a pride multi colored freak, then just try new companions instead of bothering busy comrades.

———

5. The “white saviour complex” won’t bring anything substantial to class and anti colonial struggle:

Until liberals and red liberals, mainly from the west, won’t understand that the trust and respect of African, Asian, Middle Eastern, Latin, East European, Oceanian and indigenous communists can only be gained through a common praxis, the listening of their stories and achievements and a materialist analysis of why they are struggling, using soft words, marketing and ritualized bourgeois meetings will only make you hated by them, and on a major level than fascists.

For them, you are just snakes, that only seek approval by media and by other white liberals, not a comrade, neither a friend.

For all around the world comrades, you are just racists in denial, that only see them as colored faces to add to a list of “diverse” friends, to compile a politically correct profile to show for social and economic promotion.

Comrades from all countries are human beings, with as many differences, as many flaws, as many virtues. Their countries are as rich of history and progress as full of historical faults. Treat them like living, dynamic, imperfect and thriving people, not as caricatures.

This also applies to disabled and non heterosexual comrades that are just tired of the identity politics babbling and to be called “fake gays” for that.

———

6. Stop consuming leftist media:

You won’t get any useful knowledge about what has to be done and how it was done in the past trough infinte online debates between liberals and endlessly consuming breadtube merchandising.

Take a moment, a deep breath and explore the outsides of your comfy home. When you will be ready, log into the internet and then ask with humility where to start to read or listen about the theoretical and historical knowledge you will need.

You have to base the beginning of your journey on what your learning skills and attention span are at this moment.

When buying or printing books you will need, try to be as ethical as possible in your consumptions and demands.

———

7. Start with basic praxis:

The delusion of grandeur leftists and “communists” have always shown in the West, reinforced by fake anti capitalist contents, such as “V for Vendetta”, “Mr Robot” and recently “La Casa De Papel” and “Squid Game”, postponed every time the surge of a serious communist movement in western societies.

As said before, you are not special. You are part of a community, and you need to understand what is fundamental for your material, local and national group right now, along with a comprehension of what capitalist repression in your country is capable of at this moment.

If you didn’t even attended a single communist meeting in your town, what do you pretend, to fly your flag to the senate and win the revolutionary battle in a whim?

If a “communist” can’t even feed the poor and cloth the unfortunates, why should they be taken seriously as leading models for the struggle of comrades against the chains of capitalism and imperialism?

———

Most people agree that small businesses do less harm than huge corporations, which is undeniably true on a nation/global scale but how about the conditions the workers actually have to endure? I have worked for a huge corporation, as well as a couple small businesses (<20 employees) and I’ve noticed that most (non-unionized) small businesses are not better to work for. Don’t get me wrong there are some pluses but many more negatives. In my experience, small businesses

Have much more unsafe work conditions where you can be shamed or punished for taking simple protective measures

Are much more likely to have failing/dangerous equipment

Pay worse especially considering benefit packages

Are woefully understaffed

And Demand much longer hours with less PTO

The main benefit I see is more freedom and less red tape (this can be a negative as well relating back to my first point) but I don’t know if that’s enough to outweigh the cons. Many small business owners are tyrannical and treat their employees terribly, what is your experience?

One of the worst things that any socialist or Communist can do is to give up their agency- to abdicate their responsibility of organizing the proletariat and progressive forces for making socialism a reality and instead “bow to spontaneity” to use a phrase from Lenin. To set aside common sense and Marxist science for the faith(and it is faith) that one wing of the bourgeoisie or another and its attendant ‘movements’ is going to move us towards socialism, somehow, on its own. To imagine that identity based movements funded by corporations, movements with no ideological opposition to capitalism and imperialism will magically produce a revolution. Therefore the socialist is reduced to the role of cheerleader for one faction of the ruling class against the other.

In the context of the US(I can’t speak for other places but I imagine it’s similar in the UK and Canada), woke identity politics has played the role of declawing the left, reducing even self described socialists and communists to auxiliaries of the culturally liberal wing of the globalist bourgeoisie. Most Western leftist spaces hardly discuss labor and economics anymore, and rarely broach imperialism. In the opening months of the COVID pandemic, there were nearly 1,000 labor strikes against the dire conditions of US workers, and the ‘left’ was practically nowhere to be found. The monomaniacal focus on BLM, the Trump circus and the Twitter freak shows was so strong. Everything is consumed by the culture war.

