Online Party Discipline?

There should not be much debate about the fact that online interactions change minds. Tons of people in leftist spaces (including many in this thread) will point to a subreddit, YouTuber, podcast, etc. that was a key part of their radicalization. You see the same thing on the right -- how many people got sucked into open fascism through online rabbit holes? And of course theories on how media can reinforce capitalist hegemony have been prominent in leftist thinking for at least the past ~40 years.

There should absolutely be more effort applied to identifying:

1. Groups who can be brought to our side with a reasonable amount of effort
2. Where those groups can be found online
3. What is persuasive to those groups
4. How to best get persuasive content in front of them

Fascists have been consciously doing this online dating back to at least the mid-00s. We can either abandon ground to them and NYT libs or provide an alternative.

I think we should always engage in a positive way first as long as the other person is acting in good faith. But too many times you will have people calling you names or making the millionth baseless assumption about communism and that can get tiring. Especially when some of the people on here are doing party work in real life as well. I spent a lot of time each week doing party work, talking to people, having discussions about communism etc. and it mostly happens in good faith. But then I get online and it's 'PUTLER 100 BILLION DEATH XINNIE THE POOH SLAVA UKRAINI' within two seconds and I lose all my intentions to stay nice.

Maybe a planned meme economy is a good thing. I hope some people here want to join your project.

It really seems that much of us are often too aggressive and meme-y and as fun as that is it really isn't productive.

I don't agree. I like it here.

You have a 2 month old account here with 13 comments, you are manifestly not leading the charge on engaging liberals "productively and fruitfully". Why don't you engage liberals in the way you recommend?

This is the second post like this from a low activity account, and it honestly is starting to feel like wrecker shit to suck the fun out of the grad.

I like the culture here. The admins are also aggressive and meme-y sometimes. I like that too. I would not be here without that.

I think the way we’ve been engaging with libs is fine. Try to sway the less ideologically set ones and troll the obnoxious bad-faithers. In terms of internal dialogue, whenever we have our own struggle sessions it’s good to remember Mao’s framework of “unity-struggle-unity” where we remind ourselves we’re all scientific socialists and don’t want to have a split, then we have a debate, then we come together, the losing party hopefully being swayed and both sides coming to a greater understanding.

Basically if there were patty’s with some teeth they would enforce party discipline and education and that would lead to higher quality discourse online.

Not necessarily. Comrades that engage in actual praxis in RL mostly just don't care enough to engage in discussions online. I can certainly attest to that. Since I started organizing offline my interest in engaging with libs online has stopped almost entirely. It's time consuming, annoying, unpleasant and for the most part simply unproductive. 99% of people of any political affiliation do not engage in good-faith debate online - including me and most comrades here. The time I have for political activism is sparse and I can do more productive things with it than talk to a liberal who's just gonna reply with a sissy-pee social credit meme to a comment I took 30mins to write. RL discussions for the most part are much better in this regard, because the human component shines through much more and you tend to pre-select the people you engage with to a much larger extent. Getting into political discussions with people completely opposed to your view doesn't happen that much, whereas it is the standard online.

Is there anyway to work on like, an online party discipline?

For existing real-life parties going online maybe, but their energy is used much better elsewhere. For a bunch of randos like us? I don't think so tbh. We are not organized, there's no discipline, no organizational structure, no mechanisms to enforce things, no participation to come to conclusions and analysis.

I agree that communists in 2023 have to use the online space productively. Creating platforms like lemmygrad, producing content like podcasts, videos, articles, streams, etc is just much more worth-while (and even that's limited) and lends itself more to concerted efforts than discussions with dorky libs.

In a comment below you wrote:

Maybe a lemmygrad strike force?

Can't say I like the sound of this. It's the kind of thing that will get us defederated from other instances for brigading. It's asking us to do the exact thing that Hexbear is accused of potentially doing, which has led for it to be pre-emptively defederated from dotworld.

If liberals want to learn and are open about it, they will do so; but most libs don't want to and they often see us as arseholes when we go to other instances and talk about reality. If this happens organically, fine. But to try to organise it… I'm not so sure it will be successful.

Part of the problem is that if libs don't want to think critically, they absolutely will cry and whine about every logical fallacy under the sun without thinking. Part of the problem is the material conditions of the global north audience, most of whom are labour aristocrats (we’ve had some good discussions about that if you search for them). Those who are open to new ideas are going to listen anyway.

As for dunking on libs, Marxists dunk on each other all the time for liberal tendencies. And rightly so. It's a constant struggle. The difficulty with libs is that they have internalised liberalism, so criticising liberalism can feel like a personal attack. MLs tend to take it with thanks for being shown the error of their ways.

For those liberals who are looking for a way to understand the contradictions in liberalism and their material reality, dunking and ribbing won't put them off because they are already looking for a mental way out. The dunking and ribbing makes it something to laugh about; it's much easier to take than e.g. a detailed review, an outline and critique of every premise in an argument, and a grammar correction; the (good) literature on pedagogy suggests the latter will never work.

I can see how it would be useful for us to talk about how to engage with others, to spot wreckers, trolls, etc, and distinguish them from the good faith users. We've been doing that for some time already. And just by engaging with the increasing influx of liberals to the lemmyverse, I think those of us who do engage on and outside Lemmygrad have got better at it. But this is often more about knowing the audience than changing how we say things.

