Most of us didn't start out being leftists. Lots of us have lib or chud backgrounds but was radicalised by material circumstances and leftist propaganda.
We want more people to turn left and we cannot do anything to change the material conditions of capitalism. We can however work to improve our propaganda so it will have a broader appeal.
To get a discussion going about what is good propaganda we could use our own radicalisation stories as a starting point.
I have always been a weird nerd so for me it was listening to long lectures on YouTube that helped move me from being a succdem to believing that capitalism has to be abolished. Around the time of the financial crash in 2008 Richard Wolff's Capitalism Hits The Fan as well as David Harvey's lectures on Marx was hugely influential in pointing out how capitalism is foundationally incompatible with human progress. Talks by Chomsky helped me realising how thoroughly evil US imperialismnwas and Parenti's content made me question the Cold War propaganda about the USSR and its allies that we are indoctrinated to see as common sense and get a much more nuanced view on things.
I got "Radicalized" by reading and informing myself, i don't think propaganda worked at all. Not even listening to the podcast did anything for me. Initially i tuned into the chapos, because of the reading series and i liked hearing them dunking on people i hate. But in general i think Felix Guattari, Mark fisher, Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Chomsky and Naomi Klein did a better job at radicalizing me than anything else.
In this sense i think that explaining people how the world works and giving them alternatives is a better way of bringing them left than any propaganda.
It sort of happened so slowly that I don’t really have an answer. Seeing weird memes on leftbook or wherever, and googling wtf they meant. Unironically the chapo sub lol, the sub being much more left wing than the podcast was great for that.
I’d always kind of felt like something was “wrong” with the way society is run, I’d always kind of resented working for some asshole, and when I finally properly discovered socialism it felt like everything finally made sense. Everything I’d felt my whole life was explained by alienation, by labor exploitation, etc etc. I think that is one of the most effective areas to propagandise. Almost everyone hates working for a boss - and we can explain why.
I was watching the new BlackRedGuard video this morning, and he makes a big point of saying “you have to offer people something, you have to meet them where they’re at”. The average person isn’t ready for complex theory, but when you explain the basics, that their life and the lives of those they love sucks specifically because of the capitalist mode of production, that can be fertile ground.
Climate Change, The Dollop and Tony Abbott being Australia's PM winning the first election I could vote in.
Sorry, only one of those is propaganda, but it's true. Maybe The Chaser in Aus as well.
Philosophy classes. When we came to Marx I was like holy shit this make sense.
Unlike the postmodern neomarxist utopias that chuds think universities are, I went through a full philosophy degree without a single mention of Marx/Marxist theory -- despite minoring in political philosophy. The amount of time spent on the politics of Hobbes, Smith/Hume, Kant, and Nietszche (not to mention Nozick, Hyek, and Friedman -- albeit critically), made it clear to me that, despite the study of philosophy being broadly about learning to think about how things tie together in the broadest ways and Marxist theory a concrete societal analysis of that sort, the academic institution and its deference to hegemonic 'classics' will continue to function to obscure and redirect the critical abilities that it itself works to produce.
Obviously my experience is but one, and I'm sure there are some based philosophy profs out there. I just think that on the whole, a stress on rational reflection alone breeds only liberalism (at least when the student/professor body is encapsulated by a capitalist/imperialist mythos). That's not to say that an education in philosophy is useless. For me, the most effective propaganda for radicalization was stuff that both engaged in 'careful' intellectual reflection and appealed to empathy and the subliminal sense of mass injustice that I didn't have an answer for (and which would've been attributed to 'religion bad', 'orange-man bad', 'conservatives bad', or whatever other myopic and intentionally isolated cause would be sufficient for a local explanation). To that end, I went from Sam Harris' thin veneer of intellectually honest politically engagement (and his favorite 'orange man bad spiel), to a brief spell with Destiny's more abrasive (seemingly) rigorous political debates (fuck nazi's amirite?), to Vaush who at the time had a small channel and came off as much more empathetic to oppressed peoples while also still dunking on nazis. From there, he had a brief time where he was listening to the chapo podcast and complaining about how people in the chapo subreddit hated him. I checked out the subreddit despite what was basically a condemnation of it from Vaush, specifically because of my background in philosophy. I really do think that without that drive for self-critique, I could've easily stayed at the start of that liberal-conservative pipeline (or worse... at one point i remember listening to half a Molyneux podcast... couldn't get through that even as a political illiterate though, lmao)
I know that that's a bit of a ramble. In terms of the most effective propaganda for radicalization, I would say that throughout my radicalization process, capitalist propaganda itself was the strongest tinder for radicalization, granted that (1) the subject is shown at least once that it cannot be trusted or taken at face-value, and (2) that once such propaganda is no longer taken at face-value, at least some of the internal contradictions are clearly laid bare. Some of Vaush's and Hasan's videos are good for that, just as most chapo posts are. (The main problem with Vaush, from a radicalization perspective, being that he's a grifter who actively attempts to isolate his community from political thinkers that are to the left of him, partially out of motive for status and financial gain, but partially because he is a lazy thinker who has and will continue to benefit from uncritically towing the imperial line.)
tbh i got radicalised by visiting the hermitage and seeing the big throne room and the little throne room and the gold covered private chapel. "haha.. oh i get lenin now"
clearly we should spam libs with the hermitage's virtual tour website
I grew up in a similar environment and coming to the realization that some people actually mean the things they say shook me to my core. It's not just the politics or the theology that can leave scars - it's an entire pathology, and I honestly think that the 'ironic' humor our generation has embraced can be at least partially attributed to this phenomenon.
Punk music as a teenager taught me to be an anarchist, working a job turned me into a communist.
stumbling across /r/collapse a few years ago shattered my belief in capitalism solving the climate crisis, as well as my mental state. I came out of that several months later as a vague leftist, I still struggle a lot with doomerism though.
I was always fairly leftist, but was put off from org work by the often anti-tech bias of the local leftist groups, who skewed very eco-socialist.
I stumbled across Bookchin's "Post-Scarcity Anarchism" and the combination of a respect for the environment and deep ecology with a fundamental acknowledgement of the promise of technology for human liberation, wrapped in a leftist framework did a lot to help me get more into organising.
I thought those were supposed to turn you into a fascist though???
I like Dark Souls, so I watched H.Bomberguy's Dark Souls video. That so happened to make me curious about a video thumbnail of a woman discussing incels, so I started watching some Contrapoints, which led me to starting to watching Breadtube. I was hanging around in the "we can probably reform this"/succdem mindset at that point. Then someone there suggested the "Ashes Ashes" podcast and I went "hoooooly shit this system is going to kill us" and then went to the old sub because the quarantine made me curious about how bad could it be, and it all just accelerated from there.
Chapos posting on r/politics, r/latestagecapitalism and other similar subs, then the communist manifesto (really what made the conversion complete).
Edit: Err, I should probably also mention that I was already trying to come to terms with the capitalist contradictions as experienced in my first job post college, post military.