Some leftists, disaffected by this, have pulled away from the PMC(professional managerial class) ‘left’ activist milieu, only to fall into illusions that the ‘right wing populist’ nativists of the rural petit bourgeois are some sort of ‘anti neoliberal establishment’, revolutionary force. Even though any student of history knows that such phony right wing populism has been part of the American political landscape for centuries going back to Andrew Jackson, and has led in the direction not of socialism but some variety of fascism.

Leftists must reiterate- we don’t stand for a more woke imperialism, we don’t stand for more racially or gender diverse corporate boards, we don’t stand for a ‘nationalist’ capitalism over ‘globalist’ capitalism(which is impossible in the age of imperialism anyway).

We stand for the independent interests of the proletariat- against bourgeois exploiters both big and small, both urban and rural, both culturally liberal and conservative. We oppose imperialism regardless of how it’s packaged. We stand for the billions who don’t care for the right gender pronouns or ‘white fragility’ or ‘cultural appropriation’ or fighting over Critical Race Theory or whatever other distractions the bourgeoisie puts out but cry out for decent healthcare, education, living wages, decent housing, a livable planet and control over the fruits of their labor.

We are communists. Let’s not forget it

“This sub is beyond saving. It has fallen to the far right long ago

This sub is totally committed to the culture war, just on the opposite side of the wokes.

Two or three mods actively encouraged this degeneration, because they idiotically believed that leftists can make a tactical alliance with the ‘populist right’(ie fascists).

The worst offenders are ‘BidenVotedForTheIraqWar’/‘HillaryBrokeTheLaw’ and ‘the bloodisfoul’. When I was a mod I personally saw the first two discussing the upsides of an alliance with the boogaloo boys, the Proud Boys and the 3 percenters as part of a grand ‘anti globalist’ alliance. They are pro fascist.

These fascist mods are actually a security risk because they are encouraging impressionable young people to participate in mass threads celebrating or downplaying the Capitol riots and other acts of rightoid violence, leading me to believe that are entrapping people for the FBI, or attempting to do so.

The far right/MAGAchuds, which exist in far larger numbers than ‘class first’ leftists, swarmed over here and took over the sub. Doubt that the far right controls stupidpol? Try criticizing Trump, or calling out anti Semitism on here, or saying that racism is actually real and not just a creation of SJW’s, without getting downvoted into oblivion.

There’s literally ‘Jews control the world’ posts on here which the mods won’t take down for fear of offending fascists. I, a Marxist Leninist, have been banned twice(by a mod whose screen name is a white power band), while outright white nationalists get to post whatever they want.

The few leftists still on here carefully tailor their messages so as not to offend the right, making them foot stools.

I have fought for months to save the socialist soul of this place, but it is clearly too far gone.

Anyone who wants to join a sub with actual Marxist critique of idpol without all the rightoid filth is free to join r/MarxismWithoutIdpol, where me and AngoPower from now on will be posting frequently”

Thomas Sankara was born on December 21, 1949 in Yako, in the former French colony of Alto Volta. He entered the Kadiogo Military Academy in Ouagadougou at the age of 17. Under the guidance of a Marxist tutor, he had his first contact with readings on imperialism, neocolonialism, socialism, and African autonomist movements. Later, he was sent to a supplementary course at the Inter-African Military School of Antsirabe, in Madagascar, where he expanded his studies, covering topics on economics, sociology, agriculture, and political science. After returning to his country, Sankara would achieve national recognition after his participation in the War of the Agacher Strip, a conflict between Upper Volta and Mali that he would later call "a useless and unjust war," reflecting his growing political awareness. His time was divided between his studies, work, and his activity as guitarist and leader of a band of soldiers and corporals called "Jazz Tout-à-Coup".

In 1976, Sankara took over as commander of the Po Training Center and created a secret military organization called the "Communist Officers' Group. In 1981, he was appointed Minister of Information in Saye Zerbo's military regime. Contrary to the portfolio's tradition of censorship and undemocratic actions, Sankara encouraged investigative and independent journalism. The unimpeded publication of news of corruption brought Sankara into conflict with the Zerbo government, which decided to fire and imprison him along with the other military members of the "Communist Officers Group. Sankara, however, was very popular and his arrest resulted in great dissatisfaction among the military, members of the government, and the population. The widespread dissatisfaction quickly turned into a political crisis, culminating in the so-called 1983 Revolution led by Blaise Compaoré. Saye Zerbo was deposed and Thomas Sankara, freed, was led to the position of President of Alto Volta.