I think if we try to force any kind of rules or discipline beyond those that already exist we risk, among other things:

• tone policing (which is in direct opposition to the type of expression that we should cultivate in ML spaces)
• accepting some truth to the argument that we're rude or unconcerned with intellectual, rigorous discussion (which is false)
• ostracising users who prefer to shitpost and dunk on libs (which let's face it is fun and a worthy cause)
• ostracising those who are earlier in their Marxist journey (by creating a intimidating threshold for participation)
• turning this into work, as in labour (I like it here because there's a mix of theory and people just making me laugh or having pleasant conversations without the need to self-censor. For me, it's enough that LG is a space where I can enjoy the company of other MLs)

As others have said, there’s a good community here, which took time to build. I would caution against implementing any kind of policy about how we should engage or what we should engage about. Especially at the moment, where federation is bringing some wider changes. I noticed that many Hexbear users were concerned about federation changing their culture, too. So it’s a broader concern.

While I hope it doesn’t change the atmosphere here, too much (there will surely be some change), one of the things I’m looking forward to about federating with Hexbear is seeing more shitposting on their communities. Comic praxis is still praxis.

Further, while you may have heard someone “talking about how most discourse happening was of poor quality and indicative of a lack of genuine leftist groups in the imperial core[,]” that does not make it true. The quality of discourse on LG is high. What might be true is that not everything is about theory, etc; but that's because we're all already talking on the same page.

There's no need to keep going through the basics in every community unless libs turn up. Elsewhere on the internet, ML forums degenerate into either 101 or dunking spaces. That's not necessary here (although it does happen as well) because every community builds on the same common understanding, which is taken as granted; the discussion can start at a more mature Marxist place. This may give the impression that e.g. there’s no discussion of theory (due to a lack of imperial core organising or otherwise) but it’s a false impression, I think.

It’s also important to know that while westerners are probably still the majority, here, the ratio is far better and there are a significant number of users from the global south. Further, the westerners here tend to be MLs, not ’western’ Marxists. Which means conversations are built on different assumptions than is common to see in the west. Many people here aren’t interested in e.g. US politics, which means there is less analysis of US party politics than a typical western radical might expect to find in a political forum. It doesn’t meant the political theory isn’t happening.

To be clear, I am all for education and educating. I just don't think it needs to be explicitly organised on here unless it's through a voluntary thing, perhaps on a dedicated community. Personally, I'd probably rather just do my own thing in that regard. I quite like the balance that we already have.

You seem to think minds are being changed in twitter comment sections or even on here. I think we should all know by now that’s not the case.

Besides that, anecdotally of course but whatever, before I started taking Marxism seriously and reading more I got yelled at by I can’t even estimate how many people who were a mixture of MLs, anarkiddies, whatever else. Some clown being mean to me, justified or not, had exactly zero impact on my willingness to learn more when the time came. If I’m being honest, my upbringing in the heart of capitalism had already put blinders on to Marxist ideas. They were simply wrong and anyone who believed in them was crazy/evil/stupid, take your pick. It’s not like some guy calling me a lib could lower the bar of consideration below zero, if that makes sense.

Anyway, the only way people are reliably going to come to embrace Marxist critiques of capitalism is if they find it when in a state of mind where they’re already receptive to it. If their material conditions are shit or becoming shit they’re going to be desperately seeking out the reason… I mean I wish I could say we all could help guide these desperate people to the light, but I just do not think that’s true. Sure, post an explanation when something happens that kind of boggles liberals’ brains. Maybe even post when the hogs are especially riled up over something. But overall it’s not going to penetrate deep enough.

Which of course goes to my last point which ties to your first thing. There isn’t just poor discussion from those of us who consider ourselves to be MLs and live in the imperial core… there is NO discussion because there is no real significant amount of us. I don’t think I’d even say 1% of the US have read and understand Capital. Or any other writings for that matter. It’s probably an insanely small amount. Which IS a problem because if you don’t have people who understand the ideology to teach those who won’t go learn on their own (not online, but in settings such as union meetings which is one of the reasons I do advocate for unionization even in the imperial core) then how the hell will you ever have a revolution much less one favorable to principles we’d like to see? You don’t, basically.

On the hand, and this gets a bit doomer/pessimistic so brace yourself, there will no socialist revolution within the imperial core. Not likely in our lifetimes. The way things are, and the way ideologies work, even if material conditions continue to plummet, and who the hell would expect otherwise?, people will become more and more radicalized… towards fascism. I wish it weren’t true, but the US state has all but assured it will happen either on purpose or by completely moronic and evil policies. Thry wiped out any even slightly leftist movements in the country repeatedly and barely or never touched the right wing. Add to that that fascism has no like real driving ideology or core principles. It can be molded to fit the individual racism and hatred of any given person or group. Socialism, done correctly, does require a base level of acceptance of certain principles. A politically uneducated mass of people with falling material conditions… what else is there to expect?

I know this probably comes off as inconsistent or schizophrenic. It does in my mind too. We’re simultaneously faced with the reality that we probably can’t really affect anything, but we must do something. So what do you do? Post nice essays on Twitter? I dunno, maybe. I’d say just about the only really consequential thing to be done is what I said earlier. Try to form or join a union for a profession you work in and find those workers who seem to share your mindset and see where they are in their political educational journey. Maybe you journey together further, I dunno. You could probably do this in other ways too just in the real life local community. The key though to this entire thing is the people you seek to educate in order to “convert” them have to trust you and not just like some sociopath shit where you manipulate them into it. But real, actual trust that you build through genuinely discussing things, helping people, whatever. Sounds like a lot of work. I know. It is. Way more than posting nicely online, for sure. But if you want to be doing something, short of going off and John Browning some shit or offing yourself (can’t recommend either of these), I don’t really know what else there is to be done. We’re just in a weird wait and see period of history right now it appears. The decline of the US and the western EU could take another century, who knows. I dunno. I’d just spend less time worrying about random libbed up, probably a Nazi dude on reddit being butthurt and more time worrying about focusing your power and energy where it can affect change and accepting that your power to do anything is damn near zero. Some people call that being a doomer. I’d call it being realistic.

Of course this is only one man’s opinion…

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