>>2656998One of the biggest issues the RAF faced was a lack of media support and propaganda that enabled their struggle to be connected to the broader working masses. This goes back to Gramsci's discussions on building a counter-hegemony. Ie a culture that is primed to support the revolution.
This is one reason why I started the magazine, and why I focus on 'culture' (ie music, gaming, arts, creatives, and other things of that ilk). you cannot seize political power if you do not first build cultural power, the right wing knows this better than we do, in a lot of ways. Think about the direct line between things like gamergate and the rise of Trumpian politics. Think about how these things are connected, and know we should be doing the same. They of course have the benefit of having billionaires and capitalists doing their funding, think tanks doing their marketing, and pro-capitalist algorithms boosting their content, but all of this doesn't negate the need for us to do the same. The new left knew this, but lacked strong connections to the workers, and lacked a militancy able to seize the means of production, but the concepts of "counter culture", detournament, recuperation and others are still essential knowledge today.
The left's culture is typically very sterile, academic and ultimately "uncool" and feels a lot like a puritan reading club, that's often marked by a fetishistic outlook on the "pure past" and not the creation of a new future. It often rejects pleasure, humor, aesthetics, and the messy "vibes" of actual human life in favor of correct-line asceticism. What does socialist fun look like? Socialist beauty? Socialist community? Socialist heroism? Socialist pleasure?
Something I think about a lot is that The Deprogram subreddit has an unspoken blanket ban on sex workers of any variety and maintains an ideological line that these people aren't really workers but women who need to be protected from capitalism. Usually paired with something like "China bans porn and if we win, we'lI ban it too!", because the material conditions in China are totally the same as America, or Europe. I think this speaks to how bad we are act actually creating a counter culture as leftists. Like there's a fear of "contamination", that associating with the "immoral" will taint the purity of the movement. This is a religious, not revolutionary
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