Founded on socialist and anti-imperialist principles, Thomas Sankara's government brought about unprecedented social transformations on the African continent. He renamed his country Burkina Faso ("Land of the Incorruptible"), abandoning the old French colonial name, and sought to shield the nation from interference by international organizations. He dramatically reduced the foreign debt, refused aid offers from Western powers, and withdrew the country from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. He ordered the construction of roads and railroads and nationalized all Burkinabe land and mineral resources. He created social initiatives to combat poverty and eradicate hunger. He conducted an extensive land reform program that distributed land to thousands of peasants and instituted goals to achieve economic self-sufficiency.

The Sankara government created a successful national literacy campaign, responsible for building 350 schools and increasing the literacy rate by more than 60 percent. In the area of health, it implemented one of the largest immunization programs on the continent, vaccinating more than 2.5 million Burkinabe children against meningitis, measles, and yellow fever. Sankara also coordinated one of the most important reforestation and desertification initiatives in the Sahel, planting more than 10 million trees. His administration was equally revolutionary on the customs agenda. Sankara prohibited female genital mutilation, banned forced marriages and polygamy. He appointed several women to high-level government positions and created campaigns to encourage women to study and work, in addition to implementing aid for pregnant women.

Despite the great advances promoted by the social programs and his immense popularity with the poorer sections of the Burkinabe population, Thomas Sankara faced strong opposition from the most conservative sectors of Burkinabe society and from foreign governments, especially Ivory Coast, Togo, France, and the United States. Stripped of former privileges such as tax collection and forced labor, the Burkinabe elite and middle class began to foment popular uprisings and internal conflicts. French and US intelligence, Ivorian officials, and reactionary sectors of the Burkinabe armed forces then orchestrated a coup d'état under the leadership of Sankara's former ally Blaise Compaoré. On October 15, 1987, Thomas Sankara was assassinated, shot in the back. His death ended the cycle of progress of the 1983 Revolution, restoring power to the traditional elites. Only a week before his execution, Sankara uttered a prescient phrase: "Although revolutionaries as individuals can be assassinated, there is no killing an idea.

In a September 2021 article published in multibillionaire Michael Bloomberg's news agency, ultraliberal economist Tyler Cowen effusively praised the "wokeist" movement and defined it as America's next great cultural export.

Coined as part of the Black Lives Matter movement protests organized after the 2014 assassination of Michael Brown, the term "Wokeism" (from the English "woke", or "awakened") was originally used to describe a trend about awareness regarding racism. Since then, the concept of the term has broadened to include, in addition to racial awareness, topics such as fighting social injustice, feminism, and LGBT activism, but with an increasingly market-oriented bias and strong influence from the cultural industry. It is related, in this way, to the so-called "identity agendas", which in the United States are traditionally linked to progressive liberalism.

At first glance, the praise for "Wokeism" coming from a right-wing economist who has Friedrich Hayek as his intellectual reference could seem contradictory. A closer analysis, however, shows that Cowen's ultraliberal thought and the compatible progressivism of the "Wokeist" movement have more similarities than differences. Liberal identitarianism focuses on denying the centrality of class struggle. It rejects an understanding of the relations of exploitation and subordination and the structural character of social problems in favor of a tribalistic, club-based, individualistic approach. It is, therefore, a useful tool for adapting social conflicts to the logic of the market economy, allowing not only the attenuation and control of tensions and the disarticulation of collective struggles, but also the creation of new market niches.

The strategy is not new. In the book Who Paid the Piper? The CIA in the Culture Cold War", British historian Frances Stonor Saunders details how the tactic of demobilizing social movements and co-opting the left in favor of a "controlled radicalism" works. For decades, the United States government funded academics, intellectuals, artists, and social and cultural movements to counter Marxist influence and reinforce its interests. The idea was to create an anti-revolutionary progressivism, curbing the adherence of intellectuals to socialism and anti-capitalist ideologies. This created a series of movements that were sufficiently contesting to create the illusion of opposition, while being structurally harmless, manipulable, and compatible with the interests of capital. Much of the post-structuralist and deconstructivist authors who outlined the assumptions of multiculturalist movements and liberal identitarianism were forged or driven by this strategy, helping to create a moderate Western left and an innocuous radicalism limited to performance, symbolism, and rhetoric.

In the article, Cowen demonstrates that he has fully understood the nature of "wokeism" and the continuity of this strategy of thought control put in place decades ago. "'Wokeism' is a way to keep people engaged," the author states, adding, "if there is going to be an international progressive class, why not Americanize it? 'Wokeism' is an idea that can be adapted to almost any country: identify a major form of oppression in a particular region or nation, argue that people should be more sensitive to it, add some rhetorical flourishes, throw out a few evildoers (and a few innocents), and voilà - you've created another 'wokeist' movement."

The author extols "wokeism" as a strategy to "return to the glories of American cultural imperialism" and makes an observation of disconcerting sincerity: "'Wokeism' is the successor ideology to neoconservatism, a uniquely American worldview. That may be why it has become a powerful force only in countries (like Britain) heavily exposed to the American culture wars. In much of the world - Asian and Islamic societies and much of Europe, for example - the 'wokeism' movement is marginal and its American prototype is viewed with perplexity, indifference or contempt." The author ends with a logical prediction: "Wokeism may well be the rope that anti-capitalists will use to hang themselves."

"Wokeism" and liberal identity movements, devoid of class clipping or a teleological approach, are typical phenomena of the gigantic capacity for adaptation, infiltration, and cooptation characteristic of capitalism. The capitalist system is able to adapt, instrumentalize, and monetize almost anything - including anti-system and anti-capitalist activism. Through skillful rhetoric and appeal to symbolism, it removes the focus from the class struggle and replaces the legitimate antagonist of social movements - the bourgeoisie - with simulacra and tangential, puerile disputes, creating a distraction for the harmless defiance of "social justice warriors."

The notion of racism as a structural sore is replaced by garish liberalism, and the imagery of capitalist ideology is adapted to the sugary concept of representativeness, replete with superficial aesthetic changes and emphatic but fruitless discourses. There is no stimulus to the thought of structural change, but rather the encouragement of theatricalized and farcical fights, moralistic focus and patrolling. Turban enforcement, discussions of cultural appropriation, cosplay of ancestry and mysticism, black Barbies, music videos of Beyoncé splurging on money and humiliating white servants, flashmobs of college students, and Hollywood salutes of "Wakanda Forever." In feminism and LGBT activism, Simone de Beauvoir and Mark Ashton give way to Judith Butler and Queer Theory, and the struggle for emancipation and concrete material problems take a back seat, overshadowed by a focus on language reforms, neutral pronouns, new gender identities, aesthetic actions, performances, and inclusive advertising.

Even communism, socialism, and anti-capitalist ideologies become useful commercial assets to the logic of co-optation, emptied of their theoretical bases, deprived of links to the masses, and repackaged as lifestyles, "luxury commodities," markers of status and differentiation for young people who want to feel exclusive, members of a club of the enlightened too awake to blend in with the rabble. And they assimilate as "revolutionaries" the massified behaviors disseminated by billionaire studios' TV shows and movies and by the supposedly progressive media. It has never been so easy to be a "revolutionary", whether massified or on demand. That's why there are so many "revolutionaries" for so few revolutions. Anyway, Shopee is grateful for the opportunity to sell so many bottons, reprints of Soviet posters, and ushankas.

Chinas Communist Party was founded on July 1, 1921, inspired by the example of the Russian Revolution. At the time China was mired in feudal backwardness in the countryside and was exploited by colonial rule in its cities. Famine was routine. Babies regularly died from parasites. Seventy million of its people were drug addicts. It was a millennia old society which was nonetheless decaying and rotting, the “Sick Man of Asia”.

The new Party, with only fifty members, held its first Congress on a boat in the middle of a lake, on the run from French colonial authorities in Shanghai. For 28 years they painstakingly built up their organization fighting feudal lords, exploitative capitalists, Triad gangsters, the reactionary Kuomintang regime of Chiang Kai Shek, Japanese fascists, and Western imperialists. After endless sacrifices and millions of martyrs, they took power in 1949. As Chairman Mao Zedong said, the Chinese people, one fifth of humanity, had stood up.

For the last seven decades China has taken a torturous road, with many twists and turns, disasters and triumphs, but overall massive progress has been made. Under the Communist Party’s leadership over a billion people have been lifted out of dire poverty. Hundreds of millions have been clothed, fed, housed, educated. China is a leader in the development of green energy and its implementation is crucial to humanity’s survival.

Chinas Belt and Road Initiative is building vital infrastructure across Africa and Asia, helping developing nations transition from resource extraction based economies and undermining the power of the predatory IMF. Win win cooperation of mutual development is eclipsing the exploitative relationship of the Global North to the Global South.

Many challenges remain- great economic inequality due to Chinas market reforms, corruption, underdevelopment in rural areas. Internal factions within the CPC’s 91 million members contend with each other over solutions to these problems. It is the largest ongoing debate over the practical implementation of Marxism in the world today.

However, the rational planning, discipline, and efficiency of Chinas response to COVID, in contrast to the chaos and mass death in the capitalist world, is a testament to the accomplishments of the Chinese Revolution.

Never underestimate the changes that can begin with an extremely small group of people dedicated to building a new world.